A Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire Breaking New Ground CONTRIBUTIONS to GLOBAL HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Series Editor: Charles E

A Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire Breaking New Ground CONTRIBUTIONS TO GLOBAL HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Series Editor: Charles E. Orser, Jr., Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois A HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE MODERN WORLD Charles E. Orser, Jr. ARCHAEOLOGY AND CREATED MEMORY Public History in a National Park Paul A. Shackel AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MANNERS: The Polite World of the Merchant Elite of Colonial Massachusetts Lorinda B. R. Goodwin AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF SOCIAL SPACE: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains James A. Delle DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE AND POWER: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Ecuador Ross W. Jamieson HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGIES OF CAPITALISM Edited by Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter, Jr. THE HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF BUENOS AIRES: A City at the End of the World Daniel Schávelzon A HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Breaking New Ground Edited by Uzi Baram and Lynda Carroll MEANING AND IDEOLOGY IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Style, Social Identity, and Capitalism in an Australian Town Heather Burke RACE AND AFFLUENCE: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture Paul R. Mullins A Chronological Listing of Volumes in this series appears at the back of this volume. A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. A Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire Breaking New Ground Edited by Uzi Baram New College University of South Florida Sarasota, Florida and Lynda Carroll Binghamton, University State University of New York Binghamton, NewYork Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow eBook ISBN: 0-306-47182-5 Print ISBN: 0-306-46311-3 ©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: http://www.kluweronline.com and Kluwer's eBookstore at: http://www.ebooks.kluweronline.com Contributors UZI BARAM • Division of Social Sciences, New College of the Univer- sity of South Florida, Sarasota, Florida 34243 ALLAIRE BRUMFIELD • Department of History, Towson University, Towson, Maryland 21204 LYNDA CARROLL • Department of Anthropology, Binghamton Univer- sity, SUNY, Binghamton, New York 13902– 6000 PHILIP L. KOHL • Department of Anthropology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts 02481 PETER IAN KUNIHOLM • Aegean Dendrochronology Project, Depart- ment of the History of Art and Archaeology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 ØYSTEIN S. LABIANCA • Department of Behavioral Sciences, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan 49104 NEIL ASHER SILBERMAN • Ename Center for Public Archaeology, Beaucarnestraat 17, B-9700 Oudenaarde, Belgium ALISON B. SNYDER • Department of Architecture, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403 CHERYL WARD • Department of General Academics, Texas A&M Uni- versity at Galveston, PO Box 1675, Galveston, Texas 77553 GHADA ZIADEH-SEELY • Department of Sociology, Old Dominion Uni- versity, Norfolk, Virginia 23529 v This page intentionally left blank. 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 com- monalities 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 polit- ical 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 prehis- tory. 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 material lives of communities in the Middle East over the past 500 years. We are concerned with the relationships between material culture and documentary sources, and have a commitment to understand the lives of the people excluded or ignored in conventional histories (specifically regional histories of ethnic groups separated from changes brought by imperial influences, and Ottoman and global histories which have traditionally examined large scale processes at the expense of local formations). We appreciated the contributions that historical archaeologists brought to our understanding of the history and social life of the last five centuries. Most importantly, we hoped our archaeological approaches would add complexity to the simple caricature of the Ottoman centuries as a deleterious period in world history or a stagnant empire capable of changing only in the presence of Western European expansion. As an archaeology that focuses on the global movement of goods, power relations, and the emergence of identities, Historical Archaeology should be able to contribute new insights into the Middle Eastern past, particularly in terms of understanding the roots of the present-day. Material remains could provide insights and open avenues for locating common histories for people who have imagined their societies as separate. By tracing the material remains of colonialism and imperialism, the processes of domination and resistance, accommodation and social change can be put into light of a common history. Those anthropological concepts are vitally important in the Middle East and Balkans today, since they address issues that are con- tinually contested and confronted, all too often and sadly with very tragic consequences. But until recently, the material remains from the recent past in the Middle East which could have shed some light on the recent past of this region were simply avoided, ignored, or bull- dozed away. Preface ix Throughout the 1990s, mostly implicitly and without any sus- taining scholarly organization, archaeologists began to face the chal- lenges of an archaeology of the Ottoman Empire, and a wealth of new archaeological materials recovered from excavations were retained for analysis. It became clear to us that the archaeological literature on the Ottoman period was growing, as an increasing number of scholars from a variety of different disciplines, such as history, art history, clas- sics, and geography expanded their examination of the Ottoman period in terms of its material culture. The result was increasing numbers of descriptions of Ottoman artifacts and landscapes, published archaeological reports inclusive of the Ottoman period, and discussions of the socio-politics of archaeology in the region. Yet, the growing research seemed disorganized, and centered mainly around regionally specific issues. The two of us felt that the archaeology of the Ottoman past would benefit from a more comparative approach. To coordinate some of those endeavors, we decided to organize a conference focusing on Ottoman archaeology. In 1996, we invited several dozen archaeologists,

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