When we think about archaeology, the discipline as much as the practice brings up images of time out of mind as well as the more proximate ...
When we think about archaeology, the discipline as much as the practice brings up images of time out of mind as well as the more proximate question of recorded history. Geology, palaeontology, history: each of these is associated with the idea of the past, and of what is over. However, recent developments including the development of industrial and urban archaeology suggest a method of dealing with material remains rather a relation to questions of time alone. We are reminded that the discipline has a deep relation to the contemporary and to our understanding of the present as much as to the philosophical questions of History and Memory.
Moreover, despite claims to scientific method and the rigors of objective enquiry, the fact remains that archaeology is located within political projects of nationhood, narratives of conquest, and claims to antiquity and classicism (“we have been around longer than you”).
A striking example of this came up in 2001 when a young American scholar Nadia Abu El Haj published Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Using the discipline of Israeli archaeology as the subject of her study, she argued that the facts generated by archaeological practice influence “cultural understandings, political possibilities...
