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Team

Dr. Asil YAMAN

Director of the Project, Archaeologist, Penn Museum

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Koray KONUK

Assistant Director, Archaeologist - Numismatist, CNRS - Bordeaux Montaigne University, Ausonius Institute

Dr. Anna M. Sitz

Postdoc, Universität Heidelberg

Dr. Taylan DOĞAN

Archaeologist, Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Canan ÇAKIRLAR ODDENS

Archaeologist, University of Groningen

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Erkan Dündar

Archaeologist , Akdeniz University

Dr. Işılay GÜRSU

Cultural Heritage, Ankara British Institute of Archeology

Dr. Doğa KARAKAYA

Anthropologist, University of Tubingen

Dr. Feryal TANSUĞ

Historian, Bahçeşehir University

Dr. Çağlar ÖZBEK

Sociologist, Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University

Dr. Matthew Harpster

Archaeologist, Koc University

M. Rümeysa ÇAKAN

Architect (M.A)
Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University

Merve YEŞİL

Archaeologist (M.A.), Süleyman Demirel University

İlayda ALİKAYA

Archaeologist (M.A.), Ege University

Şirin Dilara TAKI

Art Historian

Zeynep OKYAY

Curator, PASAJ

Aslıhan GÜÇLÜ

Artist/Archaeologist

Aslı DİNÇ

Artist/Researcher, PASAJ

Ayşe ÖZAYDIN

           Artist,Academician
İstanbul Nişantaşı University

Mehmet Serhat AYDEMİR

Topographical Engineer, Mesa Engineering & Cartography

Didem ERİŞKİN

Web Design

Serkan MERCAN

Web Design

Zeynep İlkcan GÖZCÜOĞLU

Archaeologist and Social Media Specialist

Sinem HACIOSMANOĞLU

Archeometry, University of Tübingen

Asil Yaman is a consulting professor at the Mediterranean section of Penn Museum since 2016. Previously he was a research assistant at the Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University (Turkey), where he worked there for seven years. He has been excavating in the eastern Mediterranean since 2003, working on projects from Aegae (Aeolis), Pedasa (Caria), Amos (Caria), Xanthus (Lycia), Arycanda (Lycia), Patara (Lycia), and Gordion (Phrygia) in Turkey. He focuses on the material culture such as late roman pottery, food culture, and trade relations between the Levant and Anatolia in late antiquity.

Currently, he is investigating the archaeology of Carian Chersonese, which is part of his post-doc project and directing the Phoenix Archaeological Project (PAP). He has also been serving as co-editor of the Levantine Ceramics Project (LCP) since 2018. Asil received the research grant of the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) in 2018.

His teaching repertory includes courses such as; ‘Anatolian Archaeology’, ‘The war between the East and West in Archaeological and Historical perspectives’, and ‘Asia Minor in Late Antiquity’ at both undergraduate and graduate level.

Koray Konuk holds a tenured position at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as an Associate Research Professor. His main interests are in the history of early coins as well as the history and archaeology of Caria, a region of southwest Asia Minor.

After studies in Classical Archaeology and Political Science in Louvain followed by a doctoral degree in Oxford, he was appointed as a Curator of ancient coins at the Fitzwilliam Museum and an invited university Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics of Cambridge University.

He has led archaeological field surveys in the Ceramic Gulf in Caria and headed the French archaeological mission at the ancient site of Euromos. He has been a visiting scholar in Oxford, Istanbul, and at the American Numismatic Society in NYC. He is currently directing a collaborative internet-based project called Historia Numorum Online which aims to record Greek coin types, the current volume being on Carian mints: http://hno.huma-num.fr/.

He is a co-editor of the new Bulletin Numismatique de l’Asie Mineure and of the International Journal of Ancient Mediterranean Studies: Philia; as well as a member of the editorial board of the following academic journals: Anatolia Antiqua (Istanbul), Anadolu (Ankara), Archaeologia Maeandrica (ARMA, Aydın), Arkeoloji ve Sanat Dergisi (Istanbul).

Anna M. Sitz is a Postdoc at the Universität Heidelberg in Germany, where she is leading a project on inscriptions at Greek sanctuaries. She comes from the US originally and completed her PhD at UPenn in 2017 with a dissertation titled “The Writing on the Wall: Inscriptions and Memory in the Temples of Late Antique Greece and Asia Minor.” This research combined epigraphic and archaeological approaches to explore the continued use and preservation of ancient, pagan inscriptions in the early Christian world. She is especially interested in the role that inscriptions played in the religious and social changes that took place in the late Roman empire. During her PhD, she spent two years in Athens at the ASCSA (American School of Classical Studies at Athens) and also held a CAORC Mediterranean Fellowship in Ankara at ARIT (American Research Institute in Turkey). In addition to Phoenix, she has done research on Byzantine Kappadokia and is currently leading the excavation of a medieval Christian cemetery at Labraunda in Karia. Her teaching at Heidelberg introduces students to subjects such as “Paganism in Late Antiquity,” “Constantine the Great,” and “Greek Identity in Asia Minor.”

Dr. Taylan Doğan graduated from the archaeology department at Ege University in 2007. Since 2004, he has joined several archaeological fieldworks at Antandros, Claros, Dascyleum, Perre, and Euromos. He completed his MA at Archaeology department at the Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University in 2012. He finished his Ph.D. in the same department in 2020, where he worked there more than eleven years. Dr. Doğan investigates the material culture like unguentaria, architectural terracottas and strigilis. He also researches temple architecture of Asia Minor during the Roman imperial period, the burial customs of the Geometric and Archaic periods.

Canan Çakırlar is a senior lecturer and the director of the zooarchaeology lab of the Institute of Archaeology at Groningen University, Institute of Archaeology. She is interested in the dispersal and development of husbandry technologies, management of aquatic resources, climatic fluctuations and societal change, provisioning of state-level societies, and human impact on Holocene zoogeography. Her previous studies in western Turkey have focused on Ulucak, Yenibademli, and Troy. For more information, please visit her academic profile and the Archaeozoology Laboratory at Groningen University.

Dr. Erkan Dündar is an associate professor at Akdeniz University, Faculty of Letters, Department of Underwater Archeology. Dr. Dündar, who has been working in Patara since 2003, has been the vice president of excavations since 2020. He has been responsible for the excavations of Tepecik Settlement since 2013 in Patara excavations. His areas of expertise are Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic ceramics, commercial amphorae, and amphora stamps. His areas of interest are late Classical-early Hellenistic defense and domestic architecture. For more information, please visit his academic profile.

Işılay Gürsu graduated from Boğaziçi University’s Tourism Administration department, and she completed her MA studies at Koç University’s ‘Anatolian Civilizations and Cultural Heritage Management’ programme. She received her PhD in Cultural Heritage Management from IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy in 2013.

She joined the BIAA upon completion of her PhD. For the first two years of her appointment, she worked on improving the presentation and interpretation of the ancient site of Aspendos and the ancient region of Pisidia. She was the Co-Investigator of the research project ‘Living Amid the Ruins: Archaeological Sites as Hubs of Sustainable Development in Southwest Turkey’, which received funding from the British Academy’s Sustainable Development Programme in December 2016. She was involved in drafting the SARAT (Safeguarding Archaeological Assets of Turkey) project application, and worked as part of the project, between 2017-2020. SARAT won the 2020 Europa Nostra Award in the category Education, Training and Awareness-Raising. 

Doga Karakaya is an archaeobotanist who specialized in the identification of charred seeds and fruits. He recently finished his Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen in the Natural Sciences in Archaeology Institute on the plant macro-remains from an Early Bronze-Iron Age settlement in south-central Turkey, Tell Tayinat. Furthermore, he was involved in several research projects of Bronze and Iron Ages in Turkey, with good field experience for recovering the plant remains from archaeological deposits. His long-term research interest focuses on how subsistence practices were affected through environmental and political instabilities in the Near East. In what ways people responded to these changes during the transitional periods such as Late Bronze Age-Iron Age is another research interest of Dr. Karakaya. Currently, he is a post-doctoral researcher in the University of Tübingen working on plant macro-remains from Zincirli Höyük in the same region. This study is part of a larger project that aims to uncover the environmental impact of nomadic communities in the south-central Turkey through analysis of environmental archaeological methods. 

Feryal Tansuğ has a PhD in the area of Ottoman History at the University of Toronto. She has a BS in Sociology from Middle East Technical University and a Master’s degree in History from Bilkent University.She teaches at Bahçeşehir University in İstanbul. She is the author of books, İzmir/Smyrna, 1826-1864, Greek Turkish Relations in a Late Ottoman City (Peter Lang, 2018, in English) and Greek Islanders in the Last Phase of Ottoman Rule (Pan Yayıncılık, 2018, in Turkish). She is the editor of the book Greeks of Imroz (Heyamola, 2012, in Turkish) and co-editor of the İstanbul as Seen from a Distance: On the Relationship between Provincial Ottomans and Their Imperial Centre (Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2011, in English). Her studies have focused on the Inter-communal and multi-religious interactions in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman spaces. Her interests include socio-cultural and economic interaction in the Ottoman Empire and Mediterranean, transnational history, Aegean islands and migration. She has articles published in the international academic journals about these issues.

Çağlar Özbek is an assistant professor in Mugla Sitki Kocman University (Mugla), Department of Labor Economics and Industrial Relations. Özbek completed his Ph.D. at Mugla Sitki Kocman University, Department of Sociology with the thesis titled, “New Actors of Democracy: Non-Governmental Organisations Within the Context of Ecologic, Feminist and LGBT Movements.” He worked as a research assistant at the same university for nine years at the Department of Sociology. His interests include international migration, gender, LGBT+ Studies, social movements, identity. He is the co-author of the book Yerlileşen Yabancılar-Güney Ege Bölgesi’nde Göç, Yurttaşlık ve Kimliğin Dönüşümü (with Muammer Tuna, Detay Publishing). He worked as a researcher in various research projects supported by TUBİTAK, EU, UNDP, and multiple organizations.

Matthew Harpster is Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology and History at Koç University, and Director of the Mustafa V. Koç Maritime Archaeology Research Center; he holds his degrees from The George Washington University, University of St. Andrews (M.Phil.), and Texas A&M University (Ph.D.).  His research interests are ancient Mediterranean maritime landscapes and communities, maritime archaeological theory and history, maritime cultural heritage management, Roman and Byzantine archaeology and history to the First Crusade, and the history of science and technology.  Professor Harpster is the Principal Investigator for the Maritime Survey of the Amalfi Costiera.

 

Yaşar Üniversitesi Sanat ve Tasarım Fakültesi Grafik Tasarımı bölümünde lisans eğitimini tamamladıktan sonra Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Güzel Sanatlar Enstitüsü Sanat ve Tasarım Anasanat Dalı’nda yüksek lisansa başlamıştır. Lisans ve yüksek lisans eğitimi boyunca birçok atölye çalışması ve sergilere katılmıştır. Şu anda İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi ve sanat inisiyatifleri için sergileme, grafik ve web tasarım üzerine çalışmalar yürütmektedir.

Merve Yeşil continues her PhD studies at Süleyman Demirel University, Department of Classical Archeology. In addition, she completed the Selçuk University architectural restoration program in 2016.

She took part in many archaeological projects such as Sillyon (Pamphylia), Aizanoi (Phrygia), Alexandria Troas (Troas), Gordion (Phrygia), Seleukeia Sidera (Pisidia). Her main study areas are Roman pottery, oil lamps and small object restoration and conservation.

Currently, the Roman Pottery of Ancient City of Alexandria Troas is within the scope of her PhD dissertation, focused on local/regional production activities and commercial connections. Her study was supported by Koç University Suna & İnan Kıraç Research Center for Mediterranean Civilizations (AKMED) in 2020.

İlayda Alikaya was born in 1996 in Izmir. Her undergraduate studies were completed at Ege University’s Faculty of Letters’ Department of Classical Archeology. She worked as an intern in the ancient city of Aigai in Manisa during her undergraduate studies. In the year she was admitted to Ege University’s Classical Archeology master’s program, she began working as an archaeologist in the ancient city of Aphrodisias in Aydın. She went to the USA as part of the Work and Travel student program during her graduate studies. She earned her undergraduate degree in Persepolis Apadana Reliefs. In her graduate studies, she continues to focus on the Achaemenid field.

2018 yılında, Selçuk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi sanat tarihi bölümünde lisans eğitimini tamamladı. Lisans eğitimi boyunca Silifke Kalesi kazısında sanat tarihçisi olarak görev aldı. 2021 yılında, Necmettin Erbakan Üniversitesi sanat tarihi bölümünde ‘Tosya’daki Türk devri mimari eserleri’ başlıklı yüksek lisansını tamamladı. Tosya Belediyesi söz konusu çalışmayı kültür yayınları kapsamında kitap olarak basıma hazırlamaktadır.

Zeynep Okyay (1985) studied Philosophy at Galatasaray University, Cultural Management at Bilgi University. She works on the development of artistic projects and networking of cultural actors/organizations. Since 2010, she mostly practices in the field of contemporary visual arts and carries out her curatorial and research-based works under the roof of PASAJ and amberPlatform. She is one of the co-founders of PASAJ independent art space based in Istanbul that collaborates with social communities and hosts project exhibitions, workshops, and talks.

Okyay focuses on the relationships between artists and communities, and the contexts in which the two meet within a specific location and time. In her research practice, she uses the dictionary form as an instrument to pursue social structures, sharing of knowledge and experience through vocabularies.

Aslıhan Güçlü graduated from Ege University, Department of Classical Archeology, and from Dokuz Eylül University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Photography. After completing her master’s degree in Art and Design at the same university, she continues her doctoral studies in the photography department. With the ‘Sümerbank’ selection at IFSAK 2nd Young Photographers Festival in 2007, with the project ‘Flowers of Evil’ at the ‘Beyond Experience’ exhibition held at Pera Museum in 2012, ‘Never Changed’ series in the second edition of Mamut Art Project in 2014, 2016 In the year III. He took part in the Fotoistanbul Photography Festival with the “The Loss of Adam” project. In 2018, she participated in exhibitions at K2 Contemporary Art Center and Izmir Painting and Sculpture Museum with her photography and video works named ‘Manifesto’ and ‘Nihil’. With the start of the pandemic, Aslıhan Güçlü, who took part in the Izole Project together with invited artists from many cities, especially Istanbul, is also one of the participating artists of the Mahalle İzmir project carried out by GAPO. In her artistic works, she focuses on the relations between the human-altered geographies, cultural memory and the individual, while focusing on ordinary events in daily life. In addition, she continues her studies on gender and body abstraction. In addition, she took part in Daskyleion, Phokaia, Aigai, Hisarönü Çubucak Antique Ceramic Workshops excavations and Myrina and Gryneion surveys.

 Aslı graduated from Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting. She is a multidisciplinary artist/researcher. Her research interests, which are located in the cross-section of art – technology –science are the production of speculations, loops, installations and performances with a special focus on the dystopia narratives, algorithmic cultures to human machine interactions. Aslı has exhibited her multimedia installations and performance works in international biennials, galleries and museums. She is also a member of PASAJ independent art space, based in Istanbul that collaborates with social communities and hosts project exhibitions / workshops. She is represented by Performistanbul. 

(b. 1984, Istanbul, Turkey) is an independent artist, specializing in art photography. After completing her bachelor’s in film, she decided to focus on photography and got her MA. Currently, she is enrolled in the Proficiency in Arts​ program at Marmara University, Department of Photography and based in Istanbul.

Her practice is mainly driven by the pursuit of reality. Interested in the paradoxical relation and contradiction between photography and reality, she contemplates on external versus subjective reality through her work. Her creative approach relies on curiosity, exploration and experimentation. She emphasizes that through emotions aroused by any creative act that constitutes art, our perspectives can change drastically. Her art is produced with that kind of emotional intensity which triggers the ability to look from another perspective.

Mehmet Serhat Aydemir started his career as an intern in a private firm in Izmir in 2016, while he was still a student. In a short time, he started to actively use the cartography tools related to his field and to process the spatial data collected in the field. In 2019, he graduated from İzmir Katip Çelebi University, Department of Map Engineering. After graduation, he continued to work in the field of Photogrammetry. He started his Master’s Degree on Photogrammetry at İzmir Katip Çelebi University in 2020. At the end of 2020, MESA continues to work by establishing Map Engineering.

Born in a small town in Bulgaria, Serkan Mercan started a new life by immigrating to Turkey at a time when he was just born. The artist, who has been living in İzmir for nearly 20 years, continues his education and work here. While continuing his education at Ege University, Department of Advertising, he studied for about 6 months in the Netherlands with the Erasmus program and then graduated from the Department of Advertising in 2016. After working in various visual design works in the advertising industry for about two years, he entered the Photography Master’s program at Dokuz Eylül University Fine Arts Institute in order to improve himself in the art of photography and completed his education with his thesis titled ” The Ostranenie Phenomenon in the Context of Contemporary Art and New Media”. He is currently working as a UI/UX Designer. In addition, he continues to contribute to the culture and art projects in Izmir in terms of design.

Kocaeli Üniversitesinde 2012 yılında başladığı arkeoloji lisans eğitimini tamamladıktan sonra 2016 yılında yine Kocaeli Üniversitesinde arkeoloji yüksek lisans eğitimine başladı. 2013 yılında Bodrum Su Altı Arkeoloji Müzesinde staj eğitimini tamamlarken Instiute of Nautical Archaeology ile su altı çalışmalarına katıldı. 2014-2016 yılları arasında ise Euromos Antik Kenti kazılarında arkeolog olarak görev aldı. Bu süreçte mimari ve seramik çizimleri ile ilgilendi. 2017 yılında ise sosyal medya uzmanlığı eğitimi alarak ajanslarda uzman olarak görev almaya başladı. Halen arkeolog ve sosyal medya uzmanı olarak çalışmalarına devam etmektedir.

Sinem Hacıosmanoğlu graduated from İstanbul Technical University, Faculty of Mines, Department of Geological Engineering and she completed her MSc degree in İstanbul Technical University – Graduate School of Science Engineering and Technology, Geological Engineering department with her thesis named “Provenance Study of the Late Bronze  Age Cypriote Potteries: White Slip and Monochrome wares from Tell Atchana/The Ancient Alalakh (Hatay) and Archaeometric Approaches” by grant from Istanbul Technical University and Çanakkale On Sekiz Mart University BAP Projects.

Currently, she is working on her PhD thesis in University of Tübingen, Germany, Faculty of Geoscience, Institute for Archeological Science. Her thesis focus on Ancient and Modern Profile of Cilician Clays and archaeometric analysis of Bronze and Iron Age potteries from Sirkeli Höyük (Cilicia, Southeast Anatolia) by grant from Sirkeli Höyük Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) Project.

Her research interests are raw material characterization, provenance analysis and production technology of archaeological ceramic and clay resources by using disciplines of mineralogy, petrography, geochemistry and field geology by related analytic analyze methods.