New book chronicle

Antiquity, Sept, 2008 by Madeleine Hummler

We move on to more familiar territory, Negotiating the past in the past or identity, memory, and landscape in archaeological research, a collection of 10 chapters edited by NORMAN YOFFEE. It showcases the work of 7 research students from the University of Michigan, complemented by a useful introduction (Yoffee) and two concluding commentaries. This is a good collection. Although identity, memory, and landscape (shortened to IML in the book) may have become a tired concept, there is nothing tired in the work here. What is new is that young researchers are not afraid to tackle the subject in areas of the ancient world which benefit from epigraphic or historical texts. Thus the studies deal with Akkadian and Elamite Mesopotamia, Roman collecting, Urartian and Hellenistic Armenia, the post-depositional treatment of the dead in Mycenae, the positioning of a Roman temple on Athens' Acropolis, architecture in the eighth century BC Napatan (Nubian) landscape, early medieval temples in India and finally the use of space in two urban centres in Quintana Roo on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Lynn Meskell's and Jack Davis's summing up make for a well-rounded work, ending with Davis's 'partial agenda for archaeologies of memory' (pp. 250-3). It echoes much of Susan Alcock's thinking: if memory studies are to be more than a bandwagon, more rigour and more critical approaches must be adopted, and the relationship between memory studies and archaeological field procedure needs to be addressed.

Selective remembrances edited by KOHL, KOZELSKY & BEN-YEHUDA is a fascinating collection, with an excellent introduction by Philip Kohl. It examines the manipulation of the past to suit nationalistic agendas in four areas of the world: Russia and Eastern Europe (4 chapters), the Near East (3 chapters), Israel/ Palestine (4 chapters) and S/SE Asia (2 chapters). The accounts from Romania, Azerbaijan, Dagestan (with a brazen case of forgery), the Crimea (where the Russian Orthodox Church seems to have stepped into the void left by the former Soviet system) and Ukraine are at times hair-raising. Things don't lighten up as one moves further east, with critical assessments of Masada and the agenda of the Israeli tourist industry. A fine paper by Ghada Ziadeh-Seely charts the vicissitudes of the fledgling archaeology of the occupied territories of Palestine, stopped in its tracks by the murder of its founding member Albert Glock and the first and second intifadas. She concludes (pp. 342-3) by warning against a new Palestinian nationalism which, by following the same path as the Israeli path she deplores, would harm academic enquiry. Not all the contributions to the book are negative, but on the whole the 13 case studies document cases of abuse. Recurring themes are conformity, an obsession with modern ethnic identity and bigotry. Kohl stresses that by treating nationalism as a secular phenomenon, the role of religious nationalism may have been underestimated. He concludes on a note of hope, stressing what seems so obvious but still needs doing: archaeologists have an essential role to play, 'namely to demonstrate the continuous intercourse between cultures and peoples and the diffusion of ideas and technologies from one culture and people to another throughout prehistoric times and to insist that no single group was responsible for the constantly growing and shared history of cultural development' (p. 24).