Ömür Harmansah
Ömür Harmansah is the Director of the School of Art & Art Art History at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and at the same time Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History. Ömür Harmansah’s current research focuses on the history of landscapes in the Middle East and the politics of ecology, place, and heritage in the age of the Anthropocene. As an archaeologist and an architectural historian of the ancient Near East, Harmansah specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Harmansah's earlier research focused on cities, the production of architectural and urban space, critical studies of place and landscape, building technologies and architectural knowledge, and image-making practices in the urban and rural environments. Harmansah is the author of two monographs, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Place, Memory, and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments (Routledge, 2015). He also edited the volume Of Rocks and Water: Towards an Archaeology of Place, published by Oxbow Books (2014). The monograph Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East has been translated to Turkish and published by Koc University Press in 2015. Since 2010, Harmansah has been directing Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project, a diachronic regional survey project addressing questions of place and landscape in Konya Province of west-central Turkey. Harmansah is currently working on a new monograph on landscape history and political ecology in the Middle East, addressing the challenges brought about by the new geological epoch Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental crisis on landscape archaeology, cultural heritage, and archaeological field practice. This monograph will bring together insights from current debates in new materialism and political ecology to discuss the precarity of archaeological landscapes and cultural heritage under the impact of late capitalism. He is the Principal Investigator for the 3-year multi-institutional collaborative project entitled “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene”. This project is supported by the Humanities Without Walls consortium, based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Humanities Without Walls consortium is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Born and raised in Turkey, Ömür studied architecture and architectural history at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), and received his PhD from University of Pennsylvania in the History of Art (2005). He previously taught at Reed College (Portland, OR) and Brown University (Providence, RI) before joining the faculty at UIC’s School of Art and Art History in 2014. He received various sabbatical and research awards, including Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations Senior Fellowship (2009-2010), Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship (Fall 2012), and University of Texas at Austin’s Donald D. Harrington Faculty Research Fellowship(2013-2014). Recently, he has been elected as a “Rising Star” in Art, Architecture, and the Humanities among the 2016 Researcher and Scholar of the Year awards distributed by the Office of the Vice Chancellor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Phone: 312-355-0616
Address: School of Art and Art History
University of Illinois at Chicago
106 Jefferson Hall
929 W Harrison Street, MC 201
Chicago, Illinois 60607
Phone: 312-355-0616
Address: School of Art and Art History
University of Illinois at Chicago
106 Jefferson Hall
929 W Harrison Street, MC 201
Chicago, Illinois 60607
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Videos by Ömür Harmansah
In the last few centuries of the Hittite Empire, the karstic landscapes of Çavuşçu Lake Basins west of the Konya Plain witnessed the construction of a prestigious, imperially sponsored monument at a prominent spring in the rural countryside: Tudhaliya IV’s sacred pool at Yalburt Yaylası near the Çavuşçu Lake. Yalburt Monument is situated on a mountaintop in a borderland region south of the Hittite Upper Land. The same king initiated the construction of a massive earthen dam at Köylütolu Yayla, 20 km south of Yalburt. Studying the agricultural landscape and the settlement history in the vicinity of these two monuments has shown that the Hittite imperial administration was interested in an agricultural rehabilitation program in this borderland region, right before the collapse of the empire. This talk discusses the results of the Yalburt survey project.
Fresh Off the Press + Forthcoming by Ömür Harmansah
As witnesses to this catastrophic present, I believe that we have a certain ethical responsibility to chronicle this spectacular era of the onset of industrial ruination, a dark episode of extreme extraction. What exactly is our role as artists, architects, archaeologists and historians coming to terms with the scale of planetary transformation from the sixth species extinction to the formation of the seventh continent, ‘the Great Pacific garbage patch’, a massive and menacing landmass of accumulated refuse?
Books by Ömür Harmansah
Advocating that archaeology can contribute substantively to the study of places in many fields of research and engagement within the humanities and the social sciences, this book seeks to move beyond the oft-conceived notion of places as fixed and unchanging, and argues that places are always unfinished, emergent, and hybrid. Rock cut monuments of Anatolian antiquity are discussed in the historical and micro-regional context of their making at the time of the Hittite Empire and its aftermath, while the book also investigates how such rock-cut places, springs, and caves are associated with new forms of storytelling, holy figures, miracles, and healing in their post-antique life. Anybody wishing to understand places of cultural significance both archaeologically as well as through current theoretical lenses such as heritage studies, ethnography of landscapes, social memory, embodied and sensory experience of the world, post-colonialism, political ecology, cultural geography, sustainability, and globalization will find the case studies and research within this book a doorway to exploring places in new and rewarding ways.
Erken demir çağında Asur İmparatorluğu ve Suriye-Hitit devletleri arasında kent kurmak; ortak bir inşa pratiği, resmi söylem ve kültürel kimlik kaynağıdır. Eski Yakındoğu’da Kent, Bellek, Anıt, bu çok yönlü tarihi olgunun karşılaştırmalı bir perspektifle yapılan ayrıntılı ve kapsamlı ilk analizi. Kitap, eskiçağ metinlerini, arkeolojik kazı ve yüzey araştırmaları ile çevre ve mekân analizlerini inceleyerek kent kurma pratiğinin kültürel bir tarihini sunuyor.
Begun in December of 1998, Mapping Augustan Rome had its origins in a graduate seminar initiated by Lothar Haselberger and co-taught with David Gilman Romano at the University of Pennsylvania. Contributors to the project included eleven graduate students and one undergraduate, hailing from various disciplines including archaeology, art history, ancient history, and classics. Each participant was assigned a region of the Urbs to research, producing written entries and annotated visual materials which were then transformed by D.G. Romano and two graduate students into a digital format. Concurrently, Andrew Gallia and Nicholas Stapp worked to model the physical topography of the Augustan city, one of the project’s notable innovations (for technical details: “Making the map”. At the end of the process, Mark Davison, a professional graphic designer, improved the legibility and aesthetics of the maps.
The written text includes two introductory chapters which outline the project’s goals, procedures and accomplishments “An introduction to the experiment”, and explain the intricacies of computerized map-making “Making the map”. The balance of the volume consists of individual entries which seek to justify and explain each aspect of the map. Each region of the city is addressed in a broad, over-arching entry, as are several urban systems such as aqueducts, city walls, and suburban expansion. Individual entries detail nearly 400 buildings, monuments, streets, tombs, neighborhoods, and horti, as well as more than 50 aspects of the Augustan city which could not be visualized, often due to an imperfectly known location (for a complete list, consult the indices of the Main Map). Rather than repeating information already available in topographic dictionaries such as the Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, each entry is limited to issues which impact the rendering process; aspects and debates tangential to the focus of our work are cursorily treated, if at all."
Journal Articles by Ömür Harmansah
Calvino’nun Görünmez Kentler’ini okuyup yazarın çılgınca bir tahayyülle
kurduğu kent tasvirlerinden birinin fiziksel mekana çevirisini yapmak, kurmaca anlatıdan imgeye ve üçboyutlu mekana dönüştürmek bizlere bir tasarım problemi olarak sunulmuştu. O 4 yıl boyunca, Brecht’in bir oyununa tasarladığımız sahne ve kostüm tasarımı haricinde, bana bu
kadar ilham veren ve heyecanlandıran bir proje hatırlamıyorum. Bu proje benim için bir egzersiz olmanın ötesinde, yeni bir yöntem, yeni bir düşünme ve çalışma biçimi olarak beni şaşırtmış ve etkilemişti.
Dolayısıyla, bir eskiçağ mimarlık tarihçisi ve peyzaj arkeoloğu olarak hem verdiğim derslerde hem de eskiçağ kent, mimarlık ve peyzaj tarihi üzerine yazdığım yazılarda Calvino’nun çizdiği rota bir düşünsel izlek olarak beni hemen hemen hiç bırakmadı. Bu kısa yazıda bu izleğin ne olduğuna ilişkin okurla birlikte düşünmeye çalışacağım.
and epigraphic evidence for the formation of the regional state Malizi/Melid. This Syro-Hittite kingdom established itself in the Malatya-Elbistan Plains in eastern Turkey during the first centuries of the Early Iron Age as one of the earliest political entities to emerge from the ashes of the Hittite Empire. Monuments raised by Malizean ‘country lords’ in rural and urban contexts suggest a picture of a fluid landscape in transition, one that was configured through the construction of cities, and other practices of place-making.
architectonic culture: finely carved stone masonry. I argue in this article that monumental building activity, as a historically conspicuous event, creates a medium of exchange of artisanal knowledge and technological innovation. The dramatic
urban landscape of the Iron age city at Ayanis (ancient Rusahinili-Eiduru-kai) in Eastern Turkey on the Eastern shore of Lake Van, features an impressive fabric of such architectonic culture, not only a product of long-term building technologies
in the region, but also that of a series of innovations associated with the reign of its founder Rusa II. This paper specifically focuses on the complex set of stone masonry techniques in the monumental structures at Ayanis, and attempts to reflect
on the multi-faceted aspects of symbolic technologies of production in the context of the foundation of the city. It argues that the highly refined stone masonry in Urartu was a symbolically charged architectural technology that effectively operated as royal insignia in the public sphere, but it also derived from the local corpus of building knowledge in the Lake Van basin.
building operations. These commemorative sites became event-places where state spectacles encountered and merged with local cult practices. The Early Iron Age inscriptions and reliefs carved on the cave walls of the Dibni Su sources at the
site of Birkleyn in Eastern Turkey, known as the ‘Source of the Tigris’ monuments, present a compelling paradigm for such spatial practices. Assyrian kings Tiglathpileser I (1114–1076 B.C.) and Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) carved ‘images of kingship’ and accompanying royal inscriptions at this impressive site in a remote but politically contested region. This important commemorative event was represented in detail on Shalmaneser III’s bronze repouss´e bands from Imgul-Enlil (Tell Balawat) as
well as in his annalistic texts, rearticulating the performance of the place on public monuments in Assyrian urban contexts. This paper approaches the making of the Source of the Tigris monuments as a complex performative place-event. The effect
was to reconfigure a socially significant, mytho-poetic landscape into a landscape of commemoration and cult practice, illustrating Assyrian rhetorics of kingship. These rhetorics were maintained by articulate gestures of inscription that appropriated an already symbolically charged landscape in a liminal territory and made it durable through site-specific spatial practices and narrative representations.
Keywords: mytho-poetic landscape; commemorative monuments; rock reliefs; place; performance; event; rhetorics of kingship; acts of inscription