Western Archaeologists Research Articles

Land, indigeneity and archaeological ruins in Ottoman Palestine: the people of Beit Jibrin and the Palestine Exploration Fund

ABSTRACT Palestinian nationalism and visions of Palestine as a nation have, since the loss in 1948 of 78% of Mandate Palestine to the newly founded State of Israel, focused on notions of rootedness and connection to the land. However, as a result of the disruptions to Palestinian culture stemming from the refugee lives of a large proportion of the population, and the loss or fragmentation of many personal and institutional archives, sources for the quotidian details of rural life and how the relationship between land and people played out in different parts of historic Palestine are often scarce. This article experiments with the use of accounts by Western archaeologists as potential repositories of such information. This derives, the author argues, not just from the descriptive features of such writings, which they share with other commonly used sources such as travelogues and the memoirs of missionaries and other temporary residents, but also from the nature of archaeology itself as an activity which intimately, if at times controversially and destructively, engages with land and soil, and in which local people were often hired to carry out excavation on their own lands. While fully acknowledging the many issues raised by the use of imperial documents to consider the lives of indigenous and subaltern peoples, I seek to employ techniques such as reading against the grain to investigate how such archives can contribute granularity and detail to our understandings of rural life in Palestine at the end of the Ottoman period.

Archeological Approaches in Jordan From 1800 Until Now

Since the early nineteenth century, individuals interested in the antiquities of Jordan investigated, documented, and interpreted the archaeological finds they encountered or excavated in this country. Their approaches developed over time, not only due to the advancement of scientific methods and tools, but also because during the last two centuries major changes affected the religious and political motivations of western archaeology in the southern Levant. In the first part, the paper traces the basic elements of these developments and their intellectual background and, in a second part, it outlines the methods Jordanian archaeologists utilized to engage with their own cultural heritage over the same period. The paper concludes with recommendations for Jordanian archaeologists that would pave the way for a state-of-the-art investigation of Jordanian antiquities, on the one side, and for a proper appreciation of the contribution of Jordanian archaeology to the Jordanian cultural identity, on the other.

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere

Steeves eloquently reminds us that settler/colonial history is not the only history nor the singular authority on the past. Through a multi-lensed approach, weaving archaeology, sociology, and her own Indigenous traditions, Steeves challenges supporters of the already waning view concerning a panhemispheric cultural group that migrated to the prehistoric Americas. Defining all prehistoric Native Americans as descendants of a singular ancestral Clovis Point people is a gross oversimplification and is not supported by the archaeological evidence, the oral traditions of Indigenous groups, nor by linguistics. Steeves warns that classifying all prehistoric American Indigenous peoples as Clovis (a) wrongly groups them as homogenous, (b) superimposes a single technological categorization on diverse heritages, and (c) forces an untrue, Eurocentric narrative.Though the Indigenous method and theory that Steeves employs includes empirical knowledge and critical thought, her process also recognizes these are not the only systems for knowing the world. Furthermore, she emphasizes that in the Indigenous method, no one owns the knowledge; instead it is relational, providing a corroboration between oral tradition and archaeological record. Steeves presents her work in a way that celebrates the diverse groups often reduced to “Indian” tropes, refuting that these different cultural, heritage, and language groups were all the same; additionally, she is adamant in dispelling the stereotyped myth that Native Americans are anti-science. She frames this conversation in terms of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) and the important work of returning human remains and funerary objects, including the remains of the Ancient One (Kennewick Man), the reburial of whom a number of Western archaeologists and institutions fought to prevent. Another issue she addresses is the use of arbitrary European nomenclature for groups, lands, flora and fauna, and cultural practices when discussing Indigenous history—instead, she argues, archaeologists and historians should use the names given by Indigenous peoples when referring to Indigenous histories. Steeves claims that expanding how we explain and explore Indigenous histories also expands our understanding of global history.Steeves postulates that there were much earlier and more frequent migrations of people to the Western Hemisphere, and that those who refute this possibility do so from the Clovis First hypothesis, which has never existed save in the minds of historians. Likewise, is it possible that indigenous groups migrated from North America to Asia (the reverse of the commonly affirmed migration pattern)? Steeves, a proponent of the multi-regional hypothesis, finds that human habitation of the Western Hemisphere could go back as far as 130,000 years ago. She investigates why pre-Clovis models have been dismissed by historians since the mid-twentieth century.Intercutting her criticism of the Euro-dominant praxis within archaeology and anthropology, Steeves uses empirical evidence, linguistic evidence, personal narratives, poetry, and Indigenous ways of knowing to express a lucid and thorough critique of commonly held beliefs about history and prehistory. Proposing a holistic approach, she shows a rich relational knowledge contained in traditional peoples’ oral histories stretching to deep time and spaces. Such stories speak of Pleistocene beasts, evidenced by two mammoth teeth kept as sacred objects.In short, Steeves attempts to reclaim the histories of prehistoric Indigenous groups by Indigenous scholars for Indigenous peoples today. In her journey, she shares with us that the stubborn inability of those who refuse a pre-Clovis habitation of the Western Hemisphere have done so not because of the evidence but because it was important to maintain the facade of a people who had an infant culture easily conquered by the older, more dominant, and more established Old World empires. By dehumanizing the Indigenous—then and now—it is possible to rationalize the systematic destruction of those traditional lifeways.Steeves ends her work by calling on scholars to fan the flames of the Eighth Fire—what she calls a healing smoke—which is a place of peace, intersected by settler and Indigenous pasts. Unlike any scholarly work I have enjoyed, Steeves brings an unprecedented life to her claims. Her fire not only challenges what we have said about the past but will also certainly inspire new, vibrant scholarship that breaks down conventions and barriers.

Archaeological Culture Interpreted by Chinese Archaeologists

Chinese modern archaeology has inherited the achievements of local epigraphy and modern western archaeology for decades, it has also achieved fruitful results. Whether at home or abroad, in the past or now, archaeological culture is one of the core issues widely discussed and studied in the process of archaeological development. Although it has been criticized, it has actually made many contributions to archaeology. Its importance is self-evident, and it is necessary to discuss and study. This paper will try to summarize the discussion of Chinese archaeologists on archaeological culture for combing, including it’s definition, naming, interaction and dissemination.

D.YA. TELEHIN AND EPOCH OF CULTURAL DISTINGUISHING IN MESOLITHIC OF UKRAINE

At the beginning of the 20th century the West European Scholars O. Spengler and А. Toynbee introduced a new мultichoice vision of the World history. In the western archaeology of the interwar period it resulted in rejection of the global stages of the development of the primitive state and mass distinguishing of the numerous local cultures.
 Іn the course of time the stage-schematic concepts of the culture development have progressively shown a trend to a concept of the locality not only in Western but in Eastern Europe too. The 1970s is notable for a start of the cultures distinguishing boom in the Mesolithic history of the European part of the Soviet Union.
 Rapid process of distinguishing of the local cultures spread all over European continent having fundamentally changed cultural-historical map of the Mesolithic Europe. The 70s are marked by publishing of numerous monographs dedicated to cultural differentiation and periodization of some regions of the Central-East Europe. These problems have come to dominate at the international congresses and conferences. Congress in 1973 in Warsaw or conference in Leningrad in 1974 might serve as examples. As a result of new cultural-periodizational researches the Mesolithic map of Europe has become extremely variegated and subject to changes almost every year. The process of cultural distinguishing in the Mesolithic studies in Ukraine and Russia was especially stimulated by the achievements of the Polish and the Lithuanian scholars in 1960—70s.
 A head of Stone Age department of Archaeology Institute of NAS of Ukraine prof. D. Ya. Telehin take active part at distinguishing of the local Mesolithic cultures of Ukraine. The final transfer of D. Ya. Telehin to the positions of locality is demonstrated in his main work, generalizing monograph on the Ukraine Mesolithic in 1982. The researcher in this work has already distinguished near 20 original cultures and types of the monuments developed within two chronological both early and late stages of the Mesolithic in Ukraine. Developing periodization of the Mesolithic of the Ukraine D. Telehin stimulated regional researches directing the youth to study the Mesolithic of separate regions or cultural communities.

Imperialism, Internationalism, and Archaeology in the Un/Making of the Middle East

ABSTRACTArchaeological materialities and imaginaries have been deeply entwined in colonial rivalries and struggles for self‐determination that have lasting legacies across the Middle East. Neoimperial ambitions and conflict over territory, religion, oil, and antiquities have similarly been accompanied by heritage claims and the rhetoric of high cultural humanism. Throughout the twentieth century, foreign occupation and military adventurism emboldened archaeological elites, including Hogarth, Kenyon, Lawrence, Woolley, and Bell, to implement expansive new designs for a one‐world archaeology. Whether situated in London or Jerusalem, Western archaeologists were instrumental in the colonial carve‐up that extended to historical sites, concessions, collections, and even the creation of new states, often working through international agencies, such as the League of Nations and UNESCO, under a banner of salvage and uplift. The connected histories of archaeology, espionage, and the end of empire have cast a long shadow, prompting deeper analysis of archaeologists’ role as participants and beneficiaries. It is thus timely to reconsider disciplinary histories and interventions—from the colonial era through two World Wars to recent regional conflicts with the attendant international responses—and to interrogate archaeology's century‐old ambitions and practices that are replicated in new technics of “oversight.” [espionage, war, archaeology, military‐industrial‐academic complex, Middle East]

The ‘Frame’ at Adab

This article uses archival sources from the US State Department to examine conflicts that arose between American archaeologists and the Ottoman state during the years 1899 to 1905 in Ottoman Iraq (Mesopotamia). While contextualising many of the practices of Western archaeologists, this article examines two conflicts that emerged between the American digs at Niffur and Adab and the Ottoman Imperial Museum. The article both augments and disputes aspects of Craig Crossen’s article ‘The Sting at Adab’, published in the Spring 2013 issue of Anthropology of the Middle East. This article’s main contribution is to argue that conflicts that emerged surrounding antiquities demonstrate the growing strength/maturity of the Ottoman state apparatus and the implementation and continuation of nineteenth-century governmental reforms known as the Tanzimat.

The involvement of Western Orientalists in cultural heritage affairs during the Pahlavi Era, Iran (1925–1979)

ABSTRACTAfter years of neglect, along with the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, Western Orientalist and Iranian enlightened thinkers provided a forum to proliferate the discourse on cultural heritage. During the Pahlavi epoch (1925–1979), Western archaeologists and architects were closely involved in cultural heritage affairs, which effectively manipulated the concept of Iranian nationalism, particularly by focusing on the pre-Islamic heritage. Despite the underlying role of the Western Orientalists in the conservation of architectural heritage, it has not been scrutinised yet, and a few publications merely studied their cooperation from an archaeological and architectural perspective. Employing an interpretive-historical research method using significant primary sources this paper examines the role and involvement of four key figures, namely Ernst Herzfeld, André Godard, Arthur Upham Pope, and Maxime Siroux, in the restoration projects that has simply slipped into neglect after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Drawing upon the under-researched and unpublished primary materials such as government letters and memoirs, this paper elucidates the involvement of Western Orientalists in conservation and/or destruction of cultural heritage in Twentieth-Century Iran.

A Russian Perspective on Theoretical Archaeology: The Life and Work of Leo S. Klejn. Stephen Leach. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015, 221 pp. $79.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-62958-138-5.

<i>A Russian Perspective on Theoretical Archaeology: The Life and Work of Leo S. Klejn</i>. Stephen Leach. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015, 221 pp. $79.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-62958-138-5.

Indigenous Archaeologies of Crete, 1878–1913

This article makes a contribution to the emerging study of alternative, indigenous and subaltern archaeologies, using the Mediterranean island of Crete as a case study. My focus is on the crucial political developments that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the establishment of the Cretan State. These developments coincided with and facilitated the consolidation of archaeology as a scientific discipline and a state policy on the island. The Cretan population of the countryside ‘contested’ the new attitudes towards the material past by persevering with embedded practices that questioned the validity of scientific approaches. What kind of indigenous imagination underscored such practices? And how did the peasants interact with the new dogma regarding antiquities? Contrary to other groups involved, such as local and Western archaeologists, the rural Cretans remain among the ‘great unknowns’: accounts of relevant events by their own pen are scarce, highlighting the importance of oral historical sources. I therefore present these people through the voices of the others. Archival material such as administrative documents, correspondence, memoirs and newspaper articles, critically assessed, are used for this purpose. This research is also influenced by autobiographical archaeology, as glimpses of my personal work experience and family background overlap with the archival data discussed here.

The Nationalistic Trend in South Korean Archaeology: Documenting the Development of a Unilinear Evolutionary Trajectory of a Homogeneous Korean Peoples

This article aims to trace historical process of nationalism becoming embedded in general evolutionism in South Korean archaeology. The mindset sedimented in South Korean archaeologists is that all groups and polities in prehistoric and proto-historic Korea must be incorporated into a unilinear evolutionary stage model as a single people. Since 1945, South Korean archaeologists have endeavoured to establish the ethnic origin of this people, along with the timeline of Korean prehistory in order to reconstruct the unilinear independent history of the homogenous nation. By adopting periodization systems created in Western archaeology—such as the Three Age System and neo-evolutionism—leading South Korean archaeologists have attempted to objectify their irrational ideological idea of homogeneity and a unilinear evolutionary process. Even today, periodization itself is a very important issue in Korea, because it is not easy to combine the internal development pattern with the impact of external cultural traits diffused from China and incorporate various contemporary groups with different development levels into a single stage. These issues cause severe disputes; South Korean archaeologists, however, fail to offer an adequate solution, instead deepening the contradictions entailed in a unified timeline model, because they cannot change the fundamental premise of South Korean archaeology, namely the homogenous Korean nation formed in the Bronze Age. Moreover, these disputes rather prevent the application of a multi-evolutionary process model based on the political economy approach to the prehistoric and ancient Korean cases.

THE PROBLEM OF TYPOLOGY IN CHINESE ARCHAEOLOGY

AbstractChinese and Western archaeologists (especially those of the anthropologically-oriented tradition) often seem to be talking past each other, not only because they are publishing in different languages, but also because of differences in theory and method. While most of the major theoretical works in Western languages are by now available in Chinese translations, hardly any English-language publications exist that explain Chinese approaches to archaeological method and theory. This article helps to bridge the gap by introducing the history of debates on archaeological method in China to a Western audience, focusing particularly on issues of typology and classification. Discussing in detail the merits—and issues—of approaches suggested by four of the most influential Chinese archaeologists (Li Chi, Xia Nai, Su Bingqi, and K. C. Chang), this article provides a deeper understanding of the preconditions of archaeological research in China. It also suggests future directions for archaeological work by local and foreign archaeologists, including but also going beyond the classification of the rich body of artifacts coming to light in Chinese excavations.

Theoretical Challenges of Indigenous Archaeology: Setting an Agenda

AbstractIndigenous archaeology focuses on laudable processes of collaborative community research and decolonization. In contrast, theoretical contributions of Indigenous archaeology in terms of interpreting archaeological materials have been minimally articulated beyond praxis. Does Indigenous archaeology have an interpretative theoretical agenda? This paper addresses this question and articulates an agenda through distillation of theoretical developments and concerns from the considerable literature on Indigenous archaeology that has emerged from the Americas, Australia, and Africa over the past two decades. A shared fundamental concern is challenging ontological and epistemological divides and dualisms within mainstream Western archaeology. Two key dimensions of Indigenous archaeology are elaborated to provide broader scope to contextualize and address these theoretical challenges. First,encountering the pastchallenges objectivist tangibility of the archaeological record with ancestral presence and contexts where artifactual absence is the (in)tangible signature of spiritual association. Second,historicing the presentchallenges secularist archaeologies of a detached past with archaeologies of the more familiar ethnographically known recent past linked to identity and diachronic explorations of ontology and spiritualism. An agenda that embraces these theoretical challenges presents major opportunities for mainstream archaeology to reorient its Eurocentric focus and produce more cross-culturally relevant and culturally nuanced and sensitive understandings of the past.

Socioeconomic Development in the Bronze Age: Archaeological Understanding of the Transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Age, South Korea

The transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Age in Korea witnessed emergent social complexity. Recently scholars have frequently referenced theoretical constructs developed in Western archaeology in attempts to understand the socioeconomic changes that occurred during this transition. Meanwhile, other researchers have realized that the Korean case can be seen as both compatible with and incompatible with aspects of these generalized socio-evolutionary models, and with specific cases of early complex society emergence elsewhere in the world. Synthesizing the current discussion of these issues, I argue that sociopolitical development in the central and southern parts of the Korean Peninsula during the EBA–MBA transition might have been closely related to economic intensification. This can be understood from a perspective that emphasizes elite control over basic economic resources as a significant factor in this development. However, it is not solely intended here to reveal compatibility or slight incompatibility between generalized theoretical discourse on complex society emergence in various regions of the world and the archaeological case of the Korean Bronze Age. Rather, the aim is to look for potential ways in which Korean Bronze Age archaeology can contribute to future discussion on this significant global topic of archaeological research, which has great promise in Korean Bronze Age studies but has not been very rigorously explored. While presenting an overview of recent research on socioeconomic patterns, the article offers a more extended discussion of a couple of crucial issues in these Korean Bronze Age societies: the varying elite strategies for agricultural intensification and the conflicting factors in deciding household size and composition as an adaptive strategy, particularly in cases of primary producers.

„Wykluczeni” z przeszłości – kobiety i „dzicy” w archeologii i antropologii kulturowej

This article deals with subject of gender and sexuality in archaeology and cultural anthropology in 19th century, which still affects archaeological interpretations of human society. Western archaeology is concerned with this matters for over three decades, while in Poland it gained only a little feedback.Matriarchal myth was analytical tool, asserting certain status quo between women and men in society of Victorian era. The greatest freedom in western civilization was given to men, while women sexuality was screened and concerned as pathological. Devolved figure of prostitute was equated with Hottentot and inquired. Both figures were considered as example of anomaly, which could have driven to evolutionary decline. In contemporary thinking about gender one can recognize this 19th century stereotypes, which are foreclosing egress beyond the beaten track.

Syrian Cultural Property in the Crossfire:

Syrian Cultural Property in the Crossfire:

Were There Commercial Communications between Prehistoric Harappans and African Populations?

This paper is an historical and scientific evaluation of Western archaeologists’ theories concerning ancient population movements and commercial contacts between the prehistoric Harappans and African populations during the Indus Age (2500-1900 BC). In this context the human skeletal remains and artifacts from Harappa and Mohenjodaro are relevant. An urnburial from the Indus river site of Chanhudaro has an important bearing upon this subject. The scientific aspect of this study is the provision of hitherto unascertained data to palaeoanthropologists anaylsing the skeletal and dental biology of prehistoric populations of South Asia.

Prometheus Unbound: Southern Caucasia in Prehistory

This paper examines the intellectual traditions and recent advances in the archaeology of the Bronze and Iron Ages of the South Caucasus. The first goal of the paper is to provide an account of the scholarly traditions that have oriented research in the region since the mid-nineteenth century. This discussion provides a detailed case study of an archaeological tradition that arose within the context of Russian and Soviet research—traditions still poorly understood within Western archaeology. Yet archaeology in the South Caucasus was strongly influenced by international research in neighboring southwest Asia, and thus the region’s intellectual currents often diverged from the debates and priorities that predominated in Moscow. The second goal of this paper is to outline the primary issues that orient contemporary work in the region from the Neolithic through the Urartian period. My interest here is both didactic and prognostic. While I am concerned to fairly represent the primary foci of contemporary regional scholarship, I also make an argument for a deeper investigation of the constitution of social life. Such studies are critical to the advancement of archaeology in the South Caucasus over the coming decade.

Art, crafts and Paleolithic art

This article initially examines the foundations of our modern understanding of Paleolithic art. Taking the period 1860-1905 into account, I show that the depiction of Paleolithic art elaborated by Western archaeologists at that time was largely based on the projection of categories used to characterize craft at the end of the nineteenth century with prehistoric art. As I depict in the final section of the article, the weakening of evolutionism and the recognition of the complexity of primitive societies at the turn of the century provoked a new definition of Paleolithic art, which included cave paintings.

Focus On Islam I

The flight of Muhammad and his companions from Mecca to Medina in AD 622 (the hijra) initiated one of the world’s great intellectual and cultural movements, which in a few centuries was to extend from China to the Atlantic. As western archaeologists, we have probably accorded relative neglect to the study of the material culture arising from Islam, although it clearly has much to offer for the understanding of all societies. To help redress the balance, Antiquity has invited a number of scholars active in the archaeology of Islamic culture to give us a taste of work in progress. This special series, which will feature in each issue in 2005, is introduced by its convenor, Andrew Petersen.