Arkeopolitics: Reframing Human History from Scratch
From The Observatory
Source: Human Bridges Project
The term “arkeopolitics” unifies the archaeology of the “order beneath” (“arkeo”) with the political science of the “order above” (“politics”). With these combined disciplines we can revaluate the human story—from the Paleolithic to the present—through an “amodernist” lens. This is not a retreat into the past, but a strategic expansion of our vocabulary to survive the future.
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In the heart of Ankara, less than a kilometer apart, stand two pillars of Turkish academia: the Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye) and the Faculty of Language and History-Geography (DTCF). Mülkiye was established in 1859 to navigate the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic relations with the West, while DTCF was founded by the first president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in 1935 to create the historical and linguistic identity of the new republic. Yet, despite falling under the umbrella of Ankara University since 1950, these neighbors have spent decades in a state of mutual ignorance about what the other does. One focuses on the “political present,” while the other is dedicated to the “historical horizon.”
This is not due to a lack of communication but is a result of structural invisibility. This paradigmatic ignorance is a byproduct of departmentalization; these disciplines were designed not to consider the other, mirroring a Western model that frames human history through the narrow lens of Eurocentric modernism.
As a student of Mülkiye, where I also later taught as a professor, I was the ward of this systemic silence. Standing behind the lectern, I often felt like the tormented pastor in Ingmar Bergman’s movie Winter Light—reciting the liturgy of 1648 and the “Westphalian Order” to a congregation that sensed that the god of modernity had long since departed the building.
My doctoral years at Cardiff Law School (2000–2005) were a revelation, but not in the way I expected. While I had arrived with an almost intimate knowledge of European legal history, I was struck by a jarring realization: the very system that claimed “universality” knew almost nothing about the history of the geography I came from, or indeed, any history outside its own curated timeline. It was later, upon returning to Mülkiye after my PhD to begin teaching and supervising the theses of my students, that I saw the extent of this omission in full view. Every lecture, every dissertation began with the mandatory nod to Ancient Greece or Rome, only to perform a dizzying leap into the modern era. There was something profoundly unsettling about this “jump”—as if thousands of years of human experience were merely a dark, irrelevant hallway leading to the brightly lit room of European modernity.
To understand what was truly lost in that gap, I began a retrospective journey. I started by asking a simple, heretical question: “What did the world actually look like in 1647, the year before modern history supposedly began?” This curiosity turned into a decade-long intellectual excavation. I moved backward from the Middle Ages to antiquity and then to Mesopotamian city-states, searching for the roots of order, until I finally reached the Stone Age.
This journey did not just challenge the “where” of history, but also the “how” of politics. As someone trained in international relations, I was indoctrinated by the Hobbesian trap: the idea of “homo homini lupus” (man is wolf to man) and the conviction that without a state—which was equated solely with the modern nation-state—there is only anarchy and chaos. This was an inescapable “reality” ingrained even in the most dissident among us: the belief that without a central authority, life was nasty, brutish, and short in every realm. Likewise, a more Lockean optimism—believing in a natural, rational order—remained a prisoner of the same 200-year-old modern script: the sovereign “umpire” was the only way to escape the uncertainty of the “state of nature.”
Even the founding fathers of the left, despite their critiques of the state, were anchored in a similar modernist progressivism. For them, the pre-state era was often merely viewed as a pre-political precursor to human development—a historical phase to be documented rather than a vital experience for navigating the present. Their teleological lens framed history as an inevitable march toward modernity, rendering the vast majority of human social organization theoretically invisible or irrelevant to contemporary governance.
However, as my study of Paleolithic and Neolithic datasets deepened, I realized that the core pillars of our social existence—from gender equality to the roots of redistribution—defied the “pre-data” paradigms I had been taught. These emerging findings, which I will explore in future articles, reveal a sophisticated laboratory of human resilience that modern political science has long chosen to ignore.
For instance, Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site known to archaeology since the 1960s, is virtually non-existent in discussions about political science and law.
Staring at the silence of a society that possessed both property and privacy, yet flourished for 1,500 years with no state, no great houses, and no trace of warfare, I realized our education resulted in a form of systemic blindness.
It would be unfair to lay the blame on 18th and 19th-century thinkers for this. They were children of their time, building theories without the benefit of the archaeological evidence we possess today. The real failure lies with us—with a modern academia that stubbornly clings to these outdated scripts despite a mountain of contradictory data accumulating over the last 20 years. Our refusal to rethink our foundations in the light of this vast human laboratory is not just a disciplinary myopia. It is a profound scientific inertia—a systemic byproduct of an obsession with hyper-specialization and the paralyzing safety of academic comfort zones.
In fact, when international relations was established as a formal discipline at Aberystwyth University in Wales in 1919, the Rosetta Stone had already been deciphered for nearly a century, the Amarna Letters had already been unearthed, transliterated, and translated, and the Hittite language was just being decoded. Archaeology was already revealing “deep time” and its profound relevance to modern law and order. Yet these two emerging fields were established in such a way that they would never coincide. They were designed to remain in parallel silence. I once asked professor Cahit Günbattı, a doyen of DTCF who dedicated his career to deciphering Akkadian cuneiform texts, if he had ever shared his findings with Mülkiye’s international law professors just a 10-minute walk away: “No,” he replied, “I don’t know why, but that’s just how it was in our time.”
As my own readings about the Paleolithic deepened, I realized that this was a systemic disconnection rather than a requirement of specialization. This fragmentation protected our paradigms, not our expertise. We were not suffering from a lack of information but fulfilling the requirements of our established universe. The data was always there. We chose to preserve the linear worldview that protected our academic existence. This led to a second, more unsettling conclusion: Modern archaeology was just as deeply political as political science. Both fields weren’t just merely silent; they were also reading from the same biased script.
The work of Sally Mcbrearty and Alison S. Brooks (2000) provided an “aha!” moment. Their critique of the “human revolution” confirmed that even fundamental classifications—like the Stone Age—were tailored to fit a European record. By ignoring the older and gradual developments in Africa, this selective lens was masking a far more complex global story.
Yet, while the explosion of Neolithic finds in Turkey—such as Göbeklitepe—initially challenged these Eurocentric myths, I soon encountered a different trap: a reactive “Anatolia-centrism” that claims the “zero point of history” all over again, just for a different geography. This is the danger of deconstruction: the temptation to dismantle one center only to erect another in its place. The flaws in these center-based narratives—whether Eurocentric or their reactive counterparts—convinced me of what I sought: not a depoliticized science, but one that transcends the narrow instrumentalization of history for modern identity politics.
Hundreds of thousands of years of human experience make any single-center history not just biased, but scientifically impossible. This realization shattered the singular narrative of my education. We have ignored a vast “human laboratory” of alternative governance—not because it failed, but because it defied the 200-year-old modern script.
This paradigmatic trap manifested as a physical silence between institutions designed to study human order. Despite isolated academic efforts and specific scholarly interests now and then, the structural indifference within Mülkiye—a school whose entire existence is dedicated to understanding the (modern) state—toward the origins and, more importantly, the “pre-history” of human organization, became an intolerable intellectual void for me.
Organizing the 2018 annual department conference, I titled it, “The World of States in a Transforming International System.” The world stood on the precipice of what I now call a “pan-crisis,” and I knew the answers wouldn’t be found in modern political textbooks alone. To explain the daily life of stateless societies and the long, non-linear process that eventually led to the state, I invited professor Mehmet Özdoğan, the doyen of Neolithic studies. His work was my constant companion. Yet to our knowledge, it was the first time an archaeologist of such stature had addressed Mülkiye. Professor Özdoğan did more than just provide an archaeological perspective on the birth of the state. He offered the encouragement I needed to accelerate my effort to merge archaeology with modern political science.
Encouraged by Professor Özdoğan, I felt a growing urge to dig deeper into the history of my field. Invited to contribute to a Festschrift for my PhD supervisor, Robin Churchill—a global authority on the law of the sea—I explored the ancient roots of maritime law. I authored a chapter on the Amarna Letters, the diplomatic correspondence of the Late Bronze Age. I didn’t call it “the archaeology of the law of the sea” yet, but framed it as “An Amodernist Approach to International Law (AMAIL)” to show that the field’s core structures persisted far beyond the narrow boundaries of the modern era. By “amodern,” I did not mean anti-modern, pre-modern, or post-modern. I sought a perspective that decenters the modern era—treating it not as the ultimate pinnacle of human progress, but as just another epoch within the trajectory of hundreds of thousands of years. While it has its distinct features, it is a period that can be scrutinized with the same analytical tools as any other, revealing that its unique structures are often just variations of much older human patterns.
These ventures were merely the first cracks; the exhaustion of old paradigms was now too visible to ignore. The global “pan-crisis” proved that the way we were taught to perceive the world was reaching its limits. This deepening crisis demanded more than isolated studies—it required a new language and a fundamental paradigm shift.
In 2021, I finally fused “arkeo” with “politics.” The mission was clear: to unify the archaeology of the “order beneath” with the political science of the “order above.” I aim to bridge an academic abyss: political science ignores millennia, instead focusing on the last 200 years, while archaeology hesitates to link its findings to modern governance or law.
Arkeopolitics invites both disciplines to an “intellectual awakening,” urging them to intertwine and reforge their perspectives into a unified, transformative framework. By breaking from Eurocentric and linear-progressivist paradigms, it revaluates the human story—from the Paleolithic to the present—through an “amodernist” lens.
This is not a retreat into the past, but a strategic expansion of our vocabulary to survive the future. Arkeopolitics is an urgent invitation to reclaim our species’ resilience.
The 3D Shift: Reconstructing Law and Politics
From this newfound clarity, I began revisiting the legal and political knowledge that had shaped me through this expansive lens. This transition required more than just a new perspective. It demanded a new kind of literacy. I found myself immersed in archaeological reports, where every architectural remain, every object, and every finding began to speak to me like a legal text, carrying within them the very codes of social order.
It was like seeing a 3D image hidden within a flat surface. This shift allowed me to reexamine the core pillars of our social existence from the ground up.
To briefly illustrate this awakening, I began by rethinking the public sphere not as a marble forum but as a 700,000-year-old campfire—the foundational site where the controlled use of fire brought with it institutionalized practices of collective action, socialization, and shared sustenance. In this setting, the essence of democracy was rooted in absolute direct participation—a natural outcome of living in groups that, as we know through the work of Robin Dunbar and other experts, averaged between 35 and 50 individuals. Within this deep-time perspective, redistribution revealed itself not as a “modern market mechanism,” but as a fundamental survival mechanism of collective pooling; a system where the productive components (men and women) shared resources with non-productive components like the elderly and children, in recognition of their vital past and future roles. This prompted me to recognize that such social cohesion was the product of a historic bloc between men and women, whose tens of thousands of years of equality evolved from a pragmatic, symbiotic cooperation.
The radical rupture that eventually shattered this equilibrium has thus become much clearer as a cumulative process unfolding over four to five millennia—from the dawn of the Neolithic to its systemic conclusion. It was the result of the convergence of climate change, sedentarization, and the advent of the plow and irrigation. This long-term transition triggered the surplus accumulation and the invention of warfare technology, which in turn led to the near-simultaneous rise of the state, systemic warfare, patriarchy, and organized religion.
I began to view these not as separate accidents, but as a coevolutionary “package of power” that fundamentally reshaped the human experience—marking the exact turning point when warfare shifted from a rare occurrence to a standard, structural method of problem-solving.
Building the Future: An Academic and Public Platform
While I continue to reexamine these core pillars through the lens of new data, I am simultaneously focused on transforming this intellectual journey into a collective resonance. I have set out to broaden my reach, learning through shared insights and incorporating the valuable feedback of a wider community.
Within this scope, I took the first step in 2021 by publishing a concise overview, where I attempted to build the preliminary framework for a holistic, 50,000-year perspective on world order. Since then, my focus has shifted toward catalyzing collaboration and public engagement.
I have been organizing monthly online talks, which have an annual keynote by professor Mehmet Özdoğan, whose visionary support was instrumental in the founding of Arkeopolitics and the subsequent training programs. A cornerstone of this effort is the Arkeopolitics summer school, operating since 2024 within the Erasmus+ framework. In 2026, the program is expected to significantly expand its horizons: adding a Budapest session to our established base in Bodrum and bringing together law and political science students from Hungary, Greece, Slovakia, and Austria. I know from personal experience that persuading and recruiting young researchers to commit to this interdisciplinary field is remarkably difficult without formal educational structures and viable career paths. Therefore, this growing network marks a strategic trajectory toward a joint master’s degree, solidifying Arkeopolitics not just as an intellectual pursuit but also as an international academic reality. By institutionalizing this curriculum through our Erasmus+ partnerships, the next generation will hopefully have the necessary tools and formal recognition to navigate the complex intersections of archaeology, law, and politics.
The impact has been satisfactory so far: Participants highlighted how discovering a deep history far older than modern national narratives allowed them to see underlying historical patterns for the first time. This perspective provided a transformative depth, enabling a comparative analysis of law and order that transcends today’s era-specific silos —patterns that are often missing in modern curricula. This momentum is yielding structural results nationally. The concept has officially entered the undergraduate curriculum at TOBB ETÜ University in Ankara—the first time this lens has been integrated into formal degree programs in Turkey.
Beyond the ivory tower, I have sought to ground this theory in the physical reality of the landscape. This mission led me to become a licensed professional guide, transforming ancient mounds into mobile classrooms through specialized, niche Neolithic tours. Much like my community talks, those who join these tours are well-educated individuals who, having reached a certain stage in life, have begun to sense a profound gap between their traditional education and the increasingly unearthed realities of deep history. Through such public engagements, I translate complex archaeological data into a shared, lived experience, testing my theoretical frameworks against the very soil where these ancient orders once flourished. This direct engagement forms the agenda for my AI-augmented social media content, YouTube series, and podcasts, where I aim to reveal the unseen background of our daily lives—arguing that shifting conditions, rather than static ideals, are what truly forge our values.
An Intellectual Restoration: Transcending Disciplinary Walls
I am aware that some still whisper that I have “strayed from my field”—or even abandoned it— while others dismiss my work as a mere hobby. But let me be clear: I view this not as a departure, but as a long-overdue intellectual restoration: a structural deepening of legal and political reasoning by anchoring them in the foundational realities of deep time.
The last two centuries have offered no historical precedent for the radical shifts—seen today in examples like climate change or AI—that are reshaping our world. However, the deep history of humanity contains the very survival experiences we need to consider. Arkeopolitics, therefore, is a call to unearth the structural conditions under which order emerges and collapses; by integrating the order beneath with the order above, we can finally stop treating “the past as a foreign country” and recognize it as our most vital pool of experience for the road ahead.
