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The dilemma of archaeology
Archaeology impacts deeply on a people’s heritage.
In the first place, it recovers a past submerged. Most often, there is no memory of this past; and when there is, it is opaque and blurred, often couched in a semi-mythical perspective. Archaeology brings authenticity, by identifying how things are in the ground (emplacement), how they have gotten there (deposition), and by proposing what their original function was.
It thus engages us in a hermeneutical process which suffuses the data with a meaning which we perceive as ours, a meaning we purport was also perceived by the ancients. In this sense, archaeology offers heritage to people who may not even be aware of it.
But at this point there often arises a fracture. The discovered heritage is offered and withheld at the same time. It is offered, because it is found and interpreted. But it is withheld, because one does not offer the suture that can meaningfully integrate the heritage with the inheritors.
Thus it is why archaeology’s impact may be negative. What can happen is that we effectively negate what we affirm. We affirm relevance as the guidepost of our effort. But we affirm it as having an end in itself: the relevance is relegated to the past, and is extended to us, the scholars, attributing meaning to this past.
In this process, the archaeologist becomes the sole inheritor.
Clearly, it cannot, it must not be so. There is a deep bond between a people and the territory where they live, including its cultural subsoil. The tradition may be broken, because there is no continuity of shared customs and beliefs. But that is precisely what archaeology must do: it must heal the breakage, and offer a renewed sharing.
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The Mozan experience
Data can be re-appropriated as they are integrated and recognized as “heritage” by those who share the same territorial identity. This has been our goal at Mozan. We did not embark on it to prove a point. Rather, we have come gradually to this realization. And the recent many years of war have brought to mind even more strongly the meaning of it all.
Five major different ethnic communities have all come together in finding a common bond in ancient Urkesh. We have touched with our hands how heritage, rediscovered and properly offered, can serve as a powerful social bond for the inheritors.
And in the process, we, the archaeologists, have been co-opted by them as having a share in their heritage. We have been nurtured by the people. This has happened in two ways.
First, it was matter of conservation. We recognized from the start that the find has an intrinsic dignity that claims to be preserved, once brought back to light. We thus engaged in simple but effective techniques that would allow us to maintain, in the pristine state in which they had been excavated, the architectural remains exposed during excavations. It was a matter of sensitivity as much as of technical expertise.
Second, it was a matter of communication. We recognized that the visitor, too, has an intrinsic dignity, especially the local visitors who come by chance to the site – in fact, not by chance, but because they live in and of this territory that is deeply theirs. Besides developing and maintaining an exhaustive and meaningful signage at the site, we have developed a number of other activities that offer meaning, at all levels – from the children in the schools to families in the villages.
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Four levels of awareness
Heritage depends, therefore, on awarenss of values. In the case of archaeology, we may say that there is an immediate relationship to, hence an immediate awareness of, the data in their raw state. But there must also be a mediated relatioship and awareness, mediated, that is, through an appropriation process which must depend on the competence of the archaeologist.
There are four levels where this happens.
- The ancients. – It is at this stage that grammar plays an indisputable role. Only through the identification of distinctive traits and the correlation of patterns can we claim to identify the ancient awareness for the values associated with culture.
- The archaeologists. – The mediation process depends entirely on the archaeologists, and it is therefore essential that they develop a sensitivity for the human experience that lay behind the record as it is being found and described – so taht it may be effectively communicated.
- Native inheritors. – Archaeological data present a unique claim vis-à-vis the awareness of the people in whose territory the data are located. They are part of the cultural landscape which nourishes them since their birth: just as they are “native” speakers of a given languages, so they are “natively” linked to the past history of their territory. And yet, there must be a mediation with the culture that emerges from the excavations.
- Adopted inheritors. – The notion of “heritage” extends beyond the territory: it has a wider human resonance which beckons when one visits a site and even from a distance, through the pulbished referential record. This, too, must be made explicit and mediated by the archaeologist.
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