McIntyre - Archaeology & Imperialism

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2001 Not for quotation or citation without the authors permission

Making Memories of Antiquity:

Archaeology, Imperialism, and the Construction of History in Jordanian Museums

Adrian McIntyreUniversity of California, Berkeley

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS OF PLACE

In March 1927, a short notice published on the last page of theBritish Museum Quarterly

reported the discovery of a nearly life-sized marble head by British archaeologists digging in the

Roman city of Jerash, one of the Decapolis cities that had formed the eastern boundary of the

Roman empire. The so-called Jerash head was found in the ruins of an early Christian church

and promptly loaned to the British Museum for scholarly study and public display. The brief

statement in the Quarterly explaining the provenance of the find appears at first to be factual and

straightforward:

The head . . . was found in 1925-6 in the excavations of the Palestine Department ofAntiquities under the direction of Professor Garstang, at Jerash, the ancient Gerasa, in themodern province of Transjordania. The Department of Antiquities of the government ofPalestine has kindly agreed to its being deposited on loan in the British Museum for one

year.

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This little text about the Jerash head seems fairly innocuous. Readers of theBritish

Museum Quarterly likely understood that the government of Palestine referred to the British

Mandate administration developed in the wake of the First World War. And whether or not they

grasped the significance of the Jerash excavationsthe first large-scale archaeological project

undertaken by the newly-formed (and, of course, British-run) Department of Antiquitiesit

probably seemed natural that such a find would be loaned to the British Museum. The specific

political and geographical names used to describe the circumstances of the heads discovery may

have seemed unimportant to those who read theQuarterly or visited the famous museum.


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Yet the next issue of theBritish Museum Quarterly, published three months later,

contains a notice of correction that amends a number of key details about the discovery of the

Jerash head, demonstrating that the facts of the matter had, in fact, been challenged:

In the note on this object in the last issue, the loan of it to the British Museum waswrongly attributed to the Department of Antiquities in Palestine. The excavations duringwhich the head was found were carried out on behalf of the Department of Antiquities ofthe Government of Transjordan, and the loan was authorized by His Highness the AmirAbdullah and the Transjordan Government.2

These contradictory notes provide tantalizing hints of an ongoing struggle to name,

define, and control the countries of the eastern Mediterranean after the demise of the Ottoman

Empire.3 And although T.E. Lawrence once bragged that he and Winston Churchill had

designed the modern Middle East over dinner,4 it is clear that the process of coming to terms

quite literally, in this casewith the new political and social realities of the region was by no

means one-sided and clear-cut. Instead, the founding of the modern state of Jordan was rooted in

the contestations (and also collaborations) between two groups of political elites, the British and

the Hashemites, neither of which originated in the region then called Transjordan by Westerners

and sharq al-Urdun by Arabs. The story of the Jerash head dramatizes some of these tensions,

and, apropos of the issues I will explore in this paper, it shows that archaeology and museums

have been contested spaces in Jordan since its earliest days of statehood.

CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

In this paper I develop an analysis of museums in Jordan that is attentive to both

historical and contemporary contexts.5 While many social scientists assert that history and

memory are central components in the construction and negotiation of cultural identitiesand

that museums and public heritage projects are significant institutional sites for mediating these


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identitiesthere remains limited empirical knowledge of how these processes actually work.

One way to understand the role of heritage projects in identity formation is to focus on the

experiences of their public audiences.

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Another approach might analyze specific communities

of memory as counter-hegemonic representations that challenge the official version of history.7

While influenced by these important studies, my background and interests support the

investigation of yet another under-researched dimension of heritage projects, namely the cultural

politics of history as played out in archaeological museums in Jordan.8 Debates involving

competing visions of history, heritage, and memory in Jordanian museums are tied to different

conceptions of the ideal society and to strategies of state- and nation-building. Thus, the goals of

my research include: 1) identifying how, when, and for whom history itself has become a

meaningful category and a contested terrain; 2) exploring how various groups perceive the

political stakes in museum projects; and 3) analyzing linkages and tensions between these

museums, which display particular claims about Jordanian history and identity, and the

differently situated individuals who produce this authoritative knowledge about the past. This

approach foregrounds the social and institutional networks that intersect in the museums and

analyzes the dialogue between scholars, technical experts, and local communities that shapes the

form and content of historical knowledge.

Anthropologists have spent the last hundred years arguing about what culture is. They

have been far less active, however, in questioningwhere culture is. I argue that museums in

Jordan are crucibles of culture located at strategic intersections between academic, public, and

political concerns. The museums that comprise Jordans public cultural landscape are also sites

of transregionaland even transnationalcultural construction. They contain objects whose

origins are elsewhere in time and space, demonstrating the intertwined roots and routes, to


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borrow a phrase from James Clifford, that constitute the basic history of Jordan.9 The museums

are sites that speak to a long history of interconnectedness, as international travel, archaeology,

and imperialism gave rise to distinctive patterns of collection and exchange. These linkages are

not abstract but are documented in the archives, in the catalogs, and in the exhibits themselves.

Thus, my analysis of museums in Jordan from a critical anthropological perspective hinges on an

understanding of museum exhibits as textshistorical narratives that interpret the past for

audiences in the present. Yet the centrality of material culture in these narratives provides a

crucial point of divergence between history in books and history in museums. As Susan Pearce

notes: academic history has been characterized by a lack of interest in material culture and a

corresponding lack of theory about the place objects hold in the production of historical

narrative.10 Yet unlike the products of academic history, which are composed primarily of

words, museum texts are primarilyvisual texts, and their impact is heightened considerably by

their focus on material objects, art, and images. The rich diversity of media in museum

exhibitions contributes to their emotive and symbolic power and makes them a critical point of

convergence for many facets of cultural debate.11

I began my research on Jordanian museums intending to focus on how conceptions of

Jordan as a modern state with a distinct national history and a unique cultural identity are

produced and displayed in key public spaces within the countrys emerging heritage industry.12

I had observed during previous visits to Jordan that disparate elements of society, from the

Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities to private entrepreneurs,

corporate developers, and venture capitalists, are committing tremendous resources to the

expansion of Jordans public culture. Well-placed individuals and groups within both the

governmental and the private sectors are determined to commemorate the countrys national


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heritage while simultaneously transforming it into a resource for economic development. Their

efforts are manifested in the restoration and adaptive reuse of traditional architecture, the

formation of cooperative handicraft projects for rural women, the conversion of excavations into

archaeological parks, as well as the development of national and regional museums, restaurants,

festivals, resorts, and other historical sites. I sought through ethnographic field research to situate

these projects as nodes on an urban network of social elites and technical experts who are

trafficking in tradition as they engage in new forms of political and cultural practice.

As my fieldwork progressed, however, I began to realize that it was impossible to talk

about the present state of the countrys museums without analyzing the role of several

historically intertwined factors that continue to play a role in these museums. This

entanglement, as I will refer to it throughout the paper, lies at the intersection of archaeology,

imperialism, and nationalism in Jordan.I began to study the origins and development of the

museums, supplementing my ethnographic investigations with historical research in the archives

and library collections of the Department of Antiquities, the American Center for Oriental

Research, and the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient. This multi-sited

research provided the documents and materials for the present paper.13 The interpretive

framework I employ is at once historical and anthropological, both archival and ethnographic. I

examine the construction of history in museums as well as the histories ofthe museums

themselves. Furthermore, I attempt to identify these multiple discourses as facets of a contested

modernity, where European roots (including Enlightenment notions of rationality and

temporality) diffused through imperialist routes and ultimately gained newfound significance in

nationalist projects by social elites that sought to exhibit the nation to itself.


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My research in Jordan dovetails nicely with recent anthropological studies of similar

nationalistic debates over history and heritage in the Middle East. Andrew Shryock found

himself enmeshed in the dialogical relationship between tribal historiography and official

written histories of Jordan.14 His work, while focused primarily on traditions of oral history,

affirms the centrality of a venerable Bedouin past in the construction of an authentic Jordanian

identity. Linda Layne discusses the Jordanian governments selective expropriation and

commodification of Bedouin culture.15 Yet unlike anthropologist Virginia Dominguez, who

creatively analyzes the production of Israeli identity(s) in festivals, exhibitions, and academic

conferences, Layne fails to locate the nationalist debates in Jordan within specific public

spaces.16 My research, like that of Dominguez, hinges on the identification of museums as

significant loci in Jordans national conversation about its cultural and historical identity.

Some brief terminological clarifications are in order. In calling these debates nationalist

and referring to their focal point as national identity, I do not mean to imply that this

conversation is produced by a coherent unity called the nation through some form of

communal solidarity. Rather, I use such terms to mark the fact that these discourses areaboutthe

nationits imagined contours and idealized contentand ostensiblyforthe nation, although

these paternalistic pretensions should be examined critically. One thing is very clear: the

intellectuals, politicians, and other social elites who are at the center of most public debates

about Jordanian history and heritage are hardly representative of the countrys diverse and

differently situated populations. One further point: Benedict Andersons well-knownImagined

Communities highlights what he terms the modular nature of nationalism, an emphasis that

tends to flatten the differences in varying nationalist discourses in order to analyze their

communal imaginings within a single analytical framework. Without denying the importance of


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Andersons work, I would agree with Anne McClintock that nationalisms are invented,

performed, and consumed in ways that do not follow a universal blueprint. Thus, I have

attempted to ground my analysis of the creation and promotion of national identity in Jordans

public culture in the singular complexities of Jordanian history.17

The first section of this paper used the example of the Jerash head to dramatize the

entanglement of archaeology, museums, imperialism, and nationalism in Jordan. The following

sections analyze more directly the historical relationships between archaeology and imperialism

in the regionboth in their obvious collaborations as well as through the more insidious role

of what I term imperial knowledges about the Middle East. This leads me to the issue of

periodization, which connects these knowledge practices directly to the modalities of museum

exhibition. I will briefly analyze two separate periodization schemes, showing how they

document a 2,000-year history of various imperialist administrations while at the same time

masking their own status as products of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European intervention.

After tracing the development of the now-standard chronological framework, I will turn to

examples from contemporary Jordan to explore how this periodization is incorporated into two

prominent museums of Jordanian archaeology in order to organize the museums material

contents and to provide an historical pedigree for the nation.

At one level, the construction of history in Jordanian museums involves the selective

appropriation and manipulation of the past. This process might accurately be described as the

invention of tradition, invoking a famous phrase that has held some sway in recent revisionist

historiography and cultural studies.18 Yet I am not convinced that this phrase adequately

expresses the complex heritage of the museums themselves or the traditions of

(mis)representation that inform their work. For the invention of tradition in Jordanian museums


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has a genealogy of its own and participates in a tradition of prejudices (in the expanded sense

of this term, as developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer) that limit its horizons and structure its

possibilities.

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This museological tradition predates the establishment of the Jordanian state and

is closely linked to the same projects of Western imperialism that forcibly reconfigured the

boundaries of Middle Eastern states after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

The role of international archaeology in developing museums in the Middle East, as well as its

complicity in the imperial agendas of expansionist European states in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, remains largely understudied. This results in no small part from

archaeologys current self-conception and from the ways that archaeologists narrate the history

of their discipline.

(UN)SCIENTIFIC BEGINNINGS: THE ORIGINS MYTH OF NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

The history of archaeology, as told by archaeologists, places contemporary research in

stark opposition to earlier, more dubious practices of archaeologys so-called pre-professional

periodthe antiquarianism (a fancy word for treasure hunting) that RAS Macalister, one of the

earliest professional archaeologists in Palestine and the first to excavate the site of ancient Gezer

for the Palestine Exploration Fund, scorned as the work of gold seekers and trophy hunters.20

Following Macalister, archaeologists of the Near or Middle East often invoke the dark ages of

grave-robbing and pillage, with conspicuous consternation, to mark the development of their

field from these questionable roots into a professional discipline characterized by rigorous

methodologies and impartial, scientific research agendas. They recite a litany of Great Men

pioneers like Flinders Petrie and William Foxwell Albright whose excavations in Egypt and

Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the standards for future


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generations of archaeologists in the region.21 Yet this redemptive narrative, with its hero cult of

father figures and its connotations of progress and enlightenment, needs to be questioned.

There are several levels on which to challenge the mythic account of disciplinary origins

that charts archaeologys transformation from antiquarianism into a professional science.

Perhaps the most striking is the simple realization that this narrative of development exhibits

common features with the historical narratives that archaeologists construct to explain evidence

uncovered by their field research: it relies on a linear chronological framework, divided into

epochs or periods, with evidence of evolutionary development from one period to the next. The

use of such a temporal sequence may at first seem benign, but I argue that this chronology has

underlying political implications. Not least among these is its tendency to relegate the

opprobrious aspects of archaeological research in the Middle East to the distant pastthe

deeper strata, to continue the metaphorand thus to claim that more scientific (read:

beneficent) principles guide archaeological research in the present.

This temporal distancing effect in the canonical history of archaeology represents not

only what Johannes Fabian terms the denial of coevalness (i.e., what the antiquarians did was a

very long time ago) but also the denial of coevilness (i.e., what they did was Bad, whereas

what we do is Good).22 Thus we can identify a second polemical component of the origins myth:

a moral geography which serves to define the right and wrong uses of archaeology. In an

article of that same title, Pre Roland de Vaux locates the earliest form of archaeological abuse

in the nineteenth century, where certain excavations in Mesopotamia, in Persia, and in Egypt

were no more than plunder operations for the profit of European museums or private

collections.23 Although de Vaux acknowledges that some excavations carried on without a

proper scientific method nevertheless preserved some priceless materials from possible


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destruction, and perhaps even contributed to the eventual growth of the discipline, he disdains

any intentions which are alien to science. Included in this category is the intrusion of politics

into the archaeological enterprise, and de Vaux identifies one of the more sinister aspects of this

involvement:

It has happenedand still happens in the midst of the twentieth centurythatarchaeology has served to conceal the intelligence services of certain major powers, orhas provided the occasion to assemble information having nothing to do, or very little todo, with science.24

Pre de Vauxs negative discussion of politics is not limited to espionage, although that is

clearly one of the more provocative ways for archaeology to be entangled with political agendas.

In de Vauxs view, which is widely shared by the archaeological community,any political

influence is detrimental to scientific research. Thus, de Vaux discusses a different kind of

corruption, namely the problematic relationships between archaeology and nationalism:

Today in all the countries of the Near East, in those which have maintained theirindependence as well as in those which have recently acquired or recovered it, in themost ancient states as in the youngest, archaeology serves nationalism everywhere. It is

used to establish links, real or contrived, with the past and to legitimize, through allegedancient rights, the possession or acquisition of certain territories.25

Pre de Vaux concludes this section of his article on a more positive note, commenting

that many archaeologists working in these conditions have safeguarded their integrity as

scholars. Yet his criticisms of the discipline are clear and direct: the purpose of archaeology is

neither to supply the galleries of museums nor to serve political interests.26 With this recounting

of rights and wrongs, the moral geography for contemporary archaeological research is firmly

established: plunder and politics are Bad, while impartial science is Good.

As outlined above, the narrative of archaeologys development from treasure hunting to

science contains at least two hidden polemical elements that seek to justify and legitimate present


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archaeological practices. Relegating the abuses to a bygone era effectively shields contemporary

archaeologists from the harsh criticisms that have been leveled at their forebears. That much is

clear; it is the second of the two implicit claims that requires further analysis. I argue that the

definition of archaeological abuse, far more than the temporally distancing move, is what

prevents many archaeologists from grasping the admittedly undertheorized parallels between

archaeology and imperialism. By defining the nature of abuse in such blunt, coarse terms

plunder, espionage, or such obviously politicized projects as nationalismthe subtler

correlations between even so-called scientific archaeology and Western imperialism are

suppressed.

The coarse definitions of archaeologys abuses mirror older definitions of imperialism. In

such definitions only the obvious, direct features of imperialism were acknowledged: invading

armies, colonization, the expropriation of administrative control, confiscation of material wealth

and resources, etc. Other, more slippery, themes such as those identified by Anne McClintock

the transmission of white, male power through control of colonized women; the emergence of a

new global order of cultural knowledge; and the imperial command of commodity capitalfell

beyond the pale of those analyses.27 These same issues (race, gender, power, knowledge, and

political economy) must also be incorporated into a critique that places Middle Eastern

archaeology within the context of Western imperial modernity. In this paper, however, I will

attempt to unravel just one thread from this Gordian Knotnamely, the linear logic of

chronological time, figured in the language of stratigraphy and periodizationand show how

this particular modality is woven throughout the entanglement of archaeology, museums,

imperialism, and nationalism in Jordan.28


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Arjun Appadurai has recently pointed out that Edward Saids study of Orientalism, while

a brilliant analysis of the contours of orientalist representations of the East, nevertheless failed to

specify how exactly the orientalist knowledge project and the colonial project of domination

and extraction were connected.29 Appadurai then takes up the role of statistics, censuses, and

other enumerative strategies to explore the linkages between bureaucratic power and the

colonial imagination in British India.30 I have something similar in mind as I raise the issue of

periodization as an imperial way of knowing and seek to connect this form of knowledge with

actual practices in Jordanian museumspractices, I hasten to add, that transgress the over-rigid

distinction between imperialist and nationalist periods in many accounts of Jordans

history.31 It would be premature, however, to rush into this argument without first establishing

the links between archaeology and imperialism on more traditional grounds. Thus, I will return

to aspects of the disciplinary origins narrative discussed earlier in this paper and draw out a

few of the more concrete examples of entanglement between archaeology and imperialism in the

Middle East.

Western interests in exploring the Holy Land were reawakened and enhanced during

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesa revival that had biblical motivations but also was

linked to questions about the very nature of empires that resurfaced in Europe during this period.

In his discussion of the changing views of Israel within the Anglo-Saxon tradition, Howard M.

Jones mentions the reemergence in [eighteenth-century] European thought of the ruins of

empire themethe doctrine, by no means novel, that political kingdoms have their birth,

growth, maturity, and decay because of some cyclical law in the nature of things.32 This ruins

of empire metanarrative became especially salient with regards to Palestine as international

travel to the region intensified. Travelers and explorers in the eastern Mediterranean were


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confronted with landscapes and social environments that did not conform to their expectations,

formed largely through their readings of biblical texts. Jones describes their varying reactions:

Now the decadent state of Palestine under the Turks, as reported by travelers, arousedcomparison with its former grandeur under Solomon or, for that matter, Caesar Augustus.Was Palestine an example of the universal law of empire, or, as some of the devoutargued, was it under a special curse? An auxiliary interest in ruins, especially the ruins ofclassical antiquity to be observed in the Near East, paralleled the larger concern. . . . Thisinterest in antiquarianism inevitably spread to cover the whole of the Levant, including,of course, the Holy Land.33

From the perspective of many explorers, however, the interest in ruins was anything but

auxiliary. They scoured the landscape searching out the vestiges of ancient sites, which they

documented in sketches and words, churning out travelogues, poetry, and other kinds of texts at

an astonishing rate. According to one estimate, Western authors published approximately 5,000

books and articles on Palestine and the surrounding areas between 1800 and 1878 alone.34

Barbara Parmenter discusses the imaginary possession-by-description at work in many of these

nineteenth-century European writings about Palestineincluding scientificas well as literary

representations of the Holy Landand points to their role in the symbolic colonization of the

region:

By figuratively removing contemporary residents from the Western image of the HolyLand or incorporating them into it, the legions of surveyors, historians, and naturalistswho combed Palestine in the nineteenth century symbolically possessed the land longbefore the British took political control of it. This situation was in no way unique. Muchthe same was happening in colonized lands around the globe.35

Other forms of possession, such as the plundering and pillage of archaeological artifacts,

were more direct ways to seize control of the land and its assets. This systematic depredation was

a clear corollary of the imperial project, and it also linked international archaeology with the rise


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of museums in both Europe and the Middle East. Kevin Walsh provides one example in his

discussion of the British Museum and the first museum boom in nineteenth-century England:

It was the acquisition of the Elgin marbles [from Greece] in 1814-15 that gave themuseum its international reputation in the field of classical antiquities. Its perceived aimswould appear to have been the ordering and understanding of the world. This wasobviously an aim closely tied to Britains perceived role as imperial master of theuniverse.36

The entrenchment and intensification of orientalism in nineteenth-century Europe was

linked closely to the increasing flow of material objects into European museums. This partially

reflects a secular drive for the acquisition of wealth and knowledge, authorized and

empowered by the mechanisms of empire. Yet much of the orientalists research, even in fields

as diverse as Greco-Roman history, classical archaeology, Assyriology, and Egyptology, also

was driven by an underlyingorientation toward biblical scholarship. Cyrus H. Gordon explains

this central preoccupation in simple, direct terms: Our Bible is but a fragment of the writings of

the Bible World. To understand that precious fragment, we need all the collateral information we

can get and digest.37 The gathering of this collateral information took many different forms,

including topographical and geological surveys, mapmaking expeditions, excavations, and even

folklore research. And, as I will demonstrate below, these investigations were often linked

explicitly to the development of imperial knowledges about the region.

THE PALESTINE EXPLORATION FUND: ARCHAEOLOGY AND/OR ESPIONAGE

A discussion of one particular institution will serve to dramatize this point. The Palestine

Exploration Fund (PEF), founded in 1865 under the patronage of Queen Victoria, is considered

by some as the beginning of the modern period in Palestinian researchmeaning, I suppose,

that it employed the language and methods of objective science as the basis of its


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investigations.38 Some of the most famous surveys and excavations in the region were conducted

under its aegis. The breadth and scope of the PEF exceeded that of any previous research project

in Palestine. The founding Prospectus stated the Funds far-reaching aims:

Much would be gained by obtaining an accurate map of the country; by settling disputedpoints of topography; by identifying ancient towns of Holy Writ with the modern villageswhich are their successors; by bringing to light the remains of so many races andgenerations which must lie concealed under the accumulation of rubbish and ruins onwhich those villages stand; by ascertaining the course of ancient roads; by the discoveryof coins, inscriptions and other relicsin short, by doing at leisure and systematicallythat which has hitherto been entirely neglected, or done only in a fragmentary manner byoccasional, unassisted efforts of hurried and inexperienced travelers.39

Although the PEF was founded as a secular society, with explicitly scientific aims, it

nevertheless shared the aforementioned emphasis on biblical texts, periods and sites. The

founding document clearly stated this predisposition in its opening sentence: No country should

be of such interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the

momentous events they describe enacted.40 Although many of its members adopted the radical,

evolutionary views that were sweeping England in the 1860s, the establishment of the PEF was

intended to meet two essentially theological goals: to discover the exact sites of various

villages and natural landmarks referred to in the Bible; and to repel with scientific aid the

onslaught made by contemporary scientists upon the foundations of organized religion.41 The

political implications of this work were direct, and links between the PEF and the British

government were established from the start: The British War Office was equally interested in

the exploration of Palestine, then part of the Ottoman empire, in order to obtain military

information and readily loaned its engineers to the Fund.42 One of the first, and most renowned,

of these military liaisons was Horatio H. Kitchener, who spent a number of years assisting

Conders groundbreaking surveys in Palestine before ascending rapidly through the ranks of the


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British imperial administration in Egypt and Sudan. The involvement of military officers in the

PEF expeditions was a quid pro quo relationship, mutually beneficial to both parties. The

explorers gained the engineers, technicians, and armed escorts necessary to ensure the success of

their missions in exchange for granting concessions to the War Office. In a recent biography of

Kitchener, Trevor Royle identifies a tacit agreement between the War Office and the PEF,

namely that a condition of the Engineer officers employment was that they would be free to

indulge in military intelligence work.43 This understanding, Royle continues, lasted at least until

the outbreak of the World War I, when the Palestine Exploration Funds projects were suspended

and the Engineers resumed their full-time work on Britains military campaigns in Palestine.

The intersecting trajectories of archaeology, espionage, and imperialismso clear in the

case of Kitcheneralso can be seen in the life histories of other notable figures in the recent

history of the Middle East. T.E. Lawrence, the infamous Lawrence of Arabia,44 studied

archaeology at Oxford and wrote his thesis on Crusader castles in the eastern Mediterranean. He

also excavated the Hittite site of Carchemish with C. Leonard Wooley and in 1913-14, at the

behest of the Palestine Exploration Fund, undertook an ambitious survey of the Sinai peninsula,

the desolate Wilderness of Zin. Thus, as Uri Raanan points out in the following quote,

Lawrences direct involvement in imperial politics began long before his (still hotly debated)

role in the Great Arab Revolt of 1916:

Map-making in the Middle East had never been completely divorced from politics. In

1874, while engaged in survey work in the area, Kitchener had meddled in consularpolitics. Laurence Oliphant had tried to play a part in the railway schemes of the powersin 1879. Just before the war T.E. Lawrence and Sir Leonard Wooley carried out a surveyfor the Palestine Exploration Fund. This work was later described as having beendesigned by Kitchener, who had taken Cromers place as the leading personality in Cairo,for the purpose of camouflaging a parallel military survey of Sinai by ColonelNewcombe.45


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Following his work with Lawrence in the Sinai, completed just prior to Britains entry

into the war, Wooley became an intelligence officer and subsequently spent two years as a

Turkish prisoner of war.

46

He then returned to archaeology in 1919 and gained worldwide

renown for his discoveries in at Ur in Mesopotamia (Iraq). The involvement of archaeologists in

covert government intelligence missions continued during World War II, when Jewish-American

archaeologist Nelson Glueck volunteered his services to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),

which after the war was absorbed into the Central Intelligence Agency. Glueck, who was an

ordained rabbi and a staunch opponent of fascism, supplied information to the American

intelligence community throughout the war. Floyd S. Fierman, who has written on this aspect of

Gluecks career using documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, describes

some activities that are oddly reminiscent of T.E. Lawrence. Apparently Glueck had even made

plans to organize a guerrilla war, working in cooperation with friendly Arabs, if the Nazis had

overrun the British and occupied the Middle East.47

IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANTIQUITIES MUSEUMS

Further evidence of the entanglement of archaeology and imperialism can be seen in the

rapidity with which archaeology became part of the official agenda of the British Mandate in

Palestine. After three years of military administration after the first World War, Sir Herbert

Samuel inaugurated the civil government of Palestine on July 1, 1920. High Commissioner

Samuel immediately formed the new Department of Antiquities and appointed an international

Archaeological Advisory Board, consisting of representatives of the principal local and national

archaeological interests. The Advisory Board met for the first time on August 3, 1920, to draft

the new Antiquities Law, which was published in October. Thus, within the first four months of

its administration, the new mandatory government established the juridical guidelines and the


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full-fledged government bureaucracy that would govern archaeological research in the region

until 1956. William Foxwell Albright, then director of the American School of Oriental Research

in Jerusalem, was an active participant throughout this process and commented on the results:

The Antiquities Ordinance may safely be termed a model of its kind, and its liberalprovisions for the division of the finds between the Palestine Museum and foreigninstitutions undertaking excavations should not fail to stimulate archaeological researchin the Holy Land.48

Albrights remarkswhich seems to hint that the old-fashioned concept of plunder may

have found new life in the guise of liberal provisions for the division of the findsattest to the

continuing importance of museums to the agendas of international archaeology. This period saw

the founding of the Palestine Archaeological Museum (later the Rockefeller Museum) in

Jerusalem, which became a central institution in the expansion of archaeological research in the

region. Roger Moorey summarizes the role of the new Palestine Antiquities Department during

the 1920s:

Under Garstang, and his immediate successors, a properly equipped Antiquities

Department with liberal new legislation was entrusted with surveying, recording andpreserving ancient monuments (over 2500 were scheduled), with facilitating legitimateresearch and with checking illegal digging for commercial profit. The foreign schools andinstitutes of archaeology in Jerusalem received every encouragement to revive their fieldresearch programmes.49

The growth and expansion of foreign archeological interests in Palestine during the

British Mandate is rarely problematized in the voluminous historical literature on the period. The

issues that concern most writers are generally limited to Anglo-Arab relations, British policies

toward Jewish settlement, and the rise of Arab nationalism. The role of foreign archaeologists

living and working in the region is almost never discussedowing in large part, perhaps, to their

own self-portrayal as objective scientists engaged in impartial archaeological research. W.F.


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Albright, in particular, is held up as a model of scholarly detachment, a disinterested yet

compassionate observer who, in his own words, could speak the tongues of both races and thus

remain neutral on the bitter struggles between Arabs and Jews.

50

Reviewing the crucial years

between 1919 and 1929 when Albright lived and worked at the American School for Oriental

Research in Jerusalem, Neil Silberman asks some pointed questions that challenge the

canonical narrative about Albrights alleged impartiality:

Can a scholar, who is also a product of modern society, with a particular national,religious, and economic position, really enter a strife torn society (like Palestine in the1920s) without participatingwillingly or unknowinglyin the political struggle that is

going on? Can he or she obtain rights to an archaeological site (which is also a part of themodern landscape), negotiate for goods, services, and government sanction, employ localworkers, and most important of all present a version of the past that is susceptible tomodern political interpolation, without contributingagain, knowingly orunconsciouslyto the modern political debate?51

Silbermans provocative and not-quite-rhetorical questions open the door to further

analysis of the historical entanglement of archaeology and imperialism. They also enable a

crucial transition in my argumentfrom discussing the overt aspects of this entanglement to a

critical reading of more subtle factors, namely the ways that certain knowledge practices inflect

archaeological discourse about the past with the (parochial and peculiar) structures of the

Western intellectual tradition. For as Silberman correctly points out in the above quote, the

aspects of field archaeology that require direct political negotiationsexcavation permits,

government liaisons, contracts with local workers and service providersare not the only areas

where politics intrude. Perhaps more important is the archaeologists ability to develop a

historical narrative. In telling the story of the past, the dynamic linkages between knowledge and

power that lie at the heart of this paper move to the fore.52 Thus, while Albright disavowed any

overt involvement with the politics of the region, his work on chronology and periodization in


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the practice of Palestinian archaeology implicated him in the larger project of Western imperial

modernity.

HISTORICAL PERIODIZATION: INSCRIBING THE PAST WITH THE POLITICS OF THE PRESENT

The modality of periodization, as developed in Middle Eastern archaeology, exhibits a

unique convergence between ideas and material artifacts, especially the broken potsherds which

are the most common artifacts uncovered by excavations in the eastern Mediterranean. Whole

ceramic vessels are easily broken, but the potsherds themselves are practically indestructible.

The durability of these ceramic fragments, combined with the presence of diagnostic features

such as rims, bases, handles, and other decorative elements, makes them an important part of the

archaeological record.Flinders Petrie was the first to recognize this and to apply it to his

pioneering excavations at Tell el-Hesi in southern Palestine, which he dug in 1890 for the

Palestine Exploration Fund.53 Petrie had tremendous confidence in the power of his new method,

and his claims on its behalf have clearly imperialist overtones: And once settle the pottery of a

country, and the key is in our hands for all future explorations.54 The real advances in pottery

typology were made by Albright, and the techniques of stratigraphic excavation were further

refined by Reisner and Kenyon. Yet perhaps Petries boasting was justified. The meticulous

study of potsherds and their stratigraphic contexts, begun with his work at Tell el-Hesi, forms the

core of a research tradition that continues to the present day, where I encountered it during my

work in Jordan with the Madaba Plains Project in 1994 and 1996. The MPPExcavation Manual

traces the genealogy of this current method:

The methodology of excavation used by the Madaba Plains Project owes much to DameKathleen Kenyons strict attention to the stratigraphy of earth layers which she importedto the Near East from England where Sir Mortimer Wheeler had developed it. . . . AtJericho, Lawrence Toombs and Joseph Callaway learned the method and brought it toG.E. Wrights excavation at Shechem. Wright combined Kenyons stratigraphic method


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with W.F. Albrights emphasis on pottery typology as a guide to stratigraphicinterpretation. . . . Our own innovations are merely amplifications of those roots.55

Yet methodological advances alone were not enough. Most excavators did not follow the

careful methods outlined above, and the relative chronologies developed for individual sites

could not be reconciled with each other. Before too long the mixed and mutually contradictory

conclusions from various excavations in Palestine had created a state of conceptual chaos.

Albright found this situation untenable, as his training in philology, Assyriology, and biblical

studies at the Johns Hopkins University had accustomed him to more rigorous methods and

analytic techniques. His criticisms of the state of archaeology on the eve of World War I were

candid and direct:

The dates given by Sellin and Watzinger for Jericho, those given by Bliss and Macalisterfor the mounds of the Shephelah, by Macalister for Gezer, and by Mackenzie for Beth-Shemesh do not agree at all, and the attempt to base a synthesis on their chronologyresulted, of course, in chaos. Moreover, most of the excavators failed to define thestratigraphy of their site, and thus left its archaeological history hazy and indefinite, witha chronology which was usually nebulous where correct and often clear-cut where it hassince been proven wrong.56

These critiques, first published in 1914, foreshadow Albrights post-war role in

developing a precise ceramic index and corresponding chronological sequence for the region of

greater Palestine (the areas now included in Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and southern Syria). During

his years in Jerusalem as Director of the American School of Oriental Research, Albright was

instrumental in developing the system of periodization that now comprises the standard

chronology of archaeological periods for the entire Middle East. In April 1923, thePalestine

Exploration Fund Quarterly Statementreported that a new chronological classification of

Palestinian archeology has been drawn up by the representatives of the three archaeological

Schools in Jerusalem.57 In this effort, actually completed in 1922, Albright collaborated with


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Garstang and Pythian-Adams of the British School and Pre Vincent of the Ecole Biblique. Their

new chronological synthesis ran as follows:

I. Stone Agei. Paleolithicii. Neolithic

II. Bronze Agei. Early Canaanite to 2000 B.C.

ii. Middle Canaanite, 20001600 B.C.iii. Late Canaanite, 16001200 B.C.

III. Iron Agei. Early Palestinian, 1200600 B.C. | (a) Philistine.

| (b) Israelite.ii. Middle Palestinian, 600100 B.C. | (a) Jewish.

| (b) Hellenistic.iii. Late Palestinian, 100 B.C.636 A.D. | (a) Roman.

| (b) Byzantine.IV. Modern

i. Early Arab, 6361100 A.D.ii. Middle Arab, 11001500 A.D.

iii. Late Arab, 1500

Several salient features of this schema are worth noting. First, this periodization

incorporates the widely influential Three Age System of archaeological periods (i.e., Stone,

Bronze, Iron) developed in early nineteenth-century Denmark by Christian Jurgensen Thomsen.

This system focuses on the changing composition of tools and major technological developments

to differentiate one period from the next. Of great significance for my study is the fact that

Thomsen developed his Three Age System, which remains the basic core of all periodization

schemes developed in the West to this day, in the context of a museum. This chronological

framework was the direct result of his work with the antiquities collection of the Royal

Commission for the Preservation and Collection of National Antiquities, which he transformed

into a new National Museum in Copenhagen and opened to the public in 1819. Thomsens

periodization provided the basic layout for the museum, where artifacts from the three ages were


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displayed in separate cabinets.58 In the early 1820s, when the museum moved from its original

space in the library of Copenhagen University to the royal palace at Christianborg, Thomsen

expanded and reorganized the exhibition so that each of the three periods occupied a separate

room.59 Thomsens innovative system of periodization was slow to catch on elsewhere in

Europe, however, for only visitors to his Copenhagen museum could encounter it until the

museums guidebook, first published in Danish in 1836, was translated into English in 1848.60

A second important feature of the 1922 Jerusalem Chronology is its attempt to assign

ethnic labels to the majority of the archaeological periods. Thus the Bronze Age is associated

with the Canaanites, while the Iron Ageextending, oddly enough, until the beginning of the

Islamic conquestsis labeled Palestinian but then further subdivided into Philistine,

Israelite, Jewish, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods.61 In the fourth or

Modern period, a catch-all category stretching from 636 CE to the present, all three divisions

are simply labeled Arab. This use of the term Modern appears to be simply a way of saying

non-ancient or non-archaeologicalthat is, not terribly important. By extending this period back

to the early seventh century and identifying its ethnic character as wholly Arab, the

archaeologists effectively excluded the Islamic periods from the scope of their investigations.

This dismissive use of the term Modern, therefore, has different implications than the use of

Modern in the current periodization scheme, which I will discuss shortly.

The emphasis on developing an ethnic periodization reflects the cultural and

ideological atmosphere of Palestinian archaeology in the early twentieth century, when

identifying archaeological strata and correlating their associated materials with specific social

groups named in the biblical texts was a primary concern of many (if not most) archaeologists.

Israel Finkelstein notes that the ethno-historical terminology was soon dropped in favor of the


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original evolutionist nomenclature, but that after 1948, many prominent Israeli archaeologists

attempted to revive the use of ethnic terms, designating the Canaanite and Israelite periods

instead of the Bronze and Iron Ages.

62

The political implications of this terminology are clear, as

it foregrounds the Exodus conquest narrative to assert a legitimizing historical precedent for

the twentieth-century resettlement of Jewish people in Palestine.63

A final striking feature of the 1922 periodization scheme is that it implicitly affirms the

importance of the Iron Age above all the other periods. The Stone Age and the Modern period

serve as relatively meaningless bookends, while the Bronze Age receives barely adequate

coverage. The Iron Age has the most nuanced subdivisions and absolute dates: a note following

the chronological classification table in thePalestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement

adds that in practice, use will be made of the terms Hellenistic, 330100B.C., Roman, 100 B.C.

350 A.D., and Byzantine, 350636 A.D. The Iron Age also employs the most specific ethnic

labels for its subordinate periods.

The centrality of the Iron Age in the social imaginary of Palestinian archaeology requires

further elaboration, which is beyond the scope of this paper. This much can be said: during the

Iron Age, a number of regional kingdomsnamely Ammon, Moab, Edom, and Israel

flourished on both sides of the Jordan River.64 While the boundaries between the Israelite,

Ammonite, Moabite, and Edomite territories were fluid and often hotly contestedin an eerie

parallel of the twentieth-century border disputes between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syriathe

polities themselves endured for several centuries. After Tiglath-Pileser IIIs conquests in 732

BCE, northern Transjordan was annexed to the Assyrian empire. Ammon, Moab, and Edom

became vassal states, but they experienced prosperity and economic growth because they

protected the primary trade route through the region.65 Any remaining shreds of local autonomy


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ended, however, with the invasion of the Babylonian military in 598BCE and 586 BCE. The

Babylonians were merely the first in a succession of foreign empires that would occupy (or, at

the very least, administrate) the region until well into the twentieth century. This imperial

history becomes the basis for a more recent system of periodization, the one currently used by

archaeologists in Jordan. In summing up the history of the region, anthropological archaeologist

ystein LaBianca explains:

Over the past three millennia, the indigenous population of Transjordan has had to adaptto a wide range of different types of supra-tribal polities. These included the indigenousIron Age kingdoms of Ammon, Moab, and Edom and the late first millennium BC

Kingdom of Nabatea. These polities were followed by a succession of externally imposedgovernment bureaucracies, beginning with the Persian provincial administration abouttwo and a half thousand years ago and ending with the Late Ottoman administration inthe early part of the present century. Thus, for more than two and a half millennia,Transjordan was ruledwith extremely varying degrees of effectivenessfrom Persia,Rome, Constantinople, Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, and Istanbul.

LaBiancas summary effectively demonstrates the discontinuities that comprise the

historical trajectory of foreign administrations in Jordan. This fits nicely with cultural geographer

Doreen Masseys assertion that places are always already hybrid.66 Jordans history of

entanglement with foreign authorities has become incorporated into the countrys basic identity.

The latest system of periodization developed by archaeologists to classify historical periods in

the Syro-Palestinian region is itself a fascinating cultural artifact that attests to Jordans long

history of interconnectedness to elsewhere.67 This litany of international influences has become

the basic organizing frameworkor geography of knowledgethrough which Jordans

historical past(s) are indexed for use in the present. The current chronological rubric is as

follows, beginning after the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Chalcolithic periods:


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Early BronzeEarly Bronze I (ca. 32003000 BCE)Early Bronze II-III (ca. 30002300 BCE)Early Bronze IV (ca. 23002000 BCE)

Middle BronzeMiddle Bronze IIA (ca. 20001800 BCE)Middle Bronze IIB-C (ca. 18001550BCE)

Late BronzeLate Bronze I (ca. 15501400 BCE)Late Bronze II (ca. 14001200 BCE)

Iron

Iron I (ca. 1200920 BCE)Iron II (ca. 920539 BCE)

Persian (539332 BCE)Hellenistic (33263 BCE)

RomanEarly Roman (63 BCE135 CE)Late Roman (135324 CE)

Byzantine (324640 CE)Umayyad (630750 CE)Abbasid (750969 CE)Fatimid (9691171 CE)Crusader (10991291 CE)Ayyubid (11741263 CE)Mamluk (12501516 CE)Turkish (15161918 CE)

Modern (1918present)68

The use of the term Modern in this latest schema of historical periodizationwhile

quite different, I believe, from the way it was employed in the 1922 Jerusalem Chronology

has implications that are worth noting. It is the only period on the list, with the exception of the

Bronze and Iron ages, that does not identify the central influence of a specific national or

dynastic group. This may be simply a pragmatic way of addressing the more complicated

political landscape of nation-states in the contemporary Middle East, where it has become

impossible to describe the region with a single, unified headingunless, of course, we employ a

heading that is egregiously vague, such as the Middle East. Yet the term has clear ideological

undertones and conspicuously glosses over the issue of twentieth-century Western imperialism.


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(Indeed, the more appropriate conclusion of this chronology would be the British period and

the Hashemite period, reflecting two regimes that continued the longstanding tradition of

imperial rule by groups whose origins lay outside the country.)

69

Furthermore, the use of such a

loaded term, with its attendant connotations of Progress and social development, also

implies that the countries of the Middle East could not have attained this enlightened state until

1918, when the regional intervention of Europe and America was heightened after the dissolution

of the Ottoman Empire. This subtle move serves to equate modernity with the West while at

the same time masking the specific details of that problematic encounter behind a more general

label.

In the same way that the account given by Near Eastern archaeologists of their

disciplines development from antiquarianism to professional science attempts to insulate the

present from the sins of the past, so too does this periodization schemea direct product, let us

remember, of similar archaeological ideas about time and historyclaim to insulate the past

from the politics of the present. My argument is thatboth claims are implicated in the discourse

of Western imperial modernity, as specific ways of knowing that structure and shape the world

according to principles that purport to be universal but are in fact quite specific to the historical

circumstances in which they were developed. This argument is not particularly radical in our

current intellectual climate, and I certainly do not believe that it sounds the death knell for the

practice of archaeology, scientific or otherwise. Rather, I wish to begin a productive dialogue

about the historical and continuing relationships between archaeology and imperialism in the

Middle East. For as Edward Said maintains in Culture and Imperialism,

Modern imperialism was so global and all-encompassing that virtually nothing escapedit; besides . . . the nineteenth-century contest over empire is still continuing today.Whether or not to look at the connections between cultural texts and imperialism is


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therefore to take a position in fact takeneither to study the connection in order tocriticize it and think of alternatives for it, or not to study it in order to let it stand,unexamined and, presumably, unchanged.70

CHRONOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY JORDANIAN MUSEUMS

The past is nothing but the latest development, todays present is nothing but tomorrows

past. The new National Museum will bring these connections to light for all Jordanians,

to see the past in the present, the present in the past, in this place.

Planning document for the proposed (but as-yet- unbuilt)National Museum in Amman, Jordan

In the final section of this paper, I return to contemporary Jordan to explore how

periodization is incorporated into two prominent museums of archaeology to provide a historical

pedigree for the nation through a heightened sense of historical legitimacy and an extension

backward in time of national history.71 The Jordan Archaeological Museum is a plain, squat

building that commands a majestic view from the top of Jabal al-Qalaa, the so-called Citadel

that rises above the historic downtown area in Jordans capital city of Amman. Built in 1951,

under the supervision of the British advisers who remained in Jordan after the formal close of the

Mandate period, the museum maintains the foremost collection of archaeological artifacts from

excavations throughout the country. The display cases in the main exhibition area of the museum

are organized in chronological sequence, from the Stone Ages to the Islamic periods.

Ironically, the large signs hung high on the walls of the museum to mark the major chronological

divisions are themselves rather dated. These signs, painted in both Arabic and English, reflect

the generalized categories that comprised the standard periodization scheme when the museum

was built: the Old and New Stone Ages; the Chalcolithic period; the Early, Middle, and

Late Bronze Ages; the Iron Ages (1 and 2); the Hellenistic Period; a section on Nabatean

Art; the Roman Period; the Byzantine Period, and a final section on Islamic Art.72


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This chronological arrangement of materials contains an underlying polemical message:

the land now known as Jordan has a long and venerable history of occupation and achievement

that connects the earliest eras of human settlement with the present-day nation of Jordan in a

smooth temporal sequence. As the museums printed brochure explains:

The land of Jordan was inhabited since the dawn of time. Successive civilizations leftrich indications of their historic presence in this part of the world, and the archaeology ofJordan has a distinct and strong presence in the circle of archaeological interest world-wide. Based on the extant historical heritage, serious scholars can verify the impressivepast which left clear evidence testifying to the greatness of this area and its importantposition.73

This trope of longevity, which identifies the current state of affairs in Jordan as merely

the most recent moments on a timeline that stretches back into distant prehistory, recurs in

museum narratives throughout Jordan. The printed guidebook for Museum of Jordanian

Heritage, located at the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at Yarmouk University

(Irbid), makes the connection between past and present even more explicit:

Although Jordan is a young state, its people are heirs to a continuum of human

development that dates back to more than one and a half million years. Those gatheringwild herbs in Spring meadows today probably do not think of the fact that for more than99 percent of this long span of time, man [sic] in Jordan has based his living exclusivelyon hunting and gathering. Similarly, Jordanian businessmen engaged in internationaltrade are by no means a new element to this country. As early as the 3rd and 2nd MillenniaB.C., trade linked the area to Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia and the whole easternMediterranean region. Jordans fertile plains and highland plateaus have been farmedsince about ten thousand years ago, and the arid and semi-arid environments in the eastand south have been exploited by specialized pastoralists for almost as long. Manysettlements in Jordan show a continuous history of occupation since the Neolithicperiod.74

The professed association between contemporary herb gathering and prehistoric

subsistence practices, as well as between the current business community and ancient networks

of transregional trade, serves to establish the pedigree of the modern state of Jordan and to


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claim legitimacy for the contemporary nation by the longevity of its historical roots. This

unbroken connection with the past is also encoded into the arrangement of exhibits in the

Museum of Jordanian Heritage. The museums layout is chronological, like that of the Citadel

Museumalthough it differs somewhat in that it is not divided according to the standard

schema of archaeological periods. The links between past and present are also heightened by the

fact that the museum does not explicitly mark the transition from the archaeological to the

ethnographic exhibits.

The main gallery of the Museum of Jordanian Heritage consists of four galleries, which

although tied to a linear temporal framework present the material according to topical clusters

and an expanded historical narrative. The first room, which covers Jordans prehistory, contains

displays on Hunters, Gatherers and Food-Collectors, Agricultural Evolution, and Village

Farming Communities. In the second room, exhibits on City States and Development and

The Development of Territorial States chart the early history of urbanization in the region. The

detailed explanations accompanying the artifacts provide contextual information on concurrent

urban developments in Mesopotamia and Egypt and locate the formation of territorial states in

Syria and Palestine against the backdrop of broader socio-economic changes in the eastern

Mediterranean. The third room of the museum, dedicated to material from the Roman and

Byzantine periods, is titled East and West and contains exhibits on The Nabataeans, Ethnic

and Cultural Plurality in Classical Jordan, and From Decapolis toJund al-Urdun. The fourth

and final gallery locates Jordan as Part of the Islamic World, and displays information about

Jordan under the Caliphate, Ayyubid/Mamluk and Ottoman Jordan, Land Tenure and

Settlement in the Late Nineteenth Century, and Jordans Present and Future.


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The notion of unilinear development is maintained as the visitor moves seamlessly from

the archaeological to the ethnographic exhibits (still in the fourth room of the museum). As

mentioned above, there is no obvious break in the exhibition to separate the present from the

sometimes quite distant past. Next to a display labeled Jordan since early Islam, AD 636

stands the reconstructed shop of an attar, or traditional Arab druggist. This small alcove, set into

the wall of the museum, contains an assortment of medicinal herbs, incense, spices, cosmetics,

and dried foodstuffs, as well as various medical texts and pharmaceutical paraphernalia from the

mid-twentieth century. The ethnographic section of the gallery also includes a potters workshop,

a blacksmiths workshop, a woodcarvers workshop, and a weavers workshop. Doors lead out

from this area into the central courtyard of the museum, where Jordanian architect Ammar

Khammash has constructed a full-size rural house complex that typifies the vernacular

architecture of northern Jordan. This model domestic space, constructed out of stone and other

local materials, includes a large, double-arched room furnished as living, sleeping, working, and

storage space. There is also a cross-vaulted room for the reception of guests, a stable, a bread-

oven room, and various other structures.

Despite the pedagogical and museological sophistication that sets the Museum of

Jordanian Heritage in Irbid apart from the older, shabbier Jordan Archaeological Museum on the

Citadel in Amman, the underlying narratives of both museums rely on a shared chronological

framework. And while the museum in Irbid claims to eschew the division into strict

archaeological periods, the linear temporal sequence remains a fundamental component of the

organization of artifacts in the museum. The same periodization system that orders the exhibits

in the Citadel Museum continues to hold sway over the Museum of Jordanian Heritage. The

canonical schema of archaeological time has not been discarded, even though its classificatory


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language of periods and dates has been somewhat de-centered by the museums emphasis on

topical clusters, historical narratives, and regional contexts.

CONCLUSION

In this paper I have explored a few aspects of the historical and contemporary

entanglement of archaeology and imperialism in Jordan. I framed this discussion within the

context of a Western imperial modernity and argued that both its ways of knowing and its social

practices, while usually couched in the universal language of science and rationality, are in fact

particular and even peculiar means to objectify and orderand, ultimately, to controlother

histories and other peoples. The archaeological traditions enshrined in contemporary Jordanian

museums are themselves part of a broader set of ideas about knowledge, culture, and history, and

are closely linked to the same projects of Western imperialism that forcibly reconfigured the

boundaries of Middle Eastern states in 1918. In exploring the role of international archaeology in

developing museums in the Middle East, as well as its complicity in the imperial agendas of

expansionist European states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have tried to argue that

the subtler and more insidious aspects of this entanglement occur through specialized knowledge

practices, such as historical periodization, that colonize the past and inscribe it with the structures

and politics of the present. By locating the origins of Jordanian museums as both products and

processes of Western imperial modernity, I hope to challenge the alleged universality of the

modernizing project. In so doing, I seek to open the door to other visions of past and present

alternate modernities, if you willthat structure peoples lives and narrate their experiences.


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NOTES

1Notes,British Museum Quarterly 1 (March 1927): 114.

2Notes,British Museum Quarterly 2 (June 1927): 32-33.

3Under the Ottomans, who ruled with varying degrees of effectiveness from the fifteenth century to the endof World War I, the area now known as Jordan was divided into a number of separate and shifting districts for thepurpose of taxation: the sanjakof Ajlun, the kaza of al-Balqa, and the sanjak(later mutasarrifiyya)of Karak.These districts, however, comprised the southern part ofBilad ash-ShamGreater Syriaand not an autonomousterritorial entity, much less a kingdom. For a detailed description of the administrative divisions of Syria and theirnumerous reconfigurations throughout the nineteenth century, see Eugene L. Rogan, Bringing the State Back, inVillage, Steppe, and State: The Social Origins of Modern Jordan, ed. Eugene L. Rogan and Tariq Tell (London:British Academic Press, 1994), 34-53.

4David Fromkin, How the Modern Middle East Map Came to be Drawn, Smithsonian (May 1991), 16,my italics.

5The fieldwork for this studypart of my ongoing research on heritage brokers and the politics of thepast in Jordanwas conducted in two research periods: MayJune 1998 and December 1998January 1999. This

research was funded by a Ford Foundation Research Grant for Social Science Concepts in Area Studies, a researchgrant from the Texas Fund for Public Policy Professionals, and additional funds from the Center for Middle EasternStudies and the Office of Graduate Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Portions of this paper originallyappeared in Adrian McIntyre Making Memories of Antiquity: Museums and the Construction of History andIdentity in Jordan, MA thesis, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1999. Specialthanks to Robert Fernea, Nina Berman, Kamala Visweswaran, and Nafiz Akehirliolu for their insightful commentson early drafts of that work.

6See Nestor Garcia Canclini,Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans.Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

7For example, Ted Swedenburg,Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the PalestinianNational Past(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

8The museums in Jordan can be grouped into several broad categories. The first, and most numerous,includes small, local museums attached to sites or towns with archaeological interest. These museumssuch as theones found at Umm al-Jamal, Jerash, al-Salt, Aqaba, the crusader castles at Karak and Shobak, the mosaic museumsat Madaba and Mount Nebo, the Nabatean museum at Petraare often small, poorly-maintained collections ofarchaeological artifacts. Many of these local museums are nothing more than a single room lined with glass displaycases, in which a veritable potpourri of artifacts are displayed without any specific provenance or supporting textualmaterials. Often these museums are staffed by low-level employees of the governments Department of Antiquities,few of whom have any formal training in museum curatorship. The National Archaeological Museum located on theCitadel in downtown Amman, which is discussed in detail toward the end of this paper, must also be included in thiscategory.

Museums of folklore and popular culture, which display Jordans bedouin and Palestinian cultural heritage,form another significant component of the museum scene in Jordan. I visited the three main museums in thiscategory: the Jordanian Folklore Museum and the Jordanian Museum of Popular Traditions, which also calls itselfthe Costume and Jewelry Museum, both located in opposite wings of the Roman Amphitheater in Amman, and the

internationally-acclaimed Museum of Jordanian Heritage in the northern city of Irbid. There are also significantfolklore displays in the museums at al-Salt and the University of Jordan. The folkore museums manifest a bizarreconflation of the past and the present in their portrayals of rural cultural traditions that are presumed to be stable yetstagnantrooted in the distant past, yet the ever-present backdrop of contemporary Jordanian life. The exhibitsembody popular notions of traditional rural existence, collapsing the boundaries between pastoral nomadism andsettled village life to portray a homogenized vision of Jordans pre-modern past. Yet this past, I want to emphasize,is not really past. Many important players in Jordans contemporary social and political landscape self-identify asmembers of tribal groups, and the countrys bedouin heritage figures prominently in the content of Jordans self-


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proclaimed national and cultural identity.

A third category is the relatively recent emergence of art museums and galleries in Amman, includingDarat al-Funun (Villa of the Arts), the new Municipal Gallery in Ras al-Ain, and the National Gallery of FineArts. A number of private galleries in Amman display and sell the work of contemporary Arab artists. The scope ofmy research does not extend to an analysis of the admittedly very provocative art movement in Jordan.

Nevertheless, my conversations with directors of these museums and galleries demonstrated that these exhibit spacesare increasingly used to display emergent examples of transregional and pan-Arab artistic expressions.

9James Clifford,Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1997), 3. For another approach to traveling theory, see Chris Rojek and John Urry, eds., TouringCultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory (London: Routledge, 1997).

10Susan Pearce,Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington, DC: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1993), 196. The work of Thomas J. Schlereth, one of the only American social historians whospecializes in material-culture research, provides a compelling counterpoint to Pearces claim. See Thomas J.Schlereth, History Museums and Material Culture, inHistory Museums in the United States: A CriticalAssessment, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 294-320; andThomas J. Schlereth, Cultural History and Material Culture: Everyday Life, Landscapes, Museums (Charlottesville:University Press of Virginia, 1992).

11

We should be quick to note that museums are much more than simple constellations of material objects,textual commentaries, and spatial arrangements. They are also composed of the social and institutional networks ofpeople that produce (and, I suppose, consume) the exhibitions. But while the aesthetic and ideological dimensionsof a museum are displayed in the content of its exhibits, the network of curators, administrators, financiers, royalpatrons, politicians, and intellectuals that influence and shape the exhibitions often remains obscured from view.These loose-knit social clusters of elite heritage brokers are ignored in the anthropological literature on Jordan,despite the fact that many of these same individuals play leading roles in the countrys current attempts to forge anational self-consciousness. A robust sociological and cultural analysis of such elites, while outside the limits of thepresent study, would be especially pertinent in Jordan, where the recovery and presentation of cultural heritage hashelped to invent a unified vision of the past that legitimates the power of these elite groups and belies the religious,political, and ethnic diversity of the present. For a critical ethnographic study of the heritage brokers in Jordansburgeoning handicraft industry, see Heather L. Ferguson, Handicrafts, Heritage, and History: Rural Weavers,Urban Elites, and the Construction of Cultural Identity in Jordan, MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1999.

12I take the phrase from R. Hewison, despite his unfortunate characterization of heritage as bogus history;see The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987). For an insightful andtrenchant overview of the heritage industry in Jordan, see Rami Farouk Daher, Gentrification and the Politics ofPower, Capital, and Culture in an Emerging Jordanian Heritage Industry, Traditional Dwellings and SettlementsReview 10 (Spring 1999): 33-45.

13For more on mult-sited methods and research imaginaries, see George E. Marcus,Ethnography in/ofthe World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95-117. I should note here that the heritage industry in Jordan is inherently multi-sited. Although centered in the capitalcity of Amman, it comprises a network of diverse projects located throughout the country, and thus the work ofJordanian heritage brokers cannot be accounted for ethnographically by remaining focused on a single site ofintensive investigation.

14Andrew Shryock,Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in

Tribal Jordan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).15Linda L. Layne,Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

16Virginia R. Dominguez, People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in ContemporaryIsrael (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); see also Virginia R. Dominguez, Invoking Culture: TheMessy Side of Cultural Politics, South Atlantic Quarterly 91, no. 1 (1992): 19-42.


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17Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,

revised ed. (New York: Verso, 1991);Anne McClintock,Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in theColonial Contest(New York: Routledge, 1995), 360.

18Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983).

19Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd reviseded. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), esp. 269-276.

20Quoted in Abdul Latif Tibawi,British Interests in Palestine, 1800-1901: A Study of Religious andEducational Enterprise (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 186.

21Other major figures in the development of systematic research methods, though none as significant asPetrie and Albright, include Claude R. Conder (for regional surveys), Frederick Bliss, George A. Reisner, ClarenceS. Fisher, and James Breasted (for stratigraphic excavations). A second generation of prominent archaeologistscodified and extended this scientific tradition, including G. Ernest Wright, Kathleen Kenyonthe only woman inthe pantheonNelson Glueck, and G. Lankester Harding. Their students, especially those of Wright, form asignificant and vocal majority in the current cohort of Syro-Palestinian archaeologists.

22For more on the denial of coevalness, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology

Makes its Object(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 37-70.23Roland de Vaux, On Right and Wrong Uses of Archaeology, inNear Eastern Archaeology in the

Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nelson Glueck, ed. James A. Sanders (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), 66. Aprofessor of history and archaeology who spent years living in the Middle East, de Vaux was well-positioned toobserve and comment on developments in the field. He edited the renownedRevue Biblique from 1938-1953 andserved as director of the Ecole biblique et archologique franaise in Jerusalem from 1945-1965. For further detailson his life and work, see P.R.S. Moorey,A Century of Biblical Archaeology (Cambridge, UK: The LutterworthPress, 1991), 90-94.

24de Vaux, 66.

25Ibid.

26Ibid. In later sections of the article, de Vaux extends his critique of Near Eastern archaeology to include

abuses of interpretation, such as the apologetic use of archaeology to prove the Bible, 68. He also criticizes theattempts of certain archaeologists (including Schliemann, famed for his discoveries at Troy) to produce artificialharmony between literary or historical texts and archaeological evidence by giving to the archaeological facts orto the texts a meaning which they do not have, and even to do violence simultaneously both to archaeology and tothe texts, 70.

27McClintock, 2-3.

28The notion of modalities in coding various imperial knowledge practices (e.g., historiography, survey,enumeration, museology, and surveillance) is drawn from Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms ofKnowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

29Arjun Appadurai,Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), 115. Aijaz Ahmed makes a similar point in his critique ofOrientalism, arguing that Saidsown liberal High Humanism and his privileging of textual knowledge prevents him from making the necessary

connections between orientalism(s) and material realities. See Aijaz Ahmad,In Theory: Classes, Nations,Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 159-190.

30Appadurai, 114-135.

31In a recent award-winning Ph.D. dissertation, Joseph Massad grounds his otherwise insightful analysis interms of a stark, binary opposition between the British colonial and the anti-colonial nationalist periods inJordan. These terms, and the periodization they invoke, are both historically questionable and theoreticallyproblematicespecially in their assumption that each period was characterized by stable, undifferentiated subject


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positions and political-material realities. See Joseph A. Massad, Identifying the Nation: The Juridical and MilitaryBasis of Jordanian National Identity (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998).

32Howard Mumford Jones, The Land of Israel in the Anglo-Saxon Tradition, inIsrael: Its Role inCivilization, ed. Moshe Davis (New York: Harper Brothers, 1956), 231.

33

Ibid., 231-32, my italics.34Ben-Arieh,Rediscovery of the Holy Land, 15; cited in Barbara McKean Parmenter, Giving Voice to

Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 8.

35Parmenter, 14. While the British administration of Palestine was never colonial in the literal sense (i.e.,unlike the French colonies in Algeria), these same literary and scientific representations played a role in a twentieth-century movement to colonize Palestine that was not merely symbolic. Parmenter continues: While geographies,maps, and specimen collections from other lands gathered dust on the shelves of colonial libraries, the Zionistmovement breathed new life into the works of nineteenth-century Westerners in Palestine. Their interpretations ofthe land provided a foothold for a new form of possession. Ibid., 15.

36Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World(London: Routledge, 1992), 30. The role of the British Museum in the early years of biblical archaeology isbriefly discussed in the introduction to T.C. Mitchell,Biblical Archaeology: Documents from the British Museum

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2-8.37Cyrus H. Gordon, The Ancient Near East, 3rd revised ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 303. An early

student of W.F. Albright, Gordon is noted for documenting transregional links that challenged the rigidcompartmentalization of ancient Near Eastern studies. See especially The Common Background of Greek andHebrew Civilizations, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965); Ugarit and Minoan Crete: the Bearing of theirTexts on the Origins of Western Culture (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966); andHomer and Bible: the Origin andCharacter of East Mediterranean Literature (Ventnor, NJ: Ventnor Publishers, 1967). Gordon gained internationalrecognition in 1957 by identifying the language of the Minoan Linear A tablets from Crete as Northwestern Semitic.

38Philip J. King,American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of OrientalResearch (Philadelphia: The American Schools of Oriental Research, 1983), 7. Kings use of the term modern, weshould recognize by now, is problematic, and, as I will explain in the following section, it also serves to mask thevery entanglement between knowledge and power that I am exploring in this paper. One source for Kings

statement, however, is the rhetoric of the PEF itself asserting the its foundational role in the scientific study of theregion. At the close of the PEFs annual meeting in July, 1914, Walter Morrison (who had been with the Fund sinceits inception in 1865) made the following remarks: [W]e may well be proud, for we were the originators ofscientific exploration in Palestine and everywhere else; and we have carried out our business during the last 48 yearsin a thoroughly scientific way. There is not a bit of pottery or a bone that has been found in our explorations whichhas not been recorded, so that we can tell exactly where it was found. . . And we have been the parent of a greatnumber of Societies, Italian, French, Am