THE MYTH OF ‘ABANDONMENT’: FINDING (SEMI-)NOMADIC INHABITATIONS OF ANATOLIAN ANTIQUITIES AMIDST THE LIMITATIONS OF LONG-NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRAVELOGUES

Abstract

Descriptions of abandoned ruins abound across the pages of travelogues created by European visitors to Ottoman Anatolia during the long nineteenth century. Yet, remnants of ancient architecture were often less devoid of inhabitation than these authors presented. Some of the most common reusers of antiquities as dwellings were nomadic and semi-nomadic communities, understudied groups in the growing subfield of research on antiquities reuse. Travelogues, with their descriptions of daily life, are vital sources to illuminate such reuse practices. This paper explores how travel authors’ over-assumption of abandonment has perpetuated in contemporary scholarship, especially when inhabitations were of nomadic or semi-nomadic natures. There are many reasons for over-assumption, including orientalism, romanticism, sedentary biases against nomadism and chronological biases against the present in favour of a glorified ‘Classical’ past. Not all causes were malicious, however. Epistemological disconnects over what it meant to ‘inhabit’ a space left authors unsure of what they were seeing. Furthermore, the way they travelled often lacked repeated visits and generally fell in the wintery half of the year, making it more difficult to recognise seasonal inhabitations. This paper proposes methodologies for circumnavigating over-assumptions of abandonment in travelogues. It demonstrates how one can trace nomadic and semi-nomadic inhabitation, even that left unnoticed by the travel authors, through graveyards and changes in vegetation growth eaten by the inhabitants’ flocks. There is great potential for moving beyond abandonment as default assumption to re-evaluate longue durée histories of ancient Anatolian architecture and its afterlives, and, as this is a largely methodological intervention, implications extend beyond this region.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. The Antiquaries Journal, 2026 · DOI ↗