Archaeology as Political Action and the False Consciousness of Objectivity

Saturday, May 1st:
9:00 am-12:30 pm

Session Organizers: Timothy Sandiford & Alexander Smith (Brown University)

“The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer exist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.” -Antonio Gramsci (1971)

Archaeology is engrained in the socio-political fabric of modern nation-states. Its consequences are frequently subtle, however, when archaeology becomes the focus of contested claims of nationality, social identity, or possession, it takes on a significance beyond the bounds of academia. Under such circumstances, academics are often tempted to retreat to the sidelines and claim an apolitical objectivity in presenting their research. This TAG session will examine the intersection of archaeology and politics within divergent political ‘truth-claims.’ It will also seek to address the responsibility of the archaeologist to recognize the wider political implications of their work and the ethical demands created by such engagement.

9:00: Timothy Sandiford and Alexander Smith (Brown University): Introductory remarks
9:10: Susan Heuck Allen (Brown University): Protégés and Problematic Projects: Charles Eliot Norton, Consular Collusion, and the AIA’s Acquisition of Symbolic Capital
9:30: Paul Mullins (Indiana University-Purdue University): The Politics of Racial Archaeologies: Excavating Urban Renewal and the Color Line
9:50: Lynnette Widder (Rhode Island School of Design): Memory and Ruin: Hans Döllgast’s Reconception of the Alte Pinakothek, 1946-1956
10:10: Morag Kersel (Brown University): The Politics of Paper: Archaeology, Museums and the Dead Sea Scrolls
10:30: Coffee break
11:00: Bryan E. Burns (Wellesley College): Personal and Political Voices: Gay Minoans, Greek Love, and NAMBLA
11:20: Ian Russell (Brown University): Vikings, Normans and Celts: A Narrative of Archaeology, Politics and Protests in Ireland
11:40: Discussion

Participants and Abstracts:

Personal and Political Voices: Gay Minoans, Greek Love, and NAMBLA

Prof. Bryan E. Burns (Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, Wellesley College)

This paper explores the role of artifacts and archaeological evidence in debates surrounding ancient sexuality – debates that are both highly personal and political. The application of cultural models from classical Greek texts (5th-4th centuries BCE) to material evidence from Late Minoan Crete (16th-13th centuries BCE) is shown to be dependent upon larger understandings of sexual identity as not only consistent across Greek antiquity, but universal and transhistorical.

Claimed connections with ancient Greek sexuality were fundamental to emergent homosexual identities of the late 19th century, driving the private collection of ancient art and inspiring writings that were simultaneously scholarly, politically minded, and heavily romanticized. Over the course of the 20th century, personal identification with the Greek past has taken new forms in the creative arts, but also produced strong voices in both political and scholarly arenas. Scholars who would seek to distinguish ancient paederasty from contemporary paedophilia downplay the age difference deemed a vital element of "Greek love," and often make subjective distinctions in their treatment of ancient representations as reality or fantasy. Vocal proponents of "man-boy love" still claim validation in the models of ancient society and lay claims of censorship against journals and presses that pass over scholarship claiming the apparent universality of such relationships.

The Minoan culture of Bronze Age Crete has been celebrated as heritage for the island's community, Greek nationalism, and even European identity. My analysis will focus on personal identification with the past. The interpretation of artifacts and images as evidence for ancient sexuality operates on recognition of age, gender, and bonded relationships, despite a remarkable lack of graphic sexual representation. The pivotal role played by decontextualized Minoan objects, including forged antiquities with fictional provenance, demonstrates the desire to possess the past – to "make one's own," whether through collecting or interpretation. Yet classical Greece plays a crucial intermediary between prehistoric Crete and contemporary cultures, supplying mythological and sociological narratives underlying transhistorical identity.

The Politics of Racial Archaeologies: Excavating Urban Renewal and the Color Line

Prof. Paul Mullins (Associate Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis)

This paper examines public discourses over racial displacement in Indianapolis, Indiana, where Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) directed the uprooting of thousands of residents from the late 1950s onward. Since 1999, archaeology has been conducted on campus in these former neighborhoods, and displaced community members and the University have each staked a variety of claims to this heritage. The archaeological project has focused on creating spaces to discuss life along and across the color line and begin reconciliation over the toll of racial displacement.

Memory and Ruin: Hans Döllgast’s Reconception of the Alte Pinakothek, 1946-1956

Prof. Lynnette Widder (Associate Professor of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design)

At few times has the potency of the built environment to participate in the construction of a people’s collective memory and identity been as pronounced as it was in Germany immediately after 1945. The Third Reich had leveraged architecture as practice, as physical heritage and as rhetorical frame with impeccable thoroughness. Even the Modernist idiom, long considered a bastion of resistance to the monumental or folkloric party style until the emergence of recent revisionist accounts, has proven to have been complicit. The Allied decimation of German cities, epitomized by the Dresden firebombing, was at least in part in recognition of the significance accruing to the built environment in the construction of national identity formation. In confronting the ruins and rubble of the post-war landscape, Germany was compelled, through its decisions around physical rebuilding, to confront such tainted issues as history, memory, cultural identity and self-representation – issues which were articulated in other areas of cultural and critical production only much later.

The conceptual framework of the ruin has deep philosophical roots in German Romanticism. Intertwined with the fascination of the ruin were the teleological accounts of cultural history which underpinned the 19th century tradition of German architectural theory. This tradition, which merged fragments of archeology, anthropology, decorative arts and art history, and philosophical speculation, produced such influential accounts of pre- and early history as Semper’s theory of ‘Raiment’ and Bötticher’s theory of ‘Tectonics’. Alois Riegl’s speculations on the nature of the monument and on Roman art manufacture, themselves alloys of archeological, art historical and philosophical practice, had been particularly influential for the generation of architects charged with rebuilding post-war German cities, and became particularly applicable in articulating a way to deal with ruins Piranesian in scope.

This paper will consider Hans Döllgast’s remarkable project, constructed in and of the shell of Leo von Klenze’s Alte Pinakothek in Munich, relative to archeologically-derived postulates on the organic and the stereometric, the ruin and the monument, and the relationship between art and its era. Within this framework, it will attempt to describe Döllgast’s successes in finding an alternative to a conservatively-motivated preservationist reconstruction or, at the other extreme, an ideological insistence on the transparent, High Modern architecture already strongly advocated by the US High Command and the returning once-German architects it sent to advise on rebuilding. In finding a means of resistance to the forms of repressed cultural memory, represented on the one hand by architecture as an ahistorical, idealized past (reconstruction) or, on the other, by an equally ahistorical international future (US corporate-style modernism), Döllgast’s work provides a rich, realized example.

Protégés and Problematic Projects: Charles Eliot Norton, Consular Collusion, and the AIA’s Acquisition of Symbolic Capital

Dr. Susan Heuck Allen (Visiting Scholar in Classical Studies, Brown University)

Following the Civil War, America struggled to regain its identity. Charles Eliot Norton encouraged the reunited states to identify with their classical roots and wanted the US to enter the Aegean archaeological arena. Following their unification in 1871, the Germans had embarked on a foreign policy of Kulturpolitik in which archaeology figured prominently in excavations at the sites of Olympia (1875) and Pergamum (1878). Meanwhile, the Austrians plumbed Samothrace (1873, 1875), France Delos, and the British Halicarnassus and Ephesus. Norton tried to secure Delphi, a site worthy of US national aspirations, but the French contested the claim. In the wake of the semi-centennial of the German Archaeological Institute, Norton’s nationalist agenda bore fruit in the founding of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) whose mission was “to encourage and aid the efforts of individual explorers and to send out special expeditions such as no individual could readily undertake.” Up to that point, America had had “little share in the splendid work of rediscovery of the early civilizations of the Old World” and, as a result, had “reaped but small benefit from it.” So Norton promoted the AIA as a national endeavor of great symbolic value and, after his protégé Joseph Thacher Clarke prospected at Assos, Sardis, Samos, and Samothrace. In the next five years, he launched five abortive expeditions in the Mediterranean: Croton, Cyrene, Delphi, Gortyn, and Assos, the latter two scotched or profoundly challenged by archaeological diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire.

The Politics of Paper: Archaeology, Museums and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Dr. Morag Kersel (Post-doctoral Fellow, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University)

“I can’t answer that question;” “The museum’s not the right forum for a political debate;” “I’m an ancient historian. I can tell you about the past;” “I’m an archaeologist. All we do is cultural activities;” “I don’t do politics.” These comments, made in response to the Palestinian request that the Canadian Government seize the Dead Sea Scrolls then on exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, are indicative of a disciplinary quest to remain apolitical in a world where politics are pervasive. This paper will investigate the enmeshed relationships involving the Dead Sea Scrolls, law, museums and the desire of archaeologists to remain above the political fray.

Vikings, Normans and Celts: A Narrative of Archaeology, Politics and Protests in Ireland

Dr. Ian Russell (Post-doctoral Fellow, John Nicholas Brown Centre for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Brown Univeristy)

On 27 January 2004, the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, in an address to the Trinity College Historical Society, stated that the last 20 to 30 years have seen the greatest changes in the society of Ireland since the country’s inception. From an archaeological standpoint, this is certainly the case. Over the past 20 to 30 years we have seen a huge growth in the number of archaeological consultancies, a 'boom' in the development of contract archaeology and a great rise in the importance of the heritage industry nationally. While economic affluence and infrastructural development aided the growth of an archaeology industry in Ireland, there has been a simultaneous growth of protest and anti-development movements utilising archaeological resources to justify their political campaigns, most notably in the forms of the Carrickmines Campaign and the Tara Motorway Campaign. In this paper, I will examine the ethos, orientation and significance of these campaigns and their broader sociological, political and academic implications for the role of archaeology in Ireland.