Unfinished narratives. Some remarks on the archaeology of the contemporary past in Iran

Dezhamkhooy, Maryam; Papoli-Yazdi, Leila

doi:10.1017/s1380203820000112

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…It is noteworthy that there was a previous case of implementation of physical violence against a professor in the faculty. Dr. Negahban, 9 the head of the department of archaeology, was stabbed (Dezhamkhooy and Papoli-Yazdi, 2020) eleven times in the chest in front of the faculty. Regarding such conflicts, physical violence against professors was not rare and seems to have been considered by the attendees a final solution.…”

Section: Documents About the Oppression Of Professorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confessions of a Green Notebook: Reading Unpublished Documents About the Oppression of Iranian Archaeology Professors During the 1980s

Papoli-Yazdi

2023

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A couple of months after the 1979 revolution of Iran, the universities were occupied by the Islamists who oppressed dissident academics drastically. Two years after the revolution, the headquarter of the Cultural Revolution was established, and universities were shuttered to be purified from any other ideology except Islamism. Due to the heavy censorship of the regime, very little is known about the documents and process of oppression during and after the occupation of the universities. In 2010, the author gained access to a ‘green notebook’ found in a trashcan at the University of Tehran, which contains informal minutes of several meetings held by the Islamic Association of Students (IAS). As a direct practice of oppression, IAS had the mission to report the behaviors of the professors working in the department of archaeology to authorities. In this article, the author elucidates the process of oppression of archaeology professors through reading documents of the ‘green notebook.’

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Section: Documents About the Oppression Of Professorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confessions of a Green Notebook: Reading Unpublished Documents About the Oppression of Iranian Archaeology Professors During the 1980s

Papoli-Yazdi

2023

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“…For a very long time, however, archaeologists were complicit with dictatorial regimes: they produced legitimizing narratives, constructed exclusionary nationalist and ethnonationalist discourses, and participated in institutional work (Díaz-Andreu, 1993; Galaty and Watkinson, 2004; Junker, 1998; Legendre et al, 2007). Times have changed and now archaeologists do not normally work to support dictatorship, but rather the opposite: parallel to the development of the archaeology of the contemporary past, communist, fascist, and other authoritarian regimes have been the object of much research during the last 15 years that has exposed their crimes (Bernbeck, 2018; Dezhamkhooy and Papoli-Yazdi, 2020; Funari et al, 2009; Symonds and Vařeka, 2020; Theune, 2018). The material technologies of oppression, repression, disappearance, and propaganda deployed by such regimes have been explored and important data have been retrieved in a variety of elements, most notably in the case of spaces of detention—prisons, concentration camps, and forced labor camps (Myers and Moshenska, 2011)—and mass graves (Ferrándiz, 2013), but also monuments (Burström and Gelderblom, 2011).…”

Section: Introduction: Archaeology Against Dictatorshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Excavating Europe’s last fascist monument: The Valley of the Fallen (Spain)

González‐Ruibal

2021

Journal of Social Archaeology

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Since 1945, most fascist monuments have disappeared or been deactivated in Western Europe. There is one in Spain, however, that remains fully operative: the Valley of the Fallen. The complex, devised by the dictator Francisco Franco, celebrates the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), keeps the bodies of thousands of victims of the conflict, as well as the leading fascist ideologue and the dictator himself, and provides a material narrative that exalts the dictatorship. With the advent of democracy in 1978, the Valley remained unchanged, untouchable, and an important focus for fascist and extreme right celebrations, both national and international. However, with the new progressive government that came to power in 2018, it has become the object of an ambitious program of resignification in which archaeology has an important role to play. In this article, I describe how archaeological work undertaken at the Valley of the Fallen is contributing toward destabilizing the dictatorial narrative by opposing the monumental assemblage of fascism to the subaltern assemblage of those who built it.

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“…The emergence of contemporary archaeology (or the archaeology of the contemporary) as a distinct subfield has sparked change in the archaeological imagination. Recent work in archaeology has offered important insights regarding the material qualities of contemporary social and political processes and concerns (e.g., Dawdy 2016;DeSilvey 2017;Dezhamkhooy and Papoli-Yazdi 2020;González-Ruibal 2016;Hamilakis 2016;Harrison and Breithoff 2017;Flewellen et al 2021;Kiddey 2017;Rosenzweig 2020;Supernant 2020;White 2020). This volume extends contemporary archaeological approaches to places that would typically invite historical analysis owing to their substantial material traces of prolonged human attachments.…”

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confidence: 99%

1 Exploring the Contemporary in Old Places

Taylor

Sesma

2022

Archaeological Papers of the American

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This chapter opens an analytic space to consider the resonance of “old places” in the contemporary moment through the lens of archaeology. Borrowing the term used by some of our interlocutors, old places are places that bear memory, that have accrued emotional attachment, and that intervene in the present as reminders of things that have happened before. Through these qualities, old places sustain life and relations. We adopt an expansive view of site formation processes that extends into the present and future and argue that studying contemporary site formation can unleash insights into the multi‐temporal constitution of the world we inhabit. We do not insist on a single approach to studying these processes, but rather suggest that the methodological and theoretical diversity that archaeologists and local communities bring together is key to studying and knowing old places in the present. We draw connections between a contemporary archaeology of old places and the emergent fields of contemporary archaeology and critical heritage studies, but also argue for retaining and fully incorporating the political and activist orientations of historical, feminist, African Diaspora, and Indigenous archaeologies—fields that have long centered the knowledge and concerns of contemporary communities—into this work.

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Unfinished narratives. Some remarks on the archaeology of the contemporary past in Iran

Cited by 6 publications

References 24 publications

Confessions of a Green Notebook: Reading Unpublished Documents About the Oppression of Iranian Archaeology Professors During the 1980s

Confessions of a Green Notebook: Reading Unpublished Documents About the Oppression of Iranian Archaeology Professors During the 1980s

Excavating Europe’s last fascist monument: The Valley of the Fallen (Spain)

1 Exploring the Contemporary in Old Places

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