Abstract:

Ethnographic documents, which have been the source of a great number of various academic studies as material cultural elements, provide information that may reveal a rather rich historical background and various aspects of communities lived in certain historical periods. Tracing the experienced lives by way of these ethnographic documents may sometimes provide the researcher with information that may not be possible to be found in written documents. Recently, historical studies have begun to take such information and documents into account by going beyond the traditional studying methods. In addition to written texts and archives, historical studies also refer to sources that are frequently encountered in many studies recently, such as non-written material works and documents, oral sources, visual and audio recorded documents. Therefore, this study was performed on the basis of the evaluation of selections among the documents covering ethnographic movable material culture elements in the Hatay Archaeology Museum, one of the most significant Archaeology Museums in the world. Within the framework of these documents consisting of these ethnographic movable material cultural elements, which constitute the main source of this study, the situation of Antakya at the beginning of 20th century was evaluated in the axis of social, cultural, and political atmosphere. In this context, it is understood that the documents used as the main source provide information about the French mandate administration that started in the region after the Armistice of Mudros signed between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente States in 1918, the decolonial efforts against occupation, loyalty to the Motherland and the Adhesion activities. The study aims to evaluate the ethnographic documents through this chronological line, trace the developments in the chronicle of the period in question and get the details of daily life of the period.