From 1936-39 and 1946-49 Sir Charles Leonard Woolley excavated the site of Tell Atchana/ancient Alalakh in southern Turkey on behalf of the British Museum. The statue of King Idrimi, found in 1939, became one of the British Museum's many prized objects and is on display to this day. At the close of the excavation season in June 1939 the statue became the subject of a dispute between Woolley and the government of the Hatay State, solved only after the intervention of the British Consul of Aleppo, the British Ambassador at Ankara and the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This paper traces the statue's journey from its discovery to the British Museum and back to the New Hatay Archaeological Museum in the form of a hologram.
This article explores how inter-war ideas about the ‘flapper’ and the place of women in modern society interacted with archaeological discoveries. Looking at how the discovery of the Royal Cemetery of Ur in Iraq (excavated from 1922 to 1934) was reported in the British daily and weekly press demonstrates the popularity of archaeological reporting in inter-war newspapers and magazines and its influence on public debates. The article uses approaches from media history and gender studies to study textual as well as visual material such as cartoons, photographs and archaeological reconstructions created to bring readers the news from the past. It explores how archaeology informed contemporary stereotypes of young women as characteristically irrational and emotional and how his overlapped with similar traits perceived to be typical of the ‘Oriental’ races and lower-middle and working classes.
Billie Melman's exploration of the "regime of antiquities" (p. 9) and the internationalisation of the (material) past offers an important contribution to a wide range of fields, including the history of the interwar period, the history of archaeology and mandate politics and mechanised technology. By linking her extensive reading to research on modernity, media histories, and literary and cultural studies, the author has rightly identified the early twentieth century as a crucial period for the development of archaeology in the Southwest Asian/North African (SWANA) region and the importance of the past in the construction of modernity.
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