Professor Owen Doonan"Archaeological Expedition to Sinop, Turkey: Exploring the Origins of Trade at the Nexus of Eurasian Civilizations,” A general overview of the Sinop Kale excavations in the context of the regional project"
Professor Owen Doonan will join our Stanford AIA Chapter on Friday, March 2 at 8:00pm, Packard Building, Room 101
Reception to follow.
Lecture is free and open to the public.
Professor Doonan has devoted the past 25 years to research and teaching about the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Middle East. He co-founded the Sinop (Turkey) Regional Archaeological Project in 1996 and have served as its Director ever since. The research was centered on the Greco-Roman colonial port of Sinop (ancient Sinope). Sinope was the most important pre-modern port on the south coast of the Black Sea, located at the center of the Turkish coast directly opposing the Crimean peninsula to the North. From 1996-2000 the project included systematic archaeological and geomorphological surveys on land in collaboration with a systematic underwater archaeological survey led by Dr. Robert Ballard and sponsored by the National Geographic Society. The project was designed as the first integrated terrestrial and undersea survey of a trade and production system that extended “from mountaintop to ocean bottom.”
As of 2012 they have completed eight seasons of archaeological survey and environmental research in the hinterland around Sinope, recording more than 400 archaeological sites ranging from Paleolithic to Ottoman periods. He is currently organizing the publication of the final reports of these two phases of the survey (1996-2000; 2010-2012). In 2015 he initiated a major long-term international excavation in the heart of the ancient Greco-Roman colony of Sinope with support from the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, CSU Northridge and several participating Universities, and private sponsors.
Professor Doonan's field research has been supported by numerous competitive external sources, including two three-year NEH Collaborative Research Grants (2010-2012, 2015-2017) and several grants (1996-2000, 2003, 2015) from the National Geographic Society. His own research and writing have been supported by grants from the Getty Residential Scholars program, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (2005), the NEH (1999), and the International Research Exchange Board (IREX, 2001). He has received a number of awards for his work including the Jerome Richfield Fellowship at CSUN (2012) and the Archaeological Institute of America's G.M.A. Hanfmann Lectureship for 2016-17. Please see the Sinop Regional Archaeological Project web page for news about the Sinop Kale excavations.