Lynn Meskell
Lynn Meskell is Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor, Department of Anthropology, School of Arts & Sciences, Penn Museum and Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2019-2025 she is A.D White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She was formerly the Shirley R. and Leonard W. Ely, Jr. Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Lynn is also Honorary Professor in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Over the past twenty years she has been awarded grants and fellowships including those from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the American Academy in Rome, the School of American Research, Oxford University and Cambridge University. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology. Lynn has broad theoretical interests including socio-politics, archaeological ethics, global heritage, materiality, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory. Lynn’s earlier research examined natural and cultural heritage in South Africa, the archaeology of figurines and burial in Neolithic Turkey and social life in New Kingdom Egypt.
Recently she conducted an institutional ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage, tracing the politics of governance and sovereignty and the subsequent implications for multilateral diplomacy, international conservation, and heritage rights. Employing archival and ethnographic analysis, her new book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (2018, OUP New York), reveals UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage. She won the Society for American Archaeology book prize in 2019. Some other recent books and edited collections include The Nature of Culture: The New South Africa (2011, Blackwells) and Global Heritage: A Reader (2015, Blackwells). Some of her new fieldwork explores monumental regimes of research and preservation around World Heritage sites in India and how diverse actors and agencies address the needs of living communities. Given the sheer scale and complexity of archaeological heritage in India, no nation presents a more fraught and compelling array of challenges to preserving its past. Recently, she has examined the entwined histories of colonialism, internationalism, espionage in the Middle East and undertaken a largescale survey project in Syria and Iraq to assess public opinion on heritage destruction and reconstruction. Her other fieldwork explores monumental regimes of preservation in India, conflict and co-operation in 1200 World Heritage sites, and the rise of heritage warfare and securitization from UNESCO to NATO.
Recently she conducted an institutional ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage, tracing the politics of governance and sovereignty and the subsequent implications for multilateral diplomacy, international conservation, and heritage rights. Employing archival and ethnographic analysis, her new book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (2018, OUP New York), reveals UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage. She won the Society for American Archaeology book prize in 2019. Some other recent books and edited collections include The Nature of Culture: The New South Africa (2011, Blackwells) and Global Heritage: A Reader (2015, Blackwells). Some of her new fieldwork explores monumental regimes of research and preservation around World Heritage sites in India and how diverse actors and agencies address the needs of living communities. Given the sheer scale and complexity of archaeological heritage in India, no nation presents a more fraught and compelling array of challenges to preserving its past. Recently, she has examined the entwined histories of colonialism, internationalism, espionage in the Middle East and undertaken a largescale survey project in Syria and Iraq to assess public opinion on heritage destruction and reconstruction. Her other fieldwork explores monumental regimes of preservation in India, conflict and co-operation in 1200 World Heritage sites, and the rise of heritage warfare and securitization from UNESCO to NATO.
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Journal of Social Archaeology by Lynn Meskell
2013 Impact Factor: 1.000
2013 Ranking: 32/81 in Anthropology
Source: 2013 Journal Citation Reports ® (Thomson Reuters, 2014)
The Journal of Social Archaeology promotes interdisciplinary research focused on social approaches in archaeology, opening up new debates and areas of exploration. It engages with and contributes to theoretical developments from other related disciplines such as feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, social geography, literary theory, politics, anthropology, cognitive studies and behavioural science. It is explicitly global in outlook with temporal parameters from prehistory to recent periods. As well as promoting innovative social interpretations of the past, it also encourages an exploration of contemporary politics and heritage issues.
Interdisciplinary
The editorial board is drawn from archaeology and the social sciences and submissions should reflect that interdisciplinary engagement. Established scholars from a variety of fields are asked to comment on submissions where relevant, bringing archaeology to a wider forum in the process. The journal also engages with contemporary perspectives on antiquity, linking past and present, the local and the global.
Broad-ranging topics
The journal covers a full range of social archaeology in independent and themed issues. Relevant topics include social life; identity issues such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class; the body; material culture; landscape; time; aesthetics; sociopolitics; postcolonialism; representation; mortuary analysis; ritual; household studies, and social memory.
"JSA is the only journal which provides world-wide coverage of the current theoretical and political issues facing archaeology making it central to debates about the current importance of the past.” Chris Gosden, University of Oxford, UK
Books by Lynn Meskell
Focuses on ethnographic and embedded perspectives, as well as a commitment to ethical engagement
Appeals to a broad audience, from archaeologists to heritage professionals, museum curators to the general public. The contributors comprise an outstanding team, representing some of the most prominent scholars in this broad field, with a combination of senior and emerging scholars, and an emphasis on international contributions
This book...
Provides a classic example of how nations attempt to overcome a negative heritage through past mastering of their histories
Evaluates the continuing dominance of nature and conservation over concerns for cultural heritage
Employs ethnographic and archaeological methodologies to reveal how the past is processed into a new national heritage
Identifies heritage as therapy, exemplified in the strategy for repairing legacies of racial and ethnic difference in post-apartheid South Africa
Highlights the role of archaeological heritage sites, national parks and protected areas in economic development and social empowerment
Explores how nature trumps culture and the global implications of the new configurations of heritage
The contributors describe various forms of cosmopolitan engagement involving sites that span the globe. They take up the links between conservation, natural heritage and ecology movements, and the ways that local heritage politics are constructed through international discourses and regulations. They are attentive to how communities near heritage sites are affected by archaeological fieldwork and findings, and to the complex interactions that local communities and national bodies have with international sponsors and universities, conservation agencies, development organizations, and NGOs. Whether discussing the toll of efforts to preserve biodiversity on South Africans living near Kruger National Park, the ways that UNESCO’s global heritage project universalizes the ethic of preservation, or the Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk that the Archaeological Institute of America sent to the U.S. government before the Iraq invasion, the contributors provide nuanced assessments of the ethical implications of the discursive production, consumption, and governing of other people’s pasts.
Edited by Lynn Meskell.
Contributors: O. Hugo Benavides, Lisa Breglia, Denis Byrne, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Alfredo González-Ruibal, Ian Hodder, Ian Lilley, Jane Lydon, Lynn Meskell, Sandra Arnold Scham
•Demonstrates the saliency of materiality by linking it to concepts of landscape, technology, embodiment, ritual, and heritage.
•Offers archaeological case studies ranging from prehistoric to contemporary contexts, from Neo-Assyria, South Africa, Argentina, Panama, and the United States.
•Explores the idea of a material universe that is socially conceived and constructed, but that also shapes human experience in daily practice.
Edited by Lynn Meskell.
Contents:
1. Introduction: Object Orientations: Lynn Meskell.
2. Mastering Matters: Magical Sense and the Apotropaic Figure Worlds: Carolyn Nakamura.
3. The Social life of Rocks: Lindsay Weiss.
4. With a Hint of Paris in the Mouth: Fetishized Toothbrushes or the Sensuous Experience of Modernity in Late 19th-Century Bogota: Felipe Gaitan.
5. Faith in Objects: American Indian Object Lessons at the World in Boston: Erin Hasinoff.
6. The Texture of Things: Objects, People, and Social Spaces in Argentine Prehistory: Marisa Lazzari.
7. Building an Architecture of Power: Electricity in Annapolis, Maryland: Matt Palus.
8. Materiality vs. the Volcano: The Hitherto Unthinkable Wildness of the Volcan Baru, Panama: Karen Holmberg.
Edited by Lynn Meskell and Peter Pels
•Grouped into four sections - Knowledges, Identities, Places, and Politics - each of which is prefaced with a review essay that contextualizes the history and developments in social archaeology and related fields.
•Draws together newer trends that are challenging established ways of understanding the past.
•Includes contributions by leading scholars who instigated major theoretical trends.
Edited by Lynn Meskell and Robert W. Preucel.
Contents:
Part I: Knowledges:.
1. The “Social” in Archaeological Theory: An Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Ian Hodder (Standford University).
2. Cross-Cultural Comparison and Archaeological Theory: Bruce G. Trigger (McGill University).
3. Social Archaeology and Marxist Social Thought: Thomas C. Patterson (University of California, Riverside).
4. Embodied Subjectivity: Gender, Femininity, Masculinity, Sexuality: Rosemary A. Joyce (University of California, Berkeley).
5. Social Archaeology and Origins Research: A Paleolithic Perspective: Clive Gamble and Erica Gittins (Both at the University of Southampton).
Part II: Identities:.
6. Archaeology and the Life Course: A Time and Age for Gender: Roberta Gilchrist (University of Reading).
7. The Past and Foreign Countries: Colonial and Post-Colonial Archaeology and Anthropology: Chris Gosden (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford).
8. Material Culture: Current Problems: Victor Buchli (University College, London).
9. Ideology, Power, and Capitalism: The Historical Archaeology of Consumption: Paul R. Mullins (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis).
Part III: Places:.
10. Space, Spatiality, and Archaeology: Emma Blake (Stanford University).
11. Social Archaeologies of Landscape: Wendy Ashmore (University of California, Riverside).
12. Living and Working at Home: The Social Archaeology of Household Production and Social Relations: Julia A. Hendon (Gettysburg College).
13. Diaspora and Identity in Archaeology: Moving beyond the Black Atlantic: Ian Lilley (University of Queensland).
Part IV: Politics:.
14. The Political Economy of Archaeological Practice and the Production of Heritage in the Middle East: Reinhard.
Bernbeck and Susan Pollock (Both at: State University of New York, Binghamton).
15. Latin American Archaeology: From Colonialism To Globalization: Gustavo Politis (CONICET-UNCPBA, Argentina) and José Antonio Perez Gollán (CONICET-Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina).
16. Contested Pasts: Archaeology and Native Americans: Randall H. McGuire (Binghamton University).
17. Identity, Modernity, and Archaeology: The Case of Japan: Koji Mizoguchi (Kyushu University, Japan).
Drawing on insights from feminist theory, art history, phenomenology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, the book takes bodily materiality as a crucial starting point to the understanding and formation of self in any society, and sheds new light on Ancient Egyptian and Maya cultures.
The book shows how a comparative project can open up new lines of inquiry by raising questions about accepted assumptions as the authors draw attention to the long-term histories and specificities of embodiment, and make the case for the importance of ancient materials for contemporary theorization of the body.
For students new to the subject, and scholars already familiar with it, this will offer fresh and exciting insights into these ancient cultures.
Structured according to the cycles of life, the book relies on categories that the ancient Egyptians themselves used to make sense of their lives. Lynn Meskell gracefully sifts the evidence to reveal Egyptian domestic arrangements, social and family dynamics, sexuality, emotional experience, and attitudes toward the cadences of human life. She discusses how the Egyptians of the New Kingdom constituted and experienced self, kinship, life stages, reproduction, and social organization. And she examines their creation of communities and the material conditions in which they lived. Also included is neglected information on the formation of locality and the construction of gender and sexual identity and new evidence from the mortuary record, including important new data on the burial of children. Throughout, Meskell is careful to highlight differences among ancient Egyptians--the ways, for instance, that ethnicity, marital status, age, gender, and occupation patterned their experiences.
Readers will come away from this book with new insights on how life may have been experienced and conceived of by ancient Egyptians in all their variety. This makes Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt unique in Egyptology and fascinating to read.
Contents:
1. Individuals, Selves and Bodies.
2. Feminisms, Gender Trouble and Sexuality.
3. Body and Soul in the Archaeology of Egypt.
4. Mapping Age, Sex and Class at Deir el Medina.
5. Accessing Individuals at Deir el Medina.
Edited by Lynn Meskell.
Papers by Lynn Meskell
We empirically test for the mechanisms underlying protest against the liberal international economic order in a context where we can causally isolate the mobilizing role of relative economic deprivation and identify both the source and target of expressed conflict. Using a difference-in-difference design at a fine-grained geographic level of analysis we show that micro-level geographic locations “treated” with the inscription of cultural and natural heritage sites of outstanding universal value onto the World Heritage list experience an increase in conflict originating from labor organizations who frequently perceive their share of tourism benefits to be unfair or inadequate towards intergovernmental organizations, national governments and businesses who either economically benefit from the liberalization, are supporters of those who benefit or are associated with that liberalization. These results provide
causal evidence in support of greater efforts to compensate the losers of economic liberalization ex ante both in proximity to World Heritage sites and, we argue, for those negatively impacted by liberalization more broadly.
of Australian Archaeology and looking back on what
makes archaeology in Australia distinctive, I want to
highlight the decades-long crossover between
archaeology and heritage and the particular way that
the discipline has been framed and practised
2013 Impact Factor: 1.000
2013 Ranking: 32/81 in Anthropology
Source: 2013 Journal Citation Reports ® (Thomson Reuters, 2014)
The Journal of Social Archaeology promotes interdisciplinary research focused on social approaches in archaeology, opening up new debates and areas of exploration. It engages with and contributes to theoretical developments from other related disciplines such as feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, social geography, literary theory, politics, anthropology, cognitive studies and behavioural science. It is explicitly global in outlook with temporal parameters from prehistory to recent periods. As well as promoting innovative social interpretations of the past, it also encourages an exploration of contemporary politics and heritage issues.
Interdisciplinary
The editorial board is drawn from archaeology and the social sciences and submissions should reflect that interdisciplinary engagement. Established scholars from a variety of fields are asked to comment on submissions where relevant, bringing archaeology to a wider forum in the process. The journal also engages with contemporary perspectives on antiquity, linking past and present, the local and the global.
Broad-ranging topics
The journal covers a full range of social archaeology in independent and themed issues. Relevant topics include social life; identity issues such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class; the body; material culture; landscape; time; aesthetics; sociopolitics; postcolonialism; representation; mortuary analysis; ritual; household studies, and social memory.
"JSA is the only journal which provides world-wide coverage of the current theoretical and political issues facing archaeology making it central to debates about the current importance of the past.” Chris Gosden, University of Oxford, UK
Focuses on ethnographic and embedded perspectives, as well as a commitment to ethical engagement
Appeals to a broad audience, from archaeologists to heritage professionals, museum curators to the general public. The contributors comprise an outstanding team, representing some of the most prominent scholars in this broad field, with a combination of senior and emerging scholars, and an emphasis on international contributions
This book...
Provides a classic example of how nations attempt to overcome a negative heritage through past mastering of their histories
Evaluates the continuing dominance of nature and conservation over concerns for cultural heritage
Employs ethnographic and archaeological methodologies to reveal how the past is processed into a new national heritage
Identifies heritage as therapy, exemplified in the strategy for repairing legacies of racial and ethnic difference in post-apartheid South Africa
Highlights the role of archaeological heritage sites, national parks and protected areas in economic development and social empowerment
Explores how nature trumps culture and the global implications of the new configurations of heritage
The contributors describe various forms of cosmopolitan engagement involving sites that span the globe. They take up the links between conservation, natural heritage and ecology movements, and the ways that local heritage politics are constructed through international discourses and regulations. They are attentive to how communities near heritage sites are affected by archaeological fieldwork and findings, and to the complex interactions that local communities and national bodies have with international sponsors and universities, conservation agencies, development organizations, and NGOs. Whether discussing the toll of efforts to preserve biodiversity on South Africans living near Kruger National Park, the ways that UNESCO’s global heritage project universalizes the ethic of preservation, or the Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk that the Archaeological Institute of America sent to the U.S. government before the Iraq invasion, the contributors provide nuanced assessments of the ethical implications of the discursive production, consumption, and governing of other people’s pasts.
Edited by Lynn Meskell.
Contributors: O. Hugo Benavides, Lisa Breglia, Denis Byrne, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Alfredo González-Ruibal, Ian Hodder, Ian Lilley, Jane Lydon, Lynn Meskell, Sandra Arnold Scham
•Demonstrates the saliency of materiality by linking it to concepts of landscape, technology, embodiment, ritual, and heritage.
•Offers archaeological case studies ranging from prehistoric to contemporary contexts, from Neo-Assyria, South Africa, Argentina, Panama, and the United States.
•Explores the idea of a material universe that is socially conceived and constructed, but that also shapes human experience in daily practice.
Edited by Lynn Meskell.
Contents:
1. Introduction: Object Orientations: Lynn Meskell.
2. Mastering Matters: Magical Sense and the Apotropaic Figure Worlds: Carolyn Nakamura.
3. The Social life of Rocks: Lindsay Weiss.
4. With a Hint of Paris in the Mouth: Fetishized Toothbrushes or the Sensuous Experience of Modernity in Late 19th-Century Bogota: Felipe Gaitan.
5. Faith in Objects: American Indian Object Lessons at the World in Boston: Erin Hasinoff.
6. The Texture of Things: Objects, People, and Social Spaces in Argentine Prehistory: Marisa Lazzari.
7. Building an Architecture of Power: Electricity in Annapolis, Maryland: Matt Palus.
8. Materiality vs. the Volcano: The Hitherto Unthinkable Wildness of the Volcan Baru, Panama: Karen Holmberg.
Edited by Lynn Meskell and Peter Pels
•Grouped into four sections - Knowledges, Identities, Places, and Politics - each of which is prefaced with a review essay that contextualizes the history and developments in social archaeology and related fields.
•Draws together newer trends that are challenging established ways of understanding the past.
•Includes contributions by leading scholars who instigated major theoretical trends.
Edited by Lynn Meskell and Robert W. Preucel.
Contents:
Part I: Knowledges:.
1. The “Social” in Archaeological Theory: An Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Ian Hodder (Standford University).
2. Cross-Cultural Comparison and Archaeological Theory: Bruce G. Trigger (McGill University).
3. Social Archaeology and Marxist Social Thought: Thomas C. Patterson (University of California, Riverside).
4. Embodied Subjectivity: Gender, Femininity, Masculinity, Sexuality: Rosemary A. Joyce (University of California, Berkeley).
5. Social Archaeology and Origins Research: A Paleolithic Perspective: Clive Gamble and Erica Gittins (Both at the University of Southampton).
Part II: Identities:.
6. Archaeology and the Life Course: A Time and Age for Gender: Roberta Gilchrist (University of Reading).
7. The Past and Foreign Countries: Colonial and Post-Colonial Archaeology and Anthropology: Chris Gosden (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford).
8. Material Culture: Current Problems: Victor Buchli (University College, London).
9. Ideology, Power, and Capitalism: The Historical Archaeology of Consumption: Paul R. Mullins (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis).
Part III: Places:.
10. Space, Spatiality, and Archaeology: Emma Blake (Stanford University).
11. Social Archaeologies of Landscape: Wendy Ashmore (University of California, Riverside).
12. Living and Working at Home: The Social Archaeology of Household Production and Social Relations: Julia A. Hendon (Gettysburg College).
13. Diaspora and Identity in Archaeology: Moving beyond the Black Atlantic: Ian Lilley (University of Queensland).
Part IV: Politics:.
14. The Political Economy of Archaeological Practice and the Production of Heritage in the Middle East: Reinhard.
Bernbeck and Susan Pollock (Both at: State University of New York, Binghamton).
15. Latin American Archaeology: From Colonialism To Globalization: Gustavo Politis (CONICET-UNCPBA, Argentina) and José Antonio Perez Gollán (CONICET-Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina).
16. Contested Pasts: Archaeology and Native Americans: Randall H. McGuire (Binghamton University).
17. Identity, Modernity, and Archaeology: The Case of Japan: Koji Mizoguchi (Kyushu University, Japan).
Drawing on insights from feminist theory, art history, phenomenology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, the book takes bodily materiality as a crucial starting point to the understanding and formation of self in any society, and sheds new light on Ancient Egyptian and Maya cultures.
The book shows how a comparative project can open up new lines of inquiry by raising questions about accepted assumptions as the authors draw attention to the long-term histories and specificities of embodiment, and make the case for the importance of ancient materials for contemporary theorization of the body.
For students new to the subject, and scholars already familiar with it, this will offer fresh and exciting insights into these ancient cultures.
Structured according to the cycles of life, the book relies on categories that the ancient Egyptians themselves used to make sense of their lives. Lynn Meskell gracefully sifts the evidence to reveal Egyptian domestic arrangements, social and family dynamics, sexuality, emotional experience, and attitudes toward the cadences of human life. She discusses how the Egyptians of the New Kingdom constituted and experienced self, kinship, life stages, reproduction, and social organization. And she examines their creation of communities and the material conditions in which they lived. Also included is neglected information on the formation of locality and the construction of gender and sexual identity and new evidence from the mortuary record, including important new data on the burial of children. Throughout, Meskell is careful to highlight differences among ancient Egyptians--the ways, for instance, that ethnicity, marital status, age, gender, and occupation patterned their experiences.
Readers will come away from this book with new insights on how life may have been experienced and conceived of by ancient Egyptians in all their variety. This makes Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt unique in Egyptology and fascinating to read.
Contents:
1. Individuals, Selves and Bodies.
2. Feminisms, Gender Trouble and Sexuality.
3. Body and Soul in the Archaeology of Egypt.
4. Mapping Age, Sex and Class at Deir el Medina.
5. Accessing Individuals at Deir el Medina.
Edited by Lynn Meskell.
We empirically test for the mechanisms underlying protest against the liberal international economic order in a context where we can causally isolate the mobilizing role of relative economic deprivation and identify both the source and target of expressed conflict. Using a difference-in-difference design at a fine-grained geographic level of analysis we show that micro-level geographic locations “treated” with the inscription of cultural and natural heritage sites of outstanding universal value onto the World Heritage list experience an increase in conflict originating from labor organizations who frequently perceive their share of tourism benefits to be unfair or inadequate towards intergovernmental organizations, national governments and businesses who either economically benefit from the liberalization, are supporters of those who benefit or are associated with that liberalization. These results provide
causal evidence in support of greater efforts to compensate the losers of economic liberalization ex ante both in proximity to World Heritage sites and, we argue, for those negatively impacted by liberalization more broadly.
of Australian Archaeology and looking back on what
makes archaeology in Australia distinctive, I want to
highlight the decades-long crossover between
archaeology and heritage and the particular way that
the discipline has been framed and practised
global security and the prospects of peace. In response, the international
community has undertaken several large-scale heritage reconstruction
projects on the assumption that they would foster development and
promote cohesion. However, to date very little is understood about how
local populations value their heritage, how they perceive its destruction,
whether they view reconstruction as a priority, and the extent to which
they support foreign efforts to rebuild. This article addresses this lacuna by
focusing on the case study of Aleppo and documenting the results of an
original public opinion survey of 1600 residents. The results hold several
implications for heritage projects in Aleppo, namely that locals prefer that
heritage reconstruction: not be privileged over security, development and
peace; includes the rebuilding of their local religious sites as much as
significant non-religious sites; transforms sites into more useful structures
for the community; and they want domestic control and agency over the
future of their heritage. The article concludes by noting that such findings
hold important implications for heritage projects in other (post-)conflict
contexts where mass heritage destruction has taken place.
الإسلامية بمدينة الموصل شمالي العراق، تم البدء
بمبادرات مختلفة لإعادة إعمار المواقع التراثية في
المدينة. إلا أن هذه المشار يع يتم تصميمها وتنفيذها
في الغالب من قبل منظمات أجنبية، والعديد منها
لديه معلومات محدودة عن وجهات النظر المحلية
تجاه مواقع التراث ودمارها.
(David Hogarth, Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolley) found themselves at the crossroads of
empire and espionage during the First World War. Recruited specifically for their archaeological training and
fieldwork in the Middle East, they occupied the frontline of military intelligence at the Arab Bureau, advancing
British interests and fending off competing powers. Not only were these archaeologists preoccupied with mapping
the Middle East and its ancient heritage, but they also devised military strategy, classified peoples, established
new borders, and helped forge new subject nations. This blurring of military and academic expertise has long
characterised our discipline. I argue that Hogarth and his proteges were high-profile participants in an emergent
military-industrial-academic complex that has shaped the development of modern archaeology.
The Islamic State targeted many of Mosul’s most sensitive and important cultural heritage sites.
Most notoriously, in 2015 the Islamic State released a number of propaganda videos in which they had filmed themselves using sledgehammers to topple and destroy statues at the Mosul Museum, and using power tools to deface giant reliefs at the ancient archaeological site of Nineveh.
In response to such mass heritage destruction, the international community has launched various initiatives worth millions of dollars to reconstruct the heritage sites of the city.
However, very little is known about whether or not the people of Mosul support such initiatives.
To find out, we conducted a survey of 1,600 people from across Mosul. Here are four of the more significant findings.
regional and international politics despite a century of
denial by the state. Furthermore, the erasure of Armenians
from archaeological accounts aligns the discipline with the
Turkish government’s historical revisionism. And that will
have uncomfortable implications for archaeologists.
a paired agenda of science and salvage such that their focus on
logical positivism converged with US foreign policy towards
international technical assistance. River basin salvage
archaeology, pioneered in the US by the Tennessee Valley
Authority and exported to the Middle East in the 1950s, was a
prime example of American Cold War techno-politics that
accompanied other international aid and technical assistance
programmes. Amphitheaters of archaeology along the Nile and
Euphrates were fertile testing grounds for the development of
what became known as the ‘New Archaeology’, but also new
deals, new science, infrastructure, and agriculture within a Cold
War setting, so that monumental heritage and dam projects
became flashpoints between American visions for the Middle East
and attempts by UNESCO to maintain the spirit of internationalism.
cultural cooperation under the aegis of the United Nations. Their project was no less than the intellectual and
moral reconstruction of a world in ruins. UNESCO’s first decades were spent entreating the world to unite in conserving endangered marvels as a common patrimony. The managerial priorities of world-making took precedence,
requiring a sophisticated bureaucracy that valorized scientific techniques as the primary means to ensure human
progress and protect virtuous human endeavors.
UNESCO’s major contribution is generally considered to be pioneering international legal instruments such
as the 1972 World Heritage Convention. Its legal framing, resting upon an assembly of States Parties, was premised on the goodwill and civility of states, both to each other and to their citizens. High-profile international
salvage missions simultaneously made material the idea of cooperation between nations and showcased UNESCO
putting all its ideals into action. But this idea has a deeper history, starting in 1948 with the proposal for an
expert committee tasked with preserving sites and monuments and the establishment of a fund to support that
work. The fund was intended to provide financial assistance to endangered monuments of great cultural value.
However, the Member States were not convinced and instead decided that particular preservation projects were
to be considered and only when a nation petitioned UNESCO. Little did they anticipate the frequency and scale
of future requests.
such as UNESCO, as well as companies, consultants, bureaucrats, and archaeologists. Our focus is upon foreign intervention around imperiled heritage, considering not only internal politics but also UNESCO’s 1960s shift from fully funded campaigns to global appeals reliant on foreign
governments, corporations, and universities. The outsourcing of salvage allowed specific patrons – national and international – to privilege particular pasts; and it is these histories and legacies that further require us to reassess the place of Raqqa in the current civil war.