Archaeology and the Politics of Erasure in the Middle East

Summary

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, but its colonial impact in the Middle East is highly neglected. In the post-Ottoman era, for instance, archaeology was deployed to forge a raciolinguistic national identity for emerging Turkish nationalism at the expense of erasing indigenous nations such as Armenians and Kurds, among others, within the official history of the dominant ethnic group. In Iran, Persian-centric archaeological studies, informed by Aryanism, have been deployed as a powerful instrument for a selective remembering of the past, aligning with the Persianist primordial nationalism. This research addresses this gap by comparing archaeology's role in state-building across the Middle East with other regions of the world. Furthermore, the current conflicts in the region cannot be fully grasped by merely examining the actions of state and non-state actors. Instead, we need to unravel how the past has been narrated and how it has informed the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38144.0