Lived Space of Displaced People: A Comparative Approach to Contested Spaces in Iron Age Northern Mesopotamia and Modern Europe

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeology grapples with the materiality of past subjects’ perception and organization of space, as drawn from objects, landscapes, architecture, and pictorial or textual representations. Generally what emerges from these data is a dominant or normative conceptualization of space. However, space is not merely the result of planned ideas from powerful individuals, but also the lived experience of the marginalized or foreign. Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace (1974) asserts that "space" is not a given, but a product. Every society produces its own (social) space that subjectivizes its members. In this paper I use a comparative approach to address the question of hidden forms of lived space. I compare the materiality and possible perception of deportees in the Urartian and Neo-Assyrian empire in Iron Age Northern Mesopotamia with the narratives and experiences of present-day refugees in Europe. Ethnographic data is presented based on experiences teaching German in Berlin in 2017-18 to people mainly from Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. I seek to both enhance the study of lived spaces in archaeological contexts and better understand the political impact of this concept on modern cities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23371