Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project

30/06/2024

We are bringing components of our exhibition "All Have the Same Breath" Gallery 400 at UIC School of Art & Art History (2019) to Akşehir Konya Archaeological Museum (Tas Medrese), but this time with archaeological artifacts from Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project seasons.

We bring to the urban galleries: what is fieldwork, what is the experience of fieldwork in the Anthropocene when the local ecology, heritage, and livelihoods are threatened by the New Climate Regime. Where do archaeologists stand and what kind of stories do they tell?

Kentin galerisine getirdiklerimiz: saha çalışması nedir? Yerel ekolojilerin, kültürel mirasın, ve yaşama alanlarının yeni ilkim rejimi altında tehdit altında olduğu Antroposen çağında saha deneyimi neye benzer? Arkeologlar bu ilişkiler ağı içinde nerede duruyor? Ne türlü hikayeler anlatmayı seçiyorlar?

Bu konuları merak ediyorsanız biz Akşehir’deyiz, bekleriz. 8-21 Temmuz 2024 Taş Eserler Müzesi

08/02/2023

Today's Washington Post discusses new evidence of a major drought immediately preceding the Hittite collapse -- quoting expert Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver of the Yalburt team.

As the world confronts escalating climate disasters, archaeologists say ancient history can reveal what it takes to survive.

03/06/2022

Yalburt Project presents at Northwestern University Keyman Modern Turkish Studies conference Sites of Memory Sites of Loss on Cukur Cami and its destruction. .Modern.Turkish.Studies

https://keyman.buffett.northwestern.edu/events/annual-conference/conference-sites-of-memory-sites-of-loss.html?fbclid=IwAR1l85aWlzO1teAtAZdsHZJp2iiuPFAtjaz0DoEQAfE9EVrru0CkKq8_rr4

21/03/2022

Delighted to share with you this major article from the Yalburt Project team that just came out from Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies. This is the product of over two years of bi-weekly meetings and radically collaborative practice of writing together. So much labor and love went into this article!

This article layers material, physical, and textual landscapes of the Hittite Empire in a compact borderland region. We argue that a real strength of landscape archaeology is in understanding and articulating medium-scale landscapes through archaeological survey methods and critical study of physical geography. Medium-scale landscapes are a milieu of daily human experience, movement, and visuality that spawn a densely textured countryside involving settlements, sacred places, quarries, roads, transhumance routes, and water infrastructures. Using the data and the experience from eight field seasons by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project team since 2010, we offer accounts of three specific landscapes: the Ilgın Plain, the Bulasan River valley near the Hittite fortress of Kale Tepesi, and the pastoral uplands of Yalburt Yaylası. For each, we demonstrate different sets of relationships and landscape dynamics during the Late Bronze Age, with specific emphasis on movement, settlement, taskscapes, land use, and human experience.

Thanks to the editors of the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, who patiently worked with us on this article. Note the cover image too!

ABSTRACT. This article layers material, physical, and textual landscapes of the Hittite Empire in a compact borderland region. We argue that a real strength of landscape archaeology is in understanding and articulating medium-scale landscapes through archaeological survey methods and critical study....

09/01/2022

Yalburt project directors Ömür Harmanşah and Peri Johnson presented a paper on the last field season of Yalburt project, surveying two Hittite urban settlements Kale Tepesi and Uzun Pinar, at Archaeological Institute of America's Annual Meeting last Thursday.

Yalburt projesi, Archaeological Institute of America yıllık toplantısında Ömür Harmansah ve Peri Johnson’ın bildirisi ile temsil edildi. Geçtiğimiz 2021 yazı son arazi sezonunda belgelenen iki Hitit kentsel yerleşmesi Ilgın Kale Tepesi ve Uzun Pınar hakkında sunum yapıldı.

01/01/2022

New publication from Müge Durusu Tanrıöver! Congratulations Muge!

Muge just published her article "Ways of Being: Hittite Empire and Its Borderlands in Late Bronze Age Anatolia and Northern Syria"

Studia Orientalia Electronica Vol. 9 No. 2 (2021): Special Issue: Identity and Empire in the Ancient Near East
Guest editor: Gina Konstantopoulos

Open access!

In part of her paper, Muge explores "imperial dynamics and responses in the Ilgın Plain in inner southwestern Turkey through a study of the material collected by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project since 2010.'

Ways of Being: Hittite Empire and Its Borderlands in Late Bronze Age Anatolia and Northern Syria Authors Muge Durusu-Tanrıöver Bilkent University DOI: https://doi.org/10.23993/store.90663 Keywords: Hittite Empire, Archaeology of Empires, Borderlands Abstract In this paper, I take identity as a cha...

29/12/2021

New publication from the Yalburt Project team, posted on academia:

Harmanşah, Ömür, Peri Johnson, Shannon Martino, Müge Durusu Tanrıöver and Ben Marsh; 2021. “Mountains as Connected Landscapes of Alterity: Boz Mountain Range and its piedmont.” In The Archaeology of Anatolia Volume IV: Recent Discoveries (2018-2020), Sharon R. Steadman and Gregory McMahon, eds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 287-299.

Mountains are often groundlessly thought of as romantic backwaters lacking in development and civility, and portrayed as unruly places to pass through by academics working under the influence of ideologies of the state. Binaries of the urban and the rural, or the perception of civilized lowlands and crude shepherds and loggers, do not adequately account for the linear ecologies that intimately connect the plains to the mountains. In this chapter we advocate for the significance of these connecting ecologies that resist the colonial or statist marginalization of mountain peoples and places. These connecting linear ecologies are substantive landscapes of everyday movement, the flow of water, taskscapes, and interconnected land use, and are not limited to roads and routes. Academic perspectives on ancient communities of the mountains tend to associate them with “landscapes of terror” (e.g., Matthews 2004). In these scenarios, marginalized mountain peoples are presented either as “tribal” threats to urbanized elites of the prosperous plains and lowland and river valleys, or impediments to regional circulation (Horden and Purcell 2000: 80). Such perspectives are produced under the influence of urban archives; they are typical of uncritical characterizations of mountains from an elitist bias and have to be taken with a grain of salt. Archaeological survey evidence, strengthened by ethnohistorical research, presents a far more even-handed perspective on life in the mountains. In this chapter we point to the intimately entangled nature of lowlands and mountains in the local context of west central Anatolia. This chapter is a modest attempt to bring back mountains as complex and connected landscapes of alterity and to invite mountains back to their place within settlement history.

Mountains are often groundlessly thought of as romantic backwaters lacking in development and civility, and portrayed as unruly places to pass through by academics working under the influence of ideologies of the state. Binaries of the urban and the

23/12/2021

Hi everyone, Archaeology of Anatolia IV is out from CSP. The very awesome Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project team contributed with an article "Mountains as Connected Landscapes of Alterity: Boz Mountain Range and its Piedmont" soon to be posted on Academia and on yalburtproject.org Congratulations to Peri Johnson, Müge Durusu Tanrıöver Ben Marsh, Shannon Martino and Ömür Harmanşah what an amazing team! Many thanks to the editors Sharon Steadman and Greg McMahon who tirelessly offer their loving labor to Anatolian archaeology.

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-7601-8/

The Archaeology of Anatolia, Volume IV: Recent Discoveries (2018–2020) - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

19/11/2021

Yalburt Survey Project senior staff member Dr. Shannon Martino will be presenting her paper "The Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Ceramics of the Ilgın Region of Anatolia" at the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) Annual Meetings in Chicago, in the Archaeology of Anatolia Session on November 20 Saturday, 4:20-6:25 pm.

Excited to hear your paper Shannon!

24/07/2021

Fieldwork is creative work. Fieldwork is hard work. It is all about engaging with the material world. Walls speak to you only when you pay attention, and you pay attention genuinely when you actually draw them by hand.

20/06/2021

Yalburt Project is gearing up for the new season of fieldwork in July! Our season is being funded by a fieldwork grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research! See you in Ilgin in two weeks!