The Living Ottoman Past: Rethinking Ethnoarchaeology in Turkey

Abstract

The archaeological study of the material culture of the Ottoman Empire in association with its rich historical records is a fairly recent development in Turkey and in countries once embraced by the Ottoman Empire. With attempts to establish the field of Ottoman archaeology with its own theory and method within the main trends of global historical archaeology in the 1990s, a historically informed approach to the material culture of the Ottoman Empire began to attract scholarly interest among archaeologists, ethnographers and cultural anthropologists. One of the most important outcomes of the development of the notion of Ottoman archaeology was that the late Ottoman material culture began to be viewed as ethnography. The study of late Ottoman material culture in the context of related textual sources opened a new path for those ethnoarchaeologists aiming to build some useful hypotheses relevant for both explaining the structuring of the prehistoric and early historical archaeological record and exploring the ways in which the material culture results from human behavior. The purpose of this article in this framework is to underline some of the merits of practicing a more historically informed ethnoarchaeology in Turkey, where the material record of the late Ottoman past maintains an unusually wide range of data with interpretative value pertaining to ethnoarchaeological research. Because there is a direct historical continuity from the late Ottoman period to the present in most remote or rural parts of Turkey, a research design involving direct participant observations of the living components of late Ottoman material culture in relation to textual sources can particularly help to formulate useful hypotheses on various aspects of human activity, including site location decisions, aspects of agrarian land use, patterns of site abandonment and discard behavior, the structure of settlements, village organization, techniques related to agriculture and herding, domestic building methods, pastoralism, craftsmanship, traditional trade, and barter.