Confronting Orientalism and Colonialism in Archaeological Material: An Anatolian Tale скачать в хорошем качестве

Confronting Orientalism and Colonialism in Archaeological Material: An Anatolian Tale

Travelling through the Anatolian hinterland, one constantly encounters the Byzantine past. The material culture is not just evident in major archaeological remains, such as the kastron (fortress) at Kerkenes (perhaps ancient Pteria), but also the mundane remains of the past built into the present: columns reused in Muslim graveyards and in people’s yards, handfuls of coins found in fields. The modern Turkish world sits squarely on the Byzantine past, and the population encounters this legacy on a daily basis. Yet, the narrative around Byzantine (and to some extent Seljuk) Anatolia is nowhere near as persuasive or pervasive as the material culture. In popular imagination, it is presented as a constant declining society, sandwiched between the monumental Roman and the glorious Ottoman. I contend that the reason for this lies in a concerted approach to Byzantium by the earliest scholars of Anatolia that presented it in particular orientalist and colonialist ways which produced a type of time/space compression (Warf, 2008) in the approach of scholars to the material remains of this past which left little room for considering how Byzantine and subsequent Turkic societies interacted with this material. Dr. Marica Cassis specializes in the Late Roman and Byzantine past of central Anatolia. She is the director of the Byzantine excavations at Çadır Höyük, a multiperiod site in Yozgat province Turkey. She also works on the incorporation of gender theory into Byzantine archaeology, and is currently writing a book on Byzantine archaeology for ARC Humanities Press. This project is funded by a SSHRC Insight grant.