Archaeolog

Thomas M. Urban

In summer of 2006 I left my job working for Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology to participate in a project in Iraq investigating mass graves for the Iraqi High Tribunal. My primary duty was analyzing "cultural objects" found in the graves of genocide victims. These objects included ballistic evidence, personal effects, and clothing. Clothing offered a particularly interesting window into the lives of the victims, revealing ethnic identity, gender, manner of death and more. Collectively and individually, clothing made a compelling line of evidence for telling the story of crimes against humanity.

Bogolan (mud cloth): This bogolanfini wrapper, formerly on display at a Haffenreffer Museum textiles exhibit, was produced in Mali by Kouraba Diarra and Field Collected by Claire Grace. Photo Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

Bogolan

I never had much interest in textiles as a category of material culture. Despite this, I found myself learning quite a bit about them. I had enrolled in a graduate seminar on museum studies during my senior year at Brown University. The course focused on developing an exhibit to be displayed in a new satellite gallery of Brown's anthropology museum. Much to my dismay, the course instructors had already decided that the exhibit would focus primarily on textiles. I wanted to gain some museum experience, so decided to continue with the course despite of my lack of interest in textiles. Ultimately, my contribution to the exhibit focused on pre-Columbian textiles from Peru and Bolivia. I considered myself to be more of an archaeologist than an ethnographer, so working with ancient textiles held more interest for me than working with some of the contemporary pieces in the museum’s collection. This was my way around the textile dilemma. After all, my curatorial contribution to the exhibit was archaeological: no touchy-feely interpretations of contemporary clothing here. I worked hard on my contribution to the exhibit, then washed my hands of the whole business of textiles, vowing never to turn back.

Continue reading "Bogolan to Baghdad: Textiles Tell the Story of Genocide in Iraq" »

Posted by Thomas M. Urban at 4:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Review of Richard J. Gould: Disaster Archaeology, The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2007, ISBN 978-0-87480-894-0, 288 p., 55 figures, 5 tables, cloth.

Richard Gould has a long pedigree as an archaeologist concerned with the present: he has made important contributions to ethnoarchaeology, modern material culture, historical archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary past (Gould 1978, 2000; Gould and Schiffer 1981). His new book shows us the usefulness of archaeology to understand contemporary disasters and the relevance of forensic methods for archaeology both in the past and in the present. Furthermore, the author eloquently defends the key public role of disaster archaeology: through the identification of human remains and personal belongings, it can bring closure to victims’ relatives and allow them to mourn their dead. The book has nine chapters. The first and last chapters are the more theoretical ones, with reflections on the nature of disaster archaeology and the archaeology of the recent past. The rest tackle particular case studies in many of which the author himself was directly involved. Through these cases, we are introduced into the practicalities, methods and problems of disaster archaeology. There are also two appendixes: the first one gives voice to several people working within Forensic Archaeology Recovery (FAR), the group set up by Gould (a nice example of multivocality, by the way), and the second one is a list of all the personnel involved in the FAR initiative. The book is well illustrated throughout with photos and drawings.

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Posted by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal at 5:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Note: a more detailed version of this entry with photographs is forthcoming in Past Bodies: An Archaeology of Bodily Practices, edited by Dusan Boric & John Robb, to be published by Berghahn Books.

Forensic experts including a team of archaeologists examined bodies from the site of Batajnica near Belgrade, capital of Serbia & Montenegro. It was suspected that the bodies from several mass graves originated from different events and from different places in Kosovo and Metohija. Sorting through human debris archaeologists looked for clues to how people died and to their identities, and also tried to detach the daily life from the clothed bodies in the ground that went together with it. This paper discusses the complex nature of the contemporary mass grave site and the role of the archaeologist in interpreting the data. It also deals with the relationship between the sensual and bodily imprints, and the life on site during the process of exhumation. (footnote: The original idea for the paper was to engage in a kind of dialog with the essay by Lindsey Weiss [2006] “Terra incognita: The material world in international criminal courts”, which discussed the nature of evidence presented in the Balkan war crime trials in the Hague Tribunal).

Coming back from excavations at a Neolithic site in Turkey, in mid-summer 2002 I joined the members of Batajnica mass grave site research team (under the auspices of International committee on missing people [ICMP] and Forensic Institute of Belgrade) that already included three physical anthropologists, two medical anthropologists, two autopsy specialists, two technicians from the Belgrade morgue, and four archaeologists. All members of the team had to fill in papers saying that we would not reveal any kind of information that we come across during the course of our work. The names of the people on the team were being kept secret, as there were people in Serbia who were unhappy that Batajnica exhumations were taking place (IWPR 2002), and certainly the sentiment was similar within the Serbian police forces – and maybe more so within the complex that belonged to the special antiterrorist unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Continue reading "Fresh scars on the body of archaeology" »

Posted by Slobodan Mitrovic at 5:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)