Specıalısts

 Dendrochronology 

Professor Ünal Akkemik completed his higher education in the Forest Engineering Division of Forestry Faculty at Istanbul University. He currently works at the Department of Forest Botany, Forestry Faculty at Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa. His wide expertise covers identifying and dendrochronologically dating archaeological sites, objects, and historical buildings from the bronze age to Ottoman era. He performed a significant number of wood identification studies and dendrochronological dating studies at several archaeological excavations and historical constructions in Türkiye. He also led several niche projects such as the one at the Yenikapı Archaeological Excavation Area. 

Professor Akkemik serves also as the curator of ISTO Herbarium and is an expert on fossil wood identification. He wrote more than 10 scientific books and 200 scientific papers half of which are published in international journals.

Dendrochronology

Nesibe Köse is a Professor for the Faculty of Forestry, at Istanbul University – Cerrahpaşa.  Her interests focus on dendroclimatological reconstructions and dendroecological, dendroarcheological, and dendrogeomorphological research by using tree rings. She built an extensive network of climatically-sensitive tree-ring chronologies in Türkiye. This tree-ring network was used to reconstruct precipitation, streamflow, temperature, and drought index. Additionally, Professor Köse has contributed to revealing the long-term fire regime of black pine forests in Türkiye determining fire-climate relations and possible effects of climate change on black pine forests. She dates wood from historical buildings, archeological sites, violins, etc. using tree rings. Currently, she is working on how forests and tree growth are affected by climate change.

 Zooarchaeology 

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Dr. Derya Silibolatlaz who completed her higher education in Ankara, currently works at Gaziantep University. Her expertise lies in understanding the activities of past societies, such as subsistence economies, hunting activities, and rituals by studying animal bones collected from archaeological sites through zooarchaeological research. Silibolatlaz works as a zooarchaeologist Silibolatlaz, who works as a zooarchaeologist in many archaeological excavations conducted in Turkey, and also leads several projects. Additionally, she is also the curator of GAUN Zooarchaeology Laboratory.

 Microbotany 

Macrobotany

Dr. Doğa Karakaya is a post-doctoral researcher (PhD. in Archaeology, University of Tübingen) at the University of Helsinki in the “Building in New Lands” project (PI: Dr. Marta Lorenzon). He specialized in the archaeobotanical research of Bronze and Iron Age societies with a focus on ancient plant macro-remains and phytoliths. His main research interest is to explore the ways through which complex societies manage their agricultural resources, the potential anthropogenic impact on the environment, and agricultural decision-making during the climatic and political instabilities in the Southwest Asia. He has been field archaeobotanist of many excavation projects in Türkiye, Spain, Greece and Georgia. Additionally, Dr. Karakaya has previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen in a research project that aims to uncover the environmental impact of nomadic communities in the south-central Turkey through analysis of environmental archaeological methods.

aDNA & isotopes on human skeletal remains

Ali Metin (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Hacettepe University. He has been working on several archaeological excavations in Türkiye and abroad almost every year since 2001. His main areas of interest are to examine the biocultural adaptations of archaeological human populations in human history and prehistory, and human-nature interaction, from a biocultural perspective in the context of human ecology. Ali Metin has a perspective that scientific production will bring more efficient results with the application of new technologies to the field as well as traditional bioarchaeological methods and interdisciplinary-multidisciplinary approaches. He has been actively involved in bone chemical analysis since 2013 and ancient DNA studies since 2014. 

Ali Metin established a new concept laboratory at the Advanced Technologies Application and Research Center at Hacettepe University in 2017. This Human Behavioral Ecology and Archaeometry lab (IDEA lab) focuses on project design and application of archaeological populations and living populations from an anthropological point of view. The IDEA lab team is focusing now on creating digital applications for archaeology and anthropology in different cultural heritage sites.

Organic residue analysis, anthropogenic soil analysis, ceramic mineralogy 

İsmail Tarhan (he/him)  is serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Faculty of Sciences at Selçuk University (Konya). Tarhan’s primary research fields include bioanalytical chemistry, chromatography methods, archaeometry, chemometrics, ingestible fat, lipids, volatile fat, food analyses, FTIR spectroscopy, and mineralogy. He has been developing new chromatography and chemometric-spectroscopy methods to study ingestible fat and lipids. Tarhan also applies FTIR and chemometric methods to archaeological ceramics from various excavations. FTIR and chemometric analyses enable him to classify archaeological pottery and identify mineralogical compositions that reveal firing temperatures. Additionally, he applies chromatography to study organic residue analyses to show the functions of archaeological pottery. 

The analysis of anthropogenic soil from excavations provides information about the range of past activities as well as identifying the borders of archaeological sites. Tarhan published extensively  in biochemistry and archaeometry in international, peer-reviewed journals. He is also taking part in archaeometry projects that are supported through the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) and the Office of Scientific Research Projects at Selçuk University. Tarhan also directs the Archaeometry Lab at Selçuk University’s Faculty of Sciences. 

Big data analysis and statistics

Tutku Tuncalı Yaman (she/her) is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Management Information Systems at Marmara University. Her educational background includes a BA  in Econometrics from Marmara University in 2004, a MSc in Statistics in 2007, and a PhD in Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences obtained in 2017. In addition to her expertise in management information systems, Tutku pursued a double major in Prehistory, specializing in Classical Archaeology in 2020. She is presently a PhD candidate in the Archaeology program at Istanbul University.

Tutku has been actively engaged as a researcher in various interdisciplinary projects in archaeology, which have been financially supported by TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) and Istanbul University. Her commitment to the field dates back to 2016, and she has been contributing significantly to both national and international excavations and surveys. Tutku is also the assistant director of Hacımusalar Höyük Excavations (Elmalı, Türkiye).

Her academic interests span a wide range of topics, including multivariate statistics, data mining, multi-criteria decision-making methods, digital archaeology, and fuzzy logic.

 Remote Sensing and GIS

Orkan Ozcan is an associate professor at Istanbul Technical University, Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences. He received his BS degree in hydrogeological engineering from Hacettepe University (2004).  His MS and PhD degrees were awarded from Istanbul Technical University, Satellite Communication, and Remote Sensing Programme in 2008 and 2014, respectively. He is the founder of the 3-Dimensional Earth Modeling Laboratory - Earth3Bee Lab. His research interests include remote sensing and multidisciplinary applications, unmanned aerial systems and land surface processes.

Earth3Bee Lab also serves as a partner of Konya Karahöyük excavations and other projects of the current team. 

Geophysics 

Serkan Özçelik is a Geophysical Engineer (MSc) with subsurface experience as well as active as a seismologist. He graduated from Kocaeli University with a degree in Geophysical Engineering and obtained his MSc from the Istanbul University Institute of Science, Geophysics Engineering Department. He was appointed to Cumhuriyet University (Sivas) as a research assistant. He worked as a research assistant at Istanbul University for about seven years as a postgraduate. In 2013 he, together with Fırat Yiğit, co-founded Ser Engineering Co. He is responsible for GPR (Ground-Penetrating Radar), ERT (Electric Resistvity Tomography), and Magnetic Surveys in archaeological sites and underground research (Utility). He continues geophysical surveys especially at archaeological sites. Serkan pursues his  academic research and published as an independent scholar. 

Geophysics 

Fırat Yiğit is a Geophysical Engineer (MSc) with a major in Archaeogeophysics. He graduated from Istanbul Technical University with a degree in Geophysical Engineering and obtained his master's degree from the Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences. He co-founded Ser Engineering Co. in 2013 and is still working there as a Senior Geophysical Engineer. He is responsible for GPR (Ground-Penetrating Radar) and Magnetic Surveys in archaeological sites and is also interested in data processing and GIS (Geographic Information Systems). He has successfully completed geophysical surveys in numerous archaeological sites.

Geophysics 

İnci Nurgül Özdoğru is a PhD student and research assistant at Istanbul Technical University, Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences. She received her BSc d in Geophysical Engineering (2018) and MSc  in Earth System Science (2022) from Istanbul Technical University. Her current PhD project aims to simulate irrigation farming as part of an agent-based modelling (ABM) method that is focused on computing socio-economic transformations at a particular site during the Late Chalcolithic period. İnci  has been a part of several geophysical teams working in various archaeological prospection projects in Türkiye and the Bavaria region in Germany.