Assemblages

Greeks apologize to the EU with a gift of a huge horse

THE nation of Greece said sorry to the European Union with a present of an enormous wooden horse.

Left outside the European Central Bank in the dead of night, the horse has now been moved into the ECB’s central lobby where it is proudly on display.

A gift tag attached to the horse, which is surprisingly light for its size and has small holes along the length of its body, suggested that it should be placed in the bank’s vaults overnight to avoid it being targeted by thieves….

via Greeks apologise with huge horse.

I’m starting to compile a list of new books to recommend as summer must reads.  I’ll add to this list as I think of them but herewith, recommendation number 1:

1. I was delighted to see that Anne Porter’s book on mobile pastoralism in the ancient Near East has been published by Cambridge University Press.  I first read the book over a year ago in manuscript form and was impressed by the lucid prose and cogent thinking on issues of mobility (social theory writ generally large does a lousy job of thinking about moving communities–nomadology is little help in this regard).  The work is a subtle study that breaks important new ground in thinking about how mobile communities were critical to an array of practices and processes at the heart of the formation of complex polities.  Find it here:

Mobile Pastoralism and the Formation of Near Eastern Civilizations – Academic and Professional Books – Cambridge University Press.

Imagine that thieves force their way into your house and steal all the paintings off of the walls.  You know who the thieves are, but they are rude and uncooperative and the police are ineffectual.  But get this, the thieves then ask to borrow some more of your things: a vase, perhaps a nice tapestry.  You refuse to make the loan unless the thief returns the paintings they stole.  The thieves yell “Blackmail!! I’m being blackmailed!”

This is roughly the narrative that Newsweek endorses in a piece on their ArtBeast blog about tough tactics Turkey has been using of late to guarantee the return of looted artifacts: Turkey’s Archaeology Blackmail – The Daily Beast.

There are things to be concerned about in Turkey’s approach.  For one thing, it seems at best unwise to punish archaeologists for a fight that is largely with art institutions.  Archaeologists as a community have generally been supportive of all claims to repatriation as part of the discipline’s intellectual commitment to context and political commitment to the communities in which they work.  Aside from being unfair, it is likely an ineffectual strategy since archaeologists have little sway over the policies of the art museums that are Turkey’s main targets.

But Turkey is absolutely right to promote its indigenous archaeological community over the interests of creaky  old foreign archaeological concessions that are more part of the 19th century than the 21st.  Substantive collaboration between foreign and local archaeologists, with locals leading the way, is how a truly cosmopolitan archaeology can and should be organized.

This approach makes demands on all parties.  Local archaeologists must be substantively engaged in all aspects of the project and cannot just be nannies to foreign teams.  Similarly, foreign archaeologists must be eager and ready to learn from local collaborators, giving them the power to shape the recovery and interpretation of what is their nation’s responsibility: the slice of human heritage now within the territorial borders of Turkey.

It is not nationalism to assume responsibility for the archaeological record.  Turkey has not demanded a specific interpretation of the archaeological past, merely that its exploration, maintenance, and preservation be taken over by local scholars.  This is an extremely positive development.  Over the last century and a half, European and American institutions have justified the appropriation of artifacts from countries throughout the Mediterranean and Near East on the grounds that they did not possess the talents and resources necessary to properly care for the remains of humanity’s past.  Now that they do have the talents and resources, their efforts are derided as nationalism.

As described in a recent column in The Atlantic Armenia is opening a fascinating new front in the battle over heritage and repatriation:

To the British Museum, she is “probably Aphrodite,” the Greek goddess of love and beauty. To most Armenians, she is Anahit, an ancient Armenian goddess of fertility. Whoever is on the 1st century BC female bronze head with wavy hair and aquiline nose, it may serve as a political prop in Armenia’s looming parliamentary election campaign.

The bust, housed in the British Museum, is featured on Armenian beauty parlor logos, coins, banknotes and stamps alike. It is better known in Armenia than even the country’s state emblem, a recent TV opinion poll indicated. If asked, many Armenians most likely assume that the head, and a companion hand, are in Armenia itself.

And, now, Education Minister Armen Ashotian, a leader of the governing Republican Party of Armenia, along with the party’s Armenian Youth Foundation (AYF), want to make sure that, one day, they will be. In February, Ashotian and the AYF launched an online campaign to gather petition signatures aimed at having the British Museum turn over to Yerevan ownership of the 1st century BC hand and head.

via How a Mythical Fertility Goddess Could Help Steer Armenia’s National Election – Gayane Abrahamyan – International – The Atlantic.

The innovation here is that the bust was not found within the borders of the Republic of Armenia and spirited out of the country to feed the colonial appetites of the British public (a la the Elgin Marbles).  Instead, the bust was found in what is today northeastern Turkey but had been since at least the early 5th century BC part of a territory named Armenia.

The Republic of Armenia’s claim on the bust is thus specifically cultural, a link defined by genealogy but separated from the national territorial by the political consequences of invasion, imperialism, and the Armenian Genocide.  Yet the claim has a distinctly modern political consequences.  Affirmation of Armenia’s claim to the bust is a de facto recognition of Armenia’s claim upon the territory of eastern Turkey/western Armenia.  It is thus a deft sublimation of irredentism into the far more subtle lexicon of global cultural heritage, of landscape into materiality.

It will be fascinating to see how this develops to shape politics within Armenia, between Armenia and Turkey, and within the global heritage community.

Today’s New York Times includes an article by John Noble Wilford on recent archaeological discoveries related to Scythian and Saka mortuary remains from Central Asia.  The article is occasioned by a new exhibit at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World that draws on collections from several museums in Kazakhstan to examine nomadic communities from the 1st millennium B.C. Altai region.  The exhibit runs from March 7-June 3 and is clearly a unique opportunity to see artifacts that are rarely exhibited in the U.S.

I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibit, but in the meantime Wilford’s article is itself of interest as it highlights the persistent tropes of otherness that have long marginalized examinations of ancient Eurasian societies within Western archaeology.  At the same time, the article appears to reinstate, unintentionally, many of those same tropes.  Here are two issues that seemed of particular note:

1. The other. Wilford points out how Eurasian pastoralists like the Scythians were portrayed as “the other” by contemporary classical Greeks.  Certainly true, but the Greeks “othered” lots of communities, including the Persians, the Egyptians, etc.  Basically, anyone not Greek, in the same way most cultural communities define inclusion (us) through exclusion (them).  Moreover, from the perspective of the Scythians, the Greeks were just another ‘other’ population on the margins of their world.  There is little evidence that the approval or disapproval of the Greeks was relevant to Eurasian societies.  But it is relevant to us moderns, and hence the surprised headline that exclaims “Eurasian nomads were sophisticated!”  That kind of recuperative “the other is sophisticated too” is simply another kind of othering device–an extension of the value of sophistication but not a collapsing of the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

2. Evolution. Wilford is correct that Eurasian nomads have been dismissed as a kind of arrested stage in cultural evolution.  But that is not a conceit of the Greeks.  It is a product of 19th and 20th century evolutionary anthropology.  Indeed, it remains deeply embedded in Wilford’s own world view. His article ends on this note:

“By these enigmatic symbols, a prewriting culture communicated its worldview from a vast and ungenerous land that it could never fully tame — any more than these people of the horse were ever ready to settle down.

The trope of the untamed is itself one dear to the evolutionary narrative of civilization in which the barbarian defiantly refuses to succumb to the bright light of urbanity.  Writing and settlement are both heavily marked categories central to the very category of “the civilized”.  Hence to describe Eurasian nomads as “pre”writing and not yet “ready to settle down”, is to reiterate the very same reasons why nomads in Eurasia have been othered by settled communities since the Greeks.

This is not to criticize Wilford’s account, merely to note its own entrapment in the tropes of us and other.  Even though he is rightly critical of such narrow renderings of the past, he is also “not yet ready” to leave them entirely behind.

Happy Birthday to the universal affirmative.

Happy Birthday, OK! – Lingua Franca – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Souren Melikian has an excellent review of “Islamic Art” at the Met here.  The article is particularly welcome as the NYTimes Arts Section has traditionally refused to trouble the staid ground of ancient art criticism.  Michael Kimmelman, for example, a regular NYTimes Art correspondent, seems to have never met a case of cultural theft he didn’t approve of.  Indeed it is very hard to find in the Times archive an article where archaeological research comes out as a greater priority than the adventurous–and sometimes illegal–acquisitions policies of the Met (even when caught red handed, Kimmelman still finds cause to defend the Met).  Therefore particular kudos to Melikian since critique of the Met clearly does not come easily to the Times editors.

Is there anything S. N. Kramer left out of his masterpiece History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Man’s Recorded History. Turns out the answer is yes. The missing 40th first is…. the first Yo Mama joke.  Colbert has the scoop:

Here is an evocative piece from the Chronicle Review on the imaginative potency of maps.

My Life in Maps – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I particularly liked the paragraph on the edges of maps–the places where it used to be written “Here be dragons” to denote spaces of fear and reticence.  As the author notes, today the standard map sheet directs us to a cascading series of other sheets and files.  But edges can still be found in the world.  In a series of aerial photos that we work with in Armenia, the edge is a hard one roughly 10km from the border with Turkey.  This edge is stamped “classified” today, or in Medieval cartographic parlance: “here be dragons”.

Eileen Murphy and colleagues from the Kunstkamera have organized an important and timely session for the European Association of Archaeologists conference in Helsinki this fall.  Here is the abstract, courtesy of Eileen:

From Skulls and Skeletons to Ancient People: Approaches to Human Remains from Prehistoric Northern Eurasia

Organisers: Eileen Murphy (Queen’s University Belfast; Ireland), Vyacheslav Moiseyev (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography The Kunstkamera; Russia) and Valery Khartanovich (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography The Kunstkamera; Russia)

From its earliest beginnings, physical anthropology has been recognised as an important tool for enabling the reconstruction of a variety of facets of human history. For many years anthropological data represented the predominant source of information pertaining to the biological aspects of a past population’s history. Given the attributes of the anthropological data collected most studies have focused on the nature of genetic admixture apparent within population groups as well as sought evidence relating to ancient migrations. In recent years, the situation has notably changed, however, and much more attention is now placed on the study of the physical remains of these prehistoric people using a suite of other scientific approaches, which include the study of ancient diseases, stable isotopes and ancient DNA amongst others. Approaches and techniques within both physical anthropology and scientific archaeology are constantly developing and the objective of the session is to draw together researchers, with a wide variety of research interests, but in which the corporeal remains of the ancient people of Northern Eurasia are central. Contextualised research of this nature has the potential to provide substantial insights on key archaeological themes, including diet, economy, health, lifestyle, funerary practices and migration. It is envisaged that this cross‐over of approaches has the potential to lead to more nuanced understandings of the prehistoric populations of Northern Eurasia and ensure that the people are central to these debates.

Web link – http://www.eaa2012.fi/index