Füsun Ertuğ

Born in Istanbul, she graduated from Erenköy Girls High School and Istanbul University Archaeology and Prehistory Department. During her university education, she worked as a photographer and folklore researcher in various rescue excavations in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia. Between 1977 and 1982, she worked as a researcher, cameraman and documentary producer at Istanbul University Film Center. She joined the women's movement in the 1980s and took part in the establishment of the Women's Library and Information Center Foundation in 1989 as one of the five women who founded the library. She aimed to contribute to the visual archive of the women's movement in particular.

She completed her doctorate in ethnoarchaeology at the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, between 1991 and 1997. She conducted her fieldwork in a village in Cappadocia, focusing on traditional subsistence economy and women's plant gathering traditions. She compared her findings with the data from Aşıklı Höyük, a Neolithic site excavated by Istanbul University in the same region, in which she also participated the excavation team. After returning to Turkey she focused on ethnobotany, a subject that had been little researched in Turkey until then. She carried out long-term projects on ethnobotany and biodiversity in Bodrum, Buldan and Muğla, participated in international congresses and seminars and published over 60 publications in these fields (all are available on Academia.edu). She also took part in the projects on useful plants in the Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanical Garden since its establishment, participated in the writing of the Illustrated Flora of Türkiye, and continued her ethnobotany courses.

She became the director of the ethnobotany pilot projects within the scope of the Cultural Inventory Project of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) and organized courses. During 2003-2006 she has taught the courses ‘Introduction to Archaeology’ and ‘Plants and Cultures’ in the Anthropology Department of Yeditepe University. In 2005, she served as the secretary of the IV. International Congress of Ethnobotany (ICEB) at Yeditepe and as the editor of the Proceedings published in 2006. She worked as the Group Leader of the EARTH (Early Archaeological Remnants and Technical Heritage) Project supported by the Council of Europe and the European Science Foundation between 2005 and 2009. In 2008, she was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship and taught courses on ethnoarchaeology for three months at the University of Sheffield and in 2016 and 2018 at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Her efforts to uncover the knowledge of rural women, especially their knowledge of plants, led her to continue her life outside of Istanbul, dealing with soil, ecological agriculture and local varieties, doing agriculture and observing nature, since 2008. For the last 10 years, she has been actively working on the General Assembly of the Women's Library and Information Center Foundation, which has been the memory of the women's movement; and her Anatolian Baskets Collection that she compiled in Iznik. She is the mother of Hasan Ali Yaraş and the grandmother of Melisa and Can.