COSMOPOLITAN PASTS: MONDAY, 5TH SEPTEMBER – SEMINAR 1
DOES EVERYONE DO ARCHAEOLOGY OR IS IT A PRODUCT OF MODERNITY?
Three articles with three upcoming questions to this topic:
1) Bradley article (Christoffer): Why are specific monuments being preserved?
Give examples.
2) Tarhuntas article (Hannah): To whom is our archaeological work?
3) Navajo article: (Max): Is it correct that a western archaeologist is doing archaeology
without cooperation with the local people?
2) Tarhuntas article
„Traces of Tarhuntas: Greek, Roman and Byzantine Interaction with Hittite
Monuments“.
Summary:
This article deals with the ways in which indigenous inhabitants of Greek, Roman and
Byzantine Anatolia and foreign visitors alike used Hittite and Neo-Hittite remains (such as
rock-cut reliefs, inscriptions and monuments or objects) to construct or verify narratives about
local and universal history.
Central questions are, what interactions during Greek, Roman and Byzantine Periods in the
immediate vicinity of mostly Hittite remains tell us about the way people in the past imagined
their own past. And furthermore how we, as archaeologists and historians use this evidence in
our own exploration of landscapes and memory in Anatolia.
Answers to these questions are trying to be achieved by six case studies. Although we
considered some of the examples and their interpretations to be overinterpretive and
speculative, they do show that remains of a former culture were recognized as special and
different – sometimes even as antique. The latter has shown that certain intellectuals, such as
Pausanias and Herodotus already showed a sort of antiquarian expertise as they drew stylistic
and iconographical analogies between various objects and also seem to have had ethnographical
knowledge. The approach of comparing differences and similarities between objects, even lead
to the creation of a chronological sequence.
While thinking about why and how people from the past were dealing with their past, the
following question arose to us: To whom is our archaeologcial work?
-
Is it only for research purposes?
Is it to educate everyone or only a specific group of people?
Is it to be a political tool?
Or is it to create identities?
[…]
Other thoughts
Other examples for how people dealt with their past? >> runestones as fundamental parts of houses
and churches; the looting of graves or secondary burials; antique artefacts as sort of heirlooms in
graves (those examples shed the light on a much more narrow range of dealing with the past then the
article does…)
Critics
What we don’t know is, if people from the past considered specific objects or monuments to originate
from the past or if these were just curious objects to them whose creator they did not know. [Except
for such cases which were described for Pausanias and Herodotus…]. So it can not always tell us
about what people thought about their past.
Even that tales are not forgotten and still being told after decades, does not tell us absolutely what
people thought about the past. >> Danger of overinterpretation!