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Walk into a well-stuffed academic library and take a stroll along the archaeological shelves. Yes, they are still there: real books made from paper and ink, gathered over decades or even centuries. Many tomes still exist only in printed form, holding information and thoughts that are carefully collected, curated, analysed, and edited, yet out of bounds from today’s digital universe.
Few are concerned with the ancient riddles and mysteries that populate social media’s imaginings of archaeology. In fact, what accounts for the weight on the shelves are mostly brick-sized or larger volumes (for some, a pavement-slab would be a more fitting image) bearing exotic names: Tell Asmar and Khafaje: the first season’s work; Die Ausgrabungen in Manching; The Kaupang Excavation Project; Gerasa: city of the Decapolis; or the publications from The Excavation of Antioch-on-the-Orontes 1932-1939.
Books and publications like these may fascinate fewer people than the ancient remains themselves, but for students and researchers they are the bricks and mortar (or pavement slabs) for the edifice of archaeological knowledge – the source of findable, accessible, intelligible, real data, obtained from years of work and analysis. Considering the abstruse nature of the content, you may be surprised to find that some volumes are worn and torn like holy scriptures, as generations of students have scrutinised them for thesis work and dissertations.
This is the stuff of final publications: the ultimate, if distant, objective of most excavation projects. Yet, besides this weight of achievement, another presence in this realm looms large by its absence: the unpublished projects. These are the truly lost cities of the past – the sites caught in limbo between excavation and publication. And cities hold a dubious place of honour in this wasteland.
Ancient cities have always fascinated excavators. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the earliest large-scale excavations in the Near East took place, focusing on sites that came to be termed the first ancient urban settlements. These were the monumental sites of Mesopotamia: places such as Uruk, dating to more than 5,000 years before our time. At the same time, monumental ruins from the Roman period also became targets for expansive excavations, usually staged by large European and American universities and museums, or by private research institutions. Today, some of these sites still remain in the hands of the respective universities and institutions who initiated excavations there more than a century ago.
Archive archaeology
The large-scale campaigns of Europeans and Americans in the Near East and Egypt spurred a profound interest in the cultural heritage of these regions. Collections from that time – many of which came to make up the core of national museums and collections in Europe and beyond – still exist and give us ample possibilities to study the practice of accumulation and display in these places. At the time of their foundation, such collections were often tied closely to rulers, emperors, and kings, and the elite in general, in ways that recall the triumphal practice of Roman emperors, who had their spoils put on show and paraded through Rome following the victorious conquest of foreign nations. One of the best-known examples of that is the spolia from Jerusalem, which were displayed in a triumphal procession shown on the Arch of Titus in the Forum Romanum in Rome.
The search for new territories to conquer and ways to assert control became synonymous with collecting and hoarding the cultural heritage of foreign cultures – often focusing on their ancient urban accomplishments. During the late Ottoman period, for example, there was a growing interest in the heritage of the territories within their domain. This is reflected in the material that the National Museum in Istanbul holds from Palmyra, a famous oasis city in Syria – a collection that was built up at the same time as European nations and private individuals were vying to accumulate ancient artefacts, which could also feature objects from that region, among others. Collecting from urban sites in the Near East became a competitive pursuit, with the twists and turns richly documented in correspondence between buyers and their agents in the region, including the Copenhagen brewer Carl Jacobsen, who founded the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.
For obvious reasons, the remains of ancient cities yielded the most lavish finds. Together with scholarly curiosity about sites mentioned in ancient sources, including the Bible, this fuelled increasing academic interest in exploring sites in the Near East. The large-scale systematic excavations that commenced in the late 19th century took in some of the most famous sites in the region: places such as Nineveh, Baalbek, Palmyra, and Gerasa were explored by Western scholars and entrepreneurs, who were driven by agendas quite different from the quest for grand publications. Urban archaeology thus emerged, even before it had ever been defined as such, with intentions that differed immensely between sites and regions, and according to national interests.
Of course, many large-scale early excavations of urban sites did generate books, edited volumes, and articles, which are now classic works of reference. But many did not, and few were published comprehensively. Today, one place where these lost cities can be rediscovered – at least in part – is in archives: at universities, at private institutions, in museums, and even in individual’s homes; in some cases, people have saved for generations excavation paperwork created by relatives. Over the last decade, more emphasis has been put on this legacy data and archive material, which has turned out to hold immense amounts of unpublished material and knowledge about urban sites in the Near East. It is, however, difficult to give such material the attention it deserves. Archive material is often not deemed very interesting as a ‘primary’ source, especially when compared to the hard data that can be freshly won directly from the ground. There is also not much prestige to be found in publishing other people’s paperwork. But the fact is that, if we want to rediscover these lost cities, we must embark on exhausting the archives by conducting archive archaeology.
This is an undertaking that requires not only knowledge of archives, but also urban archaeology and its development, as well as the relevant historical eras – not to mention a global perspective. It is no simple task. But this is exactly what a recently launched book series, ‘Archive Archaeology’, aims to do. It provides a high-impact outlet for archive material, as well as a venue where dialogues between fieldwork and archival practices can be brought to the forefront in a quest to establish a new best practice. The results allow us to reassemble at least parts of these lost cities, which are so important for understanding our urban past. One recent publication, Shaping Archaeological Archives: dialogues between fieldwork, museum collections, and private archives, edited by one of your columnists, features numerous contributions addressing archives of various kinds, in various locations and conditions, all of which contain invaluable information about the archaeological exploration of urban sites in the Near East.
From the outside, it may seem a thankless task to revive cities lost in the dust of the archives to be placed in the silence of the libraries and digital repositories. Yet today this work leads to as many new discoveries as fieldwork does, as the pages of both Shaping Archaeological Archives and the series in general show. If further proof is needed, just take a look at the well-thumbed volumes on the library shelves.
Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology and director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark. Together with Søren, she is founding editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
Søren M Sindbæk is professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions.
