Digging Far and Deep: Archaeological Sites, Dislocations, and Heterotopoi in Postcolonial Writing

• Published in: Cross / Cultures Vol. 179; pp. 3 - 207
• Main Author: Mackenthun, Gesa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Leiden Brill Academic Publishers, Inc 04.01.2014
• Subjects: Archaeology; Expeditions; Geopolitics; Historic buildings & sites; Politics; Postcolonialism; Transnationalism; Writing; Mesopotamia; United States > US
• ISSN: 0294-1426

Archaeological sites and artifacts are part of Europe's 'triumphal march' over non-European societies and civilizations.2 A key item in the narrative of salvage and preservation is the dissociation of the descendants of ancient civilizations from their past - the claim that the inhabitants of the areas where ancient monuments are dug up do not themselves remember the cultures of their ancestors, that they have no high regard for their architectural and artistic achievements, and that the descendants of ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, or Mayan culture have either undergone processes of cultural degeneration and decline or are completely unrelated to the splendours of the past.3 Even if this were true, we could state that Western nations are almost obsessively addicted to cultural preservation and reconstruction - and I confess my own addiction to the idea of preservation, of feeling comfortably at home in a world of historical plenitude. While he fantasizes about ancient imperial rulers at the site of the dig (called Tell Erdeck), that very site has also been targeted as an imperial interest zone by various powers: the Germans are building a bridge for the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway; an American geologist paid by Standard Oil and travelling in the disguise of an archaeologist explores the area in search of hidden oil wells; and a Bedouin labourer tries to convince the British archaeologist to blow up the German construction area for him for the sum of 100 pounds because he needs the money in order to marry his love interest and become independent of foreign employment and exploitation. The two men represent two different attitudes to the land and two different modes of 'discovery': digging vs drilling.8 While the geologist scans the landscape in search of oil wells or encasements, the archaeologist discovers an ancient grave with the skeletons of an Assyrian ruler and his wife - indeed a remarkable discovery that would effect a correction of the history of the Assyrian empire.9 Both men make their discoveries thanks to their expertise in reading the landscape for the tiniest symptoms of hidden structures: archaeological and geological formations that leave hardly a trace in the desert sand. Imaginary spaces can potentially have a more disturbing quality; in their capacity to produce effects of incongruity, paradox, ambivalence, uncertainty, even mystery and danger, they have a transgressive and subversive power which 'real' sites mostly lack.24 Archaeological digs, I argue, can be seen and imagined as micro-versions of such cross-cultural or transcultural disorder or ambivalence - nodal sites in the rhizomatic structure of empire where many of its economic, geopolitical, and scientific energies conjoin and interact.