Suchergebnisse

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government of Mexico made concerted attempts to define, control, and manage a national archaeological patrimony. While these efforts had precedents dating back to the colonial period, the administration of Porfirio Díaz cemented connections between archaeology and state power. Core principles and administrative structures established during the Porfiriato withstood the Revolution of 1910, and continued to shape uses of the material past during the post-Revolutionary era. However, Porfirian efforts to assert control over pre-Hispanic sites and artifacts also met with resistance from a variety of foreign and domestic sources. My dissertation examines interactions between federal bureaucrats, site caretakers, professors of the National Museum, local community members, regional officials, scholars, explorers, and travelers to examine how state power was enacted - and how it faltered - on the ground. Much scholarship on the history of Mexican archaeology focuses on changing intellectual approaches to the Mesoamerican past, or the symbolic and rhetorical uses of pre-Hispanic imagery. In contrast, I emphasize the administrative and legal practices by which the Porfirian regime asserted its authority over physical sites and artifacts. In particular, I look closely at the workings of the Inspección y Conservación de Monumentos Arqueólogicos (Inspectorate of Archaeological Monuments), an agency founded in 1885 to monitor the uses of pre-Hispanic sites and serve as a general clearinghouse for archaeological affairs. Under the direction of Leopoldo Batres, the Inspección played an active role in enforcing the prerogatives and property claims of the federal government. I argue that while the reach and influence of the federal archaeological bureaucracy increased considerably over the course of the Porfiriato, its authority remained fraught and contingent in application. Again and again, individuals and communities resisted or subverted the programs of the archaeological bureaucracy, forcing federal administrators to negotiate rather than command. Through detailed descriptions of specific incidents, I analyze competing uses of the pre-Hispanic material past in order to trace out some of the complexities of Mexican state formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the early 1920-s the Soviet state became a single possible sponsor for the archaeological science and protection of national cultural monuments. Its interest in these spheres was merely pragmatic, concerned either with political and ideological development or economical needs. Nevertheless from July 1922, a guideline became firmly established in the Russian Academy of the History of Material Culture for the practical cooperation with the state power. This guideline initiated the development of a new scientific ideology. Intending to make their science actual (and respectively financed), archaeologists started the search of directions that would be most promising in the new social, political and ideological context. These trends included the technological aspects of the archaeological materials, natural-scientific methods, prospects of materialistic analysis of problems of primeval thinking and cultural creation. All these branches finally allowed the scholars to preserve and develop further the national archaeological science.

Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.

Mortuary archaeology has always been viewed as one of the most richly evocative sources of evidence for past social systems, particularly those without writing. However, the political context within which archaeology developed as a discipline, especially in countries with a colonial past, has made it difficult or impossible for the burial record to be utilized to its full potential. Ironically, this moratorium on the use of human remains for research purposes has been accompanied by the development of new analytical techniques, including ancient DNA (aDNA) and chemical analysis of skeletal material, which provide powerful tools for understanding complex social relationships and mobility within and between ancient populations. This review focuses on the United States and Europe because of the close relationship between their scholarly communities, as a result of which the limits placed on mortuary archaeology in the United States has had and continues to have a direct impact on the development of the discipline in numerous European countries. The inferential potential of bioarchaeology in particular is discussed against the backdrop of these sociohistorical developments, and the case studies presented highlight the powerful array of interdisciplinary approaches now being brought to bear on our understanding of ancient social systems.

The Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage (DACH) has been in existence now for more than fifteen years since its re-establishment in 1994. The inauguration of this Department was a momentous event. It may be considered the revival of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine, which was established in 1920 under the British Mandate. The authority was then terminated due to the political events of 1948 when Israel was established, while Jordan assumed those responsibilities for the West Bank and Egypt for the Gaza strip. This report provides a historical background on the archaeology of Palestine, an overview of its vision, inception, objectives, development and activities during this formative period. It gives an account of the archaeological field work, current projects carried out in the Palestinian areas, including the joint excavations, restoration projects and the state of preservation of archaeological and cultural heritage sites. This is an updated version of the article (A Decade of Archaeology in Palestine) published in 2005. تأسست دائرة الاثار والتراث الثقافي قبل خمس عشرة سنة، منذ تاريخ اعادة تأسيسها سنة 1994. وقد مثل انشاء هذه الادارة حدثا مهما، يمكن اعتباره اعادة بعث لدائرة الاثار الفلسطينية التي تأسست عام 1920 في عهد الانتداب البريطاني، والتي توقفت عن الوجود مع أحداث سنة 1948، حين اقيمت اسرائيل على الاراضي الفلسطينية واتبعت الضفة الغربية الى الاردن وغزة الى مصر. يقدم هذا العرض خلفية تاريخية حول اثار فلسطين، تشمل رؤيتها ومنطلقاتها وأهدافها وتطورها ونشاطاتها في فترة التكوين هذه. كما تقدم سجلا بالنشاط الاثري الميداني والمشاريع التي قامت بها في الاراضي الفلسطينية، بما في ذلك التنقيبات المشتركة ومشاريع الترميم وحالة الحفاظ على المواقع الاثرية. ان هذا التقرير هو تحديث لنسخة سابقة بعنوان (عقد من العمل الاثري في فلسطين)، نشر في العام 2005.

From their beginnings, archaeology museums have reflected a complex and dynamic balance between the demands of developing, documenting, and preserving objects on the one hand and sharing knowledge, access, and control on the other. This balance has informed and inflected the ways that museums present the past, including both practical aspects of pedagogy and exhibition design as well as more critical and contested issues of authority, authenticity, and reflexivity in interpretation. Meeting the complex requirements of curation, deliberate collections growth, management, and conservation, as well as the need to respond to continuing challenges to the museum's right and title to hold various forms of cultural property, archaeological museums play an active role in both preserving and shaping the public's view of the past and reflect the prospects and perils of being at once a temple to the muses and a forum for sometimes contentious public discourse.

▪ Abstract  This review addresses methods and theories for the archaeological study of ancient state economies, from the earliest states through the Classical period and beyond. Research on this topic within anthropological archaeology has been held back by reliance on simple concepts and an impoverished notion of the extent of variation in ancient state economies. First I review a long-standing debate between scholars who see similarities with modern capitalist economies (modernists and formalists) and those who see ancient economies as radically different from their modern counterparts (primitivists and substantivists). I suggest that the concept of the level of commercialization provides an avenue for transcending this debate and moving research in more productive directions. Next I review work on the traditional archaeological topics of production and exchange. A discussion of the scale of the economy (households, temple and palace institutions, state finance, cities and regional systems, and international economies) reveals considerable variation between and within ancient states. I review key topics in current archaeological political economy, including commercial exchange, money, property, labor, and the nature of economic change, and close with suggestions for future research.

Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. "Politics and Archaeology : Colonialism, Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Archaeology, Part 1," The Review of Archaeology 18 (1997): 1-4, continué "Politics and Archaeology Colonialism, Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Archaeology, Part 2," The Review of Archaeology 19 (1998): 35-46.