A “New” Method in Archaeology: Architectural Energetics

Abstract

The question of how the ancient structures, which evoke admiration among visitors to excavation sites, ruins, and museums, came to be, has puzzled almost everyone. Although experimental studies have sought answers from time to time since the 1900s, many questions were answered with the introduction of the field of study of architectural energetics into archaeology in the 1980s. In this study, architectural energetics is used to answer many unanswered questions, such as how the labor force was calculated and whether the economy of the society could be understood with the resulting costs, what kind of social structure this society had, how the labor force was organized, the distribution of gender roles in the workforce, and how to calculate the population of the settlement. The goal is to find answers through the method and provide confirmation of the existing information. Although the use of this “new” method has been applied to specific architectural structures in many settlements in various parts of the world or to the texture of a city or settlement, this process has not yet been the case for Anatolian archaeology. The aim of this study is to practice the method of architectural energetics in Anatolia in the future.