NEWS
19-21 November 2025. Excavating Absence: Researching Back in Antioch and Its Vicinity. ASOR, Annual Meeting. Boston/Online.
Video presentation:
Excavating Absence: Researching Back in Antioch and Its Vicinity
Shifting power relations during the interwar period deepened the gap between people and heritage in and around Antioch. Between 1932 and 1939, French, American, and British archaeologists conducted excavations under the French Mandate, removing countless artifacts. The local men, women, and children who labored on these digs are largely absent from archival records. Their absence reflects the epistemic violence through which colonial knowledge structures erased local agency and shaped hegemonic archaeological narratives.
This paper introduces an interdisciplinary methodological framework to address these erasures. By combining C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination with Michael Shanks's archaeological imagination, I offer an alternative reading of Hatay's societies, human-object relations, and archaeological heritage. How can legacy data be reconstructed—or deconstructed— through the lens of interdisciplinary imagination? How do aesthetic regimes in museums and archives maintain or challenge colonial hierarchies?
I address these questions by reclaiming local narratives, drawing on Linda Tuhiwai Smith's concept of 'researching back' to restore local voices. This approach informs my study on the House of the Boat of Psyches, a villa excavated in 1934 during the Franco-American digs in Daphne. Objects from this site—once embedded in a specific place and context—are now dispersed across more than five North American and European institutions, as well as private collections. I trace their dispersal and reassemble their fragmented narratives, examining what this loss and its (im)possible reconstruction mean for collective memory, postcolonial archaeology, the role of artistic research in heritage studies, and the reimagining of local agency.
2-6 September 2025. Paper: The Memory of a Dispersed Heritage: Material Remains from Antioch and Its
Vicinity, 31st EAA Annual Meeting (Belgrade Virtual, 2025)
Abstract book: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q9IG_LuJRkYHwwHawe7IpIEqAqT7Vtuh/view
1-3/7/2025. Paper: Colonial Legacies and Loss: Decolonial Perspectives on Antioch's Dispersed Heritage. BRISMES, Newcastle University.
22/2/2025. Lecture performance: of sea, sunshine, leaves and red: The Europa Mosaic from Daphne and Artistic Research. KAIROS GALLERY, Istanbul.
19/02/2025. Lecture: Unearthed and Dispersed: Reconstructing Antioch's Heritage through a Postcolonial Reading of the 1930s Excavations and the Recent Earthquakes. ANAMED Library Community Lectures, Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul/Turkey.
21/11/2024. Paper: The Aesthetics of Dispersion: People and Objects from Antioch and its Vicinity. AAA - American Anthropological Association, Annual Meeting 2024, Tampa, FL.
19/08/2024. Essay: Re-Imagining Home in the Mosaic Diaspora. Platform: A Digital Forum for Conversations About the Built Environment.
28/07/2024. Essay: Mozaik Diasporada Evin Yeniden Tahayyülü. Nehna.
NEWS
19-21 November 2025. Excavating Absence: Researching Back in Antioch and Its Vicinity. ASOR, Annual Meeting. Boston/Online.
Video presentation:
Excavating Absence: Researching Back in Antioch and Its Vicinity
Shifting power relations during the interwar period deepened the gap between people and heritage in and around Antioch. Between 1932 and 1939, French, American, and British archaeologists conducted excavations under the French Mandate, removing countless artifacts. The local men, women, and children who labored on these digs are largely absent from archival records. Their absence reflects the epistemic violence through which colonial knowledge structures erased local agency and shaped hegemonic archaeological narratives.
This paper introduces an interdisciplinary methodological framework to address these erasures. By combining C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination with Michael Shanks's archaeological imagination, I offer an alternative reading of Hatay's societies, human-object relations, and archaeological heritage. How can legacy data be reconstructed—or deconstructed— through the lens of interdisciplinary imagination? How do aesthetic regimes in museums and archives maintain or challenge colonial hierarchies?
I address these questions by reclaiming local narratives, drawing on Linda Tuhiwai Smith's concept of 'researching back' to restore local voices. This approach informs my study on the House of the Boat of Psyches, a villa excavated in 1934 during the Franco-American digs in Daphne. Objects from this site—once embedded in a specific place and context—are now dispersed across more than five North American and European institutions, as well as private collections. I trace their dispersal and reassemble their fragmented narratives, examining what this loss and its (im)possible reconstruction mean for collective memory, postcolonial archaeology, the role of artistic research in heritage studies, and the reimagining of local agency.
2-6 September 2025. Paper: The Memory of a Dispersed Heritage: Material Remains from Antioch and Its
Vicinity, 31st EAA Annual Meeting (Belgrade Virtual, 2025)
Abstract book: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q9IG_LuJRkYHwwHawe7IpIEqAqT7Vtuh/view
1-3/7/2025. Paper: Colonial Legacies and Loss: Decolonial Perspectives on Antioch's Dispersed Heritage. BRISMES, Newcastle University.
22/2/2025. Lecture performance: of sea, sunshine, leaves and red: The Europa Mosaic from Daphne and Artistic Research. KAIROS GALLERY, Istanbul.
19/02/2025. Lecture: Unearthed and Dispersed: Reconstructing Antioch's Heritage through a Postcolonial Reading of the 1930s Excavations and the Recent Earthquakes. ANAMED Library Community Lectures, Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul/Turkey.
21/11/2024. Paper: The Aesthetics of Dispersion: People and Objects from Antioch and its Vicinity. AAA - American Anthropological Association, Annual Meeting 2024, Tampa, FL.
19/08/2024. Essay: Re-Imagining Home in the Mosaic Diaspora. Platform: A Digital Forum for Conversations About the Built Environment.
28/07/2024. Essay: Mozaik Diasporada Evin Yeniden Tahayyülü. Nehna.