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Unseeing the Past
Archaeology and the Legacy of the Armenian Genocide
Adam T. Smith
Archaeology has recently been described as a means of “bearing witness” through the recuperation of pasts forgotten and dismissed.
But archaeology is also a tool for unseeing, creating voids in the historical record easily filled by state-sponsored polemics. In few
places is this as clear as the Armenian Highland of eastern Turkey. The year 2020 marked the 105th anniversary of the Armenian
genocide, a programof mass murder enacted by the collapsing Ottoman Empire that resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million people
and the dislocation of almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolia. The genocide continues to define regional politics as a
century of denial by the Turkish government strains international relations. Even as an increasingly vocal cadre of historians has
grappled with the legacies of collective violence in the region, foreign archaeologists working in Turkey have increasingly avoided the
material remains of the Armenian past and the evidence of its erasure, etching genocide denial into the authoritative discourse of the
discipline. The disappearance of Armenians from international archaeological accounts of the region effectively co-opts the discipline
as a functionary of the Turkish government’s historical revisionism. This study combines close readings of works from international
archaeology’s archive with interviews with foreign archaeologists to better understand the discipline’s understudied practices of
unseeing.
Several years ago, two archaeologists were talking about excavations in eastern Turkey that had taken place some time ago.
One of them recounted this story:
[The site we were excavating] had been an Armenian village.
The house that we lived in had been the house of an Armenian man . . . whose name was Levon. He was killed, . . .
[and] the house was taken over by a large family. [Our
landlord’s] grandfather had killed the Armenian. There was
a mud brick church in the village. On one occasion, there
was a little man [who] came [to the site] who started praying
in what remained of the church. He was the sole survivor
of the village. Lived in Istanbul. He said he came every year
to pay his respect for his ancestors. The bones of whom we
excavated up on the top of the site [pause], [each one] with
a tiny hole on the back of the head.
That was quite an emotional experience; people on [the]
dig didn’t like it. Turkish authorities didn’t want to know.
[We] didn’t report it. And the bones got chucked. . . . The
next village where we worked was also an Armenian village.
[The bones we found there] got chucked into the Euphrates.
The women were mad. One of my workmen’s mother had
been an Armenian. Turkish history. . . . We dug up the
graves. . . . It had a profound influence, an emotional effect
on the dig. . . . It’s very difficult. You can’t talk about this,
and you must not writeabout it, for my sake and for your sake.
In the recording of this story, shared with me in 2020, the
narrator’s voice grows hushed and ominous as he describes the
mark that clearly identified the skeletal remains as victims of
the Armenian genocide: “a tiny hole in the back of the head.”
Following the massacre of the villagers, their property had
been appropriated by the family who now hosted a team of
archaeologists who were charged with documenting the site’s
material remains. The narrator appears to fully understand the
appalling irony of a genocide survivor visiting the site to pay
respects to slaughtered ancestors even as their remains—and
the evidence of their murder—were being “chucked” by archaeologists. And the narrator also seems to understand how
those actions made archaeology an accessory to the crime: not
just a witness to “Turkish history” but a collaborator in the
Turkish government’s continuing erasure of the material remains of Armenian communities and its steadfast denial of the
genocide. The narrator’s admonitionto nevertalkor writeabout
the episode served to cover up both the evidence of the massacre of the village’s Armenians during the early twentieth
century and the spoliation of evidence by archaeologists several decades later as they threw the bones into the Euphrates.
To my knowledge, no one has spoken out about the incident,
despite the clear emotional impact of witnessing an archaeological research project engaged in the destruction of evidence
of genocide. The murders committed at the site have simply
been unseen by the very scholars who were trained to illuminate the human past. This study seeks to document and intervene in archaeology’s practices of unseeing.
Absence-Presence
In the spring of 2015, the year that marked the hundredth
anniversary of the Armenian genocide, an archaeologist with
extensive experience working in Turkey shared this story:
Adam T. Smith is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University
(261 McGraw Hall, Ithaca, New York 14850, USA [ats73@cornell.edu]). This paper was submitted 11 I 21, accepted 30 VI 21, and electronically published 3 XI 22.
Current Anthropology, volume 63, supplement 25, December 2022. q 2022 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. Published by
The University of Chicago Press for The Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. https://doi.org/10.1086/722380
Smith Unseeing the Past S57
We have a lot of Byzantine occupation at [our site]. A
number of years ago, we revealed a stone foundation of a
large building, and one of the stones had a big cross carved
into it. Clearly a reuse of perhaps a gravestone. Our Byzan-
tinist . . . was nervous about turning this stone over. . . . She
thought it might have an inscription . . . and that it might be
either Armenian or Syriac. Either of these would have been
problematic in that it would mark the site as one inhabited by
“undesirables” (in the mind of the Turkish government) in
the past. We waited until the very end of the season and went
out in the afternoon when there were no workers. It turned
out there was no inscription, and I don’t think [we’ve] ever
been so happy to not find evidence.
1
This scholar’s inversion of archaeology’s traditional epistemological commitment to discovery is certainly notable. But
archaeology has a long history of ignoring, at times even dismantling, the material remains of certain epochs (medieval,
Islamic, postclassic, etc.) in pursuit of earlier strata. What is
most striking in the story is the clear understanding that a
state-sponsored historical narrative had stigmatized certain
communities, encouraging archaeologists to avoid any evidence of their material remains and reshaping the practice of
archaeological fieldwork.
Archaeologists working in Turkey have not always been so
concerned to avoid evidence of communities now deemed “undesirable” by the Turkish state. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Armenians loomed large in the
archaeological imagination of eastern Anatolia. R. D. Barnett
(1950) detailed a find from the site of Toprakkale thus: “One of
the earliest indications to the Western world that the soil of
Armenia contained important antiquities seems to have been
conveyed in 1874, when the British Museum bought . . . a
bronze figure . . . representing a bearded god standing upright
with arms extended, which it was said had been found at Van”
(2). In setting Van in “Armenia,” Barnett was following a toponymic tradition that had been reproduced in regional geographies, historical narratives, travelers’ accounts, and political administration since the mid-first millennium BC and in
archaeological reportage since the nineteenth century.
The map that Barnett published to locate the British Museum’s Toprakkale collection (fig. 1), reproduced from a 1910
monograph by C. F. Lehmann-Haupt, used a mix of Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish place names to present an image
of a multicultural, multilingual region. Indeed, the ethnolinguistic diversity of the Armenian Highland was central to
foundational archaeological narratives of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Jacques de Morgan (1889:39)
1. All interviews reported in this study were conducted by phone using
a set of standard questions that led to more open exchanges. Participants
have been anonymized, and their responses have been scrubbed of details
that might allow for identification of sites or research projects. The research was granted an exemption from Institutional Review Board (IRB)
review by the Cornell University IRB (protocol 2002009378).
valorized the region as a refugium for “divers peuples”; Nikolai
Marr (1939) extolled the medieval city of Ani as a cosmopolitan site of political, religious, and commercial exchange.
Today, 70 years after Barnett’s encomium to Armenian soil
on the shores of Lake Van, foreign archaeologists working in
eastern Turkey present a vision of the region purged of history’s undesirables, lapsing into near total silence when it
comes to the millennia of Armenian inhabitation. How is it
that a discipline committed to curating historical memory has
so thoroughly sublimated the heritage of the Armenians and
other ethnic minorities—Greeks, Assyrians, Kurds—in eastern Turkey, creating what Dissard (2016) has called “absencepresence”? How is it that even as the discipline has come to see
engagement with descendant communities as vital to an ethical, collaborative presentation of the past, the remains of
Armenians in Turkey—their deep past and their twentiethcentury destruction—continue to be overlooked, avoided, and
unseen, a silence that enlists archaeology as a collaborator in
the Turkish government’s continuing denial?
Unseeing
In a 2018 “Vital Topics Forum” published in American An-
thropologist (Hauser et al. 2018), a group of archaeologists
representing a diverse array of global research locations suggested that archaeology, more than being a discipline of memory, was a form of “bearing witness” to structural violence
(Hauser et al. 2018). Echoing Paul Farmer’s (2003) call for
scholarship to bear witness by both describing suffering and
analyzing its sources in the “structural violence that is immanent in the prevailing system,” Mark Hauser et al. (2018) suggested that bearing witness is “part of an archaeological episteme” that is limited, most profoundly, “by what we are trained
to see as observers” (535). But archaeologists are also adept at
“unseeing” (Miéville 2009). By unseeing I do not simply mean
our willful efforts to ignore materials from epochs deemed less
interestingin either evolutionary or art historical terms. Rather,
unseeing is a more skilled practice shaped by an awareness of
structuresof powerthat demandinattentionto the undesirables
of the past.
My interest in archaeology’s practices of unseeing is both
theoretical and historical. I am interested in the historical
question, how Turkish denialist policy has come to confine the
research practice of international archaeology in ways that
force us to unsee. But this is also a broader theoretical question
about a more general process of co-optation that enrolls scholars and heritage institutionslocated well beyond the confines of
sovereign governments in reinforcing state historical polemics.
Thus, my discussion here focuses primarily on foreign archaeologists working on the Armenian Highland, setting to the side
the unseeing practices of Turkish archaeologists.
I do not undertake this project to critique any individual
scholar. Having never participated in fieldwork in Turkey, I
do not have direct experience of the pressures under which
research is conducted, although I have learned of its challenges
S58 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
Figure 1. Barnett’s map of eastern Turkey (Barnett 1950: fig. 1, adopted from Lehmann-Haupt 1910).
through this research. My goal is instead to highlight shared
practices of unseeing that have shaped archaeological research
in the region but that are noted only in whispers. Silences in the
archaeological record too easily become historical absences,
and these absences are being filled by narratives of erasure and
denial.
Armenia and Armenians
The long history of Armenians in Anatolia has been well
documented in a large number of general histories and critical
studies and so need only be outlined here (e.g., Hovannisian
1997; Suny 1993). The toponym “Armenia” makes its first
appearance in the Old Persian and Elamite texts inscribed in
the trilingual Bisitun monument, carved into a mountain of
northwestern Iran in about 518 BC at the command of the
Achaemenid king Darius. One section of the text focused on a
rebellion in the empire’s north declares: “King Darius says: An
Armenian named Dâdarši, my servant, I sent into Armenia,
and I said unto him: ‘Go, smite that host which is in revolt and
does not acknowledge me’” (adapted from King and Thompson 1907:27). Hence the first historical attestation of the toponym “Armenia” is simultaneous with the appearance of the
ethnonym “Armenian,” peoples residing in the highlands of
eastern Anatolia and the Lesser Caucasus who were both in the
employ of the Persian king and in rebellion against Achaemenid rule (Areshian 2019). Armenians are represented in
most of the Persian royal images of subjugated populations
(e.g., Persepolis, Naqsh-i Rustam; Khatchadourian 2008, 2016)
and on the major Achaemenid “country lists” that describe
the geographic extent of royal authority (e.g., Darius’s tomb at
Naqsh-i Rustam; Briant 2002:173). Moreover, Armenia was
adopted as an administrative label for the Achaemenid satrapy
on the highland, a usage preserved in centuries of Greek and
Roman sources from Herodotus and Xenophon to Strabo,
Ptolemy, and others (Khatchadourian 2008:63ff.).
For more than two and a half millennia, regional toponymic,
ethnographic, and bureaucratic geography consistently referred
to the northern highlands by the exonym “ Armenia,” or “alArmeniya” in the Arabic tradition, even as the region was
caught up in a long series of shifting political orders (Hewsen
2001). Despite brief success as an imperial power in its own
right during the late second and early first centuries BC, Armenia’s location at a continental crossroads found it a regular
object of imperial interest, from the Romans and Parthians to
the Seljuks, Mongols,Ottomans, and Russians. During episodes
Smith Unseeing the Past S59
of independence, Armenia was typically governed from regional power centers such as the cities of Dvin and Ani, which
were tied to dynastic princely landowning families such as the
Bagratids (Greenwood 2009). These medieval polities referred
to the region using the endonym “Hayastan,” or Land of the
Hye, terms that populate the indigenous geographical lexicon
after the introduction of the Armenian alphabet in the early
fifth century AD (Galichian 2015). Despite invasion and con-
flict, Armenians remained in place on the Armenian Highland
through the era of Ottoman rule as one of the region’s largest
and most well-established self-defined communities, drawn
togetherby shared language, a written tradition, ecclesiastic and
political institutions, and durable communities dispersed across
a territory widely recognized as a homeland.
Richter (Leverkuehn 2008),
speak to the systematic deportation, rape, torture, and murder
of the Armenians in the Anatolian provinces of the Ottoman
Empire, from the Mediterranean coast to the vilayet of Van in
the far east. The scholarly consensus estimates that the statecoordinated campaigns of collective violence organized by the
Young Turks and the Committee of Union and Progress resulted in the deaths, by most estimates, of between 800,000 and
1.5 million Armenians (Akçam 2012, 2018; Dadrian 1995; De
Waal 2015; Karayan 2018; Naimark 2016; Suny 2015).
sands more were sent into exile, while the stories of women
forced to convert and marry Turkish men are only now beginning to be reassembled (Ekmekçioğlu 2013, 2016). What marks
the event as genocide is not solely the scale of the deaths but the
4
and Grigoris Balakian (2009)5all
6
Thou-
programmatic infliction of what Fatma Göçek (2015) calls “the
Collective Violence and Denial
The first well-documentedinstance of collectiveviolence against
Armenians living in the Anatolian provinces of the Ottoman
Empire occurred between 1894 and 1896, when 100,000 to
200,000 Armenian subjects (as well as thousands of other minority Christians) were massacred in a series of systematic,
state-authorized pogroms (Akçam 2006:42; Klein 2011). The
primary agents of this violence were the Hamidiye regiments
composed of local Kurdish leaders and their men, who had
been armed by Sultan Abdul Hamid II to repress non-Muslim
minorities in the east through campaigns of harassment, extortion, forced conversion, and murder (Deringil 2009; Kurt
and Sarafian 2020). It was this episode of collective violence
that stimulated an initial wave of Armenian emigration out of
the Highland, dislocating local stakeholders in the region’sheritage and establishing diaspora communities in the United States,
France, Canada, and elsewhere.
This episode was followed by the genocidal violence that
targeted the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman east
beginning in April 1915.
provided by Henry Morgenthau (2003),
2
Eyewitness accounts such as those
3
Max Scheubner-
entire repertoire of physical, material, and symbolic harm” (16).
Even after the Armenian population was physicallyvanquished,
the Republic of Turkey continueda programof genocidewaged
through material and symbolic destruction. Houses, shops,
land, factories, and any asset of value—art, jewelry, and so on—
that had belonged to Armenian families were seized, capitalized, and redistributed (Akçam, Kurt, and Arkun 2015). The
few Armenians who survived intact were forced to speak Turkish, were marked as traitors in both official and vernacular discourse, and witnessed the systematic destruction of the churches,
settlements, and cemeteries that once attested to their two and a
half millennia of inhabitation (Ekmekçioğlu 2016).
The Turkish government has steadfastly denied that what
Armenians experienced in 1915 constituted genocide. It claims
instead that seditious Armenian communities were relocated
from the eastern front in the name of military security. The
official government account asserts that 300,000–600,000 Armenians died within a single year not because of the implementation of a policy of genocide but because of the hazards of
war (Göçek 2015). Why these hazards did not have similar impacts on the region’s Muslim communities and elicited no alarm
or response from central authorities has never been explained.
Similarly, Turkish denials do not explain why Armenians far
from the front were also displaced, at times to be sent into mil-
2. There is considerable scholarly debate about the proper chronological parameters of the Armenian genocide. Morris and Ze’evi (2019)
argue that the entire period from 1894 to 1924, from the Hamidian
massacres through the founding of the modern Turkish state, constituted a
continuous “30-year genocide” against Christian minorities and particularly Armenians. More typically, histories of the Armenian genocide date
its beginning to April 24, 1915, when leaders of the Armenian community
in Constantinople were arrested and sent into exile (e.g., Dadrian 1995;
Naimark 2016:72). There is more disagreement about the proper end date
to the genocide. Some use 1917 and the crisis of Ottoman state rule (e.g.,
Bloxham 2009), while others cite the resignation of Talat Pasha and the
defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of World War I late in
1918 as the final events of the genocide (e.g., Suny 2015:334). Still others
note that violence against the vestiges of Anatolia’s Armenian community
continued well into the early years of the Turkish Republic, up to 1923–
1924 and the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne.
3. US ambassador to the Sublime Porte, 1913–1918.
itary zones, such as the thousands sent to Der Zor in the Syrian
desert (Akçam 2006:10).
Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, has defined
denial as the last stage of genocide. Denial distends the original
crime, reproducing its horrors in the present. He notes that
denial is “one of the surest indicators of genocide. The perpetrators . . . dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to
4. The German vice consul in Erzurum, 1914–1915.
5. An Armenian priest arrested and deported from Constantinople on
April 24, 1915, who escaped a forced march into the Syrian desert to
provide a firsthand account of the Armenian genocide.
6. Karayan (2018) estimates that 2.185 million Armenians were killed
between 1915 and 1918, an exactingly calculated figure that represents
the high end of the range of estimated killings. Suny (2015) estimates
600,000 killed, representing the lowest end of the range.
S60 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny
that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims” (Stanton 2013). Moreover, as Göçek (2015)
argues in her study of the effects of the Armenian genocide on
Turkish society, the failure to recognize collective violence allows
it to be consistently redeployed. She argues that, having failed to
acknowledgethe collective violenceat the origin of the state, the
Turkish government has felt free to turn to violence repeatedly
as its targets extended first to other non-Muslims (e.g., Greeks
during the 1955 Istanbul pogrom) and eventually to any nonTurk (witness Kurdish communities in the east after 1984).
Turkey’sofficial policy of genocide denial has established
the ideological conditions for the extension of physical violence into forms of symbolic violence, enacted through a forceful program of expropriation and erasure(Bayraktar 2015). And
indeed, expropriation of Armenian private property followed
hard on the heels of murder and deportation. As one contemporary observer noted, “The authorities helped themselves to
anything left behind, houses, shops, goods” (quoted in Akçam
2006:10). Systematic theft was not limited to the east. Çankaya
Mansion, until 2018 the official residence of the Turkish president in Ankara,
7
standson a vineyard that was confiscatedfrom
the Kasabianfamily as theyfled the genocide (Kezer 2012). Uğur
Üngör and Mehmet Polatel (2011) compiled one of the first
extensive analyses of the expropriation of Armenian property.
During and after the genocide, Armenian property was confiscated and broadly redistributed:
The Young Turk political elite played the decisive role in the
subjugation of the Ottoman Armenian economy to an ideologically legitimized process of mass pillage. Local elites collaborated in this endeavour by assisting the militias that came
to deport and murder Armenianshopkeepers,manufacturers,
craftsmen, peasants. Moreover, ordinary Turks, such as direct
neighbors, bazaar merchants, or refugees from the Balkans,
profited from the confiscation policy in different ways. Altogether these classes and groups contributed to the economic
destruction of the Ottoman Armenians and the construction
of a Turkish national economy. (Üngör and Polatel 2011:x)
Figure 2. A, St. Hovhannes Church of Bagrevand in 1966.
B, Church’s former site in 2000 (photos courtesy of Raffi Korto-
shian/Research on Armenian Architecture).
As just one example, in Gaziantep (former Antep), the city’s
Armenian cathedral (Surp Asdvadzadzin) was expropriated to
serve first as a prison and later an armory before its conversion
into the Liberation Mosque (fig. 3; Kezer 2015:140). Armenian
cemeteries have been destroyed, and entire towns, such as Van,
Not only did the redistribution of Armenian property and
goods implicate a large swath of the population in the genocide—
as beneficiaries, even if not as perpetrators—but also it invested
them in the policy of denial as accessories to the crime and
encouraged popular resistance to any form of recognition that
might entail reparations.
Expropriation was followed in many cases by destruction.
Armenian churches, evidence of once vibrant communities
with deep historicalroots, have been particular targetsfor either
complete dismantling (e.g., Surp Nishan Monastery in Sivas,
St. Hovhannes Church of Bagrevand; fig. 2)
8
or repurposing as
mosques, government storehouses, military depots, or stables.
have been razed (fig. 4). In 1914, the Armenian patriarch in
Constantinople compiled a list of some 2,549 religious sites
under his supervision. After 1923 only 913 Armenian monuments remained standing, and by 1974, according to a UNESCO
report, 464 of these had vanished completely, 252 were in ruins,
and only 197 were assessed as stable but in need of repair. As one
archaeologist who has spent more than a decade working in the
region told me, “There has clearly been a selection of which [Armenian monuments] will survive and which will not.”
The evidence for the destruction of Armenian-associated
monuments in Turkey is overwhelming. In places the effort
appears to be systematic, in others opportunistic, and in still
others an outcome of neglect. The cumulative result is the loss
7. Following the 2018 transition to a presidential system, Çankaya be-
came the official residence of Turkey’s vice president.
8. Now under a military base (http://virtualani.org/surpnishan/index.htm).
of a vast archaeological landscape and the steady erasure of
a heritage that ties Armenian descendant communities to
what Göçek (2015) calls “their ancestral lands” (63). Where
Smith Unseeing the Past S61
land began as early as 1880, when Sultan Abdulhamit II banned
the term “Armenia” from usage in the press, schoolbooks, and
government communications. But the pace of the program
quickened dramatically after the genocide (Öktem 2008). A
1916 decree issued by Enver Pasha, the Young Turks’ minister
of war, required that all place names of non-Muslim peoples, be
they Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, or other, should be rendered
in Turkish. After 1923, the geographic province that had been
referred to as Armenia since the sixth century BC was officially
renamed “eastern Anatolia.” Archaeological maps of the region,
from synthetic overviews to regional surveys to final site reports, rely heavily on official Turkish state maps depicting a
landscape purged of millennia of accumulated place names and
thus drained of the region’s multicultural past (e.g., Summers
1993: fig. 2). Archaeological cartography has thus been enlisted
by Turkish state policy as a powerful technology of forgetting,
etching erasure into the “objective” perspective of international
scientific archaeology.
In a review of the long history of Ottoman and then Turkish
heritage policies, Edhem Eldem (2015) has argued that “there
are few countries where the issue of cultural heritage has been
as constantly and systematically influenced by political concerns as in Turkey” (67). But where Eldem was preoccupied by
Figure 3. A, Surp Asdvazdadzin Egeghetsʿi in Aintab (Gaziantep)
prior to the Armenian genocide (unknown photographer, image
courtesy of Raffi Kortoshian/Research on Armenian Architecture). In 1986 the church was converted into the Liberation
Mosque (B; photo 2007, courtesy of Raffi Kortoshian/Research on
Armenian Architecture).
monuments remain, their public presentation often works to
elide the Armenian presence and appropriate them into a Turkish historical narrative. For example, Turkish promotional signage, maps, and materials will often refer to the medieval Armenian capital city of Ani with an undotted ı,co-optingthesiteinto
what Watenpaugh (2014) calls “Turkish vowel harmony” (545)
and thus obscuring the city’snon-Turkicorigin.Whenthesite
name is made to sound more “Turkish,” a clue to its past is erased
and a fictive alternative origin postulated. Watenpaugh notes the
sad irony that Anı (with an undotted ı)means“memory” in
Turkish.
The Turkification of place names represents an extension of
the confiscation of property that immediately followed the
events of 1915, extending the spatial experience of expropriation into the spatial imaginary (Kezer 2015:142). Estimates
suggest that more than 28,000 place names, including those
of not only Armenian but also Kurdish, Assyrian, Aramaic,
Greek, and other minority communities long established in the
region, have been changed (Sahakyan 2010). The effort to exclude Armenian heritage from the imagination of the High-
Figure 4. A, Town and citadel of Van, ca. 1876 (Reclus 1876:188).
B, Ruins of Old Van, 2001 (photo: Adam T. Smith).
S62 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
the appropriation of the Anatolian past by twentieth-century
nationalism (see also Knapp and Antoniadou 1998; Yazicioğlu
2007), there have been few systematic accounts of the scope of
Turkey’s demolition of Armenian heritage sites outside the
cultural genocide research conducted by the Armenian Genocide Museum and the extraordinary 40-yearcataloging effort of
9
the Research on Armenian Architecture Foundation.
What
these surveys make clear is that the continuing erasure of the
Armenian past from eastern Turkey is not “negative heritage”
in the sense that Lynn Meskell (2002) perceptively deployed the
term to describe post-9/11 efforts to memorialize an absence
caused by violence. It is heritage defined by violence and absence, to be sure, but it is an absence denied, a double negation.
Turkey’s approach to Armenian remains within its borders
is also not reducible to a case of what Tunbridge and Ashworth
(1996) termed “dissonant heritage,” sites where disparate memories actively collide on the terrain of heritage. There is no
question that the heritage of Armenians in Turkey is shaped by
the legacy of violence (González-Ruibal and Hall 2015:153).
However, Turkey’s program of heritage erasure has effectively
rubbed away the places where material remains might have
introduced disharmony into the government’s authorized heritage discourse (Smith 2004).
In one sense, the fate of Armenian heritage in Turkey would
seem to anticipate the renewed scholarly attention to heritage
destruction in armed conflicts (Viejo-Rose and Stig Sørensen
2015), a turn driven in large part by highly visible attacks on
cultural monuments in Afghanistan (Holtorf 2020) and Syria
(De Cesari 2015). However, Turkey’s erasure of Armenian
material heritage has taken place in secret, not as spectacle, and
is far removed from the world war that cloaked the genocide
itself. Moreover, Turkey’s continuing program of denial entails
not only a policy of material destruction but also discursive
silencing, forces that together foreclose the possibility of articulating the heritage interests of the descendant community
or undertaking a critical “archaeology of the perpetrators”
(Bernbeck and Pollock 2007; cf. Rwanda’s memorialization of
genocide in Bolin [2020]).
These paired programs of discursive silencing and material
erasure meet on the terrain of archaeology, where encounters
with the material heritage of the region rub up against disciplinary practices and ethics. But the result is not the wellestablished work of state legitimation that has preoccupied
critical analyses of archaeology’s role in shaping what Abu ElHaj (2001) describes as “the spatial foundations and ideological contours” (2) of nationhood (cf. Dietler 1994; Kohl 1998;
Özdǒgan 1998; Winter 2015). Archaeology certainly has been
9. The Armenian Genocide Museum curates an online exhibit of selected monuments impacted by Turkey’s erasure of cultural heritage.
Research on Armenian Architecture has conducted salvage architectural
surveys in eastern Turkey documenting cultural genocide with films and in
publications (Karapetian 2015). Peter Balakian (2013) has also conducted
important archival and ethnohistoric research documenting the systematic destruction of Armenian cultural sites in Turkey.
fundamental to the development of Turkish nationalism over
the past century (e.g., Atakuman 2008; Güven 2010; Yazicioğlu
2007), a project supported by both international archaeological missions (Shankland 2010b) and global heritage institutions (Human 2017). But the erasure of the Armenian material
past cannot be understood as mere selectivity in telling a national story. It is instead one element of a century-long project of dispossession, alienating a descendant community now
largely in diaspora from land, legacy, and memory. The role of
international archaeology in this project has not to date received substantial attention.
The Archive: Foreign Archaeology
on the Armenian Highland
The archive of international archaeological research in eastern
Turkey is highly skewed. Research from the Bronze Age and
earlier eras predominates, while the Iron Age is well represented only in investigations of the Kingdom of Urartu. PostUrartian investigations have been severely lacking (but see
Jakubiak 2003; Khatchadourian 2008, 2011; Summers 1993).
This is not due to a general lack of archaeological interest in
the Iron Age. Indeed, the Iron Age of Asia Minor and Central
Anatolia is a rich locus of investigation, from the long-term
investigations at Gordion (Rose 2013) to the numerous Iron
Age, Hellenistic, and Roman cities of the Mediterranean coast
(Brewster 1993; Rojas 2019; Roosevelt 2012). As a result, Anatolia’s Iron Age includes a heterogeneous array of ethnolinguistically marked communitiessuch as the Phrygians,Luwians,
Lydians, and others, but an appearance by Armenians is exceedingly rare. Kenneth Sams’s (2011) recent overview of Anatolia’s first millennium BC, as seen through the historical
sources, provides a succinct case in point; newcomers to the
Iron Age scene in Anatolia include Phrygians and Greeks, Assyrians and Lydians and Persians,but strangely, no Armenians.
Likewise, Tim Matney’s (2011) review of Iron Age southeastern
Anatolia, published in the same volume, is populated by Herodotean and Xenophonic obscurities, such as the Mardii and
the Carduchians, but not a single Armenian, despite their prominence in both The Histories (e.g., Herodotus 1992:I.194, V.52)
and The Anabasis (e.g., Xenophon 1998:III.5, IV.1–4). An im-
portant exception to this is Claudia Sagona’s extensive study
of literary sources for Iron Age toponymics, where we find a
wide-ranging discussion of Armenian peoples and places in
the region (in Sagona and Sagona 2004:25ff.). The conspicuous
avoidance of the region’s Armenian past in contemporary scholarship has emerged over the past half century of research, an
intellectual history that reveals the steady development of archaeology’s practices of unseeing.
Antecedents
International archaeological interest in the Armenian Highlands emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, when French, English, German, and Russian excavation
Smith Unseeing the Past S63
programs were established at several sites in both Russia’s
imperial provinces (e.g., de Morgan at Alaverdi, Bayern at
Redkin Lager, Marr at Ani; see Smith 2006) and the Ottoman
Empire’s East Anatolian vilayets (e.g., Layard and Rassam at
Van, Belck and Lehmann-Haupt at several sites, including
perhaps Toprakkale; see Genç 2018). With the outbreak of
World War I and the prolonged Caucasus campaign, archaeological research effectively ceased across the Armenian Highlands (pace Marr and Orbelli 1922). After 1915, archaeological
research in the Turkish-controlled portions of the Armenian
Highland was effectively foreclosed, except for a brief foray to
Van by Kirsopp Lake in 1938 (Korfmann 1977). Given the tight
government control exerted over travel in eastern Turkey after
the genocide, Charles Burney’s archaeological surveys during
the 1950s truly astonish. Beginning in 1956, Burney traveled
extensively across the Armenian Highland. Colleagues who
work in eastern Turkey today express a sense of wonder that
Burney was able to move through the region and document
sites with unheard-of freedom. But Burney’s publications were
by no means free from constraint. Most notably, he established
a methodological precedent by framing his surveys around the
region’s “Urartian and earlier sites” (Burney 1957:37), arbi-
trarily cutting off research into later phases of the Iron Age,
when the region was established as Armenia. Burney does not
justify his restricted chronological field, but its effect is quite
clear in establishing a “safe” zone for research up to and including Urartu. Yet in The Peoples of the Hills (Burney and Lang
1971), written well after the end of his fieldwork in Turkey,
Burney provides an extensive discussion of the foundation of
Armenian communities in the region following the demise of
the Kingdom of Urartu.
The shift toward “safe” prehistory was accelerated by the
work sparked by the construction of the Keban Dam, a salvage program that Dissard (2011:3) has rightly described as a
“turning point” in the conduct of archaeological research in
Turkey. Robert Whallon’s (1979) survey of the Keban reservoir
area did occasionally mention Armenian remains where these
were marked by standing church architecture: “The ByzantineSelcuk occupations have been identified by the presence of
Sgraffiato Ware and Islamic modeled pottery. ...Insome
cases, such sites had been occupied by Armenians (e.g., 054/2,
Habusu—where the ruins of the Armenian church still stood)”
(274). Strangely, however, scrutiny of the individual site entries
affords no testimony about the location or disposition of the
recorded ecclesiastical structures. The entries for neither site
number 054/2 nor Habusu (Körtepe), for example, mention
remains of Armenian churches or locate them on the published site plan. Subsequent reports on excavations at HabusuKörtepe by Harald Hauptmann (1973, 1976) make no mention
of the church.
10. Dissard (2011:5) notes that preliminary assessments of the area to
be inundated by Cevat Erder’s survey team in 1966 encountered the ruins
of Armenian and Assyrian churches in the area around Til Ağası but did
not photograph them.
10
In general, by the time of Whallon’s publica-
tion in 1979, the material heritage of Armenia had been largely
effaced in archaeological writings on eastern Turkey. Seton
Lloyd’s (1989) description of Lake Van as “the innermost
sanctuary of Armenia” (181) represents the last occasion that
I can find of a foreign archaeologist preserving the traditional
setting of Lake Van.
The effacement of Armenia from the archaeological heritage
and toponymy of eastern Turkey has expanded dramatically
over the past quarter century, even as the scale of archaeological research has increased. Armenia has not so much
disappeared from the archive as it has been eclipsed from archaeological genres ranging from the most accessible works
to esoteric professional writings. Rather than attempting an
encyclopedic review of the entire archive, I instead offer here
more detailed readings of a few key case studies from current
work conducted across genres and methodologies to better
describe precisely how Armenia has been sublimated in the
contemporary archaeological imagination.
Public Scholarship
Antonio Sagona’s (2006) The Heritage of Eastern Turkey is one
of only very few books that strives to bring the archaeology of
the Armenian Highland to a popular audience. Lavishly illustrated with photos, drawings, and antique maps, the book
traces the region’s past from the Paleolithic to the present.
Armenia is by no means absent from the book, as it makes repeated appearances as “Armenia Major” and “Armenia Minor”
in the historical maps of the region that accompany the text
(Sagona 2006:10, 27, 139, 153). Armenia also appears as a political entity of the mid- to late first millennium BC as a province of the Achaemenid Empire (Sagona 2006:108, 113) and as
a geopolitical rival to Rome (Sagona 2006:115, 140–143). The
remains of Armenian churches, including those of Ani and
Aghtamar, are highlighted in the region (Sagona 2006:158ff.).
Sagona’s discussion of Ani touches on the site’s establishment
as the capital of the Armenian Bagratid dynasty as well as its
varied fortunes at the hands of Byzantine and later Seljuk
conquerors.
There are also conspicuous absences. Armenian is not included in the discussion of the languages of Anatolia. We also
do not find discussion of Armenian communities, such as
those encountered by Xenophon in his Anabasis or discussed
in the work of medieval historians and geographers such as
Moses Khorenatsi or Anania Shirakatsi. Instead, critical authorial decisions push Armenia into the background. For example, of the Hellenistic kingdoms that ruled the Armenian
Highland in the wake of Alexander’s conquest, it is the Kingdom of Commagene that preoccupies Sagona’s (2006:112–130)
discussion. Of the kingdoms that found themselves caught
between Roman and Parthian ambitions, it is Mithradates’s
Pontic kingdom that serves as the focus of the discussion (Sagona 2006:134–143). These are peculiar decisions not simply
because Commagene and Pontus were small geographically
relative to the much larger imprint of the Kingdom of Armenia
S64 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
but also because Commagene and Pontus were both ruled by
dynasts tied directly to Armenia’s Orontid dynasty. Hence it is
quite difficult to disarticulate their histories from the central
narrative thread provided by the establishment of the Armenian satrapy under Achaemenid rule and its subsequent emergence as a powerful geopolitical actor under the Orontid and
later Artaxiad kings. Once Sagona’s attention turns to the Islamic era, Armenia largely vanishes from view. Armenians are
not mentioned among the modern peoples of the region, and
the term does not even appear in the index.
In sum, Armenians—along with Georgians, Assyrians, Greeks,
and others—are consigned to a small handful of medieval ecclesiastical ruins, while Kurds, the largest minority in eastern
Turkey today, are not mentioned once. We must ask, then,
Whose heritage is represented in the book? It would appear
from Sagona’s text that eastern Turkey’s heritage since the Seljuk invasion is a monocultural one, exhausted by madrassas
and mosques, caravansaries and bedestens (markets), mausoleums and cemeteries, all emblematic of an exclusively Turkish
heritage. And nowhere is it mentioned that collective violence
has also played a critical role in shaping the heritage of eastern
Turkey.
Matney et al.’s (2017) highly accessible overview of the excavations at Ziyaret Tepe is a very different kind of popularly
oriented archaeological invitation to eastern Anatolia. Although
it too uses extensivephotographsfrom the project’s archive, it is
less invested in historical overview than in teaching about the
site and the process of archaeological engagement with the remains. As a result, it is an extremely useful text for helping nonarchaeologists envision the complexities of fieldwork, including
the complex engagement of a research team with local institutions, from villages and work crews to the national imaginary. For
example, it is quite notable that in a brief introduction to the
adjacent village of Tepe (Matney et al. 2017:46), the text notes
that the 1845–1846 census for the village recorded 876 Muslim
households alongside 574 Christian ones. It is relatively unusual
for archaeological research teams to collect historical data on the
living communities alongside their sites (cf. Hopkins 2003), so it
is commendable that Matney’s team ventured into the archive to
provide basic demographic data.
But this work also raises the question about how the village
came to be religiously plural when the regional history in the
volume speaks only of Romans (at Diyarbakır/Amida), Turkomans (at Mardin and Hasankeyf), and Ottomans. Who were
these unidentified Christians, and where did they go? Violence
against the Armenians of Tepe began during the Hamidian
massacres of 1895–1896.
11
Nevertheless, just before the Armenian genocide, Tepe and its surrounding villages included
14 Armenian schools with 700 students (Badalyan 2020). The
modern village at Tepe has been formed by repeated episodesof
11. The 1896 issue of Ararat (420ff.) contains an extensive catalog of
murder, rape, theft, and destruction across the Diyarbakırvilayet,includ-
ing the area around Ziyaret Tepe (https://etchmiadzinlibrary.am/en/ararat
-magazine).
collective violence that began during the late nineteenth century. It is striking in this light that Matney et al. (2017:32)
highlight the role that the Assyrian Empire’s “tradition of deportation” played in shaping Ziyaret’s past, pacifying recalci-
trant populations, and creating a dependent workforce. But the
violenceand deportations that reshaped the villageof Tepenext
door went unseen.
But more worrisome than historical parallels undrawn are
the modern contradictions that likewise go unseen. The book
opens with a quote from Ataturk, who declared: “More students
should be trained in archaeology and greater care should be
taken over the exploration of the works and matchless treasures
of ancient civilizations buried in almost all corners of our
country, over their scientific preservation and classification
and over the restoration of monuments fallen into ruin due to
the persistent neglect of previous generations” (Matney et al.
2017:i). That the authors present Ataturk’s devotion to the
material remains of the past without any critical recognition of
Turkey’s systematic erasure of Armenian monuments through-
out Anatolia testifies not only to the success of the government’s
program of erasure but also to its ability to cultivate archaeological unseeing.
As a final example of the more publicly oriented archaeological writing on the region, Antonio Sagona and Paul Zimansky’s (2009) Ancient Turkey stands as the best introductory textbook on archaeology in the Armenian Highlands since
Lloyd’s 1989 work of the same name. However, the contrasts
with Lloyd’s earlier text, including their different relationships
to the anachronism of their shared title, Ancient Turkey, are
instructive. Turkey is a specifically twentieth-century phenomenon, a point that Lloyd concedes at the outset. Despite the
regular use of the phrase “ancient Turkey” by archaeologists at
least since James Mellaart’s (1978) The Archaeology of Ancient
Turkey, there is no such thing as ancient Turkey any more than
there might be an ancient United States. There is, as we have
seen, an ancient Armenia, but, as Lloyd (1989:12) notes in his
introduction, Turkey emerged out of the struggle to create a
modern republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, a
founding that involved the “assimilation and exclusion” of wellestablished non-Turkish minorities. Sagona and Zimansky set
the scene quite differently. They point out that “Anatolia” is a
recent geographical term, originating in the tenth century AD,
but nowhere is Turkey itself historicized or problematized. Indeed, the “achievements” of prehistory are specifically described as “Turkey’s cultural achievements” (Sagona and Zimansky 2009:1). A similar titular framing afflicts a number of
volumes, including Joukowsky’s (1996) Early Turkey and David
Hopkins’s (2002) Across the Anatolian Plateau: Readings in the
Archaeology of Ancient Turkey, although in the latter, Ron
Gorny’s (2002) introduction swiftly sets “Turkey” squarely in
the modern era.
12. Contrast here the parallel set of titles, which locate themselves in
ancient Anatolia (Lloyd 1956; Matthews 1998; Steadman and McMahon
2011) or Asia Minor (Düring 2011) instead of Turkey.
12
Smith Unseeing the Past S65
A second critical difference between Lloyd’s text and Sagona
and Zimansky’s work is their chronological ambitions. Where
Lloyd’s text extends through the period of the early Christian
church, Sagona and Zimansky draw their study to a close with
the Achaemenid conquest of the region, never mentioning the
peoples for whom the Achaemenid Persians named their Highland satrapy. Throughout this work, Armenia appears solely in
the figure of the modern republic and nowhere intrudes on the
territory of “ancient” Turkey. In short, Sagona and Zimansky’s
Ancient Turkey leaves only one contemporary inheritor to the
rich past it documents: the modern Republic of Turkey. It separates the region’s heritage from any living descendant community not defined by the modern political community of the
Turkish Republic.
Archaeological Survey
The more avowedly scholarly literature provides an even more
complex view of the erasures that follow from archaeological
unseeing. As a technique for recording long-term settlement
landscapes, regional surveys would seem to be quite difficult to
undertake under conditions where specific epochs of the past
are supposed to remain unseen. T. A. Sinclair’s (1987) fourvolume report on architectural remains from the Anti-Taurus
in the west to the Shirak Plain in the east provides the most
extensive survey of archaeological resources in the Armenian
Highland to date. Sinclair’s catalog is remarkable in several respects. First, it calls direct attention to the then-ongoing program
to Turkify place names (Sinclair 1987:xi) by using traditional
names to identify sites and relegating new names to brackets
alongside them. Second, Sinclair does not shrink from identifying monasteries, churches, and palaces as Armenian alongside Hittite, Urartian, Georgian, Byzantine, and Turkish exemplars of the same. Throughout, the region is represented as a
multicultural crossing place shaped by a density of ethnic communities that in cludes, prominently among them, Armenians .
Last, Sinclair’s historical vision provides an account of the initial
establishment of Armenian communities in the region following
the collapse of Urartu and the repeated formation of Armenian
principalities on the Highland. The work thus not only emplaces
Armenian communities within the region’shistorybutalsoresists their reduction to a handful of extant churches.
Archaeological surveys differ from architectural ones in
important respects. Most notably, they purport to offer more
fine-grained accounts of geographically delimited settlement
landscapes collected through systematic data collection techniques. This emphasis on methodology and the recording of
even small artifact scatters is intended to detect a wide array of
human activity areas as well as a representative sample from
which dynamics in settlement processes can be reliably inferred. However, as Khatchadourian (2008) has documented,
survey in eastern Turkey tends not only to be unsystematic in
its procedures but also to ignore remains dating to periods
after Urartu, which receive only “cursory and under-informed
treatment” (353). As she has noted, post-Urartian sites in
eastern Turkey’s surveys remain “out of mind, out of sight”
(353).
In part, the cursory treatment of post-Urartian periods can
be attributed to the poor resolution of the region’s archaeological sequences. Quite often (e.g., Rothman 2003; Sagona and
Sagona 2004), the Iron Age and later (a 2,500-year span) are
divided into just three eras: Urartian-Achaemenid, HellenisticRoman, and Seljuk-Islamic (or medieval-modern). This woefully thin understanding of the region’s past 2,500 years is
quite conspicuous given the considerable attention that Iron
Age, Hellenistic, Roman, and medieval landscapes have received in neighboring parts of Turkey in both chronologically
targeted (e.g., Kealhofer 2015; Olson 2016; Ratté and Commito
2017) and comprehensive (e.g., Düring and Glatz 2015; Luke
et al. 2015; Massa et al. 2020) surveys. Hence the neglect of
the last two and a half millennia in archaeological surveys of
eastern Turkey cannot be attributed to a general disinterest.
Rather, it appears to refl
ect archaeology’s historical imagination of the region, which clearly forwards some historical subjects while occluding others. Here is how Rothman (2004) summarizes the history of the Muş region in reporting on his 1991
and 1993 survey: “[The area around Lake Van] is a zone where
later empires of the first millennium B.C. and A.D.—Persian
Achaemenids, Hellenistic (Seleucid) Greeks, Parthians, Sassanians, Romans, and Seljuk Turks—ruled” (121). The conspicu-
ous absence is of course Armenians—who occupy the heart of
Sinclair’s Iron Age and medieval narrative—not only because of
the relatively brief eras of independent rule but also because the
Achaemenids, Seleucids, Parthians, Sassanians, and Romans all
ruled the region either indirectly, through Armenian princely
houses, or directly, in collaboration with Armenian communities
(Fagan 2015).
The result of the unseen Armenian past is that archaeological surveys overlook archaeological materials that either
are extant or were recorded by early travelers and archaeologists. An archaeological survey of the Bayburt area, a region
convulsed by repeated waves of collective violence against
Armenians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
serves as a powerful case in point. In the survey report (Sagona
and Sagona 2004), a fifth-century Armenian basilica at Hart
(modern Aydıntepe) recorded as recently as 1997 (Crow and
Bryer 1997) goes unremarked on (Sagona and Sagona 2004:
BPS 11). A later chapel at Çiğdemtepe (Sagona and Sagona
2004: BPS 15) is described simply as “Byzantine.” A stone set
into a wall at Bayburt Kale (Sagona and Sagona 2004: BPS 18)
clearly bearing Armenian text is described as an “inscribed
stone” (Sagona and Sagona 2004: fig. 18), without either the
language of inscription or the content of the text specified. Also
missing is any discussion of archaeological sites that have been
clearly erased in the survey area. H. F. B. Lynch (1901: fig. 173)
recorded the ruins of a large medieval Armenian cemetery and
monastery at Varzahan (modern Ugrak) in 1898 (fig. 5). But
the entry for Ugrak in the Bayburt survey report (Sagona and
Sagona 2004: BPS 16) makes no mention of this now destroyed
multicomponent site, marking neither its earlier existence nor
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