The Right Kind of Multiculturalism
The field of archaeology is under a political cloud because of its allegedly racist and exploitative history. American Indians have protested the “desecration” of tribal burial grounds by archaeological digs. A longstanding argument rages about the legal ownership of antiquities acquired by museums through donation or purchase since the late 18th century.
The brief against archaeology for its physical predations has been extended to its interpretive system. Militant identity politics claims that no culture can be understood except by its natives, as if DNA gave insight. All scrutiny by outsiders is supposedly biased, self-interested and reductive.
A related complaint comes from poststructuralism, specifically the work of Michel Foucault, whom Edward Said introduced to American literary criticism in his 1975 book, Beginnings. Mr. Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University and president of the Modern Language Association, adopted Mr. Foucault’s view of oppressive power, operating in Western conceptual systems as a covert instrument of domination, in his 1978 book, Orientalism. Far less talented academics followed Mr. Said’s lead in the dreary movement called New Historicism, which sees imperialism under every bush.
Erudite, cultivated, accomplished and prolific, Mr. Said is a major scholar. Unfortunately, his sharp critiques of European interest in the Near East focus on literature (which he sees as a mask for colonialism), to the exclusion of the visual arts and architecture. In his central books, Mr. Said gives dismayingly short shrift to the massive achievements of Egyptologists and Orientalists, fomenting a suspicion of and cynicism about archaeology that have spread through the humanities.
This is regrettable, since archaeology is a perfect model for multiculturalism in the classroom. During three decades as a college teacher, I have found that archaeology fascinates and unites students of different races, economic backgrounds and academic preparation.
First, archaeology gives perspective, a vivid sense of the sweep of history—too often lacking in today’s dumbed-down curriculum. Second, archaeology shows the fragility of culture. It illustrates how even the most powerful of nations succumbed to chaos and catastrophe or to the slow obliteration of nature and time.
The epidemic of violence in American high schools is, I suspect, partly a reaction to the banality of middle-class education, which is suffused with sentimental liberal humanitarianism. Anything not “nice” is edited out of history and culture—except, of course, when it can be blamed on white males. Archaeology, with its stunning panoramas of broken ruins, satisfies young people’s lust for awe and destruction.
Third, archaeology introduces the young to the scientific method, presented in the guise of a mystery story. Greek philosophy and logic, revived during the Renaissance and refined in the 17th century, produced the archaeological technique of controlled excavation, measurement, documentation, identification, and categorization. Modern archaeology is one of the finest fruits of the Western Enlightenment.
Stratigraphy, the analysis of settlement layers or ash deposits, is a basic tool of archaeology, cutting through the past so it can be read like a book. Dumps, latrines and cave floors are mined for microscopic study of seeds and pollen and for radiocarbon dating of wood, plant fibers and textiles. Chewed bones and worn teeth reveal diet and diseases and help draw the map of migration patterns and trade routes. With saintly patience, archaeologists laboriously collect shattered potsherds and reassemble them like Cubist jigsaw puzzles.
Western technology has given archaeology a wealth of tools. Aerial survey reveals the faint traces of buildings, earthworks and irrigation channels. Underwater archaeology, born after World War II, recovers artifacts from lakes and seas via scuba diving, unmanned submersible vehicles and side-scanning sonar.
Archaeology has restored human memory of vanished societies like that of Pakistan’s prehistoric Indus River Valley civilization or that of the mighty Khmer empire centered at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat. We now know about the Olmec of Mexico, whose society began a thousand years before Christ, or the Maya of Central America, whose pyramids at Tikal were slowly buried in the tangled jungle.
In the 1880’s, thanks to European archaeologists, Akhetaten, the utopian city on the Nile built by Akhenaten and Nefertiti and destroyed by their political rivals, was rediscovered at Tel el-Amarna. In the 1890s, Sir Arthur Evans’s excavations at the labyrinthine palace at Knossos revealed the greatness of Minoan Crete.
In the 1920s, C. Leonard Woolley excavated the forgotten Mesopotamian city of Ur, whose ornate treasures grace the University Museum in Philadelphia. In 1975, tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets found in Syria helped resurrect Ebla, a commercial capital of the third millennium B.C., and also deepened our understanding of biblical texts. Archaeologists are still at work on the tantalizing conundrum of the Etruscans, who heavily influenced Rome.
The British Museum is currently celebrating the bicentenary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a second-century B.C. basalt slab whose tripartite inscription was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone, found during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt when it was still an Ottoman province, is a symbol of Western intellectual virtuosity and achievement.
The modern disciplines of knowledge, far from being covert forms of social control as the leftist poststructuralists tediously claim, have rescued ancient objects and monuments from neglect and abuse and have enormously expanded the record of our species. Degree-granting programs in archaeology are few and beleaguered in the U.S. Funding for archaeology, at school and in the field, is as crucial as for space exploration. Archaeology is our voyage to the past, where we discover who we were and therefore who we are.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal.