Team Members

Peter Talloen (°Brugge, 1974) studied Archaeology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. His doctoral research at the same university (PhD 2003) focused on the religious practices in ancient Pisidia (SW Turkey) from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine period. During his postdoctoral study of the Christianisation of Pisidia at Leuven (2003-2006), he specialised in the Christianisation of space and material culture. After research fellowships of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara (2011-2012) and the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations of Koç University in Istanbul (2012-2013) he returned to Leuven as a postdoctoral researcher (2013-2018), to study the urbanisation process at the city of Sagalassos, as well as the religious life of its inhabitants. Between 2019 and 2023, he was Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Süleyman Demirel University in Isparta. Since 2023, he is Assistant Professor at the Department of Archaeology at the Bilkent University in Ankara, where he became Chair in 2024. As long-standing member of the Sagalassos Project, he became co-director responsible for the excavations in 2018 and in 2023 assumed the directorship of the excavations and restorations at the ancient city of Sagalassos in Southwest Türkiye.

Görkem Senem Özden Gerçeker received her PhD degree from Istanbul University in 2015 with her thesis titled ‘Sagalassos Red-Slipped Ceramics from Parcel 159 of the Western Necropolis of Perge’. Between 2011 and 2020, she worked as a museum specialist for the VKV-Sadberk Hanım Museum, where she curated various exhibitions and wrote publications on the museum collection. Since 1997, Dr. Özden Gerçeker has been involved in important archaeological projects as a ceramics expert and has been working as the second deputy head of excavation in the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project since 2021.  Dr. Özden Gerçeker is currently working as a Volunteer Research Assistant at the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project-Leuven Catholic University.

Inge Uytterhoeven is the Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and a Full Professor in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University. After studying Ancient Greek and Latin Language and Literature and Archaeology at KU Leuven, she obtained her PhD in Archaeology from the same university (2003). Her research integrates material and written evidence and focuses on Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique housing, public architecture, and urban studies in Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean. She has worked on archaeological sites in Belgium, Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Turkey, most importantly at Sagalassos where she has conducted field research since 1997.

Jeroen Poblome directs the KU Leuven Institute for Cultural Heritage and teaches Roman Archaeology, material culture studies and the archaeology of past economies at the Research Unit of Archaeology, KU Leuven. He has been/is member of the Kinet Höyük Project, The Boeotia Project and the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project, in a variety of functions, yet with a persistent passion for (mainly) Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine broken pottery and the amazing worlds sherds tend to unlock. He is an internationally networked scholar and an active publisher on archaeological topics, including general interest output and HEROM. Journal on Hellenistic and Roman Material Culture.

Ralf Vandam is a landscape archaeologist who coordinates the archaeological survey research in the hinterland of Sagalassos. He completed his PhD on the Late Prehistoric (8000 – 2000 BC) archaeological landscape of the Burdur Plain in 2014. In the two years thereafter, he was granted a Belgian American Educational Foundation fellowship to work at the Institute of European and Mediterranean Archaeology of SUNY, University at Buffalo, USA, and a senior fellowship at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations of Koç University, Turkey. Ralf Vandam returned to the KU Leuven with a junior postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) to conduct research on marginal landscapes in the Dereköy highlands. In 2020 he received a senior postdoctoral fellowship of the FWO on archaeological survey data integration which allows to conduct larger archaeological countryside research. Since 2022 he became an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.