Toward an Archaeology of Non-Elite Consumption in Late Ottoman Anatolia

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a growing number of studies have focused on the social histories of workers, peasants, and other popular classes in the Ottoman Empire (e.g., Berktay and Faroqhi 1992; Faroqhi 1986, 1987; Quataert 1983; Quataert and Zurcher 1995). However, it is still relatively rare for these people to be included in historical dialogues focusing on the Ottoman Empire. After all, of the vast documents available to scholars on the Ottoman period, relatively few sources describe and document the lives of non-elite groups, especially working classes and rural populations. As a result, these groups remain virtually invisible, and their lives are left unrecorded. If dialogues centering around the lives of the peasants, workers, nomads, and other non-elite groups living within the Ottoman Empire are going to be written, new approaches must be explored. Archaeology is one form of ‘documentation’ which can be used to examine non-elite economic behaviors of the Ottoman past. Much more than the study of sherds, or the history of minutiae, archaeology provides a window into the lives of workers and peasants by examining the types of material goods they consumed and then disposed of Equally important, archaeology allows us to reevaluate the relationships between non-elite groups and larger-scale political economies by examining the use of material culture within local, imperial, or global contexts. By focusing on non-elite consumption patterns,