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S76 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
North Americans, following strategies that rely on a limited
number of test pits to characterize a site. The strength of this
approach is that it can be used to develop highly subtle accounts of change over time. The weakness is that it relies on
considerable abstraction to link sites and communities together. Across the channel in Marie Galante, archaeologists
tend to focus on areas uncovered by earth-moving equipment.
The strength of this approach is the ability to highlight the
social complexities of everyday life. Its weakness is that it
conflates histories quite readily. In both cases one can see how
initial propositions such as the interests of the scholar (e.g., a
focus on enslaved life vs. indigenous complexity) might come
to define a site as either an Amerindian site or an AfroCaribbean village when the site in question is probably both.
As archaeologists work to improve their engagement with
the many stakeholders on the ground, Smith’s article reminds
its readers that the denizens of the past landscapes archaeologists study are among the most important. Indeed, if, as some
have suggested, the archaeological record of marginalized
peoples is composed of future-oriented behavior and actions
that people do and materialize in the landscape (Reilly 2019),
then marginalized people in the past are also primary stakeholders. Perhaps I am being too methodologically optimistic
here, but when I survey the exciting scholarship on fugitivity,
survivance, and decolonizing landscapes (Dunnavant 2021;
Philogene Heron 2022; Rivera-Collazo et al. 2020) that scholars are undertaking in the Caribbean, it seems that that unseeing, while not obviated as a skilled practice, has become one
of the first questions to be interrogated.
Lynn Meskell
Department of Anthropology, School of Arts and Sciences, University
of Pennsylvania, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania 19104, USA (lmeskell@sas.upenn.edu), Weitzman School
of Design, University of Pennsylvania, 102 Meyerson Hall, 210 South
34th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA, and Program for
Andrew D. White Professors-at-Large, Cornell University, 14b Day
Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA. 28 III 22
The Armenian genocide, Smith argues, continues to define Turkey’s regional and international politics despite a century of
denial by the state. Furthermore, the erasure of Armenians
from archaeological accounts aligns the discipline with the
Turkish government’s historical revisionism. And that will
have uncomfortable implications for archaeologists.
Smith posits that archaeology has a long history of ignoring,
at times even dismantling, the material remains of certain layers
in pursuit of earlier strata. That selectivity seems ingrained in
our practice, both materially and metaphorically. Practically,
most archaeologists will have at one time or another witnessed
such decisions being made during excavations, the excuses
being time, funding, project scope, or sheer indifference. One
might take comfort in relegating such practices to earlier culturehistorical approaches to fieldwork, although I remain unconvinced. Politically, the resistance to all forms of historical in-
clusion, as Smith suggests, has more disturbing effects. Having
never excavated in Turkey, Smith can say the unsayable: that
Turkey’s denialist policy restricts and polices the research
practice of international archaeology in ways that force archaeologists to unsee.
That unseeing, I would argue, has reached new limits. The
practice of archaeology in Turkey has, in recent years, irrevocably changed. By this I mean increasing surveillance, intimidation, raids on archaeological storerooms, and suppression
of academic freedom.
14
Turkish academics and heritage nongovernmental organizations have been taken to court, fired from
university posts, and imprisoned. Democratic and human
rights norms have been significantly eroded, and Turkey now
findsitselfonthetop10listofautocraticnations.Turkisharchaeologists who sign petitions are instructed to publicly recant,
or excavation permitswill be withheld. The increasing precarity
of permits lies at the heart of the current reluctance, silencing,
and self-censorship on political matters that Smith outlines.
That precarity exists for nationals and foreigners alike. Unfortunately,Shankland’s1990s ethnography reflectsa markedly
different era when Turkey was moving toward liberal democracy and Europeanization policies with the aim of European
Union accession. That failure and the rise of Erdoğan’s rightwing political party (Adalet ve Kalkın ma Partisi) have led to democratic backsliding, further propelled by a failed military coup.
I was in Istanbul July 15, 2016, during the attempted coup.
Protesters shouted “kill the secularists” on my street, the famed
Istiklal Cadessi. It was bloody, and in the aftermath thousands
of military officials, police officers, judges, professors, teachers,
journalists, and civil servants were purged. Erdoğan instigated
a brutal crackdown, including torture and detention, further
extending his already significant personal powers. Over those
days of fear and violence, Turkey was host to the UNESCO
World Heritage meetings. The strategy for chairing the event
was to control the controversial nomination of the archaeological landscape of Ani, featuring Armenian churches from
the tenth to thirteenth centuries CE. Armenian participation
was excluded from the dossier. Despite United Nations security
concerns, participants were urged to return the day after the
coup to discuss Ani. Yet live transmission of the session was
blocked and did not resume till Turkish ambassador Huseyin
Botsalı took the floor to be congratulated on Ani’s inscription.
Turkey had banned the United Nations broadcast, just like
coverage of the coup. Erdoğan’s government and its “new truth
regime” hid behind the rhetoric of multiculturalism that agencies such as UNESCO hope to promulgate. But heritage recognition can be mobilized to open new domains for manipulation, injury, and revictimization. For this reason I chose Ani
and not Palmyra for the cover of A Future in Ruins: UNESCO,
World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (Meskell 2018).
It is the normalization of conflict and the slow violence of
the state implicating our own historical discipline that is the
14. https://www.al-monitor.com/ originals/2020/10/turkey-seed
-bank-british-archaeobotanical-erdogan-ata-tohum.html.
Smith Unseeing the Past S77
real danger. Archaeologists are reluctant to do more, say more
because of the consequences for their research, of having to
leave yet another country, as an older generation did with Iran
and Iraq (see also Apaydin and Hassett 2019). British, American, and some European projects are the last holdouts, desperate to hold on to concessions when it is clear that the Turkish
government wants international teams out or significantly curtailed. Ever-changing legislation and onerous requirements
have made that intent obvious. Some pursuing “community
archaeology” cannot even venture out locally. Smith is right to
be critical. Seeing firsthand the security experts, terrorism
training, safety drills, and site reinforcements in place to ensure
that excavations continue, as I did in 2016, further confirms the
resolve of foreign archaeologists to remain. I suspect that older
generations will not be swayed by Smith’s arguments and see
their work operating outside national politics.
It is not only Armenian erasure, as Smith effectively lays
bare, but also that of the Kurds and other minorities within the
Turkish state. Diyarbakır is another case in point, with its
multiethnic history cleansed and sanctioned through Turkey’s
World Heritage inscription. Turkey’s program of heritage
erasure effectively “conserved away” the material remains of
history in Ani: overrestoration in the 1990s resulted in reconstructions that erased Christian symbols, just as it did the
genocide. As Smith, along with Watenpaugh, Papazian, Biner,
and others, have documented, there has been a century of
dispossession alienating descendant communities from land,
legacy, and memory. For me, this only reinforces the prevalence of “negative heritage,” those sites that hold conflicting or
adverse associations for the national imaginary, that operate as
a locus of social meaning, material practices, technologies of
power, and political configurations. But where other nations
have harnessed their national shame for positive didactic purposes (Meskell 2002:558), Turkey has charted an alternative
path to erase or misappropriate the places and people that it
refuses to acknowledge within the national imaginary. That
refusal has implications for archaeologists that we are only just
beginning to recognize. Smith’s contribution is a necessary step
in that reckoning.
Leila Papoli-Yazdi
School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Malmö,
Sweden (leila.papoli-yazdi@mau.se). 5 V 22
A Revolution Based on Shame: Toward Seeing
the Unseen
No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is
already revolution of a kind. (Marx 1843)
Past: The Constructed Past
The first two decades of the twentieth century started with
drastic transformations in the Persian and Ottoman Empires.
Two years before the end of the First World War (1916), the
Sykes-Picot Agreement, which led to the division of the Ottoman Empire, was reached. This was the year before the great
famine in Iran (Abrahamian 2013) when many people starved
to death. That happened only two years after the Armenian
genocide was committed by the Jeunes Turcs (Bloxham 2003).
The political transformations resulted in changing traditional ethnic diversity in the region. To establish a modern
nation-state, the governments of both Iran and Turkey (see
Whittemore 1943) needed a constructed national narrative of
history. As a matter of fact, the mythical narratives had lost
their traditional functions immediately after the rise of modern political structures.
Before all these happenings, archaeology was imported to
the region (Papoli-Yazdi and Garazhian 2012) with the permission of monarchs and states in the nineteenth century. In
the long run, if antiquarianism was busier with looting precious objects, colonial and nationalist archaeologistswere more
involved in reinterpreting and translating the past to the present, which led to massive population engineering in the twentieth century.
On the basis of such a trajectory, nationalism is still acting as
the main dilemma of the discipline in the region. The Turkish
and Persian nationalist-biased archaeologies overlook the existence of minorities, impoverished people, the “Others,” women,
the LGBTQ community, enslaved people, and any “mistakes”
or “mass murders” (Dezhamkhooy and Papoli-Yazdi 2018).
The construction of such a purified interpretation of past heritage owes its existence to all the archaeologists who follow a
biased framework or the scholars who deliberatelyignore all the
violent incidents happening adjacent to the sites where they are
excavating (e.g., Lloyd 1955).
Present: Eyes Wide Shut
As a matter of fact, the “unseen” Armenian genocide and its
dark heritage are not an exception to ignoring a chapter of
history by archaeologists. The genocide is, in fact, one of the
many victims of systematic oblivion and a powerful example of
how people in power might misuse archaeology.
The term “unseeing archaeology” suggested by Adam Smith
to describe the relationship between archaeology and the Armenian genocide not only elucidates that “archaeology” ignores the brutality of power structures willingly but also serves
as a helpful term to explain how the networks of nationalist
and colonialist archaeologists work.
Smith also put his finger on the oppression of resistant
archaeologists. Those archaeologists who put their efforts into
uncovering neglected facts and heritage would be gradually
ignored and exiled to isolation by the mainstream archaeology
in the region. The well-known case of Charles Burney and the
narratives about him are only one example. In a broader context, the silence about the under-pressure groups of people is
entirely evident in the international journals focusing on the
S78 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
region. Most of the articles on the region are mainly about the
deep past and so-called glorious culture. Foreign archaeologists sometimes prefer to remain silentbecause they fear losing
the privilege to conduct projects. To get to the point, with the
dismissal of the resistant archaeologists, the highlighted chapters of the region’s history would be limited to a few topics, such
as progress, advancement, and homogeneous nations.
Back to the case of the Armenian genocide, it is of note that
from a very general perspective, not only the genocide as an
“event” but also its consequences as a “process” have been
neglected by archaeology. Last year, I interviewed four Armenian families whose grandparents escaped to Iran during
the genocide. The formal history of Iran is silent about the last
wave of Armenians (and Caucasians) who entered the country
during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast, the
focus of several contributions and projects is on the Armenians
who were forced to move to the Safavid capital, Isfahan, in the
seventeeth century. One key reason for this neglect might
originate from the proactive role of Armenian and Georgian
fighters in the Constitutional Revolution of Iran (1905–1911),
which was introduced broadly by the government as a movement organized only by Turkish and Persian leaders.
Future: A Revolution Based on Shame
Adam Smith’s article introduces a strong case of the misuse of
archaeology to manipulate history. It is a matter of fact that the
discipline developed during the past two centuries as a way to
support the emergence of constructed nation-states and Orientalism (Çelik 2016; Galaty and Watkinson 2004; Trigger 1995).
On the other hand, engaged archaeologists usually have enormous problems providing funding for their research projects.
At the same time, the international institutes and foundations
in the Global North prefer to invest money in projects that do
not violate the intentions of political structures in other countries. Meanwhile, the memories of the suffering of people who
lost their lives, still are under pressure, or are displaced are fading,
while the scattered and vulnerable material culture remaining
from the brutal actions of nation-states is being ruined and removed. By helping modern states strengthen the idea of pure
race, a glorious past, and constructed nations, archaeology has
had a vital role in the continuation of conflict in places of the
world such as Caucasia, Turkey, and the Middle East.
To see the unseen, engaged archaeologists should start questioning the politics of funding and publishing in the discipline.
Obviously, there are teams of archaeologists working with the
governments’ financing in countries ruled by dictators, which
encourages them to systematize oblivion.
We archaeologists, through such criticism, may step forward toward a narrative of history in which all people from
every group will have a voice. The long-term unseeing of the
Armenian genocide by archaeologists also gives a proper example of the influence of present-day archaeologists’ interpretation about the past in the future.
Susan Pollock
Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie, Freie Universität Berlin,
Fabeckstrasse 23–25, Raum 0.1051, 14195 Berlin, Germany
(spollock@zedat.fu-berlin.de). 1 VII 22
Adam Smith makes a powerful case for the role of archaeology
in the silencing or “unseeing” of portions of the past, specifically those that state powers oppose. Histories of archaeology
have demonstrated the extent to which the field has been and
continues to be entwined with state agendas or easily co-opted
by them, not just in one region but globally. Smith shows us
how well this works by means of self-censorship and vague
fears of retribution, even in the absence of explicit prohibitions
or direct intimidation.
The author begins by juxtaposing unseeing with archaeology as a witness. He is quite right to highlight the potential and
the actuality of unseeing, as it reminds us that witnessing has to
be an active undertaking, a deliberate seeing, and, in many
cases, also listening. It involves intention and choice, and these
make the act of witnessing political (Bernbeck 2017; Bernbeck
and Pollock 2018; Pollock 2020). Smith touches on this from
the opposite side, as it were, through his discussion of unseeing
as skilled practice shaped by attentiveness to the desires of the
powerful. An important intervention can be proposed here,
drawing on the “counterforensics” practiced by Forensic Architecture, a forensic approach that is informed in particular
by architectural and spatial analysis and that seeks to uncover
the crimes of the state (Forensic Architecture 2014; Weizman
2019). With its attention to materiality in all its facets, an archaeological perspective in combination with that of counterforensics holds enormous potential.
This potential is also connected to a different side of archaeology: its well-known tendency to destroy that which it
studies through one of its central activities—excavation. But
this destructive activity also extends what we (can) know by posing probing questions and directing our increasingly sophisticated
methodological repertoire to answering them. In this way, archaeological research can produce something new out of what no
longerappearstobethere.Itdoessobyevaluatingandinterpreting material traces to reveal what has been forgotten, hidden,
unseen. As archaeologists, we know that traces of that which has
been denied, neglected, or even presumptively erased are almost
always still present. This is so even when they amount to the
testimonyof absenceor the negative, such as a cut in the ground
that removed what was once there or the chemical residues of
organic remains that have long decayed. As Smith argues, we
archaeologists need to “train our lenses to see that which is no
longer present, the residues and marks left by erasure itself.”
But it is a matter of not only what is found or which traces are
recovered but also the act of doing so. In the case of archaeology, this means recovering—often literally unearthing—what is
buried or otherwise hidden. The conduct of archaeology, in
particular in the field, leaves open the possibility of finding the
hitherto unseen, unknown, and even unexpected, thereby unleashing the potential of witnessing.It can be connected to what
Smith Unseeing the Past S79
Reinhard Bernbeck and I have referred to as an archaeology of
perpetrators (Bernbeck and Pollock 2007).
Smith contends that both ethnoarchaeology and community archaeology are complicit in the project of unseeing in
Anatolia. Ethnoarchaeology emphasizes continuity, thereby
obscuring temporal differences, as well as homogeneity. In the
case of community archaeology, Smith asks how archaeologists
can engage descendant communities in research and heritage
projects if many or most of their members have been killed or
exiled. This question is in turn connected to another one: Who
is—and who is not—part of a community? What happens
when the (political) interests of “the community” are opposed,
perhaps even diametrically, to those of archaeologists and the
kinds of projects involving marginalized groups that they wish
to pursue? Smith implies that in a case such as that of Armenians in Turkey,community archaeology reveals its overlynaive
startingpremises. The question is whether it can be recuperated
if it were to be retheorized in a more sophisticated way that pays
attention to context, interests, and power relations and that goes
beyond a simple dichotomy between the interests of the state
and those of a purportedly marginalized community.
Smith’s plea for turning the skilled practice of unseeing into
one of deliberate seeing and indeed of witnessing could quite
well be rephrased as an argument for the relevance of an archaeology of the recent past. An archaeology directed to that
which happened “just yesterday” (or even today) grapples with
many of the sorts of issues and questions raised in this paper,
not least of which is an attention to suffering (Pollock 2016;
Pollock and Bernbeck 2016). It is a sad recognition that the
practice of such an archaeology borders on the impossible in
many places in the world, exactly because it often takes an
active witnessing role. The question that this paper poses but
understandably does not resolve is whether and, if so, how that
can be changed. Framing it in terms of personal courage is not
enough, even though the actions of individual scholars should
in no way be discounted. Smith’s mention of solidarity among
colleagues in other disciplines is important, but while it is a
step that can only be welcomed, it, too, is insufficient. The institutionalized structures and structural violence that are part
of archaeology’s connection to the state will need to be radically rethought and reimagined.
Alice von Bieberstein
Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage,
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany (alice
.bieberstein@hu-berlin.de). 4 V 22
In this important contribution to the study of genocide denial,
Adam T. Smith offers us an almost archaeological reading of
archaeological practice yet, from his perspective, under mirrored terms. In other words, he is trying to do what he sees
archaeologists as failing to do—namely, account for critical
absences in the archaeological record and thereby reflect on
the conditions of the production of archaeological knowledge.
Smith thus addresses and tackles the epistemic, ethical, and
political stakes of archaeological practice and writing by foregrounding the particular conditions under which these stakes
become meaningful in the context of Turkey and in particular
eastern Turkey, a region that was part of historic Armenia until
the Armenian genocide. Denial of this genocide has been at the
heart of Turkish state formation ever since. Through a detailed
study of its manifestation, Smith is trying to understand how
archaeology, despite the discipline’s own idealized selfunderstanding as bearing “witness” to history, has been coopted into this regime of denial. Because what Smith finds
in the archaeology of the region is an almost deafening silence
on its Armenian history, an eclipse from the archaeological
imagination.
Smith sheds light on two dimensions of this complicity. The
first is material-epistemic. In much of the paper, he meticulously tracks how Armenian history is rendered or reproduced
as absent in archaeological writing. He lists numerous examples: “safer” periods are privileged, while more “conflictual” ones
are neglected; Armenians are disarticulated from the history of
other dynasties and communities—for instance, in the medieval
period—while they vanish altogether in the literature on the
Islamic era. They might appear in one place but then not in
another, revealing how denial works in a way so that things never
quite add up. In archaeological surveys, traces are misascribed,
misnamed, or altogether occluded. While Armenians might be
more present in ethnoarchaeology, the rupturing violence of
1915 disappears as a force shaping the present. Last, heritage at
large tends to be deethnicized and even Turkified.
Smith mainly teases out the specificity of the case by relating
it to the broader literature on heritage, destruction, and archaeology, noting that we are faced not so much with a kind of
negative or dissonant heritage but with a double negation
under the sign of denial, whereby the very absence of heritage
is itself “unseen.” While I recognize that Smith’s main intention lies in holding up a mirror to the discipline of archaeology,
I would be curious to see what would emerge if the discussion
were more squarely placed as a contribution to the understanding of genocide denial. Many scholars have addressed the
history and present of denialism in Turkey, including its networks and mechanisms (Bayraktar 2010; Cheterian 2018; Dadrian 1999; Dixon 2010; Göçek 2015; Hovannisian 1999;
Sarafian 1999; Suciyan 2016; Suny, Göcek, and Naimark 2011;
Ternon 1999). They have studied its main tropes and effects on
research and science (Bayraktar 2010; Ekmekçioğlu 2021;
Ternon 1999) and how it plays out in particular in the field of
publishing (Maksudyan 2009), novels (Galip 2019), art and
cultural policies (Karaca 2021), law (Ertür 2019), and historiography (Nichanian 2009). Settings outside Turkey (Auron
2003; Schaefgen 2006) as well as the role of non-Turkish (international) scholars are not absent from this literature either.
Smith adds a rich and valuable case study of the complicity of the
field of archaeology, but as we continue to labor to understand
the phenomenon of denial, what more could be learned from
Smith’s contribution?
S80 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
One interesting aspect that emerges quite powerfully for me,
even if it is not rendered explicit, is not simply the participation
of international scholars in maintaining and reproducing
Turkey’s regime of genocide denial but the particular role that
academia’s own prestige economy plays in this. Particularly
against the background of rising labor precarity, the references
to fears around research permits and possible retributions
forcefully reveal the extent to which members of the international research community (have to) subscribe to the logics of
this prestige economy that mark professional commitments
in the long continuum between “careers” and surviving in the
academic job market. Smith refers to how complicity and silence were “bought” during the genocide through the redistribution and transfer of Armenian wealth to various fractions
of the local population, a process that entailed the destruction,
erasure, and Turkification of the landscape. The mechanisms
of profit in the case of archaeological work today are of course
different, but still, there is an economy of exchange at work
that attaches itself smoothly to the logics of academic knowledge production: archaeological data in exchange for the unspoken promise to contain the history of violence within unthreatening “whispers.”
This links up to the second, affective or subconscious dimension of complicity covered in the article. Smith shows that
while archaeologists working in Turkey seem not to have received proper and comprehensive training in the local politics
of history, the force of rumors and anecdotes is sufficient to
trigger sociopsychic responses of repression and censorship,
what Michael Taussig(1999) referred to as public secrecy—that
is, the knowledge that surfaces only to be buried anew. While
thus clearly also universal, the particular affective structures at
work take, in this case, the almost ironic yet also frightening
form of an anxiety of finding evidence as such, given that such
evidence would create ethicopolitical tensions between disciplinary protocol and the diffuse yet powerful exigency to know
what not to know. Smith recounts reactions of repression,
shame, and censorship culminating in the disturbing image of
archaeological remains being chucked into the same river that
carried the bodies of murdered Armenians in 1915, thus repeating a historical gesture, if once removed. What is striking is
that even though nothing is ever made explicit, the archaeologistsappear to know very well what is expected of them. Denial
can thus latch on and mobilize psychopolitical structures and
responses that reach well beyond a particular setting, raising,
once more, critical questions about “other” conditions of possibility that render denial possible.
Heghnar Watenpaugh
Art History Program, University of California, Everson Hall,
One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, USA
(hwatenpaugh@ucdavis.edu). 4 V 22
“Turkey’s erasure of Armenian material heritage has taken
place in secret, not as spectacle” (emphasis added), writes
Adam T. Smith in his thoughtful and provocative article. He
considers a conundrum in the discipline of archaeology, yet his
conclusions resonate with any discipline that takes the past as
its subject—including history, art history, and cultural heritage. More than other fields, archaeology has made exemplary
strides in acknowledging its origins in nineteenth-century
imperialism and in critiquing the baggage that comes with it.
Instead, contemporary archaeology centers professional ethics.
As Smith shows, contemporary archaeology prioritizes the
engagement of local communities by experts. It understands its
goal to be the discovery of the past through its traces, and it
privileges “truth telling.” Even further, a trend that has gained
momentum in archaeology is that of “bearing witness” by
shedding light on marginalized pasts or episodes of violence.
Yet Smith’s article reveals that the actual practice of archaeol-
ogy in certain times and places puts tremendous pressure on
these ethical goals. In the case of Western academic archaeologists who work in Turkey, these pressures take the form of
career demands and the institutional infrastructure of the Turkish state, where archaeological research by foreign archaeologistsmust be thoroughlyvettedto receiverevokable excavation
permits and excavations must feature state-appointed Turkish
experts who are collaborating professionals but can also be
agents of surveillance. In these contexts, archaeologists feel
compelled to abide by state narratives and norms, especially as
they concern certain pressure points. These pressure points
have to do with the state’s policy toward what can or cannot be
said about the past, what can or cannot be acknowledged, what
can be voiced, and what must be silenced. The material presence of Armenians is one of these pressure points. Anything
that is seen to indicate “Armenianness”—whether it is inscriptions in the Armenian alphabet and language, churches and
sacred sites associated with the Armenian Church, the ethnicity
of former inhabitants, place names that have a link to the Armenian language, material and textual sources that speak to the
presence of Armenian communities from the deep past to the
contemporary period—all must be subject to a strict regime of
silencing.
Within these norms, the Armenian presence in what is today the Turkish nation-state can be only partially acknowledged in a few selected and circumscribed places and represented by a few sites or buildings, such as Ani, the expansive
medieval city located on the border between Armenia and
Turkey that was recently placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This silencing has little to do with theory, method, or
interpretation. Rather, the source of this silencing is the Armenian genocide and its long-simmering aftermath, its proactive policy of denial by Turkish state institutions (Erbal et al.
2015). This includes not only the denial of massacres and dispossessionsthat took place more than a century ago but also the
continuing persecution of remaining Armenians in Turkey and
the suppression of traces of Armenian communities. The end
point of such a view of history includes the recasting of the past,
but even further, it also projects onto the past an imagined
future where Armenians will never have existed (Watenpaugh
Smith Unseeing the Past S81
2019:10–11). Archaeology is an active tool in this process of
negation and erasure. The archaeologists surveyed by Smith
who were impelled to abide by these rules were conscious of the
measure of what was being demanded of them. For the most
part, they internalized these norms and became their enforcers
for themselves and their peers—to the point where “archaeol-
ogy [became] an accessory to the crime . . .a collaboratorin the
Turkish government’s continuing erasure of the material
remains of Armenian communities.” They became keepers of a
state’s secrets.
In my own fields of art history and cultural heritage,a similar
process of silencing obtains. Art history narrates the artistic
creations of the past in a historical framework, while cultural
heritage takes the elements of the past, exhibits them in the
present, and preserves them for the future. At each stage, numerous decisions must be made to select materials and to frame
them in a particular way. Pressure can be exerted at each of
these points. As in the case of archaeology, art historical research in state archives and libraries in Turkey requires an official research permit in most cases. This presents opportunities
for “vetting” and for scrutiny. For art historians working in
Turkey, the norm has been to avoid the Armenian layer of the
country’s past or to limit its acknowledgment. This remains
true despite a recent movement to challenge such norms.
Cultural heritage in Turkey is perhaps even more enmeshed
in strong state institutions. In surveying the evolution of the
institutions of patrimony in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey,
Edhem Eldem (2015) observed a pattern of “ subordination of
the entire notion of heritage to political and ideological priorities” (67). He commented that the systematic privileging of
political concerns in cultural heritage distinguishes Turkey
from other states rich in layers of heritage that attract international archaeologists—such as Egypt, Syria, or Iraq. Specifically, heritage institutions bear down on the remaining Armenian community in Turkey, who must witness their living
heritage be taken over and turned into anonymized patrimony.
Melissa Bilal observed that for Armenian citizens of Turkey,
heritage discourse constitutes a discourse of power, one that
dispossesses them and alienates them from the heritage of their
own ancestors (Bilal et al. 2022; Kricorian 2019).
For Armenians outside Turkey, whether citizens of the Republic of Armenia or members of the global Armenian diaspora, Peter Balakian (2013) writes, “The ruins of Armenian
culture inside present-day Turkey are captive sites to which
Armenians have no organic or even accessible relationship”
(83; emphasis added). Balakian was thinking in particular of
the city of Ani on the Armenia-Turkey border, which has
remained closed since 1993. Ani spent much of the twentieth
century experiencing vandalism, neglect, and destructive
“restorations” until a new phase in the early 2000s. Christina
Maranci reflected on being an architectural historian who is
also a grandchild of genocide survivors and who studies the
medieval past of the Armenian community among state institutions that rarely name the group or acknowledge its history. Maranci (2020) observed “ghosts inside and outside the
buildings at Ani” (39). She called “ghosts” the remains of
whitewashed paintings or damaged reliefs whose traces are still
faintly discernible. But more broadly, ghosts are nebulous and
unwanted presences that in places like Ani remind visitors of
that which must remain unsaid, must be kept secret.
What does this portend? What does it mean for archaeologists or other professionals to effectively turn themselves into
the keepers of secrets for a nation-state that more often than
not is not their own? And how can this be reconciled with the
increasing movement in these professions to center social
justice and insist on the role that professionals must play in
terms of truth telling and bearing witness? In his analysis of the
complexities of discourses of witnessing, Jacques Derrida fastened on the notion of
sworn testimony that is untruthful. For secrets, even when they
remain concealed, “[speak] to the other by keeping quiet, keeping something quiet from him. In keeping quiet, in keeping silent, it still addresses” (Derrida 2005:96;
quiet, this silence can be deafening.
“secret” as in the case of perjury—a
15
Lazzara 2018). This
Reply
Filling the Void: Heritage and Unseeing
Inspired by Alfredo González-Ruibal’s introspection, I want to
begin a response to my thoughtful and generous colleagues
with a look inward as well. To be succinct, I hated writing this
article. I began the research in 2015, the centennial year of
the Armenian genocide, and labored fretfully over the text as
the material I was compiling got darker and more damning. I
eventually took a two-year hiatus from the project in part
because of the untimely death of Tony Sagona, whom I admired greatly as a colleague and as an archaeologist but who
also plays a central role in my analysis. But I also knew that I
would have to finish the project, so I eventually returned to it,
albeit with little joy. González-Ruibal is right that archaeologists are not happy talking about “the power of archaeology to
erase the history of those whose history has been stolen.” It is a
sad, miserable, and depressing endeavor. But it is also an obligation that we strive to lift the burden of communities oppressed by pasts that haunt the present.
Archaeologists are generally not trained to enter the maelstrom of political conflict. Indeed, if anything, archaeologists
have been trained to avoid it, flowing like quicksilver away
from conflict zones and then returning just as swiftly as security and permits can be arranged, no questions asked about
intervening calamities, perpetrators, or victims. But Goshgarian really presses the issue home when she writes, “What is
[archaeology’s] work, really, if they are so fearful of seeing and
writing about the past?” The point is well taken. What is the
15. I thank Michael J. Lazzara for discussing this essay with me.
S82 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
point of excavating yet another Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze
Age, Iron Age, or classical site in Turkey if the cost is the
discipline’s integrity? Scholars and institutions need to find an
answer to Goshgarian’s reasonable question. How can archaeological work in Turkey be both active and principled? And if it
cannot be principled, should it be active? Or to generalize more
broadly, is there, as González-Ruibal asks, a dark truth about
the discipline as a whole that our abilities to unsee reveal? I will
come back to this question at the end of these remarks. But
there are at least some signs that the discipline as practiced in
some parts of the world may be changing as we come to better
understand archaeology’s authority within the twenty-first-
century formation of the nation-state, its ethical obligations to
disempowered communities, and the real harms that can arise
from ignoring injustices whose traces define the archaeological record, its presences, and its voids (Flewellen et al. 2021;
Franklin et al. 2020; Lyons and Supernant 2020; MarekMartinez 2021).
Laurent Dissard, Lynn Meskell, and Heghnar Watenpaugh
all call attention in their comments to how voids in archaeological discourses come to be filled by state narratives. Archaeology tends to assume a kind of innocence about pasts unseen, as if they were merely overlooked or perhaps not in the
scope of the work undertaken. So it is important that archaeologists understand the narratives that fill the gaps of what
they leave unseen and unsaid. As Meskell notes, Turkey has
folded two major sites on the Armenian Highlands into
UNESCO’s World Heritage List over the past decade: Diyarbakır Fortress and the Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape
(inscribed in 2015) and Ani (inscribed in 2016). These sites
represent Turkey’s most visible international efforts to fill the
voids left by archaeology’s unseeing. But the proposals for the
two sites differ in important ways, as do the fates of the monuments they seek to preserve.
The UNESCO nomination for Diyarbakır is direct about the
history of Armenian occupation in eastern Turkey: “Distant
descendant of an ancient city of the Bronze Age, [Diyarbakır]
was successively Aramaic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Median, Seleucid, Armenian, Parthian, and finally alternatively Persian
and Roman” (UNESCO 2014:81). Even the nomination’s account of the traditional multicultural fabric of the city takes
pains to identify the now lost legacy of minorities, including
Armenians. Moreover, the nomination preserves a sense of the
city’s enduring Armenian heritage, as lists of surviving monuments repeatedly invoke Surp Giragos, an Armenian church
restored in 2011. And a sense of the interests of descendant
stakeholders is also quietly visible in the outreach efforts described in the nomination, which includes signage in multiple
languages, including Armenian. What the Diyarbakır nomination forwards is the kind of cosmopolitan vision of the
Armenian Highland that was manifest in the earliest archaeological work in the region.
The Diyarbakır nomination was not advanced by Turkey’s
central government but by the city’s Kurdish municipal authorities at the time, led by Abdullah Demirbaş, then mayor of
the city’s old district. In addition to promoting the UNESCO
effort, Demirbaş aided the restoration of Surp Giragos and
promoted the reinscription of Armenian, Assyrian, and Kurdish minorities into the city’s urban fabric. “We want the people
living in the city to realize that, historically, Diyarbakır has always been a multicultural city” (Demirbaş quoted in Khatchadourian 2015). Demirbaş has even made reference to the
genocide, saying, “Our grandparents, incited by others, committed wrongs, but we, their grandchildren, will not repeat
them” (Demirbaş quoted in Khatchadourian 2015). This inclusiveness indicates the willingness of some state actors at the
time to illuminate what we might call “oppositional heritage,”
drawing attention to what the state—and archaeology—refuse
to see. However, the fate of Surp Giragos, a central feature of
Diyarbakır’s UNESCO nomination, is instructive. The church
had been expropriated following the genocide and converted
into a warehouse, left to slowly decay as the remaining Armenian community slipped away. In 2008, with support from
Demirbaş, a group of diaspora Armenians initiated a restoration of the church at a reported cost of $5 million, opening it for
the celebration of Mass in 2011. But in 2016, amid a renewed
turn to authoritarianism, the Turkish government again expropriated Surp Giragos, restarting the process of collapse and
decay and reenacting the seizure of Armenian assets (fig. 6).
In contrast, the UNESCO nomination for Ani was forwarded by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and it
looks quite different (UNESCO 2016). The city of Ani served
as the capital of the Bagratid Armenian Kingdom from AD 961
to 1045 (Hakobyan 2001:16ff.). Ani lingers in the Armenian
national imagination more than perhaps any other site, as it
represents a broad flourishing of Armenian arts, society, religion, and politics during the later Middle Ages (Der Manuelian
2001).
Immediately following the end of the Cold War, surveys and
excavations were undertaken at Ani by a Turkish-French collaboration, followed by a program of restoration initiated in
1993 by Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The primary foci for conservation at the site once known as “the city of
1,001 churches” (Der Manuelian 2001) were the Mosque of
Manuchihr, the palace, and the outer ramparts. At the same
time, the most acclaimed structure, the Church of the Redeemer, was left in danger of collapse, and the elements of the
site that spoke directly to its Armenian history were neglected.
At the Lion’s Gate (fig. 7), the entrance to the city, the restoration program altered the configuration of the city emblem,
the lion relief, removing the cross that had been formed by
colored diamond-shaped tuff blocks surmounting an animal
figure in relief (Watenpaugh 2014:538). As Heghnar Watenpaugh (2014) has noted in her detailed account of Ani’s appropriation into Turkish heritage ideology, official signage at
the site consistently downplays the Armenian layers of Ani’s
history: “Even when signage indicates the names of rulers,
churches, or dynasties, official publications about the site
rarely, if ever, use the term ‘Armenian’
to describe either the
ethnicity of former inhabitants, the religion to which churches
Smith Unseeing the Past S83
Figure 6. Surp Giragos, Diyarbakır. A, In 2008, before restoration. q Nevit Dilmen, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en). B, In 2012, after restoration (Dosseman, Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons). C, In 2017,
after reexpropriation by the Turkish government (Armenian Weekly 2017).
are dedicated, or the alphabet and language of inscriptions”
(535). It is in this context that the Turkish government successfully advanced Ani to be inscribed in the UNESCO register
in 2015, a chaotic process Meskell (2018) describes in detail.
As Meskell points out, what was glaringly absent from
Turkey’s Ani nomination was any sense of the Armenian community as stakeholders in the process of preservation and interpretation. Where the Diyarbakır proposal set the reengagement of Armenians and other exiled minorities at the heart of a
counterheritage project, the Ani cultural management plan makes
nomentionofArmenianstakeholderswithinorbeyondTurkey.
The elevation of Ani to a World Heritage Site has ampli-
fied Turkey’s cultural expropriation of Anatolia’s Armenian
past, a final act of symbolic violence that tears the site away
from the Armenian community that has long curated its memory. This is the kind of heritage ideology that fills the voids left
by archaeology’s techniques of unseeing.
Heritage ideologies like those reshaping Ani’s past are
fundamental to sustaining policies of genocide denial. Von Bieberstein and Göçek both observe how denial emerges out of
mass violence and then warps civil society around its agenda of
secrecy, untruth, and falsification. This is where what von
Bieberstein calls “the academic prestige economy” works powerfully to conspire in erasure. Archaeologists need not actively
S84 Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022
The affective result of things not adding up is a constant
sense of doubt and disorientation, or gaslighting, in the current
parlance. Trying to locate the Armenian presence in the archaeology of the Highlands is an exercise in the uncanny. A
sense of presence that eludes one’s efforts at apprehension.
González-Ruibal uses the term “haunting,” and this feels exactly right. It is not just the phantoms of eliminated peoples
that appear as a spectral presence across the region but also the
unsettled spirits of the perpetrators. Watenpaugh describes the
ghosts felt by Christina Maranci when she visited Ani, spirits
that, as González-Ruibal intuits, “trouble the present and indict the living.” Haunting is a way of describing the weight of
the past that presses on survivors of mass violence and their
descendants, especially genocides denied. Descendants are
never accorded closure as false heritage ideologies repeatedly
retraumatize new generations forced to bear the burden of
demands for truth and justice. Unseeing makes these burdens
on descendant communities heavier. The goal of an archaeology that sees injustice and brings itself into the maelstrom is
to lighten the weight borne by the descendants of mass violence, to see their pain and that of their ancestors, and to acknowledge that it is real.
What I overlooked in my analysis but several commenters brought forward was how senses beyond sight can be deployed to attune observers to absent presences, to the ghosts
that haunt archaeological places. Listening, as Pollock and
González-Ruibal both note, is vitally important. To be heard
can be just as vital as to be seen. But just as the visual sense can
Figure 7. Lion’s Gate at Ani before (A) and after (B) restoration
during the 1990s (photo credit: A by Aram Vruyr, B by Samvel
Karapetyan; both reproduced by permission of Research on
Armenian Architecture).
unsee, auditory senses can be filled with either noise or what
Watenpaugh describes as a “deafening silence,” an unhearing.
Perhaps archaeology might be thought to rely most heavily on
touch and the tangibility of its evidence. But erasure creates
absences of tactile sensation. As Hauser notes in his contribu-
participate in heritage ideologies bent on erasure. They can
simply do nothing. Silence becomes absence, absence a void
open to be filled by state polemics. Watenpaugh brings the
long-term program of genocide denial to its logical end, noting
how unseeing “projects onto the past an imagined future where
Armenians will never have existed.” To take this observation
one step further, once Armenians never existed, then the genocide of this population that never was could not have taken
place. Erasing the victims from the past also serves to cover up
the crime.
But archaeology does possess powerful tools for seeing the
past, if it chooses to use them. I was taken with von Bieberstein’s description of how denial “works in a way so that things
never quite add up.” This was also my sense when trying to
match archaeological excavations with historical accounts of
known Armenian villages. It was incredibly difficult to get
things to add up, not just because the village names and toponyms had all been changed but because archaeologists were
maddeningly elusive about the recent pasts of the sites where
they worked. Archaeological unseeing aids in making sure that
things never quite add up. But this dissonance, if attended to,
is also a key indicator of genocide and denial.
tion, unseeing accrues, which I take to mean that it compounds
across “observers.” Hence one scholar’s unseeing becomes the
baseline for another and another and thereafter becomes fact,
complete with a dense citationalfield. There are no collectionsto
touch or objects to hold.
As several comments indicate, my analysis does not clearly
identify the source of programs of unseeing, instead gesturing
rather broadly to the government and state, terms I use interchangeably. The comments here have more clearly pointed
to the complexity of identifying the institutional locus of denial
and the demands it places on foreign archaeologists. Meskell
and Pollock both point to the state and its determined, institutionally centered threats of violence. Indeed, it is quite difficult to overstate the role of governments in the conduct or
misconduct of archaeology globally, and I agree with Pollock
that the discipline must reckon with its political co-optation in
a strident new era of nationalist chauvinism.
But Göçek and Papoli-Yazdi are also correct to point to the
permeation of governmental objectives into civil society. The
relationship between state and subject is where the work of
national formation gets done; hence archaeology must
way to renegotiate its relationshipto both. Göçekis undoubtedly
find a
Smith Unseeing the Past S85
correct that at root the core problem is the “exclusionary nationstate framework,” as it has been adopted globally as a framework
to support nativism and chauvinism. However, the exclusionary
ethnonational state is only one form of the modern European
conception of nationality. That form of postabsolutist political
society also generated accounts of national belonging that privileged tolerance of all but the intolerant (e.g., Locke) and
cosmopolitanism(e.g., Erasmusof Rotterdam). So to import an
exclusionary form of the nation-state suitable to ethnic eradication rather than one open to multiculturalism is not solely a
problem of the source material. It is also a consequence of
lasting legacies of violence and hatred that become embedded
in civil society, ready for mobilization.
Any renegotiation of archaeology’s relationship to both
state and civil society will require new methodologies that
prevent practitioners from using the past as a screen to shield
us from the calamities of the contemporary. As Dissard, Göçek,
Meskell, and Papoli-Yazdi point out, unseeing is not just about
Armenians. Just in Turkey alone, Greek Rum, Assyrian, Arab,
and Kurdish communities have also been oppressed, expelled,
or destroyed, and their pasts too are being unseen. To take a
global view on unseeing would bring forward numerous communities on every continent whose pasts are inconvenient to
the present. It is also important to note that it is not only archaeologists who unsee. Goshgarian points out that historians also
unsee, even when there is no fear of direct retaliation,suggesting
that disciplinary cultures of inattentiveness cannot be blamed
only on the state. Rather, they have become deeplyembedded in
our systems of knowledge production.
One way for archaeology to reshape its relation to state and
civil society is to follow a suggestion made by both GonzálezRuibal and Pollock to rethink our methods and epistemologies
around a forensic model of knowledge production that seeks to
provide material evidence to hold perpetrators accountable.
To use Eyal Weizman’s (2017) phrasing, this would redirect
archaeology’s abundant powers of observation to focus on
“violence at the threshold of detectability” and its presentation
in public forums. This would be a significant transformation of
the discipline. Traditional archaeology, more often than it
admits, often seems like an antiforensic science, an endeavor
that regularly blunders its way across crime scenes, oblivious to
evidence, sometimes actively destroying it in the pursuit of its
own obscure form of reportage. This is what Dissard accurately
describes as reporting without bearing witness. Data are assembled and discussed in such detail that it obscures what has
been unseen, unwitnessed.
My colleague Lori Khatchadourian has described an archaeology that sees the injustice that forms its sites and assemblages as “heritage forensics.” It is this kind of approach
that we have undertaken in a heritage monitoring project that
she and I codirect, along with Ian Lindsay, called Caucasus
Heritage Watch (CHW). CHW is an effort to develop techniques of heritage forensics that contribute to truth and, eventually, peace in the region by wading into the virulent debates
over heritage destruction and appropriation.CHW uses historic
and newly tasked satellite imagery to track the fate of heritage
since the collapse of the USSR and the conflicts that have
followed the independence of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The intellectual foundations for CHW rest on the shoulders
of work accomplished by discussants here, such as Bernbeck
and Pollock’s (2007) archaeology of perpetrators, which, as
Pollock notes, points squarely to the kind of archaeology of the
contemporary detailed by González-Ruibal (2019). The recent
drive in North American archaeology to imagine a discipline
committed to social justice also informs the work of CHW
(e.g., Atalay 2006; Bruchac 2014). But the project operates in a
regional context where the ethical clarity of resistance to colonization or fascism is not shared moral terrain. Even as we
seek to see the ghosts of the past and speak their truth, we are
shouting amid a cacophony of polemical heritage ideologies,
fake histories, false equivalencies, and confounding cruelty.
A number of respondents ended their comments in roughly
the same place I did, posing the question “What is to be done?”
(to borrow from Lenin). I take this as a question about both
archaeology in Turkey and archaeology more generally. Intervening in the discipline’s silences is clearly just a first step
toward putting the long history of the Armenian presence in
Anatolia back into the mouths of scholars. Pollock is certainly
correct that sustained progress cannot rely solely on the personal courage of a handful of actors. That would neither be fair
to the dissidents nor reshape wider structures of power that coopt archaeological research. However, the courage of “resistant
archaeologists,” as Papoli-Yazidi (2020) calls them, can make a
difference, as her own experiences in Iran make clear. Her
form of resistant archaeology sets out a relationship between
the archaeologists who take risks to speak difficult truths and
the institutional structures that, in the long term, collapse under the weight of untruth and oppression. As archaeology can
attest, not everything can be erased.
But such a future requires that the discipline writ large
commit to seeing and listening. There are three arenas where
the discipline can begin to reexamine the commitments that
lead to unseeing. First, we need to train students to understand
that expertise in the Bronze Age, for example, requires knowledge of all the conquests, cruelties, and calamities that have
shaped that archaeological record as we see it today. Injustice
is a fundamental formation process of the archaeological record, and students must learn to see it. An archaeology o f the
contemporary is thus integral to any archaeological research
design.
Second, archaeology needs to rapidly diversify its tool kit to
include practices that elude state tactics of intimidation. If
excavation and survey, our traditional methodologies, cannot
be conducted without co-optation, other forms of research
practice need to come to the fore and be validated by institutions. No archaeologist should feel that buckling to state cooptation is just part of getting a permit for an excavation
pivotal to securing tenure or promotion.
Last, our professional associations need to be more assertive
about the core values at the heart of the field. In May 2022, the
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