Reshaping Identities Through the Destruction of Artifacts

Author(s): Joshua Heath; David Witt

Year: 2015

Summary

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 Euro-American cultures, fundamentalist Islamic groups are not simply spurning this connection to their cultural heritage, they are destroying the remnants of those cultures to make it more difficult for those connections to be made. By contrasting case studies where states explicitly tie themselves to the ancient world against states or other actors that wish to destroy artifacts that connect to a non-fundamentalist past, it is possible to see how these different approaches lead to the creation and curation of different identities. Through this examination of the intersection of agency, history, and belief, it will be possible to show the roles archaeological artifacts and previous cultures play in modern identity creation.

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Cite this Record

Reshaping Identities Through the Destruction of Artifacts. Joshua Heath, David Witt. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396073)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: 25.225; min lat: 15.115 ; max long: 66.709; max lat: 45.583 ;