Category: Voices

Voices From the Field (2022-03-15)

Gygaia Projects

With Koç University, Gygaia Projects (and the Kaymakçı Archaeological Project) is a partner on the current grant Negotiating the Modernity Crisis: Globalization, economic gain and the loss of traditional and sustainable food practices in Turkey (AHRC AH/V000454/1) at Royal Holloway University, London. The project is called SOFRA.

Erica Rowan (Royal Holloway) and Christina Luke (Koç Univeristy), along with ANAMED post-docs Gülşah Şenkol, Jessica Feito, and Dalila Alberghina, are documenting seasonal food practices in the region of Manisa. Christina, Gülşah and Dalila visited the local markets in Gölmarmara, Ahmetli, and Salihli in February; the entire group returned in March.

We came together to walk field boundaries, meadows, and forests with local communities as they collected wild, edible plants. Their rich traditional knowledge spans generations.

We also visited the wild plant festival in Alaçatı and shared a meal of traditional foods at Asma Yaprağı.

Here we experienced the shifting landscape of knowledge. You can hear more about it at our 2022 ASOR paper later this year:

“Boundaries of the Orman: The Materialities of Wild Greens in Mera in Western Anatolia,” by Christina Luke, Gülşah, Şenkol, Dalila Alberghina, Jessica Feito, and Erica Rowan.

Look forward to more posts from Gygaia Projects soon!

Voices From the Field (2022-02-15)

In the last quarter of 2021, Koç University PhD student and Kaymakçı Archaeological Project Assistant Director and ceramicist Tunç Kaner made good use of his Machteld J. Mellink Fellowship from ARIT to visit Prof. Dr. Peter Pavúk, his colleagues, and students at the Institute of Classical Archaeology of Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.

An interior view of the Institute of Classical Archaeology’s library.

The topics of meetings, seminars, and discussions all focused on Kaymakçı and its ceramic development, which is at the core of Tunç’s PhD project. In this phase of study, Kaymakçı’s architectural phases were reviewed based on excavator reports, focusing mainly on excavation area 99.526, which is also the area that serves as the primary case study for the project. With the combination of architectural remains and ceramic data, Peter and Tunç began to correlate ceramic developments with the four stratigraphic “Excavation Area Phases” (EAPs) previously identified in the excavation area and worked on clarifying the parameters needed to make energetic calculations for ceramic production at Bronze Age Kaymakçı.

Tunç and Peter at work.

Outside of study time, Tunç got to tour Prague and nearby cities with other Kaymakçı colleagues (such as Peter Demján).

Look forward to more posts from Gygaia Projects soon!

Voices From the Field (2022-01-20)

Christina Luke was a speaker in “The Ethics of Working with and Communicating about Cultural Objects” symposium sponsored by the University of Helsinki and the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences in December 2021.

There was a lot of discussion about sustainability and approaches to the management of natural and cultural heritage.

Christina touched on long-term historical as well as recent desiccation narratives.

She also focused on different narratives of extraction in the region from Yemişçigöl to the Bozdağ range and how these inform how we think about the Kulaksızlar and Lydian Hoard legal cases.

Look forward to more posts from Gygaia Projects soon!

Voices From the Field (2022-01-10)

Kaymakçı and the Marmara Lake basin were again well represented at the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) in November 2021. This year our work was highlighted as part of the collaborative “Humidity and Society: 8,500 Years of Climate History in Western Anatolia” joint project of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI)-Istanbul and Koç University, which is generously funded by the DAI’s “Groundcheck” program. See below for the title slide and abstract.

An Examination of Environment and Agriculture in Neolithic to Byzantine Period Western Anatolia using δ¹³C Data from Seeds and Wood Charcoals

Benjamin Irvine, Ceren Çilingir, Christina Luke, Rana Özbal, Felix Pirson, and Chris Roosevelt

Abstract: This talk presents the preliminary results of the δ¹³C data from seeds and wood charcoals to examine arable agriculture and reconstruct environmental and climatic conditions in Neolithic to Byzantine period western Anatolia.  The data presented here is part of the joint DAI and ANAMED project, “Humidity and Society: 8,500 Years of Climate History in Western Anatolia.” The analysed samples come from Neolithic Barcın Höyük, Bronze Age Kaymakçı, and Roman to Byzantine period Pergamon (Kleopatra Hamamı). The dataset is the first of its kind, in terms of diachronic scale, for Anatolia. Furthermore, it will provide a significant contribution to quantifiable scientific approaches to Turkish archaeobotanical research, something which is currently underrepresented.

The results from the stable isotope analyses on the seeds demonstrate that there were differing approaches to crop and field management between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, particularly the effects of anthropogenic factors such as irrigation/field location choices. The δ¹³C data, in combination with ¹⁴C dates, for the wood charcoals have allowed for a diachronic examination of available humidity and growing conditions for trees, and thereby, an indication of environmental and climatic conditions. Whilst work continues on this aspect of the project, preliminary observations suggest that there was greater variability in humidity in the Neolithic and that the (Late) Bronze Age appears generally to be more humid than earlier and later periods. At an intra-site level some periods of lower humidity have been noted, with one particularly noticeable drier period at Kaymakçı at around 1700–1600 cal. BCE.

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A New Publication on Wetlands and Reclamation Attempts in the Ottoman Period

Gygaia Projects

We are pleased to announce a new publication on wetlands and attempts at reclamation in the Ottoman period – including Lake Marmara, nearby Yemişçigöl, and other lakes in western Anatolia. See below for bibliographic details!

Çelik, Semih, and Christina Luke. 2021. “Of Wetlands and Reclamation Regimes: Climate Change, Social Upheaval, and Political Practice in Western Anatolia in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Winds of Change: Environment and Society in Anatolia, edited by C. H. Roosevelt and J. Haldon, 251–276. Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) Series. Istanbul, Turkey: Koç University Press.

Look forward to more posts from Gygaia Projects soon!

Coring Three Lakes

Gygaia Projects

In the last week of October, a small group of Gygaia Projects team members took advantage of a new collaboration with Dr. Çetin Şenkul of Süleyman Demirel University (İsparta, Turkey) and his PhD students Mustafa Doğan and Yunus Bozkurt, to take sediment cores for paleoenvironmental analyses from three desiccated lakes in Manisa.

The first two of these – Yemişçigöl and Eğrigöl – dried up completely within recent memory, and at least the former had been a marshy wetland canalized already in late Ottoman times (for which subject see a forthcoming publication by Semih Çelik and Christina Luke which will be announced on this site when published).

Taking cores from the dried lakebed of Yemişçiğol

The recent tragic and full desiccation of Lake Marmara, as of August 2021, provided the third opportunity to collect sediment cores.

Several coring projects had already recovered and published core data from Lake Marmara, but – given the presence of water in the lake until recently – none used truck-mounted coring methods capable of penetrating hardened strata and preserving the long, continuous sediment columns essential for longitudinal paleoenvironmental analyses (sedimentology, palynology, etc.).

Coring at the northern (left) and southern (right) fringe of the lake basin in plowed lakebed being readied for agricultural reclamation.

We were grateful for the opportunity to collaborate and look forward to sharing results when possible!

Look forward to more posts from Gygaia Projects soon!