POST‐COLONIAL RUINS: Archaeologies of political violence and IS

Abstract

The carefully staged and hyper‐mediated destructions at a number of world‐famous archaeological sites in the area controlled by the Islamic State across Syria and Iraq have often made the headlines in recent months; and these spectacles can be counted among IS' visual markers of identity. In the mainstream media, they have largely been interpreted either as ‘cultural cleansing’ or as an expression of IS' inhumanity, of its barbaric iconoclasm and its criminal fight against idolatry. In this paper, I propose to interpret them as overdetermined acts or rather spectacles of destruction that must be situated within a specific political genealogy. I highlight the long‐standing, deep entanglement between archaeology and (empire and) state building in the Levant.

The ritualization of heritage destruction under the Islamic State

“…Emphasis is placed upon the corrupting forces of various schools of thought, such as the ‘teachings of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud’ which are thought to have created ‘generations void of any traces of the fitrah [innate faith]’ (Dabiq, 2016a: 20). Another example is the stated IS desire to both physically and ideologically destroy the existing state structures of the region, imposed by the British and the French at the end of the First World War (De Cesari, 2015). Putting it succinctly, in Issue 1 of Dabiq , Baghdadi is quoted as saying that the members of the IS will ‘trample the idol of nationalism, destroy the idol of democracy, and uncover its deviant nature’ (Dabiq, 2014d: 8).…”

The Manipulation of Social, Cultural and Religious Values in Socially Mediated Terrorism

“…Following the end of colonial oversight in the mid twentieth century came the arrival of secular nationalist governments who sought to use the rich history of Iraq and Syria to inculcate a sense of collective identity (Baram 1991;Wedeen 1999). Attacks on pre-monotheistic sites are therefore not just an attack on the sins of polytheism and idolatry but also an attack on the Western colonial powers who unearthed the ancient relics and designed the modern state, as well as an attack on an entire epoch of state produced symbols that manipulated the region's rich history to serve their own 'nationalist agenda' (De Cesari 2015).…”

Archaeology and Contemporary Warfare

“…In 2015, the spotlight of international and archaeological attention turned to Syria and northern Iraq where the Islamic State engaged in a series of spectacular, mediatized performances involving the partial destruction of famous monuments at Nineveh, Nimrud, and Palmyra (Bohrer 2015, de Cesari 2015, Harmanşah 2015, Shaw 2015. Much less notice has been paid to the dynamiting of shrines and tombs of significance to various local religious groups.…”

“…In this respect, they stand in contrast to the much less widely reported (in Western news media) destructions of shrines and other religious structures in northern Iraq and Syria, which are aimed more specifically at local populations. In the public hand-wringing that accompanied news of the destruction of ancient sites, occasional voices began to question whether the terms of the debate, especially the assumption of universally agreed-upon values of archaeological objects, might themselves be a problem (Bohrer 2015, de Cesari 2015, Harmanşah 2015, Shaw 2015.…”