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Why did sedentary farming communities continue to hunt even though they had access to domestic animals and cultivated plants? What motivated their hunting activities and what kinds of strategies did these motivations require them to develop? These core questions shaped my zooarchaeological approach by highlighting that the successful hunting and targeting of specific wild species depends on ecological knowledge, understanding the animals and the landscapes humans and wildlife shared, and making decisions accordingly.

Since 2019, I have been focusing on exploring how humans interacted with wildlife and how these relationships were shaped by their social and environmental contexts. Alongside my work on the significance of deer, birds, fish, and rodents in agrarian communities and their use as proxies for reconstructing paleoenvironmental conditions, I am also interested in the roles of domesticated animals within agrarian economies. 

Since 2022, I have been working as the zooarchaeology expert at the Kaymakçı Citadel (2nd millennium BC), a site that has become central to my efforts to understand human–animal–environment interactions among sedentary agrarian communities in western Anatolia. 

 In my doctoral research, Tracing Hoof Marks: Deer Hunting Strategies and Practices in Bronze Age Western Anatolia, I focus on deer species to explore the spatial and temporal hunting strategies of hunters within sedentary agrarian communities and to understand the role ecological knowledge played in their decision-making processes.