Love, Serena

University of Queensland

Research Topic: The Domestication of Humans through Architecture from the Neolithic through Bronze Ages at Multiple Sites in Türkiye.

Dr.Love’s project, “The Domestication of Humans through Architecture” explores how people socially adapted to a changing built environment and the reciprocal influences of the built environment on the formation and expression of cultural identity. Ancient architecture is one medium to express and contest cultural identity and document the emergence of social inequality. Her research explores the mutual constitution between the built environment and rise of complex societies in Anatolia through a compositional analysis of mud-bricks in architecture. Mud-bricks can provide empirical data to understand how material choices can reflect codes of social values and ideology through a process of social technology. Mud-brick compositions quantifiably recognize brick-maker recipes, where combinations of raw materials were used between different buildings and compositional variation relates to social inequality. The relationship between architecture and cultural identity is demonstrated through case studies, from the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age Neolithic (8400 BCE) to Bronze Age (1600 BCE), including Boncuklu, Çatalhöyük, Çadır Höyük, and Early Bronze levels at Tell Tayinat. Through a comparative analysis, my research considers architecture as material culture, where mud-bricks are interpreted as objects reflexive of human behavior, which are metaphors for an engagement with the environment and an outlet for symbolic communication.