Ömür Harmanşah

KONYA
DISPOSABLE
LANDSCAPES
DISPOSABLE
LIVES

The Political Ecology

of
Water
in
Central Turkey
2 “Our ghosts are traces
of more-than-human
histories through which
ecologies are made
and unmade… Every
landscape is haunted by
past ways of life.”
Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Nils Bubandt, Arts of Living on a
Damaged Planet
4 Introduction
Ecological disasters and global climate
change have recently become matters
of everyday concern for all around the
world. From “breaking news” reports
on hurricanes destroying cities to mass
migrations caused by war, terrorism, and
violence; from scientific reports on the
mass extinction of biological species to
apocalyptic feature films, we live in an era of
ecological anxiety. As Bruno Latour recently
pointed out, this is no more an “ecological
crisis” but an instability that is here to stay.
Environmental scientists propose that we
entered a new geological epoch called
the Anthropocene, which highlights the
human impact on the planet’s geology and
ecosystems since the Industrial Revolution.
For the first time in planetary history, human
species is considered a geological agent
that introduced irreversible structural
changes to the atmosphere, biosphere,
hydrosphere, and lithosphere. Yet far from
bestowing humanity the lion’s share of
power over the rest, the Anthropocene
debate points to humanity’s limitations in
shaping its own deep history and future.
In this era of rapid change, violence, and
ecological panic, a reconsideration of the
distribution of agencies across the planet’s
history has become inevitable. Historians
point to the implications of our moment of
global anxiety on how we write history,
urging us to reconsider historical
fundamentals such as nature/culture divide,
prioritization of human over geological time,
and the notions of agency, progress, and
freedom.
As a landscape archaeologist and an
architectural historian, I have been asking
the question; what does the field practice of
landscape archaeology look like in the age
of the Anthropocene? What does it
mean to write histories of landscape in
an ecologically responsible way and in a
way sensitive to the structural inequalities,
especially with the question of access to
resources and the very basic right to live
in and belong to a place in a world where
we are faced with increasingly dramatic
forms of environmental injustice? My
current project investigates the study
of archaeological landscapes in the
contemporary Middle East at a moment
of global ecological crisis, ongoing military
conflict, and heritage violence. Its objective
is to investigate the new methodological
and epistemological challenges to the
study of landscape histories brought by
the onset of the Anthropocene.
In this paper, I argue that as landscape archaeologists, we have long dedicated
our efforts to understand the human-environment relationship primarily in the Holocene
environments, trying to understand the human evolution from prehistory to industrial
modernity, always searching for pristine landscapes where the archaeological or the
environmental record is best preserved. This however has led to the prioritization of
particular landscapes for study over others. The new ecological crisis now urges us to
revisit this disciplinary practice and raises serious questions about our responsibility to
address landscapes of the Anthropocene, and requires us to engage with the political
ecology of the field where environmental catastrophe and injustice are fast becoming
the norm. Whether we like it or not, for example, when we look at the nature of
archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East, almost all archaeological practice have
adopted the methodologies and mentalities of the salvage operation, whether
explicitly or implicitly, under the new world order of late capitalism and its treatment of
landscapes. I will finally talk about the concept of disposable landscapes as a
discourse of the late capitalist state, as a deeply rooted, historically nuanced rhetoric
about particular places which are continuously sacrificed to development or war.
I will also make a call a politically engaged, ethically responsible archaeology of
landscape that can precisely undermine such discourses of disposable landscapes
and disposable lives.
6 Landscapes,
Landscape archaeologists always had
an advantage in having a good grasp
of the long-term and the deep history,
and we expect them to show up as
a To reconcile the landscapes of the
Holocene (as nostalgic ecologies of
preindustrial life on planet earth) and
the landscapes of the Anthropocene

Temporality
prominent speakers at the roundtable of (as ruined/degraded landscapes
the Anthropocene. They are indeed doing of industrial modernity and late
so but maybe not at a scale of involvement capitalism), and to understand

and the
as historians or climate scientists. So the similarities and differences,
one of the questions I would like to ask continuities and ruptures between
today: what does an eco-critical, politically the two.

Anthropocene
It is important to note that Anthropocene engaged an environmentally responsible
is not only about the dramatic changes field project look like, one that takes
in the environment in the recent past, but seriously the questions posed to us by
more significantly it is about the deep future, the Anthropocene. I will propose today
a looming apocalyptic future that we face that there is a fundamentally important
today. Unlike what its name implies- i.e. the project awaiting survey archaeologists and
subordination of nature to the Anthropos, landscape historians, many components
or human agency- on the contrary it implies of which they have so far been reluctant

b
the “becoming geological of the human to embrace or engage despite the global
species” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it. urgency of the environmental crisis
Jeremy Davies has recently written that debates. And that project is To engage politically with the sites of
“humanity is not at the center of the picture fieldwork - with the explicit objective of
of the Anthropocene” and neither it is unraveling discourses and practices
reduced “to an undifferentiated mass”. of disposability that reduce local
ecologies in their relation to global
discourses of climate change and
the Anthropocene.

One aspect of the Anthropocene debate

is the weakening of the strict separation
between historical time, i.e. the temporality
of historical writing, and the temporality of
geological structures of the planet earth,
and the total collapse of the conviction that
the nonhuman, geological time is ahistorical
or relatively unchanging or immutable. If

c
the onset of the Anthropocene is a moment
in which an unusual window is opened into
the slow moving processes of the mineral Related to the previous, an
world, like an accidental and deep cut understanding that critical theories
into the stratigraphy of the sediments of of the environment will emerge from
earth’s history, and has demonstrated to the field, and the idea that the social
us that the impact of human species has movements that we have recently
always been at work as a geological agent seen in massive scales such as the
in that history, what exactly would be the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement
implication of this new found understanding or the Gezi Movement in Turkey
of deep time on historical accounts of the are becoming the primary source
past? The debate around the Anthropocene of inspiration for the metropolitan
is then not simply a geological debate theory production today.
but an intensely political and cultural one,
especially involving the politics of sciences
embroiled with scenarios of environmental
crisis, the governance of the planet, and
the role of late capitalism in the present
predicament.
8
Holocene
Anthropocene
Landscape archaeology has accomplished
a great deal in its collaborations with the
environmental sciences, especially in field
of paleoenvironmental and paleoclimate
reseach, and the vegetation history of
particular regions during the Holocene.
In these long-term evidence of vegetation
fluctuation in micro-environments, it is
easy to trace the human impact on local
landscapes. For example, from the pollen
cores from the Beysehir Lake just south
of the area where I do fieldwork in south
central Turkey, wide scale forest clearance
of deciduous oak, pine, cedar, juniper, and
fir, while at the same time the plantation
of olive, walnut, sweet chestnut orchards
as well as vineyards are attested in the
so-called “Beysehir Occupation Phase”
registering a geological stratum of a
substantial anthropogenic change in the
vegetation of the region, starting sometime
in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE
and corresponding to the height of the
Hittite Empire.
versus
Landscapes
However, the archaeological study of
Holocene landscapes become favorable or
even possible only if they are preserved
sufficiently- I will refer here to the concept
landscape taphonomy which studies the
processes of ruination by which elements
of the past landscapes are selectively
removed degraded or buried, removing
our ability of accessing the material record
of earlier landscapes. Geomorphology then
is called for rescue to help archaeologists
to move away from disturbed landscapes
in order to access the better preserved,
less ruined landscapes. These are the
landscapes of the Holocene, where
the human species have a relatively
harmonious life in relation to the natural
environment. Side by side with the well
preserved Holocene landscapes, are then
the landscapes of the Anthropocene, which
are the dystopic landscapes of the industrial
development, the wastelands of failed
engineering projects, degraded and ruined
landscapes by pollution, extreme extraction,
flooded valleys and basins by the waters of
a massive dam, badlands and the
brownfields of late capitalism, the ruins
in the aftermath of an atomic bomb, or
Fresh Kills on Staten Island, the garbage
dump of New York City.
What do we mean by disposable
landscapes? Saskia Sassen in her new
monograph Expulsions points to the
emergence of a new logics of expulsions,
where “people, enterprises and places are
expelled from social and economic orders
of our time.” This is practiced not only
through explicit, physical destruction of
landscapes and deportation of communities
but also through structural changes through
legislation. A good example here is the
new legislation in Turkey that abolished
the rights of villagers to pasture and the
common lands and the abolishment of
the entire status of what used to be called
“village” by turning them into neighborhoods
of cities and thus removing their agency
to make decisions on the rural landscape.
The new legislation removes the agency of
farming communities living in rural places
and makes agricultural and pastoral land
vulnerable to development.
In her book The Mushroom at the end of
the world, Anna Tsing elaborates on the
concept of “salvage accumulation” by which
she refers to the way late capitalism makes
use of raw materials or environmental
resources such as human life, coal, or oil.
Shedefines salvage accumulation as “the
process through which lead firms amass
capital without controlling the conditions
under which commodities are produced.”
So this is about commodification of raw
materials and resources, to which we might
add heritage. As matter that comes out
of the ground and as artifacts produced
in the deep past, we’ve known for a long
time a similar process of commodification
of cultural heritage as well. So despite
archaeologists who passionately argue
against this, cultural heritage and
archaeological sites and assemblages are
often the object of salvage accumulation
and salvage archaeology precisely
operates in this peri-capitalist realm.
10

One important argument that Anna Tsing

makes in relation to salvage is that, salvage
is not a side effect or ornament of mere
ordinary capitalist processes, but this is
precisely how capitalism works. Salvage
accumulation then is not necessarily a
processthat is emergent at moments of
crisis, say construction of a dam or military
conflict, but it is exactly a feature of how
capitalism operates on the ground. We
might then rethink the common discourse
about looting and the illegally excavated
antiquities as casualties of war and
understand it in a way the bread and butter
of late capitalism. Tsing notes that “sites
for salvage are simultaneously inside and
outside of capitalism” (Tsing 2015: 63) and
she refers to them as pericapitalist, and
points to a rather messy system in which
violent conditions, destructive environmental
processes, or processes that are outside
the realms of legality may well be
incorporated through supply chains to
serve capitalist returns.

As Tsing puts it “salvage translates violence

and pollution into profit.” (Tsing 2015: 64).
To put this in a more constructive tone,
we might think of this pericapitalist realm,
where translation takes place and salvage
accumulation occurs, as political arenas
where we can question the “unquestioned
authority of capitalism in our lives”. This
is why salvage archaeology projects are
right in this platform of translation.
12
Kuru Gol Basin
as an
Anthropocene
I conclude my paper by speaking about
a case study from our survey project in
west central Turkey in the province of
Konya within the small district of Ilgın.
In 2010, we started this project with the
idealist intentions and the grand research
objectives of investigating diachronically a
borderland landscape of the Hittite Empire
where multiple imperial monuments were
raised in the 13th century BCE. Our
methodology was largely a combination
of Mediterranean style intensive survey
and the more extensive methods of
Near Eastern landscape archaeology,
accompanied with a critical geomorphology
that did not shy away from degraded or
heavily altered landscapes but saw them as
great opportunities for understanding
radical differences between contemporary
and ancient land use and water regimes.
A few years into the survey, we started
investigating the Kuru Göl basin, a drained
lake basin immediately to the west of
Yalburt Yaylası the famous Hittite sacred
pool complex with a hieroglyphic Luwian
inscription of Tudhaliya IV, and quickly
learned about the plans for the construction
of a coal-fired power plant and the planned
opening of open pit coal mines within the
basin.
In the 1960s, the Department of Waterworks undertook a
massive infrastructure project that turned the Çavusçugöl into a
reservoir and established a vast network of irrigation first in the
Atlanti Plain and then later in the Ilgin Plain, aiming for irrigated
agriculture especially for sugar beets. With this infrastructure
project, the Kurugöl was cut off from the Çavuşçu wetlands
and did not receive any irrigation water, leading to substantial
drops in its groundwater and the eventual disturbance of its
multiple springs.Çavusçu wetlands became in fact a protected
natural habitat for its bird communities, but the adjacent Kurugöl
Landscape
was left out of the equation. In the final stages of this project
in the early 1990s, Kurugöl Basin became the planned site
for a coal-fired power plant and its open-pit coal mine and
power plant. Right around this time, in 1993-1994, a team
of archaeologists from Selcuk University were conducting a
survey of archaeological settlements in the Ilgin district and
in their writings they explicitly state that Kurugöl basin could
certainly not have any significant settlement since it is so
impoverished. So I guess the point I am trying to make us
that this local landscape is entangled in the core ecological
problems of the global present and regional past, but it is
also characterized as a ruined, degraded landscape, a perfect
example of a landscape characteristic of the Anthropocene,
for archaeologists not worthwhile to study due to its heavily
degraded character, and from the perspective of the policy
makers, a disposable landscape with disposable lives in it.
Today there is one small town Çavuşçugöl and five villages
which will be directly impacted by the power plant project and
these communities will have to be moved. With the approval of the Ministry of Culture
and Tourism, we therefore decided to
A confounding discourse in academic focus our attention to the Kurugöl basin,
literature and state ideology persists since especially in 2013 and 2014 seasons.
the 19th century that the lake basin was
an environmentally degraded landscape of
upland erosion, poorly drained lowlands,
and diminishing springs; and consequently
unworthy of any archaeological fieldwork.
For example, the anthropogeographer
Hermann Wenzel, who worked under the
Nazi regime and visited the region, wrote
in his two volume Forschungen in Inner
Anatolien, published in 1935, already spoke
about this landscape as a marginal extreme
steppe landscape, “a declined landscape”
(General Niedergang) settled by resilient
people who eke out a meager existence in
an extreme landscape that he compares
to the dry Arctic steppe landscapes of the
North, agriculturally unsustainable and
devoid of proper water sources.
14

Despite previous official documents

reporting the virtual absence of
archaeological heritage in the mining
and plant construction area, the Yalburt
Survey Project’s fieldwork in the Kurugöl
encountered a rich archaeological
landscape. The Kurugöl and the valley
of the Çebişli-Reşadiye River, which used
to drain into both the Kurugöl and Çavuşçu
Lake, are segments of the route connecting
the Yalburt Yaylası spring monument
and the ancient east-west road that runs
through Ilgın, Akşehir, and Afyon. The
limestone and schist hills of the Dökmekaya
Ridge that define the western edge of
the Kurugöl has a series of active and
fossil springs from Uzun Pınar to Kartal
Pınar and Dede Tepe Pınarı. Centered
around these springs and on the slopes
that descend to the floor of the Kurugöl,
the Yalburt Survey Project identified a In response to our survey reports, the
cluster of settlements: the Early Bronze Regional Council for Preservation in Konya
Age mounds of Çallı Ağıl Höyük, Davların registered several of these sites as first
Tömbek Höyüğü, and Ada Tepe; a low and third degree archaeological heritage,
second millennium BCE mound at Kartal temporarily stalling the power plant project.
Pınar; a looted Late Bronze Age pithos This news was cheerfully received by local
cemetery downslope from Uzun Pınar; a communities living in the Kuru Göl basin.
scattering of Late Bronze Age ceramics The municipality of Ilgın, the Ministry of
on the built terraces below the Hellenistic Energy and Natural Resources and the
fortress on a promontory by the Uzun Ciner Holding, which is the multi-national
Pınar spring; and lastly terraces of company that will build the power plant
undated stone compounds spread over collectively filed an objection to the
the slopes of Dökmekaya and Uzun Pınar. Council’s decision and the case went to
During the Middle and Late Bronze Ages the Supreme Council for Preservation at
then, settlement concentrated on the the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. This
western edge of the basin, including the council eventually reduced the heritage
construction of a stone-built fortress, an status of three archaeological sites in the
imperial pithos cemetery, and a series of mining zone to three, opening the door for
mounded settlements lining up along a salvage archaeology and clearing the way
series of natural springs on the western for the power plant construction. Salvage
slopes overlooking the basin. We surveyed archaeologycan be applied to third degree
Hareme Mezarligi mound, which produced archaeological sites in Turkey. Such a
a Middle Bronze Age or Assyrian Colony treatment of landscapes fails to address the
Period seal. loss of an entire archaeological landscape
and reduces the past environments to
specific sites and nodes in the landscape
where limited archaeological evidence can
be recovered.
16

One exciting possibility for the future of

landscape research then is to engage
with the politics swarming the Holocene
and the Anthropocene landscapes. The
challenge that the debates around the
Anthropocene presents to us is precisely to
break the binary between the Holocene and
the Anthropocene landscapes as pristine
vs contaminated, and embrace landscapes
of the Anthropocene for archaeological
scrutiny by abandoning the idea of pristine
landscapes altogether. The case of the
Kurugöl Basin suggests that the persistent
discourses of the state and academia on
degraded character of landscapes lead
to a legitimization disposable landscapes.
These landscapes are not found worthy
of study by academics and they are
conveniently prepared to be sacrificed to
development. Yet political engagement
This decision of the Supreme Council is with the field requires us to untangle and
now being challenged by the three court expose such deep rooted discourses and
cases opened by the ecological activist rethink local histories from the perspective
organization Ecology Collective/Climate of ecological justice and a regime of care.
Justicebased in Ankara as well as the
inhabitants of Çavuşçugöl town with
the support of archaeological heritage
reports from Yalburt project. There is
an ongoing legal battle. Yalburt Project
has also intervened with the creditor
organization for the power plant project.
In collaboration with the organization
Bankwatch, Central and Eastern European
network for monitoring the activities of
international financial institutions that are
environmentally unsustainable, we reached
out to the creditor bank International and
Commercial Bank of China- ICBC and
submitted a detailed report that outlined the
environmental, archaeological and human
rights impact of the power plant project.
In response to this report and a face-to-
face meeting with their executives, ICBC
suspended the project and eventually
withdrawn from it.