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Research at KUDAR

Research Projects

KUDAR is presently supporting research in Türkiye and in Italy investigating society’s relationship with the sea. This work includes fieldwork on land and under water, as well as post-excavation research and documentation. Please follow the links below for more information about our ongoing work and its results.

Boğsak, Türkiye

Courtesy of the Boğsak Archaeological Survey

The Boğsak Archaeological Survey (BOGA), directed by Günder Varinlioğlu of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, is a diachronic field study of a 25 km-long stretch of the coast of eastern Rough Cilicia to the south and west of Silifke (ancient Seleucia ad Calycadnum). Since 2017, a team sponsored by KUDAR has conducted shoreline and snorkel surveys as part of Dr. Varinlioğlu’s project, documenting maritime fortifications, installations, informal harbour sites, and anchorages. Please click here for more information.

Ancient Maritime Dynamics (AMD) Project

The Ancient Maritime Dynamics Project (AMD) began in 2015 with a goal of using the large corpus of maritime archaeological data on the seafloor to model and to understand seafaring activity in the antique Mediterranean. With a dataset of approximately 1100 sites, varying from the 7th century BC to the 7th century AD in age, and including isolated finds, extensive shipwrecks, cargo, and personal items, the AMD project demonstrates that the size of this archaeological corpus can build narratives of past maritime activity equivalent in scale to those previously produced through the amalgamation of textual and terrestrial data. Please click here for more information.

Modeling the Maritime Cultural Landscape of the Amalfi Coastline

This project to model and to understand changes in the maritime cultural landscape of the Amalfi coastline began in 2016, and includes a variety of scholars from archaeology, history, ethnography, and geo-morphology to try and reconstruct the changing relationship between the communities living along this coastline, and the nearby sea. For example, how is this relationship manifested in the urban facades of this region’s port towns? How is the modern relationship with the sea different than in the Roman era? For more information about this project, please click here.

Yenikapı Hull Research

Photo courtesy of C. Pulak / Institute of Nautical Archaeology.

Begun as a rescue excavation in 2004 under the direction of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, archaeological research at the site of Yenikapı recovered at least 36 Byzantine shipwrecks. Since 2018, faculty and students associated with the KUDAR Maritime Archaeology Center have been working at the Bodrum Research Center of the Instiute of Nautical Archaeology on the documentation of three of these shipwrecks. For more information, please click here.