Collective Memory

Natural History, Feb, 2001 by Ellen Goldensohn

We are all historians, archivists, curators. We paste family photographs into albums or cram them into boxes along with school yearbooks and letters from old friends. We hold on to material objects, however plain, that embody private memories. A few people I know are quite ambitious in their efforts to possess a past that is theirs alone. With some historical detective work, they manage to reconstruct a genealogy, tracing their line back to early colonists or distant shores. Others among us, however, can't peer very far into the family past without losing track of our ancestors, whether in the chaos of minor and major migrations or the tragic oblivion of slave ships, massacres, famines, plagues, and wars.

But all of us leave the chronicling of deep time and large-scale history (the stories of our nations, our ethnic or religious groups, our species itself) to the professionals--historians, archaeologists, paleontologists, and (these days) even geneticists, who trace the winding paths of our genes on strands of DNA. Yet these large-scale stories, together with the irreplaceable historical objects connected with them, belong to all people. In an important sense, a document such as the Magna Carta or the map of the human genome belongs to everyone, as do humanity's artistic and architectural masterworks. Machu Picchu, Luxor, the Parthenon, Angkor Wat, and all the other special places built by our forerunners, while the pride of particular nations, can also be said to be the property of the world.

As John Malcolm Russell explains in this month's issue, the land we now call Iraq (known in the past as Mesopotamia, Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia) is the birthplace of writing, irrigation, cities, religion, monumental architecture, and other major human innovations. Iraq, writes Russell, is one big archaeological site. Certain of the country's ancient places, such as Nineveh and Babylon, are well known; others are obscure and have yet to be fully excavated. During the Gulf War, some sites were severely damaged, and in the years since, many have been critically endangered by looting.

However one views the politics and events that have led us to this point, Russell's article and Alexandra Avakian's photographs serve to remind us that if the special places of Iraq are destroyed or lost, all of us are diminished.