ANOTHER CITY IN ANOTHER LIFE
Marlisa Wise AE120: City and the Festival 30 March, 2007
The ruins of ancient civilizations inspire speculation, wonder and delight, connecting human civilizations across time and space through shared characteristics. We expect a certain lineage to reveal itself among the detritus of ancient cities, the lineage of our human society. In the public squares and the city gates of fallen civilizations we are attempting to build a collective memory and history for society – yet these retellings have all the complications inherent to their “doubleness”[1] in time and place. While it is commonly believed that ancient material and architectural evidence (when given fair and unbiased treatment) can illuminate and broaden our understanding of the human experience, the material evidence can never equate with the original. It will forever remain a copy, a reenactment of what once was. Be it an orthostat, a public square, a morning ritual in the streets of Nineveh, the archeological evidence must be approached with the care that its troubled multi-temporal nature deserves. When seeking out our lineage we mustn’t forget that we are constructing, not merely unearthing our past. That detritus on the floor wants to be something. Give it your story.
The archeological practice has become troubled in recent years, asked questions that were previously unconsidered. In his collaborative text, Theater/Archeology, archeologist Michael Shanks wonders, “are the diggers themselves subjects for record?”[2] My answer is a resounding “yes”, that the photograph tells more about the cameraperson than the subject matter. In this essay, Marc Van de Mieroop will serve as our prototypical digger for a measured reflection on the practice of archeology- what is written regarding his practices thus applies to all those who attempt an archeological (re)construction of our history.
In Marc Van de Mieroop's book The Ancient Mesopotamian City he devotes an entire chapter to developing a comprehensive model of ancient Near Eastern cities across history. If we understand the material evidence of ancient cities to be multi-temporal and the abundance of remains to be simultaneously (and paradoxically) a loss of “authentic” experience, his attempt to develop a consistent model of ancient Mesopotamian social history should be immediately suspect. The authenticity of the remains and the document both deserve suspicious treatment; not to be dismissed, but to become understood in new more productive ways which may illuminate multiple times and societies.
Van de Mieroop attempts to comprehensively define Mesopotamian social practices through what he defines as shared material/architectural practices (the city walls and gates, the relation to patron deities, the motivations of kings, etc.) He gives a detailed account of this generalized built environment in its relation to speculated cultural practices. The leaks in his arguments are quickly apparent upon examination of the actual material evidence and variations among archeological accounts – Van de Mieroop writes about ancient Mesopotamian cities as he imagines they had been, not as they actually were. It takes only a survey of related scholarship to find dissenting opinions and reports[3] Civilizations may share building practices or mythologies, but in no case are they all quite the same – similarly, archeologists may share cities but their stories are all their own. “It is a common aspiration of much archeology eventually to construct historical narrative.”[4] Yet one constructed narrative is no truer than any other, all are reproductions (re-performances) of the city, just as it was originally imagined, reproduced and performed by its inhabitants. We have only to remember Calvino to understand the multi-spatial, multi-temporal nature of the city.
The question remains (!) whether the ‘accuracy’ of archeological writing is really of utmost importance. Not only should we ask what happened, but also how it is remembered and what survives. Van de Mieroop declares that for ancient Mesopotamians, "A city without a wall might thus not have been conceivable"[5]. I propose that (similarly) a city without a narrative might not be conceivable in our contemporary society. Imagined and told and sung differently across time and place, the history of civilizations remains in many ways and forms. These narratives form the new walls of the cities as we build them through cultural production.
Van de Mieroop describes city walls as "defensive", removing them from everyday functions rather than integrating this common urban feature into the everyday functioning of the city. Our impulse to narrate, construct and delimit the past serves a similar defensive function and is similarly integrated into our everyday lived existence. Notions of the past as non-repeatable and documentation as mimesis keep the ground solid under our feet and the past relegated to it’s reproduction, preserving the idea of the past as an original, pristine and non-repeatable event. While archeology guards the past (just as Van de Mieroop’s city walls were especially useful under attack) both are actually a constant presence maintained by those who pass by. In our inhabitation of cities we preserve narratives of their pasts, altering them through our actions despite the distance of time – thus a city in ruins may exist differently and simultaneously, cities multiplying out of our control. In our reading of Van de Mieroop we are complicit in building and maintaining his imaginary city. We live surrounded by narrative walls not dissimilar to ancient walls covered with narrative inscriptions –
The stories constantly rebuild the space.[6]
Van de Mieroop addresses the city gates built in many ancient Mesopotamian cities, those entrances/oculi to the urban experiences that have received such great attention, at the beginning of his description – the entrance to his city. He writes in a style that heavily emphasizes visual knowledge of the city and leads us in his narration on a kind of procession through the city, recreating a visual and spatial experience through the filter of his text. He uses the present tense (“coming closer to town”[7]) and vivid adjectives, often addressing the imagined heat, smell, and sound of his generalized city. He includes pictures as a kind of proof that his words are true, and yet those pictures are hand drawn human representations. Van de Mieroop performs the city for us, and as we read we imagine another version of this composite city with no original. The presence of framing and perspectival production in Van de Mieroop’s digging/writing is unavoidable.
My problem with Van de Mieroop’s scholarship lies in his narrative approach, the patterns he lays out in the ancient cities he describes, and how he builds them for his readers. Without experiencing the cities ourselves, we can only know them through Van de Mieroop’s words – he is responsible for the transmittance of their complex history and he tries to present a master narrative. We know better. Generalizations prove problematic when dealing with the archeology of ancient Near eastern cities because of the disparity between residual evidence and the complex nature of living cities. The issue here is of documentation, of the distinction between the authentic ‘real’ life of these cities in the past and their current status as reconstructed histories. I argue that all types of remains must be valued and acknowledged for their complex nature and relationship to the past.
While archeology is concerned with the social structures and cultural practices of past civilizations, it is itself a mode of cultural production and social re-remembering. Memory becomes of the highest importance and historical narrative becomes a form of reenactment. Dealing with these messy remains of social history (if history, in fact, can be said to remain) is the function of archeology, which proves to be a vexed problem indeed. Imagining the ruins as they were thousands of years ago often leads to a programmatic approach that overlooks the unique and vibrant nature of cities in their paradoxically enduring immediacy. The aim of archeology is to form something new out of something old – to explore the between spaces of past and present, to create documents for an indeterminate future audience. Archeological practice inhabits a mercurial realm of material remains and human imagination, physical ruins and story-telling.
[1] Here I refer to the notion of the double as the forgotten/feminized/replaced, drawing from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, W.E.B. DuBois’ notion of double consciousness and the work of Antonin Artaud, who wrote, “Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double”.
[2] Shanks, Michael and Mike Pearson. Theater/Archeology. Routledge Press, London, 2001, p31.
[3]Due to the conglomerate nature of Van de Mieroop’s imagined city, it would be tedious to parade scholarly examples which support and contradict his claims to varying degrees. The point I am trying to make is that the existence of those variations is productive, and if an archeological account acknowledges its personal and fallible nature, it is more honest and more useful.
[4] Ibid.
[5]Van de Mieroop, Marc. The Ancient Mesopotamian City. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, p73.
[6]Imagine Karkamish as it once may have been, and the series of reproductions its memory has faced. Its first excavation team’s objects and documents were bombed, now our only records are copies/remembrances of their interpretations. The museum where other recovered Karkamish relics were held was later bombed as well, and now the site itself is a military zone, an unreachable heterotopia. And yet as I write and you read these words, Karkamish is still living, still imagined and reproduced.
[7]Van de Mieroop, Marc. The Ancient Mesopotamian City. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, p67.