Professional and Personal

Professional and Personal
Most professional business is conducted one way or another through personal contacts. One of the most valuable aspects of a faculty trip like this is the opportunity to meet a set of colleagues that would otherwise remain unknown to us. All of the various scholars who gave us formal presentations were interesting and enthusiastic, and several were outstanding. Kathy Kamp and I intend to conduct a research project in Turkey, doing an ethnographic study of villages and regional crafts, with implications for archaeological interpretations, so we were eager to meet anthropologists and archaeologists who could help us make contacts, possibly join us as collaborators, point us to useful information, or explain permitting and other formal necessities. We met with two archaeologists at Bogazici. Ayfer Bartu Candan works with what might be called the sociology of archaeology, in other words, how the public uses the information produced by archaeologists, how governments, groups, and individuals use the past to understand their own identities, and how archaeological projects interact with local people, bureaucrats, and differing audiences. She has been studying the famous site of Catalhoyuk, an early farming “city,” and also questions of preservation and development of historic neighborhoods in Istanbul. Rana Ozbal directs an excavation near the city of Bursa, in the region where we intend to work. Her finds include flint which may provide a clue to the antiquity of one of the crafts we are studying, the making of flint blades for use in threshing sledges, a stone-age survival that lasted until the 1980s.
While all of the formal presentations were interesting, Murat Guvenc of Bilgi University explained a couple of his projects that are particularly relevant to us. Trained as an architect, professor Guvenc works with urban sociology. In the photo he is showing us his new atlas of voting behavior, which maps the voting profiles of different regions using several clever statistical methods, to show changes and continuity in the political orientations of the country since 1960. He also is in the process of working with 19th century fire insurance maps of Istanbul, which can be coupled with census data to provide a detailed history who lived where, and what their occupations were. He kindly offered to provide some of his material for Kathy to use in GIS courses.