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Director

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Scott Branting
University of Central Florida
Scott Branting is an archaeologist with specializations in the ancient Near East and geospatial science. He holds advanced degrees in archaeology and geography from the University at Buffalo and the University of Chicago. For ten years he served as the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Scott is also involved in using satellite images to monitor cultural heritage sites from space, and has worked on archaeological projects around the world.

Co-Director

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Joseph W. Lehner

The University of Sydney

Joseph Lehner is a Lecturer in Archaeology at The University of Sydney and Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award Fellow. He finished his PhD at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and is a past Alexander von Humboldt German Chancellor Fellow at the University of Tübingen and a Senior Fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Koç University in Istanbul. He conducts extensive field work in Türkiye and Oman, and has been involved in projects elsewhere in Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Australia, and Arctic North America. His research focuses on the social, environmental, and cultural impacts of strategic resource management, in particular mining and metallurgy.

Associate Directors

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Sevil Baltalı Tırpan

Istanbul Technical University

Sevil Baltalı Tırpan received her M.A in Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of Chicago and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Virginia. She is now an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Istanbul Technical University. She worked on the topics of architecture and symbolism and the anthropology of houses and ritual spaces. Trained both in archaeology and anthropology, her areas of most recent research explores the topics of politics of the past, heritage and culture, local perceptions of the past, impact of archaeological praxis on local people, ethnography of archaeology, space/place, memory, materiality and time.  Along those interests she organized (with Aybil Goker) an international conference entitled, “Materiality, Memory and Cultural Heritage” in 2011 sponsored by Tübitak, Istanbul Technical and Yeditepe Universities. She has been conducting traditional and digital ethnographic field work on the local perceptions and representations of the past and place in Şahmuratlı village in Yozgat, Türkiye.

G. Bike Yazıcıoğlu

Simon Fraser University

Gökçe Bike Yazıcıoğlu is an Anatolian archaeologist, whose current research focuses on isotopic investigations of human mobility and cultural dynamics of integration in early complex societies. Bike (Bee-kah) is the second Associate Director of Kerkenes Project, where she oversees excavations at the site and takes part in facilitating the project’s public outreach efforts. After Istanbul University (BA), she completed her graduate studies in Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Chicago (MA and PhD), where she also taught and worked as project assistant. Bike has worked at excavations and surveys in Türkiye since 1998 and continues to work as a translator and editor of publications on Anatolian archaeology since 2001. For more information about her research and published work, visit her academic profile and academia.edu.

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Dominique Langis-Barsetti

University of Toronto

Dominique Langis-Barsetti received her Ph.D. from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She specialises in geophysics, remote sensing, 3D modelling and simulation, and ancient urbanism. Langis-Barsetti has been an active member of the Kerkenes Project since 2010 and has been an instructor on the Kerkenes Fieldschool since its inception in 2016.

Assistant Directors

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Tuna Kalaycı

Leiden University

Tuna Kalaycı is an Assistant Professor of Archaeological Computer Sciences at Department of Archaeological Sciences at Leiden University. His interests include urban studies,  production landscapes, landscapes of movement, and sensor data. Tuna holds degrees in Statistics (BSc, METU-Ankara), Settlement Archaeology (MSc, METU-Ankara), and Anthropology (PhD, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville). Before joining Leiden University, he held a post-doctoral researcher position at the IMS-FORTH (Greece) and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the ISPC-CNR (Italy).

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Jessica Robkin
Geospatial Coordinator
University of Central Florida

Jessica Robkin is an Assistant Professor in the History department at the University of Central Florida. She is a UCF graduate, a member of the ChronoPoints Project for the digital documentation of culture, and specializes in geospatial studies, social organization, modelling and simulation, and heritage protection and management. She has been a part of the Kerkenes Project since 2019.

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Soran Avcil
Senior Conservator
Soran is a freelance conservator. He carries a bachelor's degree from Batman University and studied archaeology at the University of Foggia. He undertook postgraduate courses at Gazi University. He has been a member of Kerkenes team since 2015, and also works at Çadır Höyük, Tell Tayinat and other projects in Türkiye. His archaeological conservation and experimental conservation studies continue.

Senior Researchers

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Nilüfer Baturayoğlu Yöney

Architectural Documentation and Preservation Coordinator

Mustafa Kemal University

Nilüfer Baturayoğlu Yöney is a preservation architect specializing in archaeological survey, documentation and preservation methods, heritage management, and the history, characterization, and conservation of building materials and technologies. Prior to becoming a professor at MKU, she worked at Abdullah Gul University and Istanbul Technical University, where she received her PhD. In addition to working at several archaeological sites in Türkiye, she has been a member of the Kerkenes Team since 1993. She has documented most of the structures at Kerkenes and acted as the architectural consultant for the restoration project at the Cappadocia Gate.

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John M. Marston

Boston University

John M. Marston is an environmental archaeologist who studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use in the Mediterranean and western Asia. His research focuses on the environmental signatures of empire and climate-change adaptation in the ancient Near East. A specialist in paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, Marston’s contributions to the field include novel ways of linking ecological theory with archaeological methods to reconstruct agricultural and land-use strategies from plant and animal remains. Marston has worked with the Kerkenes project since 2010, where he focuses on the recovery and analysis of botanical remains from the site, with the goal of reconstructing household-level variability in agriculture and land use. Marston is the Director of the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory at Boston University.
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Sarah Graff

Barrett, The Honors College, Arizona State University

Sarah R. Graff is an archaeologist who received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2006. Her research examines social interactions, especially in the context of the production, exchange and consumption of ceramic containers. She analyzes ceramic production techniques and ceramic use, such as ceramics used for cooking and food preparation, in context. Methodologically she uses petrographic analysis to learn more about production techniques. Sarah has worked on archaeological projects in Syria, Türkiye, and Oman, including projects she designed, funded, and directed. She was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at The University of Chicago and held an American Association of University Women (AAUW) Post-Doctoral Fellowship before joining the faculty at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University.

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Lucas Proctor

Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften
J.W. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Lucas Proctor is a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. As an environmental archaeologist and archaeobotanist, his research engages with the dynamic ways in which people, plants, and the environment interacted in the past, with a particular focus on agropastoralism, urbanism, and woodland resource exploitation strategies in semi-arid landscapes. Lucas is currently engaged in interdisciplinary research projects spanning Southwest Asia, with active field work in Türkiye, Iraq, and Oman. His work has been funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
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Canan Çakırlar-Oddens

Groningen University

Canan is the senior zooarchaeologist of the project and the director of the zooarchaeology lab of the Institute of Archaeology at Groningen University, Institute of Archaeology. Her research interests include 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 Türkiye have focused on Ulucak, Yenibademli, and Troy.  For more information, please visit her academic profile and the Archaeozoology Laboratory at Groningen University.

Official Site Guard

Kadir Erciyas