Arkeopolitics: Reframing Human History From Scratch – OpEd


Göbekli tepe. Photo Credit: Spica-Vega Photo Arts (Banu Nazikcan), Wikipedia Commons

April 4, 2026 
By Erdem Denk


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.


It would therefore be unfair to lay the blame on those 18th and 19th-century thinkers. 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 yet call it “the archaeology of the law of the sea,” 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. In this era of global “pan-crisis,” we need to consider hundreds of thousands of years of social organization as a vital dataset.


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. 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.

Author Bio: Erdem Denk is a professor of international law and international relations at Ankara University and the founder of the transdisciplinary research initiative Arkeopolitics, which integrates archaeology, history, political theory, and legal history to reinterpret the long-term dynamics of human societies. His research focuses on the evolution of law and social order since the Paleolithic. He is the author of The 50,000-Year World Order: Societies and Their Laws (2021, in Turkish) and is currently working on three books, in Turkish and English, titled When There Was No State, The Invention of the State, and The Story of the State.

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.