Keeping Scores, Searching for Meaning and Going Mega. Archaeology in Turkey
Keeping Scores, Searching for Meaning and Going Mega. Archaeology in Turkey

Summary/Abstract: Archaeology in Turkey emerged as a discipline only in the 1930s, after the arrival of German scholars fleeing from the Nazi regime who were appointed to Turkish universities. In the early years of the new Republic, archaeology had become an agent in nation-state formation, concentrating its efforts on the pre-Ottoman past in search of an identity detached from the recently collapsed sultanate. Archaeology in Turkey assumed a rather conservative position in education, fieldwork and publications. Object-based archaeology dominated, championing the culture-historical approach, and education in most archaeology schools in Turkey continued to follow the limited definition of “archaeological cultures.” The beginnings of archaeology as a discipline in Turkey has been widely discussed by several scholars, hence the main objective of this paper is to discuss archaeological education, practice and theory in Turkey today with a special emphasis on the relationship between the culture-historical paradigm and the resultant conservatism in practice.

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