Integrating Geo-Archives, Textual Memory, and Institutional Praxis: The SE-HGA Protocol for Ottoman Water Management in the Konya Plain

Historical research on human–environment relations often separates material landscape change from the cultural and institutional systems through which change was perceived and managed. This article develops Socio-Ecological Historical Geoarchaeology (SE-HGA) as a conceptual integration and reporting protocol for combining geo-archives, documentary evidence, spatial reconstructions, and material practices while retaining differences in provenance, scale, chronology, and uncertainty. The design combines a purposive, DOI-verified methodological corpus with two bounded secondary-data demonstrations concerning the Konya Plain. The principal sixteenth- to nineteenth-century illustration recodes published legal, fiscal, spatial, and infrastructural claims; an independent 1907 irrigation-project study is then used as a transfer stress test. Neither exercise constitutes empirical validation. Claims are recorded by provenance, temporal and spatial support, genre, epistemic status, and ordinal confidence, and their relations are classified as convergence, complementarity, contradiction, silence, or scale mismatch. A worked encoding of 17 suğlas (seasonally inundated cultivation units) in an Ottoman kanunname (provincial law code) and 10 fiscally visible suğlas in a 1584 register shows why literal disagreement should not be averaged away. The application also demonstrates why the approximately 40.7% disappearance or abandonment of 499 recorded settlements cannot be attributed to hydroclimatic stress without testing security, route exposure, fiscal pressure, and institutional capacity. The demonstrations illustrate P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, and P8 to different degrees, while P6 and P7 remain untested; none of the eight propositions is fully tested. SE-HGA’s present contribution is therefore procedural: it makes evidential dependence, incompatibility, and insufficiency auditable and identifies the primary data required for subsequent validation.