Place, Memory, and Healing

by Omur Harmansah

Place, Memory, and An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments investigates the complex and deep histories of places, how they served as sites of memory and belonging for local communities over the centuries, and how they were appropriated and monumentalized in the hands of the political elites. Focusing on Anatolian rock monuments carved into the living rock at watery landscapes during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, this book develops an archaeology of place as a theory of cultural landscapes and as an engaged methodology of fieldwork in order to excavate the genealogies of places. Advocating that archaeology can contribute substantively to the study of places in many fields of research and engagement within the humanities and the social sciences, this book seeks to move beyond the oft-conceived notion of places as fixed and unchanging, and argues that places are always unfinished, emergent, and hybrid. Rock cut monuments of Anatolian antiquity are discussed in the historical and micro-regional context of their making at the time of the Hittite Empire and its aftermath, while the book also investigates how such rock-cut places, springs, and caves are associated with new forms of storytelling, holy figures, miracles, and healing in their post-antique life. Anybody wishing to understand places of cultural significance both archaeologically as well as through current theoretical lenses such as heritage studies, ethnography of landscapes, social memory, embodied and sensory experience of the world, post-colonialism, political ecology, cultural geography, sustainability, and globalization will find the case studies and research within this book a doorway to exploring places in new and rewarding ways.

218 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 2014

About the author

Currently teaching ancient Near Eastern archaeology, architectural history, and material and visual culture at the School of Art and Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago. Born March 25, 1971, a snow-stormy night in Konya, that conservative town, of all places in Turkey, as the first child to a middle class Turkish family from Cappadocia, an agricultural engineer father and a library scientist mother, who wandered across the country, working for the state farms, dragging their 3 children with them. Omur ended up studying architecture in Middle East Technical University, Ankara, who knows why, stuck between a naive desire to become a poet and being good at math. Ankara's modernist landscapes captured his imagination. His desire to write about buildings rather than designing them, put him inevitably into the field of architectural history. His arrival at Penn, threw him to the world of the Ancient Near East and saved him from becoming a boring classical archaeologist and drawing marble pieces forever (he now draws cruder varieties of stone). He wrote a dissertation (which always seemed never-ending) on the utterly esoteric topic of founding new cities in the Ancient Near East. A monograph came out from Cambridge University Press in March 2013 is a result of this work: Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East. His favorite place in the world is Taskahve in Ayvalik.