Intimate Identities: A Critical Feminist Perspective on Identity and Prehistory in Türkiye

By Sera Yelözer (Bilkent University, Department of Archaeology)

Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2026

Time: 1730-1900

Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)

Abstract: How can the intimate relationships between people and things help us rethink identity in the deep past? In Türkiye, archaeological debates about identity have often centred on the political and ideological frameworks shaping the discipline, leaving the lived, embodied dimensions of prehistoric identities less fully explored. Essentialist and ahistorical assumptions about who people were and how we might recognise them archaeologically continue to shape interpretations.

This lecture brings a critical feminist perspective to these questions, connecting the politics of archaeological knowledge in Türkiye with the interpretation of identities in Neolithic Anatolia. Moving from a brief historical and contemporary overview to identity dynamics in archaeology and selected archaeological examples, it focuses on personal ornaments as intimate objects through which people constituted identities, negotiated difference and sustained relationships within and across communities. Making, wearing, exchanging and depositing ornaments offer ways to explore how identities took shape through material practices and encounters over the course of people’s lives.

What can archaeological evidence reveal about these embodied experiences? Whose identities become visible through our interpretive frameworks and whose remain obscured? By approaching identity as relational, situated and continually made, the lecture considers how a feminist engagement with the intimate material worlds of the Neolithic can challenge inherited categories and open new interpretive possibilities for West Asian prehistory.

About the speaker: Dr Sera Yelözer is a TÜBİTAK BİDEB Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Archaeology at Bilkent University. A specialist in prehistoric personal ornaments, she studies the small things people carried, wore, repaired, exchanged and buried with their dead, combining microscopic use-wear analysis with feminist approaches to identity, materiality and human-object relations. Her current project explores connections between body adornment technologies, craft specialisation and social identities in prehistoric Anatolia. Her work also critically examines gender, power and inclusion in archaeology in Türkiye, alongside questions of decolonisation and the politics of archaeological knowledge.

Organized by the Department of Archaeology