Damla Büşra Tuğ (she/her) is a second-year PhD student and an archaeologist working with Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver on the research track. Her research interest is in the archaeology of childhood, particularly focusing on Anatolian toy culture and its relationship with domestic settings.
As an archaeologist and art historian in training, Damla has been involved in various excavations and an archaeological survey. To name some of them: the Polatlı Landscape Archaeology and Survey Project (PLAS), the Türkmen-Karahöyük Archaeology Project (TKAP), the Aydın Miletus Archaeological Excavation, and the Labraunda Archaeological Excavation. Having such experiences has helped shape her interest in material culture and asked questions such as how we label artifacts and under what criteria.
Damla earned her BA in the Department of Archaeology at İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University in Turkey. For her senior project, she constructed a small project that would later flourish, where she made several copies of ancient toys from Near Eastern contexts, mainly Mesopotamia, and observed a group of children aged between 2 and 4 interacting with them.
Yet, interestingly enough, this project was not complete and perhaps will never be. Since it made her question more: for instance, what if the parameters of this experience were different? What if she had conducted this project with a group of children who were older and from a rural area? Did the results rely on gender?
Therefore, in the summer of 2026, with the TKAP Community Archaeology Team, she repeated a similar setting and let a group of children—this time aged between 6 and 14, a mixed group of girls and boys from the village where the excavation takes place—interact with the replicas.
Now, she is looking forward to presenting the results of these two projects in poster format at ASOR 2026. Yet rather than seeing these projects as complete, Damla sees them as the beginning of a larger journey. Each experience and interaction continues to bring new questions about children, material culture, and the ways we can connect the past with the present.
Advisor: Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, PhD