Reclaiming Time in the Old City: From State Heritage to Life Projects in Acre (Israel/Palestine) and Rhodes (Greece)

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For contemporary residents and descendants of former residents, the oldness of “old cities” indexes the persistence of home, memory, and attachment. This poster centers the materialization of residents’ interactions with surfaces of the old cities of Acre (Israel/Palestine) and Rhodes (Greece), which were assembled under Crusader and Ottoman rule, and through to the present. The Old City of Acre (‘Akka), a predominantly Palestinian community, was dramatically transformed by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The Old Town of Rhodes, now inhabited mainly by migrant Greeks from surrounding islands, was home to significant Turkish and Sephardic Jewish communities until the mid-twentieth century. An archaeology of surfaces and of the contemporary in these two places disrupts state heritage professionals’ preservationist visions. Photographic surface survey and ethnography illustrate how community practices of care and material processes of transformation and decay enable life-sustaining projects where state preservationist policies often fall short.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• 2023 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow