A Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

v Preface Archaeology has a long and distinguished tradition in the Middle East, but its realm has been limited to uncovering the history and social processes of the distant past. During the late 1980s, a number of scholars, following the lead of post-medieval archaeology in western Europe and Historical Archaeology in North America and coastal Africa, made calls for an archaeology of the recent past of the Middle East. Those calls included improving the discipline of archaeology by testing notions in the material record of the recent past, finding the commonalities in history for national groups that imagined their pasts as separate, and countering the impact of colonialism and imperialism in the region by exposing historical trajectories. The contemporary political situation in the region made it increasingly clear that new bridges to connect the distant past and the present were possible and necessary.Filling the gap between the contemporary eastern Mediterranean and the archaeological past required archaeologists to confront the history of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire, whose rule started in Anatolia in the fourteenth century, controlled at its height the area from Vienna to Mesopotamia and Arabia and across North Africa, and lasted until the First World War. The legacy of this empire for the Middle East and Southeast Europe has left a significant imprint on the lives and relations of people living in this region.Like others who took up the call for an archaeology of the recent past in the Middle East, a sustained commitment to the history and cultures of the region was the force behind our research. In Baram's case that involved an evaluation of various understandings of the emergence of modernity in Israel, while Carroll's interest centered around the recent past of Anatolia. Our common interests and training in North American historical archaeology provided us with methodological and theoretical frameworks that seemed worthwhile to bring together and develop for the eastern Mediterranean.We recognized that, although historical archaeology began in North America as the study of European influence and settlement in the post-Columbian era, a growing number of historical archaeologists vii viii Preface were successfully tracing the material record of the modern world for peoples throughout the globe. For us, an archaeology of the Ottoman period became a logical extension of global historical archaeology. However, our understanding of this field was never quite the same as it was for most archaeologists working in North America; for us historical archaeology was never truly juxtaposed against prehistory. After all, in the Middle East, 'history' begins five thousand years ago. More importantly, the Ottoman Empire was an independent polity, not one of the Western European colonies which have come to dominate discussions in global historical archaeology.Nevertheless, it was in historical archaeology that we were both able to develop our research interests focusing on global and local changes in the materi...