The Plot Against the Past: Reuse and Modification of Ancient Mortuary Monuments as Persuasive Efforts of Appropriation

Abstract

‘The were not for something in human beings in complicity with it’ writes Alexander Kluge (1990, 20) in The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time. Kluge is concerned with condensed dramatic cinematic time and his present now lies several decades in the past. However, the image of an empowered present plotting against a defenceless past presents itself as an adequate point of departure. Reuse and modification of ancient monuments after extended periods of disuse—monuments herein defined as anything from monoliths and sarcophagi to large earthen mounds and wooden or stone buildings—are frequent phenomena throughout the world. Reuse can range from one-time visits and the placing of human remains and artefacts to the rearrangement of architectural elements and remodelling of entire structures. No cultural continuity is required (Bradley 1993, 117–21) for discontinuous reuse can bridge centuries and even millennia. Reuse of monuments is an ongoing phenomenon. Not only prehistoric monuments but also historic monuments have been affected. I therefore will follow Taylor’s lead (Taylor 2008, 24), overstep the disciplinary thresholds and not pay attention to a prehistory-history distinction. The term prehistory was only born in the early nineteenth century AD (Rowley-Conwy 2006; Taylor 2008, 2) and people who reuse or manipulate monuments do not draw lines between historic and prehistoric monuments. Additionally, the onset of modernity brought along expanded chronological constructions of time. How we from the so-called Western World look upon the past and our expectations of the future not only has made us more time conscious in relation to the present but entirely changed our conceptualization of time (Koselleck 2004). To historians and archaeologists time is stratigraphic and sequential. Archaeologists are concerned with fixing objects and events in their proper place and time. Today most people look at the past with a temporal depth to it (Dodgshon 2008, 6). However, the way we look at time is not how everybody else conceives of it. Different cultural contexts create different concepts of time (e.g. Lévi-Strauss, 1970, 16; Hirsch 2006).