Unearthing Ideology: Archaeology and Politics
Archaeology reveals what is kept hidden underground. Yet, the decision about what to reveal, where to look, what to exhibit, and what questions to ask, are all politically inflected. From Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns to the looting of Iraq’s National Museum, archaeology has long been entangled with imperial power, nationalist myth-making, and political dominance—with the historic aim of understanding and narrating the history of the Other (from whom civilization sprang, but from whom “Western” peoples have long since departed and progressed). And yet, the discipline of archaeology purports to be a science, with methods for identifying and dating its material and testing archaeological conclusions. So how can we assess archaeology as a means for producing knowledge? What kind of knowledge has it historically produced? And what would it mean to “disentangle” archaeology from the national and imperial systems in which it incubated and through which it flourished? Is a de-politicized archaeology possible—or even desirable?
In this course, we will investigate archaeology as a mode of knowledge production entangled in imperialism, settler colonialism, and cultural hegemony. Reflecting on past and current archaeological fieldwork in Western Asia and beyond, we will examine the discipline’s intellectual, political and cultural biases through excavation methods, its relations with locals, and the teleological narratives of history that locate human and civilizational infancy in the “middle eastern” region. We will consider how archaeological data has been used to legitimize territorial claims, racial ideology, and modern national imaginaries—from Britain’s use of Near Eastern antiquity to justify empire, to postcolonial nation-states’ deployment of archaeological heritage to consolidate identity and power. Special attention will be paid to the politics of museums, repatriation debates, the weaponization of cultural heritage in war, and the rise of indigenous archaeologies and decolonial methodologies. And we’ll examine the challenges to archaeology posed by feminist and post-colonial theories, which interrogate the deeply rooted conceptions of binary gender models and inherent inequalities thereof, as well as ethnocentric views of other cultures via Othering and Orientalism. As we go, we will read from works by Nadia Abu El-Haj, Zeynep Çelik, Yannis Hamilakis, Bénédicte Savoy, Fekri A. Hassan, Alice Stevenson, Lamia al-Gailani, Zainab Bahrani, Michael Shanks, Bruce Trigger, Susan Pollock, and Adel Yahya.
Course Schedule
Wednesday, 6:30-9:30pm ETSeptember 10 — October 01, 2025
4 weeks
$335.00
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