Culture(s) from the Ground and in the Archives: Towards a Future-oriented Archaeology
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
With Professor Rubina Raja, Aarhus University
Field archaeology is often viewed as a discipline producing data more objectively than other humanities disciplines, since the data comes straight from the ground. Recent research into the documentation (today, archival materials) that archaeological fieldwork produced in the period between the late 19th and middle of the 20th centuries, has challenged such narratives, with profound repercussions for the understanding of a formative period in which an “urban archaeology” came into existence. It has also begun to disentangle the ways in which the past was deliberately constructed in certain ways through the deconstruction of ancient sites.
This lecture takes its point of departure in the excavations of the iconic classical city Gerasa in what is today Jerash in northern Jordan. The first excavations there were undertaken by German, and later an American-British, team from the early 20th century onward. New investigations into the archival materials from these excavations show how a vision of the “urban” and its place in the modern perceptions of the classical world was forged through such excavation projects and how they still resonate today. Just as importantly, the lecture probes whether disentangling these ways of (re)constructing the past through the archives might not only be a way of understanding how the past was forged in a certain mould through fieldwork projects, but whether such archival work also might also be a way towards developing a future-oriented archive of archaeological fieldwork.
Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology and art and head of Unit for Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, History and Legacy Data at Aarhus University, Denmark. She specializes in the archaeology and history of the Eastern Mediterranean from the Hellenistic period to early Medieval times and the history of archaeology between the 19th century and World War II, including the history of collection building. She heads two large-scale collaborative research projects: Locally Crafted Empires focussing on portrait sculpture from West Asia, and the Lost Cities Rediscovered project. The latter project pivots on a re-examination of legacy data and archaeological archives in connection with the Big Digs of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Middle East.
Contact name: Katy Pettit
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