Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Travelogues by European visitors to Ottoman Anatolia often depict ancient remnants as abandoned. Yet many of these sites were actually actively inhabited, especially by nomadic and semi-nomadic communities, populations understudied in the growing subfield of reuse studies. These sources overassumed abandonment due to their orientalism, romanticism, and sedentary and chronological biases, but also because of non-malicious, practical matters of nineteenth-century travel and epistemological disconnects. Such over-assumptions persist in modern scholarship that relies on travelogues.
In this lecture, Sean Silvia proposes methods to identify overlooked (semi-)nomadic inhabitations despite source limitations, and offers a phenomenological analysis of the experience of inhabiting antiquities as a (semi-)nomad. To recognise this vaster world of reuse is crucial for longue durée histories of Anatolian antiquities and their afterlives.
Travelogues by European visitors to Ottoman Anatolia often depict ancient remnants as abandoned. Yet many of these sites were actually actively inhabited, especially by nomadic and semi-nomadic communities, populations understudied in the growing subfield of reuse studies. These sources overassumed abandonment due to their orientalism, romanticism, and sedentary and chronological biases, but also because of non-malicious, practical matters of nineteenth-century travel and epistemological disconnects. Such over-assumptions persist in modern scholarship that relies on travelogues.
In this lecture, Sean Silvia proposes methods to identify overlooked (semi-)nomadic inhabitations despite source limitations, and offers a phenomenological analysis of the experience of inhabiting antiquities as a (semi-)nomad. To recognise this vaster world of reuse is crucial for longue durée histories of Anatolian antiquities and their afterlives.
