Middle East (Other Keyword)
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This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a discipline initially tasked with understanding non-Western histories and heritage, archaeology has functioned mainly as a technology of forgetting rather than remembering when it came to indigenous material cultures. The role of archaeology in colonizing African and South American cultures is widely explored,...
Endangered Archaeology in Arid Lands: Remote Sensing and Heritage Management (2017)
The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa Project (EAMENA) uses satellite imagery to record damage and threats to the heritage of the MENA region. We are recording these data in an open-access database to create a useful platform for the management and protection of heritage in these countries. A remote-sensing approach to heritage management has many advantages and is particularly effective in the arid MENA region due to limited vegetation and development. The availability...
Reshaping Identities Through the Destruction of Artifacts (2015)
Archaeological artifacts can be used to foster a powerful feeling of national pride, or they can be held up as a sign of previous degeneracy and destroyed to 'purify' a populace. For example, artifacts such as Egyptian pyramids, Mesopotamian Lammasu, Afghani Buddhas, and Malian Sufi Shrines represent cultures and conditions that do not fit the fundamentalist identity of Islamists groups. While modern states have often—and rightfully—raised these artifacts as evidence of equality with...
Scales of Analysis and Modes of Interpretation in Osteobiography: An Example from the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project (2017)
Bioarchaeologists have traditionally prioritized statistically significant patterns in large skeletal assemblages to document major biocultural trends in human populations. But in the last 15-20 years, the osteobiography approach has returned to favor, encouraging bioarchaeologists to focus on the specifics of the human scale, reconstruct an experiential prehistory, and restore an identity to those "genderless, faceless blobs" (Tringham 1991: 97) who people so many traditional interpretations of...