The Fate of Walls

From a recent op-ed: For five millennia, politicians have proposed walls like Trump’s. They don’t work.  From The Washington Post, Sunday July 29, 2016.

The opening:

Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico to block the flow of migrants has been justly criticized on moral, economic and political grounds. But while the Trump Wall (as he has called it) is the most provocative proposal of the election season, it is not particularly original. Over the past five millennia, politicians have repeatedly turned to large walls to solve problems. We should look carefully at the track record of this ancient technology before we invest what some estimates suggest could be $25 billion in construction costs for a 2,000-mile-long wall, plus millions more in annual maintenance.

And the conclusion:

What is most captivating about barrier walls, like the Trump Wall, is neither the scope of their construction nor the resoluteness of their strategic vision. Rather, they are powerful symbols of a particular kind of hubris, the conceit that the translation of mania into masonry can alter the decisions, fortunes and futures of countless others through architectural intimidation. Here, the Berlin Wall should still live in all of our memories as a potent symbol of how walls and totalitarian politics often find common cause. Barrier walls are not simply clumsy, imprecise solutions to problems of population movement, past and present; they also represent a catastrophic failure of political imagination endemic to totalitarian thinking.

Click on the link above for the full op-ed.

Indo-European Origins, Recomputed

A NYTimes article on Friday considers a recent computer model of language divergence that places proto-Indo-European (PIE) speakers in Anatolia 8,000-9,500 years ago in small agricultural villages.  The model thus stands in opposition to the argument for PIE arising on the Pontic Steppe sometime after 3500 BC advanced most systematically by David Anthony.

Indo-European Languages Originated in Anatolia, Biologists Say – NYTimes.com.

I leave the linguistic assumptions built into the model for others to critique.  But there is an archaeological question which the model will find hard to address: what social dynamic does the early Anatolian model provide for the expansion of Indo-European?  Small agricultural villages do not have built into their social dynamics an obvious mechanism for wide-scale expansion.  One clear advantage of the steppe origins model is the clear socio-technical apparatus for rapid expansion provided by horse riding and chariots/wagons.  The Neolithic Anatolian village provides no such mechanism.

This is not to argue that extension would be impossible–obviously farming and its technologies diffused widely.  But the hoe and the horse are not equivalent technologies of dissemination.  The hoe is a scale-narrowing object–one that yokes the land to human production by tying farmers to very local places (as opposed, for example, to the wider ranges of foragers).  The horse, in contrast, is a scale expanding technology, one that encourages a wide-ranging sense of place.  Missing from the Neolithic Anatolian model then is a sense of how language dispersal could have been so dramatically scaled up even as the lives of its putative speakers was scaling down.

New Maya Temple of the Sun God

A fascinating discovery of a temple of the sun god at El Zotz in Guatemala dramatizes the articulation of rulership with the cosmos.  Two things of particular interest strike me most immediately.  The first is the dynamic nature of the architecture, designed to in a sense draw the viewer around the building in rhythm with the arc of the sun.  In this sense, it might well seem that the building itself is not still but rather orbits around an axis.

The second point of interest is the iconoclasm that resulted in the destruction of nose and mouth.  Houston argues that this reflects an understanding of the building of the temple as itself alive, suggesting that we need to revisit episodes of temple destruction as not only opportunities for looting but more significantly as efforts to extirpate the gods themselves.  To leave a community without their gods is presumably to leave them truly bereft, a mortal blow to the very possibility of life and sovereignty.

See video and text here: “Dramatic” New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces.

Heritage, Irredentism, Materiality

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.

A Life in Maps

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”.

CORONA Satellite Imagery-based Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Near East | Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies

An update on the CORONA Atlas of the Near East initiative.

January 2011 Project Update – Approximately 1200 images have had the necessary ground control information collected and readied for final processing. Of these over 200 are ready for publication – as orthorectified images – through an ArcGIS Imager Server service.  This service will enable a variety of access methods including a WMS, KML files for viewing Google Earth, ArcGIS.com and a dedicated mapping website. Each image will be available in the National Imagery Transformation Format (NITF) with embedded RPC information enabling a full range of photogrammetric processing including DEM generation from overlapping images, 3D feature mensuration and orthorectification against any available DEM. The RPC coefficients can also be adjusted against user-supplied ground control to the position and orientation properties of the image before orthorectification.

via CORONA Satellite Imagery-based Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Near East | Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies.

Archaeologies of Sovereignty

The new issue of Annual Review of Anthropology contains an article of mine examining the emerging archaeological investigations of sovereignty.  From the abstract:

Archaeology has long sublimated an account of the political into a series of proxy concepts such as cities, civilizations, chiefdoms, and states. Recently, however, the archaeology of political association has been revitalized by efforts to forward a systematic account of the political, attentive to the creation and maintenance of sovereignty in practical negotiations between variously formalized authorities and a publically specified community of subjects. This new, and largely inchoate, archaeology of sovereignty has pushed the field to attend to the practical production of political regimes and the material mediations that articulate authorities and subjects. This review is intended to highlight the latent principles that draw this dispersed literature into a shared archaeological concern with sovereignty by sketching the intellectual crises that created the space for its emergence and the key concepts that orient current research. Taken together, the works discussed here point to a new concern with the dynamics of authorization and subjection across a wide range of political practices.

“I am pleased to provide you complimentary one-time access to my Annual Reviews article as a PDF file (http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/eprint/Gtc6VXqVGmW5Ns6uhBqb/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145754), for your own personal use. Any further/multiple distribution, publication, or commercial usage of this copyrighted material requires submission of a permission request addressed to the Copyright Clearance Center (http://www.copyright.com/).”

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