Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-vpsfw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T07:27:57.537Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Towards a History of Preservation Practices: Archaeology, Heritage, and the History of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2015

Mirjam Brusius
Mirjam Brusius*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; e-mail: mirjam.brusius@history.ox.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

My roundtable contribution inevitably starts with a critique of the field the scholarly utility of which we as contributors wish to defend. The study of the antique sciences (including the history of archaeology and heritage) still has marginal standing in science studies. So does the Middle East as a geographical region, which until recently enjoyed little scholarly interest in the field. The persistent Eurocentric research agenda of science studies has been questioned, however, with the recent call for a “global history of science.” This ambiguous term has triggered new methodological challenges, but it has also created new trenches.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 574 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 Robson, Eleanor, Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

2 Rudwick, Martin, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simon Schaffer, “When the Stars Threw Down their Spears: Histories of Astronomy and Empire,” Lecture 2, “An Antique Land” (Tarner Lectures, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., 23 February 2010).

3 Christina Riggs at the workshop “Tales from the Crypt: Museum Storage and Meaning” (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 30–31 October 2014). See Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh, “Conference Report,” H-ArtHist, 12 February 2015, accessed 25 May 2015, http://arthist.net/reviews/9456. See also Thompson, Jason, Wonderful Things, A History of Egyptology: From Antiquity to 1881 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Daniela Helbig, “La Trace de Rome? Aerial Photography and Archaeology in Mandate Syria and Lebanon,” History of Photography (forthcoming). See also Scheffler, Thomas, “‘Fertile Crescent,’ ‘Orient,’ ‘Middle East’: The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest Asia,” European Review of History 10 (2003): 253–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For “local histories,” see Shaw, Wendy, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Bahrani, Zainab, Çelik, Zeynep, and Eldem, Edhem, eds., Scramble for the Past: Archaeology in Ottoman Lands 1740–1914 (Istanbul: Salt, 2011)Google Scholar.

6 Colla, Elliott, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 The “single archaeologist approach” was critiqued by Bahrani et al., Scamble for the Past, 28. A possibility would be to place the history of archaeology within the concept of “trading zones” defined by Peter Galison. See Galison, , Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 806Google Scholar.

8 Carruthers, William, introduction to Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures, ed. Carruthers, William (New York: Routledge, 2014), 9Google Scholar.

9 Daston, Lorraine, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Brusius, Mirjam, “The Ancient Near East in Storage: Assyrian Museum Objects as a Cultural Challenge in Victorian England,” in The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940, ed. Meyer, Andrea and Savoy, Benedicte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 19–30Google Scholar.

10 See the project website of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, accessed 25 May 2015, https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/news/features/feature24.

11 Here and in the following I draw on Yannis Hamilakis, “Indigenous Archaeologies in Ottoman Greece,” in Scramble for the Past, 49–69.

12 Ian Straughn, “On Heritage Crusades and Other Cultural Rescue Missions in the Middle East,” presented at “The Disciplined Past: Critical Reflections on the Study of the Middle East” (Symposium, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 4–5 April 2014). For a different view on illicit looting, see Rose-Greenland, Fiona, “Looters, Collectors and a Passion for Antiquities at the Margins of Italian Society,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 19 (2014): 570–82Google Scholar.

13 Hamilakis, “Indigenous Archaeologies,” 49.

14 Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter, C. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

15 See, for example, Bernhardsson, Magnus Thorkell, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Reid, Donald, Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums, and the Struggle for Identities from World War I to Nasser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Eleanor Robson, “Modern War, Ancient Casualties,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 March 2015.