I would like to divert your attention from the politics of the present for a bit, to talk about the politics of the past. The distant past. Actually, the Bronze Age, some 4,000-5,000 years ago.
The region is one you may be familiar with from the news reports of today. It is roughly contiguous with the modern state of Iraq, and encompasses a bit of eastern Syria and even Western Iran. Great human innovations may trace their roots here--writing, statehood, literature--civilization, in many ways, as we would recognize it today.
This world, known to us as Mesopotamia, produced great artistic treasures. Of course, we don't know for certain how these treasures were perceived back then, but we may be sure of their value. The two objects displayed here were buried as part of a great and macabre ritual of human sacrifice, one that occurred around 2600BC.
Life in the region was far from idyllic, as a culture involving human sacrifice might indicate. Wars were fought constantly. Battle and disease took a constant toll.
The great kingdoms of Sumer, and Akkad, and Ur rose and fell, as did the later Babylonians and Assyrians.
But as they vanished, along with their world, they left things--hints of who they were, and in those hints, clues to who we are. Traces of paint on pottery, ornately carved figurines, written and illustrated mythologies--all of these have become a part of our culture today, sometimes deeply veiled, sometimes quite clearly. These people did not exist in a vacuum--they became us, and we are them.
Yet recently, we have decided to destroy them. No this was not the point of the invasion of Iraq--our reasons for invading this world, no matter what your politics, were not to bomb Bronze Age centers back to the Stone Age. But this is happening, and even those aware of the story are not aware of its scope. We know from a few media reports around January 15th of this year that Babylon was heavily damaged by American troops.
And a few people in the media, and on blogs, and around the world were--briefly--mortified. But the horror went away as the coverage lapsed back into silence. We've heard of Babylon, so we could relate to it. But no one mentions that Nineveh is smack in the middle of Mosul; that Mari--the site of great palace archives, and a monumental clue to the entire history of the Ancient Near East--is just over the border into Syria; that no one has TOUCHED archaeology in Iraq since around 1988.
Why aren't these covered? Do we blame the media? Well, yes and no. The media likes excitement, and sensationalism, and archaeology is a tough sell unless something happens. Something Indiana Jones-like, or the finding of a 20 million year old hobbit in the South Pacific. And then these stories spike, then go away. The media gets bored with "hard" social science. Fair enough.
But there's something more substantial at work here, and this is where the Politics of the Past comes back into play. Archaeology has always been a tool. An exciting, swashbuckling one at times, but a tool, and usually for those with the power to wield it. The Rosetta Stone was not just the key to one of the greatest mysteries of writing, but a symbol of French power in North Africa. The Egyptian collections of the British Museum derive from similar sentiments--glory in museums equaled glory on the battlefield. Nazi Germany, in a far more insidious manner, went further, and used archaeology not just to flaunt imperial dominance but to prove racial dominance. Gustav Kossina developed the idea that ethnic identities could be directly derived from material cultures, and used the notion to demonstrate the primacy of the German race--a technique espoused by Adolph Hitler to a horrific end.
In todays political world, despite any lessons we could or should have learned from the past, we continue to use archaeology to suit our own ends. How? Well, in the War on Terror, we choose not to acknowledge archaeology at all. Remember the clamor when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas? Wherefore now? Do we only clamor when it suits our own end? Checking whitehouse.gov, I don't see any condemnation, any brief acknowledgment, any hint of regret about what has been done to the archaeological heritage of that part of the world. Nothing. Ah, yes--I do remember something--back in 2003, right after the Major Battlefield Operations were over.
Rumsfeld: Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, "My goodness, were there that many vases?" (Laughter.) "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?"
So, ignorance, and where ignorance is not possible, mockery and downplay. Archaeology, in the case of the War on Terror, simply does not benefit us.
But these sentiments, and the practices that reflect them, extend beyond political PR tricks. Disturbingly, they seem to extend to the practice of archaeology itself. We can see a clear example if we return to the looting of the Iraq Museum. Initial reports, as you'll recall, trumpted the figure of some 150,000-200,000 pieces stolen from the museum. One of the first people to highlight this number, and its awful significance to the world of Mesopotamian archaeology was Henry Wright, a well known archaeologist at the University of Michigan, and the head of the team that went to Baghdad for the initial assessment of the damage.
Wright led a National Geographic expedition of archeologists and
anthropologists on a recent inspection of some 25 sites in northern
and southern Iraq.
"Irremediable damages are being inflicted, even as we speak," Wright
told a tele-press conference. "The future is of great concern."
WASHINGTON, June 11 2003 (AFP)
Response to Wright's assessment was harsh. While most people acknowledged that Rumsfeld's assessment of one stolen vase was a bit low, many conservatives cried foul, that the number was either deliberately raised as another rationale for protesting the war, or that it disregarded the Baathists' role in the destruction of its own archaeological heritage. Blaming the US forces, they claimed, was completely out of line.
Among those people who hotly disputed Wright's claim was another well-known archaeologist, Alexander Joffe. Joffe's work has been in a similar region as Wright, although he has focused more on Syro-Palestinean archaeology, and Biblical era materials (although he tries not to approach archaeology from the Biblical perspective, to whatever extent possible).
Intriguingly, (and I found this out from a lecturer of mine), Joffe has moved quite far to the political right in recent years. He is now on the staff of the Middle East Forum, and the director of Campus Watch, whose explicit mission is to monitor teaching of Middle Eastern affairs on college campuses. Unfortunately, his work on Campus Watch seems to have quite profoundly influenced his interpretation of archaeology and archaeologists.
Joffe, like many conservatives, downplays the extent of the damage. While there is nothing wrong with a reassessment, he employs it as one of the centerpieces in an argument that seeks to discredit what he sees as a misplaced liberalism and hidden agenda in archaeology as a whole.
Third, and most important, Donny George began to revise his estimates of losses. "It's not a total loss," he told The New York Times. "But some of the major masterpieces are gone." George also indicated that part of the collection had been stored in vaults in the museum and elsewhere. The headline of the story: "Museum Pillage Described as Devastating but Not Total."[34]
Thus, in the space of only four days, the Iraqis and the archaeologists had dramatically revised their shared narrative. The devastation was now only partial, the looting was the work of "organized gangs," and the status of certain storage areas was uncertain but hopeful. From this point onward, the media became increasingly skeptical of the fevered claims made by both Iraqis and Western archaeologists.
The gist of the article is that archaeologists especially those who trumpeted the looting, have abandoned morals and ethics to promote their own agendas:
But the archaeological establishment is already busy building a new order, which looks surprisingly like the old one. They have recently recommended that archaeology in Iraq be supported directly through the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Army Corps of Engineers, but that it come under the formal supervision of old friends at the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.[60] With the archaeological status quo restored in Iraq, where are the incentives for moral reassessment?
Here's the entire article--it's very interesting..
Joffe's invocation of moral reassessment, combined with his new credentials, seem to suggest another agenda. As a renowned archaeologist, why does he not join in the condemnation of the devastation of Iraq's heritage? Even if he takes issue with some of the ways in which archaeology has been done in the past, where is his credibility as an archaeologist? It seems, unfortunately, that it may have been sacrificed to the neoconservative agenda.
It is probably true that the initial estimates of damage were on the high side. However, reports continue of thousands of artifacts smuggled across the Jordanian border, reports extrapolated from the few that are actually found and recovered en route. Damage has been done--heavy damage--to museums, to sites, to our heritage, to ourselves.
As the war continues, so does the damage, and so must the outcry. Responsibility for what has already been done does not matter--responsibility for what can be done does. This is an issue of incredible importance--human history is being devastated. Make noise about it. Write letters about it. If nothing else, learn about what's going on. The reason that archaeology may be so effectively used as a tool is that so many people are ill-informed about it, and what it means.
**On a side note, it is interesting to speculate what role Bamiyan may have played in the US administration's PR strategy, had the Taleban waited a bit longer.**