1,721,024 research outputs found
The nation and its ruins: antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece
No full textThis innovative, extensively illustrated study examines how classical antiquities and archaeology contributed significantly to the production of the modern Greek nation and its national imagination. It also shows how, in return, national imagination has created and shaped classical antiquities and archaeological practice from the nineteenth century to the present. Yannis Hamilakis covers a diverse range of topics, including the role of antiquities in the foundation of the Greek state in the nineteenth century, the Elgin marbles controversy, the role of archaeology under dictatorial regimes, the use of antiquities in the detention camps of the Greek civil war, and the discovery of the so-called tomb of Philip of Macedonia.Contents 1. Memories cast in marble: introduction 2. The 'soldiers' the `priests'. and the `hospitals for contagious diseases': the producers of archaeological matter-realities 3. From the Western to indigenous Hellenism: archaeology, antiquity, and the invention of modern Greece 4. The archaeologist as shaman the sensory national archaeology of Manolis Andronikos 5. Spartan visions: antiquity and the Metaxas dictatorship 6. The other Parthenon: antiquity and national memory at the concentration camp 7. Nostalgia for the whole: the Parthenon (or 'Elgin') marbles 8. The nation in ruins? Conclusion
Introduction: What future for the 'Minoan' past? Rethinking Minoan Archaeology
No full text'Minoan' Crete is one of the most intensively investigated archaeological cultures in the world, and one that has often captured the public imagination. It is a Bronze Age Aegean society, but it has been intimately connected with the Classical Greek myth of King Minos and his Labyrinth since Sir Arthur Evans excavated and restored (some would say 'rebuilt') the important site of Knossos, more than a century ago. Yet many archaeological interpretations of this fascinating culture are still largely traditional in focus and often anachronistic. This collection of papers, challenging and re-examining many conventional and established versions of 'Minoan' history is thus long overdue. How have modern preconceptions and socio-political developments shaped archaeological interpretations of 'Minoan' society? What were the gender roles and attitudes of the inhabitants of Bronze Age Crete? How can data such as the puzzling architecture, the stunning wall-paintings, the elaborate and abundant pots, the landscape and the way it is perceived by humans, help us understand the nature and the negotiations of power and the role of the so-called palaces? These are some of the questions that this book addresses, considering 'Minoan' archaeology from a variety of interpretive angles, and situating 'Minoan' archaeology in the mainstream of archaeological thinking and practice. Contents: What Future for the 'Minoan' Past? Re-thinking Minoan Archaeology (Yannis Hamilakis); Archaeology as Museology: Re-thinking the Minoan Past (Donald Preziosi); Virtual Discourse: Arthur Evans and the Reconstructions of the Minoan Palace at Knossos (Louise Hitchcock and Paul Koudounaris); Cretan Questions: Politics and Archaeology 1898-1913 (John C McEnroe); Palaces with Faces in Protopalatial Crete: Looking for the People in the First Minoan States (Marianna Nikolaidou); Gender and the Figurative Art of Late Bronze Age Knossos (Benjamin Alberti); Integration and Complexity in the Late Pre-Palatial Period: A View from the Countryside in Eastern Crete (D C Haggis); Landscapes of Memory, Craft and Power in Pre-Palatial and Proto-Palatial Knossos (Peter M Day and David E Wilson); Mind the Gap: Between Pots and Politics in Minoan Studies (Carl Knappett); Pottery as a Barometer of Economic Change: From the Protopalatial to the Neopalatial Society in Central Crete (Aleydis Van de Moortel); Millennial Ambiguities (John Bennet)
The "war on terror" and the military-archaeology complex: Iraq, ethics, and neo-colonialism
Full text linkThe archaeological response to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq is often portrayed as a crusade to rescue antiquities, destroyed either directly by the military action itself or indirectly by the looting of archaeological sites and museums. I argue in this paper that this narrative is awfully inadequate, and masks the ethical and political dimensions at the core of this historical episode. I contend that, in their often well-intended attempts to rescue antiquities, most archaeologists involved have projected a professionalized, apolitical and abstract response, devoid of the social and political context, and based on the fetishisation of a narrowly and problematically defined archaeological record. I argue further that the increasing collaboration of many archaeologists with the invading militaries and occupation authorities since 2003, assisted by the “cultural turn” especially within the US military, have laid the foundations for an emerging military-archaeology complex. I trace the contours of this phenomenon by examining various archaeological and museum discourses and practices. This new development (with historical resonances that go as far back as the 18th century, if not earlier) is linked directly with the ontology and epistemology of archaeology, and deserves further close scrutiny and analysis. The thesis advanced here does not advocate inaction and withdrawal in situations of warfare, but a critical engagement that safeguards the autonomy of the scholar; critiques the political agendas and power structures of contemporary warfare; deconstructs its discursive basis and its ideological overtones; and shows its catastrophic consequences for people and things alike, past and present. <br/
Archaeology and the politics of pedagogy
No full textIt is argued here that pedagogy, rather than being a passive process of delivery, is part of the field of cultural politics, a contested domain, a public sphere where knowledges, views and perceptions on the past and the present are debated and contested, or valorized, reproduced and legitimized. Recent archaeological theory has neglected the field of pedagogy, which, as a result, has been largely colonized by the instrumentalist discourse, in its new, market-oriented reincarnation. This dominant view of archaeological pedagogy is presented in objectified, neutral terms as the natural, inevitable course of affairs: it has become the 'doxic' regime that is presented as being beyond criticism at its core, save for peripheral managerial points. Archaeology, however, has the ability to undermine this objectified discourse by showing the contingency, historicity, and the inevitably transient and unstable nature of the present-day pedagogical regime in archaeology. Current instrumentalist pedagogy, despite its dominance, does not go unchallenged. One way of challenging it is by devising pedagogical processes that create a space for critical reflection, reconnect subjectivity and experience with knowledge, and allow students not only to understand the material and social processes that generate and reproduce their own subjectivity, but also question and even transform these processes and conditions. Student-centred journals that promote critical reflexivity are an example of one such pedagogic process. This paper presents the experience of the author in using such a device in the teaching of a course on the archaeology and anthropology of eating and drinking
'Learn History!' Antiquity, national narrative and history in Greek educational textbooks
No full textTable of Contents:The Cupboard of Yesterdays? Critical Perspectives on the Usable Past by
K.S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis I. Projects: The State in Action 1. Monumental Visions: the Past in Metaxas' weltanschauung by Philip
Carabott 2. "Learn History!" Antiquity, National Narrative, and History in Greek
Educational Textbooks by Yannis Hamilakis 3. The Politics of Currency: Stamps, Coins, Banknotes, and the
Circulation of Modern Greek Tradition by Basil C. GounarisII. Fractures: Resisting the National Narrative 1. The Macedonian Question in the 1920s and the Politics of History by
Patrick Finney 2. Recollecting Difference: Archive-Marxists and Old Calendarists in an
Exile Community by Margaret E. Kenna3. The Ethnoarchaeology of a "Passive" Ethnicity. The Arvanites of
Central Greece by John Bintliff III. Conversations: From Past to Present 1. Dimitris Pikionis and Sedad Eldem: Parallel Reflections of
Vernacular and National Architecture by
Eleni Bastéa 2. Spaces in Tense: History, Contingency, and Place in a Cretan City by
Thomas M. Malaby 3. Poked by the 'Foreign Finger' in Greece: Conspiracy Theory or the
Hermeneutics of Suspicion? By David Sutto
Archaeological ethnography: a multi-temporal meeting ground for archaeology and anthropology
No full textArchaeology and anthropology, despite their commonalities, have had a rather asymmetrical relationship, and the periodic attempts for closer collaboration resulted in mutual frustration. As both disciplines have recently undergone significant changes, however, with anthropology embracing materiality and historicity, and archaeology engaging in contemporary research, often invoving ethnography, the time is ripe for a new rapprochement. Archaeological ethnography, an emerging trans-disciplinary field, offers such an opportunity. Archaeological ethnography is defined here as a transcultural space for multiple encounters, conversations and interventions, involving researchers from various disciplines and diverse publics, and centered around materiality and temporality. It is multi-temporal rather than presentist, and while many of its concerns to date are to do with clashes over heritage, it is argued here that its potential is far greater, in that it can dislodge the certainties of conventional archaeology, and question its ontological principles, such as those founded on modernist, linear and successive temporality.<br/
Past as oral history: towards an archaeology of the senses
No full textThe Body' was a trendy topic of consideration in sociology and related fields during the 1990s, tied up with modern preoccupations with gender, the individual, and agency. The papers in this volume attempt to engage the body as a topic of archaeological enquiry, and as a subject influenced by cultural categories of perception, experience and practice. The papers are divided into three sections which explore the relationship between the physical body and other cultural ideas such as the 'self' and 'individual', those that take issue with the interpretive limitations of traditional methods of data analysis, those that consider the ways in which archaeologists can integrate material culture with social and symbolic constructions of human bodies, especially in art and burial rituals. This book is based on a workshop held at the University of Wales, Lampeter, in 1998. Overall the mixture of papers is somewhat bewildering, looking at case studies from Oceania, Britain, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean, from prehistory, the medieval, and post-medieval periods.Contents: Archaeology's humanism and the materiality of the body / Julian Thomas -- Body parts : personhood and materiality in the earlier Manx neolithic / Chris Fowler -- Moralities of dress and the dress of the dead in early medieval Europe / Jos Bazelmans -- Aesthetic corpse in nineteenth-century Britain / Sarah Tarlow -- Feeling through the body : gesture in Cretan Bronze Age religion / Christine Morris and Alan Peatfield -- Past as oral history : towards an archaeology of the senses / Yannis Hamilakis -- Ways of eating/ways of being in the Later Epipalaeolithic (Natufian) Levant / Brian Boyd -- Time and biography : osteobiography of the Italian Neolithic lifespan / John Robb -- (Un)masking gender-- gold foil (dis)embodiments in Late Iron Age Scandinavia / Ing-Marie Back Danielsson -- Re-arranging history : the contested bones of the Oseberg grave / Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh -- Art, artefact, metaphor / Mark Pluciennik -- Marking the body, marking the land : body as history, land as history : tattooing and engraving in Oceania / Paul Rainbird
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