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S66 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
regard, they would appear to be working under substantially
different research conditions than archaeological field research.
Nevertheless, there is cause for concern in how both studies
ultimately reinscribe a monocultural historical subject similar
to those established in recent archaeology.
Yakar’s ethnoarchaeology provides a highly detailed de-
scription of what he calls “an average traditional Anatolian
village,” which he glosses with the Turkish köy. According to
Yakar, these villages were mostly founded over the past 130 years,
although some retain a “Greek or Armenian substrate,” now
reshaped by the resettlement of Turkish and other Muslim
groups. Yakar’s (2000:3) emphasis throughout is on the continuity of customs and practices that he observed with archaeological and epigraphic evidence from remote antiquity.
Such a perspective tends toward two forms of compression.
First, it compresses forms of cultural difference expressed in
daily practices into the homogeneous figure of the rural peasant, a slot wholly consumed by its modern occupant, the Turkish
villager. Second, it washes away historical ruptures such as
Figure 5. H. F. B. Lynch’s (1901: II.234) 1898 photo of the Armenian cemetery and monastery at Varzahan (modern Ugrak),
Bayburt vilayet.
those created by collective violence. Hence despite accomplishing an extensive review of the historic ethnic diversity of Anatolia,
in Yakar’s ethnographic account, one peasant is effectively the
same as the next in a timeless Anatolia. As a result, the tradi-
its erasure. More than 18,000 Armenians are estimated to have
lived in the Bayburt caza of the Erzurum vilayet in 1914 (Karayan 2018:337). Not only has the entire population been either destroyed or deported, but also their heritage is now systematically unseen.
tional Anatolian village ends up looking much like a modern
Turkish one. Yakar’s generic Anatolian villager uses Turkish
names for everything and cooks food according to distinctly
Turkish recipes. Although “ethnocultural” factors such as do-
mestic building materials and forms (Yakar 2000:147) occasionally generate variability, these divergences in no way con-
Ethnoarchaeology
If survey is methodologically fraught in contexts where certain eras are intentionally silenced, then ethnoarchaeology in
regions shaped by unacknowledged—and unacknowledgeable—
collective violence would seem to be epistemologically untenable. Since 1990 there have been two important ethnoarchaeological studies centered on the Armenian Highland: Jak Yakar’s
(2000) Ethnoarchaeology of Anatolia and Liza Hopkins’s (2003)
An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Sos Höyük and Yiğittaşı Vil-
lage. Both works differ quite substantially from the more spe-
cifically archaeological works in the archive in their treatment
of the history of Armeniansin Anatolia. Both provide historical
overviews; Yakar’s analytical objects extend across Anatolia,
while Hopkins’s interests center more specifically on the area
around the site of Sos Höyük and modern Erzurum. Both address in detail the emergence and growth of Armenian polities
in the region from the mid-first millennium BC and the rule of
Armenian principalities through the early second millennium
AD. Both historicizethe present, referring to the events of 1915
as “the forced exile of Armenians from eastern Turkey” (Hopkins 2003:35) and noting the deaths caused by starvation, disease, and deportation (Yakar 2000:115). Neither directly addresses collective violence, but both acknowledgethe Armenian
historical presence in the region and the ethnographic consequences of collective violence in rural eastern Turkey. In this
strain the formulation of the traditional Anatolian village. To
the contrary, such variations make the isomorphism between
“traditional Anatolian” and “Turkish” much clearer. Indeed,
throughout Yakar’stextwefind skepticism regarding the im-
portance of ethnic diversity in Anatolia, from the Hittites forward. Hence, while Yakar acknowledges the long Armenian
presence in the region, the force of the ethnography is to minimize its significance and smooth away the ruptures caused by
collective violence.
Hopkins’s ethnoarchaeological study opens the door to
thinking historically about the creation of the contemporary
communities of eastern Anatolia, noting the contrast between
early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers’ reports and
the region’s emerging modernity. But what Hopkins leaves unwritten is the role that the Armenian genocide specifically
played in Erzurum’s modernity. The murder and deportation
of the 35,000–40,000 Armenians living in Erzurum and its surrounding villages began in July 1915.The German vice consul in
Erzurum at the time observed: “They were killing Armenian
women, children, and elderly people by burning them, cutting
them to pieces. They were suffocating them in the rivers, shooting
them by groups, from cliffs they rolled them into deep chasms”
(quoted in Demoyan 2014:53, translated by L. Khatchadourian).
It was that violence and the attendant confiscations of property
that provided the basis for the emergent wealthy Turkish class
that would introduce modernity to eastern Turkey. These vectors
Smith Unseeing the Past S67
of modernization are nowhere mentioned in Hopkins’s analysis,
allowing the state to be the sole historical force shaping the
region.
In brief, what we see in the ethnoarchaeology of the region is
a more resolute willingness to confront the historical presence
of Armenians in eastern Anatolia than appears to be current
within more straightforwardly archaeological writing. But at
the moment of the present—where ethnoarchaeology composes its objects most forcefully—the collective violence that
has shaped the region for the past century falls away. Yet what
could be more profoundly ethnoarchaeological in both its force
and importance than the systematic slaughter of more than
1 million people? If ethnoarchaeology cannot perceive trauma
of such magnitude, then one must wonder about its broader
relevance to archaeological programs.
Archival Operations
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995:26) argued that silences shape
accounts of the past at four critical moments in the process of
knowledge production: the creation of facts, their assembly
into an archive or record, their retrieval as coherent narratives,
and the retrospective significance accorded those narratives.
The archive of international archaeology in Turkey engages in
all four forms of silencing, from the unseeing of facts to their
exclusion from the record and their minimization in the narration of the region’s past. What we see in the archive are, to
my mind, three interrelated operations. First, there is an obvious elision, a conspicuous avoidance of materials and eras
that would of necessity raise the question of the Armenian
presence in the region and thus force this follow-up question:
“Where did they go?” Second, there is a form of monumentalization where the unavoidable remains of Armenian
history are crystallized in a handful of major monuments, most
notably the ecclesiastical remains at Ani and Aghtamar. In
part, this is an understandable response to Turkey’s destruction of everything but a few ecclesiastical sites. What else is
there to work with above the ground? But archaeology’s vision
is supposed to penetrate more deeply. The monumentalization
of the Armenian past has the effect of closely circumscribing
memorialization, limiting it to a handful of isolated places and
focusing it historically on the ninth to eleventh centuries, a safe
remove from the communities destroyed by the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth.
Last, material remains in the region that have survived efforts to cleanse the material record of eastern Turkey are deethnicized—that is, they are referred to not as Armenian but as
generically Christian or Byzantine, categories that are treated
quite differently in official Turkish discourse (Watenpaugh
2014:542). But the cosmopolitanism of the Armenian Highland was never simply a matter of religious identification, as
the categories of both “Christian” and “Muslim” contain extraordinary ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian diversity.
Each of these operations is built atop archaeological methodologies that were developed to reveal, illuminate, and doc-
ument, but in eastern Turkey, they support an epistemology of
unseeing. How do such methodological inversions take place
in the field?
The Interviews: Foreign Archaeologists
on the Armenian Highland
Given my reading of the archive, I was concerned with better
understanding the interests and experiences of the international archaeologists who created it. To that end, I conducted a
series of semistructured interviews that were designed to elicit
both the personal experiences and critical reflections of specialist practitioners in the field. This work finds its methodological wellspring in sociological studies of science and expertise (e.g., Knorr-Cetina 1999; Latour 1987) where the central
analytic goal is to illuminate the forces shaping the production
of knowledge. The Turkish government’s policy of genocide
denial makes open conversation about the fate of Armenian
heritage in Anatolia almost impossible. And indeed, many
colleagues either politely declined invitations to speak or refused to even answer my initial overtures. Ultimately, I was
able to conduct formal interviews with eight scholars who have
led archaeological field projects in the Armenian Highland
over the past two decades. These were conducted largely by
telephone in recognition of the need for anonymity and as it
provided a comfortable medium for discussing an uncomfortable topic well away from the apparatus of surveillance at
work on archaeological field sites. Each interview followed the
same initial script to ensure the compatibility of the conversations. But having covered a set of standard initial questions,
each interview was allowed to follow the path chosen by my
interlocutors. Although I make no claims for the universality
of my sample, a population constrained by both the limited
number of international archaeologists who work in Turkey
and the legacy of state intimidation, it was clear that their
experiences significantly overlapped.
The first question I posed to my interlocutors was whether
my rendering of the eclipse of Armenia from the archaeological lexicon of eastern Turkey tallied with their own understanding of the archive. My correspondents were unanimous
that it did. As a number of correspondents pointed out, archaeological research in eastern Turkey is extremely difficult
and has been throughout the past century. My interlocutors
pointed to long-standing challenges not just in receiving research permits but also in gaining access to museum collections and even simply traveling to the region.
Charles Burney’s experiences during the 1950s and early
1960s floated through a number of my discussions as a kind
of object lesson in both the difficulty of working in eastern
Turkey and Turkish state retribution. More than half of my
informants mentioned what they described as his “exile” from
Turkey, which led him to take up work in neighboring Iran.
One story held that when Burney (1966) was working at the
Urartian citadel of Kayalıdere, west of Lake Van, he asked to
see a nearby Armenian monastery and was thereafter never
S68 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
allowed to conduct research in Turkey again. Whether true or
not—and there was a great deal of uncertainty about the veracity of the stories—accounts of retribution have created a
palpable sense among international archaeologists that Armenians and their history on the Highland, even apart from the
events of the genocide, are forbidden.
But there is also a clear frustration with this situation among
researchers: “[The town where I work] had beautiful [Armenian] churches, but all have been allowed to collapse. And no
one talks about it. How can archaeologists not talk about that?”
Another noted: “At [our site] there are [Armenian] churches
that have been turned into mosques. But no one investigates.”
The frustration that I have encountered appears to emerge
not out of an ethic of care or a sense of advocacy for Armenians
but rather from a disciplinary concern that in acceding to this
requirement of research, foreign archaeologists are not just on
ethically thin ice but also abdicating a scholarly responsibility.
Interestingly, their sense of obligation appears to be centered
not in a recognition of the traumas and heritage interests of dislocated descendant communities but rather in a distinctly archaeological obligation of stewardship (Lynott and Wylie 1995).
How then has a government program of denial so powerfully influenced scholars who were not trained within Turkish
institutions or subject to direct state intimidation? The institutionalized procedures of archaeological research in Turkey
would seem to create ideal conditions for direct government
surveillance and enforcement. Permit applications and rosters
of team members must be approved by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Internal Affairs prior to consideration by the
Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Moreover, each project has
assigned to it a local government representative or, more recently, must have a Turkish codirector. Traditionally, representatives were drawn from local museum staff, and a number of
scholars reported to me a sense that the representatives were
largely there to surveil the foreign teams. As one schol ar put
it, “You don’t know what the representative will tell the ministry.”
My interlocutors noted that there was rarely, if ever, a direct
commandment communicated by government officials not to
speak of Armenians or other ethnic minorities. But they also
recalled episodes that engaged governmental representatives
in effacing the Armenian presence. One archaeologist related a
discussion of a ceramic ware type that they wanted to name
after the Armenian Kingdom given the conditions of its historical production in the last centuries BC. Local archaeologists informed their foreign colleague that this would get
them all into trouble. So a geographically and historically anodyne term was adopted instead. Several colleagues noted that
maps were objects of considerable concern to government
officials. These included both the maps that archaeologists
made and the source maps they used. As one archaeologist put
it: “Our Turkish minder insisted that we use only the recent
maps, which included only the Turkified place names. And I
suppose that sends a pretty strong signal.” Indeed, the insistence on using Turkified maps appears to have been broadly
communicated.
These instances aside, the silence surrounding the Armenian past in the Highlands appears to be most rigorously
enforced by a self-censorship reproduced by foreign archaeologists themselves. As one scholar put it: “Talking about Ar-
menia is discouraged in our expedition. . . . [Near our site]
there are Armenian churches that have been turned into
mosques, but no one on this team of archaeologists dares investigate. It is very frustrating to not be able to talk about this
but to live with it all around you.”
Another, a bit more defensively, argued, “Archaeologists go
into Turkey knowing that Armenia is a sensitive topic that
should not be discussed.”
“The problem,” one put it to me, “is that you are controlled. I
am afraid that if I say something [about the Armenians], I will
pay by not being allowed to work. Fear is the first factor. . . . I
am afraid.” It is this fear of retribution that, for almost all of my
interlocutors, lies at the root of their self-censorship.
For most of the people I interviewed, the substance of their
fears centered on permission to start or continue research. As
one informant put it: “Once people got involved in projects
and could travel there, they didn’t want to raise any hackles.”
Another pointed out that the government makes it so difficult to get a permit that once you get one, “you start thinking
about what you are going to do to hold on to it. It is a risk to
talk about any minorities in Turkey.” Much of the anxiety
seems to arise out of object lessons that circulate discursively
in the community of scholars. Almost all of the scholars I
interviewed shared secondhand stories of team members sent
home, permits delayed or denied, and projects summarily ended,
all as a result of what might be collectively described as an interest in the region’s minorities, whether Armenian, Assyrian, or
Kurdish. The sum total of the circulating stories of retribution
is that actual retribution needs rarely be done. Self-censorship
realizes the goals of the state. One scholar put it to me directly:
“[We foreign archaeologists] are collaborators of the Turkish
government.”
This is a very different picture of the conduct of archaeological research in Turkey than that painted by the ethnographer David Shankland (2010a), who describes a relatively
happy relationship between research projects and the Turkish
state “in that foreign teams are largely insulated from local
political concerns” (233). Shankland notes how the state has
permeated the practice of archaeology through the museum
network and other institutions but does not reflect on how this
has enabled the co-optation of international archaeology into
the state program of genocide denial and stoked considerable
anxiety—ethical and professional—on the part of practicing
archaeologists. As one archaeologist with experience in Turkey
commented to me during the researching of this study: “I don’t
feel like it is safe for me to even be [talking to you].”
Conclusion
In many respects, the current state of archaeological research
in eastern Turkey bears a strong resemblance to the condition
Smith Unseeing the Past S69
of Ottoman history in the late twentieth century as described
by Donal Quataert (2006): “In the late 1960s (when I entered
graduate study), there was an elephant in the room of Ottoman Studies—the slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in
1915. . . . To the best of my knowledge, no one ever suggested
that the so-called ‘Armenian Question’ was not to be studied.
Rather, a heavy aura of self-censorship hung over Ottoman
history writing” (249). Into this void, Quataert (2006:250)
notes, came a body of writing during the 1980s that was not
critical history but state-sponsored propaganda that attempted
to intervene in the historical imagination of the genocide: it
suggested, first, that the Young Turk regime went to great
lengths to protect the lives and property of Armenians whom
they relocated from the front and, second, that more Muslims
than Armenians perished between 1911 and 1922 (Erbal 2015).
These claims have entered into Turkish authorized heritage
with memorials focused on Armenian massacres of Turks at
both the Erzurum Archaeological Museum and the Iğdir Memorial of Martyred Turks.
Stateworks of counterfactual heritageappear to have shocked
Ottoman studies out of its torpor. Quataert observes that since
the late 1990s, the silence in Ottoman history surrounding the
Armenians has been broken, in part by foreign scholars, including members of the Armenian diaspora,who have engaged
Turkish historians, a movement that culminated in a 2005 international conference on the events of 1915 held at a Turkish
university despite threats, intimidation, and harassment (Suny,
Göçek, and Naimark 2011). In April 2015, Boğaziçi University
hosted a successor gathering in Istanbul titled “The Armenian
Genocide: Concepts and Comparative Perspectives” as part of
a series of efforts by Turkish human rights organizations, Armenian partners, and civil society activists to commemorate
the hundredth anniversary of the genocide.
Architectural history, long a more forthright observer of
Armenian remains in eastern Turkey than archaeology (Maranci 2001, 2015), has likewise shown considerable willingness
to push for greater openness. The recent volume Architecture
and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100 – 1500 (Blessing and
Goshgarian 2017) is an excellent case in point. By pushing for
a wider consideration of the landscapes within which major
monuments were situated, the work necessarily resists the confinement of Armenian (and other minority) pasts into a handful of ecclesiastic ruins. The observation of signs of Armenian
craftsmen working on Seljuk constructions (McClary 2017:31–
32) and the integration of Islamic stylistic elements into the
Church of Tigran Honents at Ani (Guidetti 2017) serve as
powerful reminders of the diversity of eastern Anatolia’s medieval and early modern communities—the antithesis of the
monocultural image of the region produced by archaeology’s
unseeing.
Given these developments, it seems an auspicious moment
to think that archaeology in Turkey might also be able to bear
witness to the Armenian past and its erasure rather than continue its practices of unseeing. Indeed, there is a great deal at
stake in archaeology finding its voice. For archaeology, what is
at stake in confronting the legacy of Armenians on the Highland is not just the ethical integrity of the field but also the very
possibility that it might embrace an emancipatory epistemology (González-Ruibal 2019). Archaeology in eastern Turkey
todaythrowsthat possibilityinto considerable doubt, as it would
seem that we can describe suffering and analyze its sources
only when contemporary power structures do not demand that
archaeologists unsee as a condition of research. Here I have
described but one case of archaeological unseeing, but certainly
there are many more. Can archaeology still see the Uighurs of
western China or the Rohinga of Mayanmar? Have these episodes of collective violence—all denied by the perpetrating governments—already begun to distort archaeology’s vision (Sawa
2020; Viviano 2015)?
The case of the Armenian Highland presents a particular
challenge to archaeological efforts to engage descendant communities as stakeholders in heritage remains. Who counts as a
descendant community when obliteration from ancestral lands
has been completed? How can we represent
“local” interests in
the past when those interests are shaped by a relentless need to
hide atrocities? The fate of the Armenians in Turkey has been
made so invisible that even archaeology’s most attuned witnesses
can fail to see. Sonya Atalay’s (2010) community-based participatory research collaboration with the excavations at Çatalhöyük, near Konya in central Anatolia, provides a succinct case
in point. Atalay’s work sought to develop a community-driven
program to help engage residents of local villages of Küçükköy
and Çumra in the archaeological research and help the investigations respond to community interests and needs. But the
current communities surrounding the site are just one set of
stakeholders in the region’s past. In 1914, an estimated 29,000
Armenianslived in the Konya vilayet (Karayan 2018:387), more
than 13,000 in the Konya sanjak, where Çatalhöyük is located.
By 1926, there were no more than 800 in the entire vilayet
(Hewsen 2001:238).
How can archaeology be predicated on “engaging descendant and local communities as partners in archaeological research” (Atalay 2010:418) when key potentialstakeholdershave
been murdered, descendant communities forced into exile, and
the traces of their histories erased? My point is not that Atalay
failed to bear witness to the collective violence that has remade
communities across Turkey. In that, the community-based
participatory research program at Çatalhöyük was constrained
by the same forces shaping the larger excavation project and
indeed archaeological research across Turkey. What is striking
is that witnessing in Turkey has been made so difficult by denial, effacement, and a legacy of archaeological unseeing that
even an expert in the erasure of indigenous peoples and the
politics of reparation could not see it. Bearing witness will require not only that we unlearn unseeing—a project where Atalay’s (2012) work has led the way in North America—but also
that we train our lenses to see that which is no longer present,
the residues and marks left by erasure itself. The possibilities
offered by what Lyons and Supernant (2020) have called “an
archaeology of the heart” are quite promising, insofar as the
S70 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
approachemphasizes“the role of how intergenerational trauma
impacts Indigenous communities and influences their ability to
engage with archaeologists, as well as recognizing the possibilities for a responsible archaeology that can aid the healing process from historical trauma” (10). Needless to say, there is considerable room for an introduction of an ethic of care into
archaeological practice in a region where the remains of genocide victims might be tossed into the Euphrates. However, in
another sense international archaeologists have in fact been too
careful over the past 50 years. Too careful not to offend. Too
careful not to raise hackles. Too careful of their own interests.
González-Ruibal (2019:49ff.) argues that where archaeology’s
“soft politics” has eschewed disagreement for the sake of consensus, a renewed “hard politics” must embrace the dissensus of
struggle and the legacies of traumatic pasts. In Turkey, archaeologists clearly have both hard conversations and hard choices
ahead if the discipline is to bear witness to the collective violence
that has shaped the sites where they work and the communities
they dig alongside. That work will involve a commitment to
caringand a willingness to dissent, to be sure. But it starts with a
commitment to seeing.
Epilogue
In the winter of 2019, as I returned to work on this study after
a two-year hiatus, I was invited to give a lecture to a group of
archaeologists at an institution in North America. It struck me
as an opportunity to present this project and continue my
informal efforts to better understand the conduct of archaeological research in Turkey among experienced scholars. So I
sent off my title and abstract to the organizer, and the initial
response I received was positive, noting the importance of the
topic.
Two days later, I received an email from the organizer asking for a phone conversation. My proposed topic had a member of the organizing committee feeling “highly exposed” to the
potential scrutiny of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. I was informed that this colleague “didn’t want the Mellaart treatment,” referring to the rather infamous case of a
British archaeologist banned from research in Turkey. The
organizer made it clear that I should feel free to say what I
wanted since they did not want it to sound like I was being
censored. “We can accommodate what you want to say as long
as we can label the talk as something else.” While also leery of
luring attendees in with a “bait and switch,” the organizer was
very concerned to “keep it to ourselves” and thus forestall the
possibility that Turkish authorities would hear that scholars
were discussing the Armenian genocide and archaeology’s
ethical responsibilities.
I remain deeply sympathetic to the organizers at this institution. The episode is emblematic of the very phenomenon
detailed here. Scholars, even those ensconced in institutions
half a world away, have been enlisted as coconspirators in the
Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s campaign of silence through practices of distributed intimidation. We have
come to police ourselves so effectively and have so compromised the ethical positions we wear with confidence in other
settings that the Turkish state does not even have to lift a
finger. “Fear,” the organizer told me, “is its own taskmaster.”
What is ironic in this situation is that the organizers had been
working assiduously to bring ethical issues into their lecture
series. They had heard scholars discuss the impact of ISIS’s
campaign against archaeological monuments and the role of
looting in the destruction of sites in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.
Recognizing the contradiction, the organizer said thoughtfully:
“There are no consequences for criticizing ISIS or ignoring the
plight of the Palestinians. But the Turkish government can
bring extraordinary pressure.” The organizer continued: “Here
we have the perfect case where we can discuss the role of politics and society on archaeology, and I have to ask you to
modify your talk.”
In the end, I did not present this work in that forum, even
though it is precisely the audience that I hope this discussion
will eventually find. I could not, in good conscience, ask for an
open conversation on archaeological ethics and more than a
century of genocide denial in this paper and then participate in
a forum where I needed to cloak my objectives to save colleagues from the fear of retaliation. What is clear is that if we
are going to change how archaeologists confront both the past
of the Armenian Highlands and Turkish denialism, we must
do so as a collective. Even as the Turkish government relies on
collective self-censorship to support its erasure of the atrocities
of 1915, the archaeological community, especially international
archaeologists working in the region, must stand united in resistance. Like Ottoman studies, archaeology can and must create opportunities for dialogue with colleagues in Turkey and
Armenia to put an end to our techniques of unseeing.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go first and foremost to my colleagues who agreed
to be interviewed regarding the fate of Armenians in international archaeological research in Turkey. Such conversations
are never easy, but they are important. I thank my interlocutors for their candor and their confidence. This research was
greatly aided by Harutyun Muratyan, Gegham Badalyan, and
Robert Tatoyan from the Armenian Genocide Memorial Institute, who helped to clarify key points of demography. My
thanks also to my Cornell colleagues who provided feedback
on drafts that I presented in various colloquiums and workshops. Benjamin Anderson and Lori Khatchadourian provided
sustained critical engagement as I worked to refine the argument of the paper. My thanks also to Heghnar Watenpaugh
and Maureen Marshall, who provided useful suggestions and
timely encouragement for me to finish the project. My thanks
also to Laurent Dissard for his deep reading of the text and his
generous effort to help improve the work. I am deeply indebted
to the four anonymous reviewers of the draft manuscript, who
offered insights and cautions that helped improve the analysis here. And I am very grateful to Laurence Ralph for his
Smith Unseeing the Past S71
willingness to work with me on the final stage of the revision
process.
Comments
Laurent Dissard
Department of European and International Relations, University of
Toulouse, Toulouse 31000, France (laurent.dissard@univ-toulouse
.fr). 2 VIII 22
Adam T. Smith in his article defines archaeological “unseeing”
as a “skilled practice shaped by an awareness of structures of
power that demand inattention to the undesirables of the past.”
He claims that, rather than discover the past, archaeologists
unsee it. In this short commentary, I want to question these
“shared practices of unseeing that have shaped archaeological
research” to explore how they play out in the traces of Armenians in present-day eastern Turkey. Much of the archaeological unseeing can be said to occur in scientific reports that
archaeologists publish once a site has been excavated. For me,
the notion of unseeing amounts to reporting without bearing
witness. While current usage associates the former (reporting)
with the idea of bringing back factual information—that is,
giving a spoken or written account of something one has heard,
observed, or investigated—the latter (bearing witness) means
reporting inconvenient truths that might more easily be left
unsaid. Michael Herzfeld (2000) reminds us that archaeology is
too often scared to offend or embarrass because it remains in
the service of powerful ideologies, unlike other disciplines such
as anthropology, which questions the cultural basis of prejudice
by paying closer attention to the margins. This is the case of
(foreign) archaeologists working in eastern Turkey over the
past century or so, as Smith rightly demonstrates. The material
remnants of the Armenian past are too rarely the focus of archaeological writing, including but not limited to site reports,
because archaeologists, not uncommonly, regard them as being
too offensive or embarrassing to bring to light.
As Smith explains, even though foreign archaeologists are
warned but seldom punished, it is the fear of retribution that
is behind the discipline’s self-censorship and so much of the
unseeing. It is the same phenomenon that is at the source of the
country’s ordinary, banal reality of denial that Talin Suciyan
describes in her book The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-
genocide Society, Politics and History. Suciyan (2016) explains
how collective violence against Armenians at the end of the
Ottoman Empire continued in different forms under the
subsequent Republic of Turkey, how “denial has been established as the core mechanism of sociation and individuation, at
the expense of the survivor with all his or her being, including
his or her experiences, language, told or untold histories, and
knowledge” (18). She defines the postgenocidal habitus of
denial as “a set of created values, daily practices, and mecha-
nisms denying the experience of the survivor” (18). But archaeological unseeing has another manifestation in this widespread yet discrete phenomenon. Archaeology creates voids
like the “silence of denial,” which surrounds the presence and
absence of the not-so-hidden Armenians in present-day Turkey. This denial continues to generate secrets so entrenched
that a single word is enough to cover up their reawakening
(Dissard 2021).
This “heavy aura of self-censorship,” Smith reminds us, has
lifted elsewhere. Some Ottoman historians are now reexamining the origins of the Armenian genocide and its role in the
formation of Turkey (Akçam 2006; Göçek 2015; Kévorkian
2006; Suny 2015). Others have undertaken microlevel analyses
of the treatment of minorities at the turn of the last century
(Ekmekçioğlu 2016; Kurt 2021; Suciyan 2016; Üngör 2011,
2014; Üngör and Polatel 2011). Anthropologists are now also
critiquing Turkey’sofficial historical discourses from the per-
spectives of oral history and memory studies (Biner 2010; Çelik
and Dinç 2015; Neyzi and Kharatyan-Araqelyan 2010), thus
filling important gaps in the archival record. Archaeology,
however, has yet to really tackle the issue. Armenian traces are
never completely absent. They can appear so sporadically that
they quickly become unseen, Smith explains, turning into epistemic voids and archaeological silences too quickly covered
over by state-sponsored narratives of historical denial. Only on
rare occasions is the process of “reframing” (Shepherd 2003) to
foreground such absences imagined in Turkey. In 2011, I asked
the archaeologist Gregory Areshian what he thought of the
dearth of anything Armenian in site reports coming out of
eastern Turkey. I mentioned that words like “Armenia” did
appear now and then, most often on the sidelines of these texts,
musing that perhaps something else besides an intentional and
complete erasure on the part of archaeologists was at play. “Yes,
perhaps the word Armenia appears,” he replied, “but a history
of Armenia has never been written [by archaeologists].” If bits
and pieces of the Armenian past are never completely absent
from archaeological writing, what archaeologists have not yet
been able to do is present an unabridged picture of the region’s
past (and present), including its most inconvenient truths.
My point here is not to discredit the entire discipline but to
ask how we can move forward. If so much unseeing is caused
by archaeologists simply reporting rather than bearing witness,
then further dialogue is needed to reach a more just form of
collective witnessing in the future. I agree with Smith here,
although what his well-documented and thought-provoking
text does not offer is a suggestion of how exactly to go about
creating these opportunities for intellectual exchanges and implementing long-term solutions so that eastern Turkey’spast
can be acknowledged in its full complexity. Of course, learning
more about the recent history of collective violence in the region is a necessary first step. Language is another hurdle preventing foreign archaeologists from gaining a finer appreciation
of social and political dynamics at both the local and national
levels. Learning Turkish and Kurdish and Armenian, in this
case, might help to overcome individual fears and collective
S72 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
censorship. Finally, more Turkish archaeologists today are willing to discuss the absence of minority pasts in the archaeological record, and a younger generation, especially, is becoming more aware of its epistemic lacunae. Archaeology in Turkey
is far from being constituted by a homogeneous group of likeminded people, all presumed to be nationalist and xenophobic,
and many of its practitioners are conscious of the ill treatment
reserved for minority heritages in their country by the state.
Some possess a great awareness of the dire situation in which
Armenian ruins have fallen (literally) on the ground. Foreign
and Turkish archaeologists need to work together if progress is
to be made. I take this piece as an invitation, above all else, to
open up the dialogue: a first step that Smith has courageously
taken to begin to “see” not only Armenian heritage but also
other marginalized pasts. To bear witness, however, cannot be
an isolated act undertaken by one individual alone but is a continual process of awareness and reflexivity by an entire community of practitioners and society at large.
Fatma Müge Göçek
Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, 500 South State
Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1382, USA (gocek@umich.edu).
31 VII 22
This is an excellent article that beautifully articulates how
Turkish governments have systematically silenced the Armenian past in Turkey. They have done so through the dominant
narrative (of official history), political bartering (e.g., if
nonprofits want to preserve Armenian remains in Turkey, they
must make at least an equal material contribution to Turkish
remains as well), or intimidation of experts working in Turkey
(to ensure that they never mention Armenians if they want to
get work permits in Turkey).
All these policies have led to the self-silencing of violence by
those who deal with the Turkish state. It is in the last context
that the author very ably demonstrates the ensuing autocensorship by interviewing archaeologists working in Turkey, all
of whom silenced at some point in their lives the Armenian
history embedded in these lands to be able to keep working on
archaeological digs in Turkey. He also situates the silences of
the Armenian past in terms of knowledge construction about
the region and modern Turkey, thereby documenting “epistemological denial” in addition to the archaeological material
one.
A few remarks to keep in mind going forward: it would be
great if the author went through the text to further fine-tune
the local social actors complicit in this denial. Currently, he
uses “state” and “government” interchangeably. It is correctthat
both fully overlap in terms of their virulent nationalism, which
systematically excludes any social groups undermining the of-
ficial Turkish national obsession with a “unitary” state. Hence
“other” social groups, like the Greek Rum and Kurds, as well as
Assyriansand Arabs, for whom these were ancestral lands, have
been systematically silenced, marginalized,or destroyed. Such a
strategic move would extend this systemic violence to other
social groups in Turkey whose public existence is denied.
I would argue that this symbolic violence as a primal policy
can be traced to the foundation of the Turkish Republic as a
nation-state in 1923, if not to the protonational Union and
Progress visions of the late Ottoman Empire in 1908. This
denialist stand of the newly established Turkish nation-state
and its governments was then taught to generations of schoolchildren through the quickly centralized educational system. As
a consequence, this violent stand of the state was ideologically
transmitted to society at large and ended up privileging the
Sunni ethnic Turks at the expense of all others. Eventually, the
majority of Turkish citizens were pedagogically co-opted into
this denialist state framework, which was then reproduced
through the institutions of the media and law, also carefully
controlled by the Turkish state.
There are two points of note here. First, it is not solely the
Turkish state but also Turkish society that supports this stand,
which in turn explains its perpetuation through republican
generations. Hence it is the combination of state and societal
denial that sustains denial to this day. One needs to recognize
the complicit stand of Turkish society moving forward because
only through such recognition will there be hope of moving
forward to a humanitarian solution.
Second, there is still room to study the degree to which
different Turkish governments have acted on this denialist
policy in practice—it would be interesting to study this exclusionary practice across republican history to see whether
there were variations in practice. Given that this is a strictly
political stand (rather than a humanitarian one that recognizes
all human existence in the region), I would argue that its praxis
may change contextually over time: if there is indeed such temporal transformation, it would add to the author’s narrative by
helping him identify points of resistance within Turkish state and
society at large, points that may highlight the way forward to the
final peaceful public acceptance of difference.
It would also be interesting to extend this practice to other
social groups within and outside Turkey. For instance, one
could compare the policy against Armenian sites on their ancestral lands with policies about Georgian, Kurdish, and Greek
sites to observe whether there is variation across ethnic groups.
For instance, Anoush Suni’s recent work reads the current
impact of the Armenian genocide in eastern Turkey through
not only Armenian but also Kurdish material remains.
Also of significance is how these remains belonging to “other”
people are nationalized across countries. When one follows
this line of reasoning, one ends up realizing how deeply such an
exclusionary policy is embedded in western European modernity, which generated the exclusionary nation-state framework by privileging “fraternity” in addition to liberty and equality. In this context, I find the work of cultural sociologist Fiona
Greenland illuminating; she articulates how the Italian state
made nationalist interpretations of archaeological remains in
Italy, claiming the remains of ancient people from North Africa
Smith Unseeing the Past S73
as their own “citizens.” She and I have also edited a volume
(Greenland and Göçek 2020) on cultural violence that contains
additionalinsights into how to further categorize this violence. I
wait with great enthusiasm for further future insights into the
repertoire of denial in the region by this author.
Alfredo González-Ruibal
Institute of Heritage Sciences, Spanish National Research Council,
Avenida de Vigo, s/n, 15705 Santiago de Compostela, Spain (alfredo
.gonzalez-ruibal@incipit.csic.es). 10 VI 22
Since the 1980s, archaeologists have been trying to recover
silenced voices and erased pasts, and the archaeology of the
subaltern has become dominant in fields like historical archaeology. We archaeologists are always happy to talk about
the power of our discipline to write the history of those who
have no history. We are much less happy to talk about the
power of archaeology to erase the history of those whose history has been stolen. Except, that is, if it is the archaeology
practiced by our colonial forebears—the reverse image of our
virtue. Adam Smith has demonstrated that archaeology can be
an excellent discipline for unseeing the pasts of others. This it
does through a set of methodological inversions that includes
elision, selective monumentalization, and deethnicization. It is
difficult to read his powerful text without thinking, “Have I
ever done the same myself?” The answer is probably yes, to
some extent, somewhere, consciously or unconsciously. Smith
presents an extreme case of erasure, that of the Armenian genocide and its persistence, but extreme cases of structural violence are good for reflecting on more common and apparently
benign cases of structural violence.
Let me share a personal anecdote. For several years I did
fieldwork in the region of Alatish, on the border between
Sudan and Ethiopia. Al atish, an Arabic word, refers to a place
with a scarcity of water. The region was for most of its history
within the orbit of the Sudan (although not part of the Sudan),
and now it pertains to Ethiopia. During the late nineteenth
century, the entire indigenous population of the area was exterminated or enslaved, first by the Turco-Egyptian colonial
army and then by Sudanese Dervishes. Emptied of its indigenous communities and erased of its past, Alatish is now a
national park that, like many other national parks in Africa,
offers an image of pristine emptiness by erasing its genocidal
origins (Meskell 2011). The name was changed recently. I was
asked by the Ethiopian authorities to refer to the area in my
reports and publications as Altash, not Alatish. Why? Because
Altash was the daughter of King Tewodros II, one of the fathers of modern Ethiopia. I was being asked to contribute to both
a history of erasure and a fake history of Ethiopia in which
Alatish, always an autonomous area beyond the grip of the
state, became an integral part of a centralized, culturally homogeneous Ethiopia. I played dumb and continued to use
Alatish. But then, nothing was at stake in my case. What would
I have done if something had been? Would I renounce a permit
to work in the country to keep faithful to the erased memory of
the indigenous peoples of western Ethiopia? Smith’s article has
made me question myself about this, and I am not sure that I
have liked the answers. Because after all, it is not such a big deal
to change one name for another. Or is it?
The world is full of ruins and empty spaces where archaeologists work. Ruins and empty spaces, however, are rarely
innocent. They are most often the scene of a crime. It can be
mass starvation, as in Ireland; colonial dispossession, as in the
occupied territories of Palestine; genocide, as in large parts
of North America, South America, or Australia; or capitalist
depredation, as in virtually every corner of the world. Denial of
genocide, as Smith has demonstrated here, does not necessarily mean active negation but simply looking elsewhere.
Here, the triad perpetrator-bystander-victim used in genocide
studies is useful (Ehrenreich and Cole 2005). Archaeologists
might not be perpetrators—that is, we do not often engage in
open denialism. But we are all too often bystanders. We witness, and by doing nothing, we acquiesce.
Yet doing nothing is no guarantee that the problems will
disappear. It is rather the opposite. One thing that is obvious in
this article is the power of negativity. The erasure of the Armenian past has made that past reappear time and again,
haunting the state, the Turkish people, and archaeologists. As
psychoanalysts know well, engaging in denial is the best way of
being haunted. The strategies deployed to unsee the past in
Turkey become, in the end, strategies for producing phantoms.
The more the past is dematerialized, disassembled, and hidden, the more the past comes to trouble the present and indict
the living. Because phantoms vanish only when you listen to
them and attend to their grievances. Archaeologists have a
unique power: we can listen to phantoms. But we can also
waive this power and participate in the political economy of
denial in which all authoritarian regimes exist.
We can read Adam Smith’s paper in two different ways: It
can be read as a disgraceful example of how archaeology in a
specific case works toward historical erasure. In this way, it is
yet another piece on the sociopolitics of the discipline, an interesting but ultimately comfortable exposition of how some
people do wrong things in some places. But it can also be read
in a much more disturbing way: as the revelation of some dark
truth about our discipline, something that is not restricted to
specific places or periods. Adam Smith has reminded us that
archaeology is a weapon of seeing as much as of unseeing. And
the choice of how to use it is not always easy.
Rachel Goshgarian
Department of History, Lafayette College, 210 Ramer History House,
Easton, Pennsylvania 18042, USA (goshgarr@lafayette.edu). 25 VII 22
Around 1900, Rupen Zartarian, an Ottoman Armenian intellectual originally from Chungush (near Diyarbakı r) who
studied and, later, taught at Euphrates College in Harput (Kharpert)—as well as at other Armenian schools throughout the
S74 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
Ottoman Empire—wrote a short story called “Repentance” (in
Armenian, “Zghchum”). This particular work has never been
translated from the Armenian and was published as part of a
collection titled Nocturnal Clarity (Tsaykaluys) in Istanbul in
1910.
Like many of Zartarian’s works, “Repentance” shares real-
istic sketches and impressions of life among Armenians in the
villages, towns, and cities of the late Ottoman Empire that offer
fascinating insights into the ways in which one Armenian man
of letters experienced and chose to write about the world in
which he lived. Zartarian’s writing was so evocative of life
among Armenians in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman
Empire that in discussing his 1910 collection, the ethnomusicologist and priest Gomidas Vartabed (né Soghomon Soghomonian) reflected:
When I read [Tsaykaluys], I did not see Zartarian, but rather
an entire nation, an entire people, in all of its beauty and
splendor. This work left an impression on me not of a book,
but of a life. . . . When I flipped through its pages, it was not
words and sentences that appeared before my eyes—it was
as if an unknown being was holding my hand and leading me
to unknown places, to fragrant treasures, and to sparkling
pearls. When we talk about Zartarian, it seems that he doesn’t
exist for me at all, rather life, the country, the homeland does.
(Vartabed 2013 [1913])
13
In “Repentance,” after describing many of the horrors faced
by Armenians living in an unnamed city in the late nineteenthor early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, Zartarian (1994)
asks: “How will this blind, compassionless persecution end?
Where is the zenith of this torment and misery?” (246). In this
essay, Adam Smith offers a sobering response to Zartarian: it
does not end, and its zenith has moved beneath the ground.
It now starts long before it had ever existed in the mind of
Zartarian.
What is this “it,” though? Is it the “blind, compassionless
persecution” of which Zartarian wrote in the early twentieth
century? Or is it— now—something else? Here, Adam Smith
opens a door to a new kind of conversation on the inversion of
archaeological theory with regard to work done by foreign
archaeologists in Turkey that intentionally “unsees” Armenian
pasts in the face of the trickle-down effects of the campaign of
genocide denial enthusiastically espoused by various governments of the Republic of Turkey. With this important contribution, which is sure to ruffle many feathers, Smith shows
how complacent (comfortable?) foreign archaeologists have
become in their complicity—in unseeing layer on layer of a
continuous 2,500-year Armenian past in the Armenian Highland (or eastern Anatolia), today located within the borders of
the Republic of Turkey. In an attempt to be as empathetic as
13. Both Vartabed and Zartarian were arrested and deported with 180
other Armenian community leaders in Istanbul on April 24, 1915. Zartarian was murdered in early May, at Karacaören, near Diyarbakır. Vartabed was released and perished in a psychiatric hospital in Paris in 1935.
possible to his colleagues in archaeology, Smith endeavors to
uncover and explain the primary reason behind this complicity: fear of governmental retaliation. Fear on the part of
archaeologists that they will not be able to continue doing their
work. One cannot help but wonder, What is their work, really,
if they are so fearful of seeing and writing about the past?
Because I am a scholar of medieval Armenia and Anatolia,
much of this essay was remarkably relevant to my work; I say
that it is remarkable because one would not normally imagine
a medievalist and an archaeologist of the Bronze and Iron Ages
having very much in common—even if they do work in the
same geographical region. What struck me as so similar was
both the absence of Armenians in work on the Anatolian Iron
Age produced by scholars working outside Turkey and that
same absence in studies of medieval Anatolia, even produced
by scholars working outside Turkey. One cannot argue the same
defense of “fear of retaliation” for historianswho ignoreor gloss
over the historical recordof Armenians in medieval Anatolia (at
least, not to the same extent one can for archaeologists), so it got
me thinking.
Here, I could share anecdotes about various times in academic settings in Turkey that I have been asked to use a term
other than “Armenia” or when others have been asked to do
the same. I could share a list of occasions when colleagues have
tentatively asked questions about Armenian sources—unsure
whether they “even exist” for the medieval period. I could go
on about how some of the most erudite scholars of medieval
Anatolia are unaware of the different registers of the Armenian
language in the medieval period, in spite of the fact that Armenian written sources are relatively robust (even though so
much was destroyed!) for a time period that scholars of the
field often lament has so few sources.
Still, the goal of Smith’s work reallyis not a complaint or even
a criticism—heis asking us, as scholars who work on the region
he calls the Armenian Highland, to think about why this
unseeing of Armenians has become so accepted, why people
who do not live in Turkey are so complicit in it, and how we
might collectively move forward such that the unseeing stops
and we can collectively feel confident that the work being done
is ethical, authentic, and good.
With regard to medievalists, I would tentatively suggest that
the ways in which the general field of Middle Eastern studies
(or “Oriental studies”) was shaped—primarily in “Western”
countries—as separated by language and faith greatly impacted an “unseeing” of Armenians in medieval Anatolia. This
approach unfortunately aligned very comfortably with policies
of various governments of the Republic of Turkey over the
course of the past hundred years that also preferred to ignore
(or destroy) medieval Armenian pasts within their borders,
contextualized within the frameworks of Arabic, Persian, and
Turkish Islamic histories. So when will it stop? As Smith suggests, the only ethical way forward is by taking a challenging
collective step. Byzantinists, inside and outside Turkey, offer
an example—and have experienced important intellectual
advances, in spite of various setbacks. It is now time for
Smith Unseeing the Past S75
archaeologists and historians of the premodern world (who
work beyond Byzantium) to do the same.
Silence is an important theme in Zartarian’s (1994) “Repentance,” where he writes: “This terrified people, with each
new investigation, after each piece of bad news, exchanged
stirring, searching glances. And that was it. That look was
everything—an explanation of and for everything. It was the
entire reflection of that cursed life and incomprehensible lot.”
Silence, understandably, was a significant means of survival
for many Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—they were people largely under attack by a regime
that seems to have felt threatened by their existence. It is remarkable that scholars living beyond the confines of a different,
twenty-first-century government should continue to feel the
need to be silent about Armeniansand their histories because of
similar concerns. Adam Smith encouragesall scholars to see the
significance of their silences and to collectively take courage in
embracing their academic call to ethically consider the past.
Mark Hauser
Program for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Department of
Anthropology, Northwestern University, 1810 Hinman Avenue,
Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA (mark-hauser@northwestern.edu).
24 VII 22
Adam Smith volleys a well-aimed challenge at the collective
practices of unseeing among archaeologists. Whereas archaeologists have tended to focus on how their archaeological
practice may address many of the silences in the historical record, Smith emphasizes “unseeing” as a “skilled practice shaped
by an awareness of structures of power that demand inattention
to the undesirables of the past” and that can create and harden
those silences. This is an important argument and a valuable
extension of a call I authored that “bearing witness” was part of
an archaeological episteme “constrained by existing traditions,
our positions in the field, and our political commitments” in
which archaeologists are trained to “see” (Hauser et al. 2018:535).
Smith amasses compelling evidence demonstrating that the archaeological record of Turkey has been increasingly depopulated
of references to Armenians and their material record. This present absence has translated into hardening dominant stateauthored discourses of genocide denial.
Smith’s article is an important caution as engagement with
descendant communities has become a central element in archaeological practice. As Smith notes, avoiding pasts deemed
undesirable by the Turkish government was not always a practice of archaeologists. Unseeing developed over time and “enrolls scholars and heritage institutions located well beyond the
confines of sovereign governments.” Smith derives unseeing
from China Miéville’s (2009) The City and the City, where
denizens of two distinct cities occupy the same location. To
navigate their cities, these “topolgangers” deliberately unsee
both the people and the built landscape of the other city. Such
work resonates with discussions of temporality, history, and
geography that populate scholarship in the Caribbean (Camp
2002; McKittrick 2013; Trouillot 1995; Wynter 1971). Projecting these insights into Turkey’s recent and distant pasts,
Smith argues that archaeologists navigate the complex and
thorny politics of the past in contemporary Turkey by unseeing
the material record of Armenians and physical evidence of
their genocide.
The politics of the past in the eastern Caribbean supports
this argument. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the removal of indigenous peoples included both acts of
physical violence and discursive erasure in which administrators began to rely on distinctions between “true Caribs” and
escaped slaves who were “pretending,” the latter providing
justifications for expulsion or administrative oversight. These
acts and practices hardened contemporary discourses that
positioned islands as a terra nullius latent with potential that
could be realized only through colonization, slavery, and markets. In French and English colonies and postcolonies, this
enabled an all too easy distinction of a pre-Columbian indigenous past and a colonial past infused with African materialities
and sensibilities—a distinction that shaped land policy, heritage management, and enfranchisement. Such distinctions defined archaeological typologies and material practice and shaped
discussions of who the primary stakeholders are for preColumbian archaeology and historical archaeology.
There are important differences between Smith’s careful
account of Turkey and my own understanding of such dynamics in the Caribbean. One of the most important claims of
Smith’s article is how the skilled practice of unseeing creates
“voids in the historical record easily filled by state-sponsored
polemics.” This observation is an important modification to a
tendency to focus on the production of knowledge about the
past rather than considering the reproduction of the past.
While Smith focuses on discourses that emerge within states
where the work is taking place, the Caribbean is a counterpoint, highlighting that such unseeing can be imported from
colonial regimes. Take the flurry of archaeological activity that
emerged in the twentieth century as the United States began to
acquire territory and military bases in the region. Archaeology
became part of a project that defined the region as “the Caribbean,” divided it from other parts of Latin America, and
made it legible to a historical narrative in which the United
States exerted increasing economic and political hegemony in
the region.
If I might offer an extension from my own experience in the
Caribbean, such unseeing does not get counteracted but accrues. If we consider that the United States is just one of many
former and neocolonial powers that exerted regional influence
through archaeology, it is easy to see how the Caribbean past
becomes a landscape filled with blind spots. Part of the reason
for this is that unseeing, as Smith notes, is not just a matter of
overlooking. It is a skilled practice. This skilled practice translates into the different traditions of how sites get excavated. In
Dominica, for example, much of, although not all of, the archaeology that has been conducted recently has been done by
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