A Response to The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (2007) by Yannis Hamilakis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Posted by Elissa Z. Faro
by Elissa Z. Faro (Dartmouth College)
January 20, 2009. On this historic day, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, the issues that Hamilakis considers in this book – the relationship between the modern nation-state and its historical and material past – resonate anew.
Hamilakis’ book aims to address a number of themes that, although discussed in terms of Greece and Greek antiquities, are current issues that concern the larger archaeological and anthropological world. He aims to explore, problematize, and re-examine the concept of archaeology as the practice of producing meanings out of material traces of the past; the concept of national imagination and its relationship with the concept of modernity. For me, as an archaeologist who primarily works in Greece, this book struck a special chord for my own research and fieldwork. At the same time, it triggered many thoughts, responses, and reflections about my own and other’s work in different periods, different regions, and in different developing nations of the world. Below, I will discuss how Hamilakis approaches the complex network of relationships between archaeologists, citizens, politicians, and the larger global world.
Hamilakis’ over-arching framework is based on his view of nationalism, which he sees as a cultural system, an ideology, an ontology, and even the social dreams of a people. In the introductory chapter, he states explicitly that “the book explores the key position of the ancient Greek (mostly Classical) heritage and its material manifestations in the lives, imagination, experiences, anxieties, and hopes of people in Greece” (7). Employing a primarily anthropological methodology – a “multi-sited historical and archaeological ethnography” (cf. Marcus 1995, 1998) – this book tackles issues such as stakeholdership in the past, colonialism, consumerism, and national identity.
Digital Desiderata: the Future of Archaeology's 'Second Life' in Augmenting Media (1.1)
Posted by Timothy Webmoor and Michael Shanks
A conversation at the Metamedia Lab with Torin Golding (avatar), the creator of ROMA, the largest archaeological site in SecondLife.
Digital technologies are changing the nature of scholarship. Far from an exception, archaeology too is changing. It may be that archaeology is traditionally thought of as a 'down and dirty' profession, done 'out there' in the field, the popular/public image of an archaeologist-at-work - we even like this conception of the 'rude scholar', equally at home before a bookshelf or a mountain. At the same time it is a discipline with a particular history of technophilia. For a set of closely related reasons (epistemological and ontological), it is especially beholden to technological desires. Why? By some accounts bridging the gap of 'record' to generalization, technology, specifically the tried-and-true instruments of technoscience, were to assure the objectivity of 'second order observations'. The complex - 'polysemous' and rich - quality of archaeological materials could be transformed through instruments' reproducible procedures into 'data'. They were neutral devices. We can count with/on them. Most often this technology visualizes the results of such algorithmic alchemy.
Indeed, archaeology has also been one of the leading fields in conveying the 'stuff' of the archaeological site and landscape in visual form. More than most disciplines, archaeologists have been at the forefront of developing and strategically deploying and thinking about visual media. For the discipline, visual media serve as 'stand-fors' the vestiges of the past. From GIS maps and query databases to stratigraphic profiles and artifact sketches to obsidian hydration composition graphs to photogrammetry, site and feature photographs and theodolite maps, little of archaeology can be conveyed or argued without visual media. This is particularly so with a discipline that records as it irrevocably transforms through archaeological excavation and survey. Often all that remains at hand are our visual media. These become the guarantors of what was once 'out there'; the anchors to what we say. Unfortunately, archaeologists too often restrict their usage and familiarization with visualization to GIS or 3-D 'fly-throughs'.
This legacy, perhaps more prominent in North America and the U.K., brings us to the current 'new' technologies of digital media. Some Archaeology and Media type readers are becoming available to archaeologists. Most of these books on media tend to have anachronistic arguments. Perhaps for reasons of 'viability' in the publishing world, or because of the still strong influence in Britain and the States of viewing media not in its technical capacities but as a powerful mechanism of the culture industry's status quo. Asked about media and quite a few colleagues would talk about popular reception in mainstream media, the role of television and radio(?!). Some are still stubbornly instrumentalist, especially in their view of GIS, AutoCAD and VR applications.
This is not (yet) a media manifesto for the discipline.
We do believe that the digital turn in both society and the discipline holds promises for increased public interest and engagement. Not simply through the limited (old Web 1.0) idea of internet 'access', but through the emergent Web >2.0 platform enabled actions of: user-generated content, mixing, mashups, database proliferation, etc. Yet it also may threaten the 'boundaries' of the discipline through the dispersion of archaeological information across vast networks not beholden to peer-review or other established measures of quality and accuracy.
More conference proceedings - particularly at WACs and TAGs and CHATs - cull papers on new media and other internet based technologies. There is the estimate that a new blog is born every 1/2 second on the internet; a good number (see Witmore's March 1, 2006 entry) dedicated to archaeology. No project has yet been entirely devoted to the issue of the increasing ubiquity and convergence of digital media in society and its demonstrable impact upon archaeology. So in the setting of an on-line journal dedicated to archaeology, it seems an appropriate time to look at some of these new media in detail - with the features and interactivity that only a blog such as Archaeolog can provide. So in this initial installment, we are going to hold a discussion about SecondLife.
Interest and use of this on-line gaming-cum-social-network phenomenon in archaeology is emerging. Some of this interest has been shared already on Archaeolog (see Tringham's November 19, 2007 entry). Metamedia and Stanford Humanities Lab also collaborated early on with new media artist Lynn Hershmann to explore how to animate archives - link. Not just a game for an isolated group of bug-eyed, monitor masochistic techies, SecondLife brings up many salient issues for archaeology: what is the nature of representation; what is accuracy versus imaginative dissonance; how do we get people to commit to visualized information; is the partially immersive the way forward for World Wide Web 3.0; how do we engage differently with digital heritage; what is remixing and co-creation of the past? To illumine many of these concerns for the future of the past, we sat down with Torin Golding, the avatar of the creator and manager of one of the earliest and largest archaeological sites in SecondLife (SL). In the first part of this discussion we will simply highlight some of the parameters for understanding the buzz around SL; present some demographics and other facts. To really get the detail, an ethnography of digital culture would be requisite (for a partial account see Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human by T. Boellstorf). For now we will give SL in broad-strokes and hope that most users of Archaeolog are somewhat familiar with the avatar world. For those unfamiliar or who have just wandered aimlessly a bit, Torin Golding's experience of getting started will provide a field guide of sorts. The next part (1.2) of the discussion will get at the practicalities of running an archaeological island in SL, as well as frame the pressing issues relating to the digital futures of the past.
An ancient architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis with an 1805 inscription in Ottoman Arabic (Photo by Fotis Ifantidis; cf. Paton 1927: 7-72; Hamilakis 2007: 98-99).
During the course of a series of studies on the social and political lives of ruins in Greece (cf. Hamilakis 2007), I was, inevitably, often drawn on the most iconic specimen of Greek national imagination, the Athenian Acropolis. I thus soon became aware of two facts: the first is that most tourist guides and official presentations to the site still present to the nearly 2 million visitors per year a sanitized image, a partial, monumentalized façade of only one aspect of the rich social biography of the monument: a version of its classic life, broadly defined. The site was important before classical times, and it continued to be important subsequently, up to the present. Yet, very little of that richness reaches the visitors. Moreover, the site continues to be projected exclusively as a sight, a staged authenticity that is offered to the visitors for almost exclusively visual consumption and admiration. I have elsewhere explored this phenomenon by pointing to this ocularcentric monumentalisation as the outcome of the combined efforts of the photographic and the archaeological (Hamilakis 2001, 2008).
Caracol de la Resistencia: Zapatista Symbol References Maya Past
Posted by Thomas M. Urban
In an ethnographic interview conducted in June 2007, leaders of the autonomous community of Oventic in highland Chiapas, Mexico discussed with me and a colleague the meaning of the caracol (snail) as a Zapatista symbol. They explained that the ancient Maya ancestors used a conch shell as a horn to summon people to gather in one place as a community. Their ancestors lived during less technologically advanced times, they noted, when the world moved at a much slower pace than today, much like the slow-moving caracol. Today the symbol of the caracol expresses the ideals of small community government in the face of globalization. The caracol represents the ideals of an autonomous Zapatista government with direct reference to a distant Maya past on two levels, and connects the Zapatista present with a conception of the Maya past as a direct and logical historical trajectory. Other icons frequently employed by the Zapatistas, such as pyramids and glyphs, reference more blatantly the ancient Maya past. The symbolism of the caracol is more subtle, yet more powerful in the meaning it relays.
Mayan Identity and the Zapatista Movement
The Zapatista movement began officially in eastern Chiapas, Mexico in 1983. The movement derived its name from Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the Mexican Revolution. The Zapatistas are often characterized as the first post-modern revolution, perhaps unjustifiably so, and have abstained from violence since a cease fire was brokered in 1994 (Johnston 2000). The movement is most often associated with anti-globalization, anti-neo liberalism, and indigenous rights. Zapatistas gained much attention by vociferously opposing the NAFTA free trade agreement in the early 1994 (Rich 1997). The outside world recognizes Zaptista rebels by their black ski masks (pasamontanas) and red bandanas (pallacates).
Last weekend I attended a workshop on heritage & reconstruction, organised by a group of young heritage professionals unhappy with the current state of both practice and theory in the German heritage sector. This was the sixth such workshop on “Reconsidering heritage management” (Nachdenken über Denkmalpflege). All the others have already been published at www.kunsttexte.de.
This year, the event was held at the Bauhaus Dessau. They have a vested interest in reconstruction, for example due to the complex and still unresolved debate on whether or not Gropius’ house (image left) should be reconstructed as part of the local tourist attraction of the Masters' Houses, a World Heritage Site. Most of the heritage professionals so far favour to retain the grey GDR building that was erected in 1956 in its place as a historic witness in its own right.
Open source Archaeology? Taking 'Yahoo!s' seriously at Teotihuacan, Mexico
Posted by Timothy Webmoor
A World Heritage site always attracts a lot of attention. Such archaeological sites are viewed to materially represent irreplaceable ‘heritage’ on a global scale and are defined and protected through the United Nations’ UNESCO declarations (eg. UNESCO 1988). Teotihuacan, Mexico is no exception.
Replete with two monumental pyramids (the Pyramid of the Sun being the 3rd largest Pyramidal structure in the world) set amidst the ruins of a once densely populated, urbanized city (the first of its kind in Mesoamerica), “Teotihuacan”, or the “city of the gods” as the Aztec later identified it in Nahuatl, has attracted, both historically and contemporaneously, a broad range of interests. As most of us may personally attest to in visiting these world monuments, such interests run the gamut from the archaeological
to new age spiritualism.
Working at Teotihuacan, I often heard the phrase ‘yahoos’ being used to refer to the unsanctioned, occult practitioners who regularly gather at the site for their rituals.
Enter , the billion dollar, international internet company based in the Silicon Valley of California. To celebrate the media giant’s 15th anniversary, Yahoo! announced that it would create a ‘time capsule’ to gather together a snap shot of contemporary human life. Beginning this past October 10th, the search firm began collecting text, audio-visual and video contributions from any and all interested parties worldwide – estimated in analog terms to represent about 5 million books worth of data (OCRegister 2006). These would be uploaded via the internet.
This media-bundling was then digitized and beamed into space via laser a few months ago on October 25th. Following in the original steps of the affable ‘yahoo’ Carl Sagan, this digital ‘time capsule’ was made in hopes of communicating to digitally attuned extraterrestrials the diversity of life and culture on Earth. As a spokesperson for Yahoo! stated: the purpose was to join the "past and present with the universe's potential future by sharing today's culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away" (Subzeroblue 2006).
A ‘hard copy’ of the time capsule will be buried on the Sunnyvale grounds of the corporate offices. But, in keeping with the ethos of ‘digital democracy’ inherent in the conception and content of the Time Capsule Project, the company wanted to laser the digitized information in real-time at a prominent locale. You guessed it. This Yahoo! chose the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.
This year, the event was held at the 
, the billion dollar, international internet company based in the Silicon Valley of California. To celebrate the media giant’s 15th anniversary, Yahoo! announced that it would create a ‘time capsule’ to gather together a snap shot of contemporary human life. Beginning this past October 10th, the search firm began collecting text, audio-visual and video contributions from any and all interested parties worldwide – estimated in analog terms to represent about 5 million books worth of data (OCRegister 2006). These would be uploaded via the internet. 
