Bordered Places Bounded Times : Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Turkey

Building on similarities and exploring differences in the way scholars undertake their research, this volume presents crossdisciplinary communication on the study of borders, frontiers and boundaries through time, with a focus on Turkey. Standing at the dividing/connecting line between Europe and Asia, Turkey emerges as a place carrying a rich history of multiple layers of borders that have been drawn, shifted or unmade from the remote past until today: from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to the period of early states in the Bronze Age, from the poleis of classical antiquity to the period of the empires defined by the Roman expansion and Byzantine rule, from the imprints of the Ottoman state’s expanded frontiers to contemporary Turkey’s national borders. Amidst proliferating interdisciplinary collaborations for the study of borders between social anthropology, geography, political science and history, this book aims to contribute to a nascent but growing direction in border studies by including archaeology as a collocutor and using Turkey as a case study.

Emma L Baysal is Associate Professor of Prehistory at Trakya University, Turkey. She completed her PhD on prehistoric craft specialization at the University of Liverpool in 2010. She specializes in, and has published extensively on, prehistoric ornaments and what they can tell us about social structure, technology, communication, trade and beliefs from the Epipalaeolithic period until the Early Bronze Age. She is currently working on artifacts from a range of prehistoric sites in Turkey.

Leonidas Karakatsanis holds a PhD in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex. He has researched and published on issues related to the politics of identity and representation, minorities and migration, nationalism, peace and reconciliation, the politics of culture and emotion, and the theories of qualitative methods in social and political sciences. He is the author of Turkish-Greek relations: rapprochement, civil society and the politics of friendship (2014) published as part of the Routledge Advances in Mediterranean Studies series. Since 2015 he is the Assistant Director of the British Institute at Ankara.