Excavating in Türkiye

Like many countries, Türkiye increasingly aligns archaeological research with tourism agendas. Over the last five years, this trend has intensified to a degree that has fundamentally reshaped fieldwork (Erciyas Reference Erciyas2023). Excavation directors now face new pressures as the Ministry of Culture and Tourism redefines the purpose of archaeological research: to dig and restore for longer periods and at greater speed. Archaeology has, in practice, become closely tied to tourism in a country whose economy is in sharp decline, strained by political, economic and human-rights crises.

In 2019, the Ministry, in collaboration with the Turkish Historical Society, launched a scheme to provide funding and personnel for Turkish-led excavations, encouraging sites to operate year-round with maximum time devoted to excavation and restoration. Initially covering 22 sites, the programme expanded to 125 excavations by 2021, with Comana included in the second wave. In 2024, a new initiative—Geleceğe Miras Projesi (Legacy for the Future Project)—further accelerated the excavation and restoration of monumental centres. An inauguration ceremony held in August 2025 at the Presidential Palace in Ankara required excavation directors to leave their fieldwork and attend in person. While these programmes have increased funding and personnel support, they have also emphasised the creation of visually striking, restored archaeological ‘wonderlands’ over more nuanced research objectives.

Today, excavation directors—who are all based in universities—are expected to spend extended periods on site while they are not released from their heavy teaching, advising and administrative obligations. When prolonged leave from their home institutions is not possible, sites are frequently left under the supervision of less experienced personnel, with limited scientific oversight. Success is largely measured by the area of earth removed and monuments restored, while other aspects of archaeological work—scientific analysis, publications, public engagement, international visibility and student training—are often sidelined.

These pressures illustrate a broader trend: field directors are increasingly expected to act as managers, mediators, administrators and specialists in industrialised archaeological practices—particularly digital workflows—becoming, in effect, efficient “ghosts in the machine” (Caraher Reference Caraher2019: 376), often at the expense of sustained scientific practice. While funding institutions worldwide demand accountability, many prioritise knowledge dissemination, societal impact and digital accessibility—criteria more compatible with reflective, methodical fieldwork than with a relentless excavation pace. In this context, the ability to slow down is both a practical and philosophical intervention, challenging the dominant productivity-driven paradigm. Archaeologists are confronted not only with physical labour and scientific responsibility, but also with ethical and intellectual challenges: how to balance site management, scientific rigour and the human experience of the landscape. Despite these pressures, excavation at Comana continued at a deliberately reduced pace after the pandemic, as the Covid slowdown had revealed the intellectual and social value of slower work, reconfigured labour organisation and deeper engagement with the site’s ritual landscapes.

Comana: ritual landscapes

One of the most significant outcomes of slowing down was to experience the site in a calmer way, with greater attention to its landscape. This perspective encouraged us to move beyond the excavated material, chronological frameworks and textual references and, instead, to ask broader questions about the lived environment, particularly the ritual landscapes. To situate these reflections, a brief introduction to Comana’s ritual landscape is necessary.

Comana, a Hellenistic (334–30 BCE) sanctuary dedicated to the goddess Ma, was a centre of economic, social and ritual life (Erciyas et al. Reference Erciyas, Steadman and McMahon2021). The sanctuary controlled agricultural estates, whose revenues supported religious and administrative functions. Biannual festivals transformed the landscape into spaces of commerce, ritual and social interaction, drawing traders and visitors from across the region (Strabo Geographica 12.3.32; Jones 1928). Processions, feasting and offerings created a shared, meaningful environment, embedding communal memory in the land.

Under Roman rule (63 BCE–fourth century CE), Comana retained its centrality as a polis (city state), administering lands within a wide radius and fulfilling both civic and imperial functions (Erciyas Reference Erciyas, Sökmen and Schachner2021).

In the Byzantine period (around eleventh–twelfth centuries CE), ritual activity expanded across the plain and surrounding highlands through networks of churches, monasteries and chapels, creating a layered sacred geography that structured daily movement and ceremonial life (Erciyas & Sökmen Reference Erciyas and Sökmen2010). The cult of St John Chrysostom exemplifies the continuity of sacred landscapes: although centred at nearby Bizeri, his veneration remained closely tied to Comana, where multicommunal panegyri (assemblies) persisted into the nineteenth century, drawing diverse religious communities into shared ritual practice (Erciyas & Ivanova Reference Erciyas, Ivanova, Tsetskhladze and Yıldırım2023: 198).

In the late medieval period, Comana continued as a small town centred on a fortified hill (Hamamtepe) with a production facility for ceramics, metal and bone objects and glass (Erciyas Reference Erciyas, Erciyas and Acara Eser2019: 5–10). Archaeological evidence for this period around Hamamtepe includes the ruins of a hamam, possibly a mosque, several bridges crossing the Yeşilırmak river and its tributaries and a mausoleum formerly attached to a larger building identified as a zaviye (dervish lodge) through a Sufi inscription. Additional zaviyes existed in nearby villages, suggesting the persistence of ritual and administrative activity in a wider geography.

While few physical remnants of earlier ritual landscapes survive today, excavations at the site, along with survey data, inscriptions and historical sources, allow at least partial reconstruction of Comana’s complex and multilayered ritual geography. The scarcity of material evidence encourages alternative approaches, including phenomenological methods, to understand how past communities inhabited and experienced the landscape.

Slow archaeology as embodied practice

The complexity and continuity of Comana’s ritual landscapes—spanning the Hellenistic and Roman sanctuary, Byzantine sacred sites such as monasteries and the Late Medieval settlement (twelfth–fourteenth centuries) with a zaviye—illustrates that understanding a site fully requires more than mapping structures or cataloguing artefacts. The sparse material record, combined with primarily textual accounts of festivals, processions and communal rituals, invites archaeologists to consider not only what was built but how people moved through and experienced these landscapes. At Comana, the pause imposed by the Covid-19 slowdown created precisely this opportunity, offering a demonstrable example of how slow archaeology can deepen insight into both the material and experiential dimensions of past landscapes.

Rather than simply altering the pace of work, slowing down invites a different way of producing archaeological knowledge. It allows archaeologists to approach excavation as a craft (Caraher Reference Caraher2013: 45) and creates space to engage with the landscape as a human environment. In doing so, slow, reflective fieldwork challenges the productivity-driven logic shaping contemporary excavation practice, in which speed and monumentality routinely take precedence over scientific and ethical rigour. At Comana, the reduced pace of fieldwork foregrounded embodied presence, sensory perception and lived temporality—all key elements of phenomenology—as integral to archaeological understanding. These dimensions did not initially present themselves as theoretical concerns, but as practical features of working and moving within the landscape. Only later did it become clear that making sense of such experiences required a conceptual framework capable of addressing lived practice, perception and time.

While I had worked in the Comana landscape for many years, my conscious bodily engagement with it intensified in the summer of 2023 through daily walks with my dog, Karamel (Figure 2). For an hour and a half each day, I moved through the land not as a surveyor following archaeological clues, but as an embodied observer: taking in the views, sounds, smells and physical sensations—the changing angle of light, wind, shade and colours.

Figure 2.

Karamel looking out at the landscape around Comana (D.B. Erciyas archive).

Several key aspects of these walks illuminate how embodied practice can inform archaeological practice:

Familiarity and embodiment: repeated engagement created deep familiarity with the land’s physical and sensory features. Terrain, vegetation, animals and slopes shaped how the walks felt. Light, in particular, proved transformative: walking at night, I realised I no longer needed illumination—the landscape had ‘illuminated itself’, and I moved without fear.

Perception of time: initially guided by my watch, I soon experienced time through environmental cues—the evening prayer, bird calls, the movement across distances—reflecting Husserl’s concept of lived time (Husserl Reference Husserl1991).

Creation of meaning and belonging through shared experience: local knowledge and mental maps demonstrated how landscape features were named and understood in contextually meaningful ways. Having moved through the land over time, encountered local mental geographies and interacted with them in ways beyond the excavation context, I became part of this mental map, gaining a sense of belonging and connection.

These observations provide a bridge to Comana’s ritual landscape. It is at this point that phenomenology becomes relevant—not as a prescriptive theoretical lens applied in advance, but as a means of articulating the embodied and experiential knowledge that slow archaeological practice had already brought into view.

Just as I experienced the land personally, past communities would have engaged with the landscape through ritual, procession and daily activity, creating meaningful, memory-laden and socially embedded experiences. Phenomenology, combined with slow archaeology, allows archaeologists to consider how these embodied practices shaped both the physical and experiential dimensions of Comana.

Embodiment and ritual landscapes illustrate how culture, the body and space interact to create profound and meaningful experiences. When spaces are charged with ritual significance through practices and monuments, the body is an active participant in producing experiential meaning, a notion that is often neglected in archaeological interpretation. My growing familiarity with the landscape through daily walks revealed how individuals and communities can develop an intimate connection to a place, fostering a sense of identity, belonging and continuity. Of course, my experience as an archaeologist walking the landscape differs from that of an ancient participant in ritual, yet both illustrate how embodied practices—whether ordinary routines or ceremonial acts—could reinforce the relationship with the landscape. Rituals, in particular, would have intensified these connections: Hellenistic communities carried a figure of Ma through the landscape during biannual festivals; Byzantine inhabitants encountered the roofs of the many churches across the land as they went about their daily routines; at Chrysostomos’ panegyri, people from across the land gathered to cook, eat, dance and pray, transforming an otherwise unfamiliar landscape into one that felt distinctly their own.

Ritual experiences likely provided a shared understanding of time. The blooming of fruit trees could signal an approaching festival, while the evening call to prayer (ezan) would mark daily rhythms for children and shepherds alike. As Husserl (Reference Husserl1991) emphasised, lived experience of time is foundational to all perception.

Crucially, these experiences were shared. Words were often unnecessary; signs and symbols arising from everyday activities and ritual practices created a communal understanding. Even participants unaware of the specific signals were influenced by them. These shared, embodied practices—like the topographical metaphors in this shepherd’s mental map, drawn after a shepherd in Erzurum, Türkiye (Özdemir & Kaplan Reference Özdemir and Kaplan2013, 459, Çizim 3) (Figure 3)—made landscapes socially meaningful and culturally embedded. What this mental map expresses so vividly is a language collectively shared by the local community, whose members were intimately familiar with these placenames despite their never having been formally recorded. Familiarity with these placenames eventually shaped my own sense of connection to the community, encouraging a more deliberate engagement with the landscape and allowing me, in a sense, to speak the same language.

Figure 3.

A shepherd’s mind map showing local topographical metaphors (Özdemir & Kaplan Reference Özdemir and Kaplan2013, 459, Çizim 3).

Phenomenology, as applied here, does not require an in-depth engagement with Heideggerian (Reference Heidegger1962) or Husserlian (Reference Husserl1960) philosophy of intentionality and consciousness. Archaeology has already borrowed from these discourses on the relationship between mental acts, the external world and objects.

Phenomenology enhances this perspective by emphasising human experience. Instead of an object-based view of the ancient world, it foregrounds embodied engagement with space, considering sensory experience—sight, sound, touch, smell and movement—as central to interpretation. It also acknowledges subjectivity, situating contemporary perception alongside historical evidence, and encourages archaeologists to think creatively about how past people navigated and experienced the landscapes they inhabited. According to Tilley (Reference Tılley1994: 12), archaeologists can encounter a past ‘being-in-the-world’ by using their own bodies as the medium of engagement, thereby grasping the meaning of the archaeological record.

William Caraher’s concept of ‘slow archaeology’ highlights why this approach is particularly valuable. Small, deliberate projects require engagement at every stage of the archaeological process from fieldwork to publication, emphasising archaeology as an integrated craft rather than a mechanised process (Caraher Reference Caraher2013: 45). Slowing down allows archaeologists to reconnect with their sites, observing landscapes in ways impossible during accelerated seasons, and to reflect on both human activity and the broader social, ritual and environmental contexts in which it occurred. More recently, this perspective has been reframed as part of a broader conversation under the term ‘the archaeology of care’, emphasising ethical responsibility both to the discipline itself and to the communities in which archaeological work is carried out (Caraher Reference Caraher2019).

These concerns are not only theoretical; they have practical consequences on how archaeological knowledge is produced and who can produce it. If phenomenological insight at an archaeological site is limited by time, bodily presence and engagement, then its application is shaped by the intensive labour conditions under which excavations are conducted. Accelerated schedules, intensive digging schemes, institutional pressures and administrative demands hardly allow time for reflective engagement, making embodied approaches unevenly accessible for archaeologists. While Caraher does not explicitly address state or institutional regimes, the emphasis on care provides a useful framework for reflecting on the structural pressures that shape archaeological labour, pace and professional responsibility in specific contexts.

It is within these constraints that the question of method must be approached. I do not claim to have developed a fully formalised method for directly translating present-day embodied experience into past experience (a difficult task overall; Hamilton et al. Reference Hamilton2006); however, I have considered several ways in which such practices might be more systematically documented. These include keeping a diary of repeated walks; using visual methods such as photography and video recorded from multiple perspectives and at different times of day; mapping routes, distances and durations in relation to landscape features; and plotting movement within geographic information system frameworks. Ethnographic engagement through conversations and interviews with local residents could further illuminate how people navigate the landscape and its rhythms over time (Luke et al. Reference Luke2017; Erciyas Reference Erciyas, Öz and Luke2022). While a systematic study of local taskscapes could be valuable, it also risks becoming a distanced and overly formalised mode of engagement.

All these suggested methods could help alleviate the burden on archaeologists striving to maintain scientific rigour while establishing solid epistemological foundations for research with coherent methods. Yet perhaps the goal here is not necessarily to achieve this in a rigid, prescriptive way. Rather, these experiences may be more valuable in generating meaningful research questions, as my friend and colleague Nicolas Trepanier suggested during our discussion of this piece, guiding inquiry without constraining it to predefined procedures. Crucially, the feasibility of such approaches depends both on theoretical openness and working conditions that permit attentiveness and bodily presence outside of the excavation rush, conditions that are increasingly difficult to find in Turkish archaeology.