COMMUNICATION DESIGN AS A NARRATIVE MEDIUM: THE MUSEUM OF TROY

Date

2026-8-17

Author

Yarman, Eren Su Kibele

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This dissertation investigates the transformation of archaeological context when artifacts, previously situated within stratigraphic layers, architectural environments, landscapes, and usage practices, are relocated to museums. It posits that communication design serves not merely as an ornamental addition to curatorship or architecture, but as an interpretive medium that renders archaeological evidence comprehensible, contextualized, and accessible to public audiences. Utilizing semiotics, heterotopia, hermeneutic narrative, space syntax, and heritage interpretation as its theoretical framework, the research conceptualizes the archaeological museum as a constructed realm of signs, movements, thresholds, and narratives, rather than a neutral repository of artifacts. Its qualitative methodology integrates theoretical analysis with spatial and visual observation and experiential analysis. The comparative chapters delineate the significance of this argument through various museological contexts: Casa Romana elucidates the importance of in-situ display and material continuity; the Acropolis Museum illustrates how proximity, absence, and perspectives can engage the visitor with a compromised architectural entirety; the Bodrum Underwater Archaeology Museum unveils both the atmospheric impact and narrative limitations of adaptive reuse; and the Ephesus Experience Museum highlights the interpretive disadvantages of immersive spectacle when archaeological materiality is supplanted by hyper-real reconstruction. By tracing the chapters' progression from theory to comparison and case analysis, the dissertation emphasizes design as a scholarly argument manifested in spatial form. The Museum of Troy is analyzed as the principal case because Troy condenses, in one landscape, archaeological stratigraphy, Homeric memory, excavation history, dispersed heritage, and contemporary cultural politics. Its purpose-built corten-steel volume, descending entrance, vertical circulation, stratigraphic visuals, typological displays, trade-route maps, tactile devices, and displays of absence convert fragments into a layered public narrative. The research indicates that the museum's efficacy is maximized when communication design operates relationally, connecting objects to function, materials to production, vessels to maritime exchange, myth to reception, and absent artifact to issues of ownership and restitution. It also highlights constructive tensions. The museum's subdued analogue language safeguards the significance of artifacts; nonetheless, some introductory panels are overly instructive, certain installations necessitate more precise context, and faulty digital components expose the vulnerability of technology-reliant mediation. In summary, the dissertation argues that archaeological museums are most impactful when they do not obscure re- contextualization but rather clarify it. Communication design can integrate evidence and imagination without erasing their distinctions; it can manifest absence, uncertainty, and layered temporality in a manner that renders the past critically perceptible in the present.

Subject Keywords

Archeological museology, Communication design, Context, Narrative construction, Heritage interpretation, Museum of Troy

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120567

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis