Field Notes - 25 November 2013 - Skull Triangles

Witness to a Greater Germanic Past? The SS-Ahnenerbe and the Archaeological Research Sites of Dolni Věstonice and Solone Dr Martijn Eickhoff (Radboud University Nijmegen) Discussant: Dr Helen Roche (University of Cambridge) Abstract In my presentation I focus on two archaeological excavations carried out by Dutch prehistorians Assien Bohmers and Frans C. Bursch during the Second World War in the villages of Dolni Věstonice (Unterwisternitz) and Solone (Soljonoje). These excavations were contracted by the SS-Ahnenerbe—an SS research unit—and are therefore examined not only in conjunction with the history of East Central Europe and the history of archaeology, but al­so on the micro-level, where institutional, organizational and biographical aspects are in­corporated alongside cultural and social backgrounds. The inspiration here is the post-colonial approach, in which scientific expeditions carried out outside Europe are understood as a process in which each party influences the other. It thereby becomes clear how during the Second World War, the SS-Ahnenerbe tried to portray the two research sites as materi­al witnesses to a Nordic- (Indo-) Germanic past. In the scenario, Unterwisternitz was a sym­bol of 'origin' and Solone symbolized 'propagation'. At the same time, the Czechoslovak­ian and Ukrainian interpretations (and significance) of the research sites were to be oblite­rated. This leads to the conclusion that the SS-Ahnenerbe was indeed a highly active National Socialist scientific organization and that they developed a new militant and “Greater Germanic” scientific style and a new practice which at the time was directly connected to the terrorist interventions of the Na­tional Socialists. The avant-garde nature of the SS organization did, however, also contri­bute to the fact that their activities had little “effect” outside their own SS circle. The two excavations—including the fact that SS archaeologists had ever been involved on-site—were as a result soon forgotten after 1945.

Disciplinary Formation, Imperialist Gender, Nationalist Class: Egyptian Archaeology under British Military Occupation (1882-1956) Prof Stephen Quirke (ULC) Discussant: Mimi Winick (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) Abstract In his 1996 History of Archaeological Thought, Bruce Trigger described archaeology across Africa as neo-colonial. Two decades later, in the political economy of knowledge, de-colonisation remains one paradigm shift that never materialised – nowhere more visibly than in the study of other places/times. With a smaller scale of population, narrowly bounded disciplines offer opportunities to analyse this continuity, and to identify the trump cards of domination. In Egyptology established practitioners such as the philologist Georges Posener have voiced concern over self-isolation; in its current practice, the sub-discipline seems torn between the First World technocracy of archaeological fieldwork, and an anti-theoretical positivism in research into ancient written sources. From the history of nineteenth and twentieth century archaeology, two particular liberation motifs or genres might be re-interpreted as implicit strategies of domination: praise of women archaeologists, in a first wave feminist style; and praise of Egyptian Egyptologists, in nationalist historiography. Is it possible to develop a self-critique in either area, against normative self-images of heroism? Is a war of position possible against the hegemonic structures of both science and its civil society?

Dr Christina Riggs (University of East Anglia) Discussant: Dr Chris Wingfield (University of Cambridge) Abstract Considerations of aesthetics have played a part in studying and interpreting the ancient past since Winckelmann and Hegel, although many 20th and 21st century archaeologists may reject 'aesthetics' as a useful or productive category. In this paper - developed for the Durham-based AHRC Research Network on Ethics and Aesthetics in Archaeology - I use the ancient Egyptian mummy to argue for an ancient aesthetic that we can reconstruct through, for instance, considerations of materiality, and I contrast that to modern encounters with the Egyptian mummy, which employ a very different, and very persuasive, aesthetic based on anatomical and forensic science. What implications might this contrast have for archaeological and museological interpretations of the ancient Egyptian funerary sphere, including debates around the ethics of curating and researching human remains?

Dr Alice Stevenson (UCL) Abstract The latter part of the Victorian era and early Edwardian period witnessed a change in the pace and nature of museum collecting of Egyptian culture. Crucially, this was the time when both archaeology as a discipline and museum curatorship as a profession became established, their relationship up until the 1920s being symbiotic. By examining case studies from a few of the hundreds of the world’s museums that received such material of the export and reception of assemblages from British excavations in Egypt this paper seeks to tease apart these relationships and explore how the idea of archaeological context was constructed in the intersections between fieldwork and museum practice.

Dr Richard Staley (University of Cambridge) Discussant: Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)

Skull Triangles: Flinders Petrie, Craniometry and Race Dr Debbie Challis (University College London) Discussant: Dr Kate Nichols (CRASSH, University of Cambridge) Abstract My paper takes as its starting point a ‘Diagram of Climate and Race’ published by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in the anthropological journal Man in 1902. I will consider Petrie’s assumptions around race and skull dimensions inherent in the diagram and how this relates to his work at this time. Petrie collected skulls for what became the National Eugenics Laboratory at UCL and I will concentrate on the use by ‘computers’ at UCL of skulls from the predynastic site of Naqada, Petrie’s first large collection for Karl Pearson.

Narrating the Fall of Empires in Weimar and National Socialist Racial Ideology Dr Helen Roche (University of Cambridge) Discussant: Dr Joachim Whaley (University of Cambridge) Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, the idea that the destinies of races, nations and empires were universal and biologically determined (wherever and whenever in human history they existed) was the preserve of a minority of racial theorists and academics. However, within a few decades, such ideas came to dominate National-Socialist thought, and were propagated in ideological and educational material throughout the Third Reich. Using a variety of examples drawn from these racial interpretations of history, concerning both the ancient and the modern world, Roche argues that this inculcation of a particular racial historical framework follows very closely the model of ‘schematic narrative templates’ devised by the sociologist James Wertsch. Wertsch’s work has shown that a crucial element in the formation of collective identity is provided by forcing historical occurrences to fit into a consistent, immutable narrative framework, which can be used both to justify and to legitimise the actions of the nation or ruling power in question. This paper explores the development of this phenomenon, and analyses the ways in which schematic narrative templates of race came to dominate German intellectual and historical thought during the 1930s and 1940s.

People and Places Reading Group: Experts, Politicians, Labs and Media in Late Twentieth-Century Palaeoanthropological Knowledge Production Miquel Carandell Baruzzi (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Abstract Our Michaelmas reading group develops from Miquel’s interest in the ‘Orce man’ controversy that arose over a cranial fragment discovered in 1982 in Orce, Granada that initially appeared to be from a hominid but was later attributed to a donkey’s remains. In this session, Miquel will trace how paleoanthropological knowledge is “constructed” by different actors (academic experts, politicians, journalists) in excavation sites, laboratories, conferences and the modern media. Seeking a better understanding of the strategies used by scientists in this process, we will discuss how it is possible to analyse and begin to frame the construction of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline at the end of the twentieth century.

Of Cats, Cathedrals and Crusaders: Rethinking Approaches to 'Heritage' through Representations of Restoration in Cyprus Dr Astrid Swenson (Brunel University, London) Discussant: Professor David Abulafia (University of Cambridge) Abstract The paper examines the history of the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the Crusades during the modern colonisation of the Mediterranean. More particularly, it will closely examine the photographs and drawings of Cyprus made and collected by the French medievalist Camille Enlart in 1899 on a government sponsored research mission. These visual archives can be used to rewrite the history of heritage in Europe from the margins by reinserting a perspective that is both imperial and transnational, and that connects the history of art and archaeology with that of the history of medicine. But these images are also useful in transcending a focus on national and imperial rivalries by reflecting about how to connect the public uses of heritage sites, with more intimate, embodied, sensory, personal appropriations

Sadiah Qureshi (University of Birmingham) Discussant: Sujit Sivasundaram (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge) Abstract Paying to see living foreign peoples perform was enormously popular ‎in the nineteenth century. ‎Throughout the 1800s, for a shilling or more, the ‎public flocked to see everyone from Africans to ‎Aztecs in European metropolitan centres. Foreign peoples would perform songs, dances and ‎ceremonies designed to showcase both their ethnic ‘singularity’ and lives abroad. Initially, such ‎shows usually consisted of a single individual or small group imported in relatively haphazard ‎circumstances. By the late nineteenth century, particularly under the aegis of world fairs, entire ‎‎‘villages’ of foreigners from around the world were being exhibited together. ‎ Across the century, the shows provided a form of popular entertainment combined with ‎intercultural encounter and scientific enquiry. For instance, the shows were routinely marketed as opportunities to meet and greet ethnic groups which were unknown in Europe. Canny ‎impresarios sought to maximise their profits by associating their shows with ongoing military, ‎political and missionary activity in the colonies. The shows were also routinely promoted as useful ‎for anyone with an interest in race and the new disciplines of ethnology and anthropology. Thus, ‎displayed peoples became specimens that were crucial to nineteenth-century debates on race. ‎This paper will consider the importance of displayed people for broader histories of race, science ‎and empire. In particular it will argue that the shows were crucial opportunities for intercultural encounter. Moreover, they were sites for the making of scientific knowledge because they allowed the lay and the learned to create and participate in ongoing debates on the nature of human variation. In doing so, the paper will also ‎consider opportunities for future histories of science and empire.‎