Scribbling Through History Ragazzoli, Chloé; Harmansah, Ömür; Salvador, Chiara ...
2018, 2018-05-31
eBook
For most people the mention of graffiti conjures up notions of subversion, defacement, and underground culture. Yet, the term was coined by classical archaeologists excavating Pompeii in the 19th ...century and has been embraced by modern street culture: graffiti have been left on natural sites and public monuments for tens of thousands of years. They mark a position in time, a relation to space, and a territorial claim. They are also material displays of individual identity and social interaction. As an effective, socially accepted medium of self-definition, ancient graffiti may be compared to the modern use of social networks. This book shows that graffiti, a very ancient practice long hidden behind modern disapproval and street culture, have been integral to literacy and self-expression throughout history.
This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political ...narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.
This paper focuses on ISIS's recent destruction of archaeological heritage in Iraq and its (self-) representation in the global media. It is argued that the Islamic State's destruction of ...archaeological sites and museums as well as historical monuments and local shrines can be seen as a form of place-based violence that aims to annihilate the local sense of belonging, and the collective sense of memory among local communities, to whom the heritage belongs. It is also suggested that the Islamic State coordinates and choreographs these destructions as mediatic spectacles of violence aimed at objects and sites of heritage, which take place as re-enactments or historical performances that are communicated to us through ISIS's own image-making apparatus that utilizes advanced technologies of visualization and communication.
Reviews "Cities and citadels in Turkey : from the Iron Age to the Seljuks," edited by Scott Redford and Nina Ergin (Peeters, 2013). This volume is the formal product of a symposium held in December ...2009, one of the annual symposia organized by the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Koç University. The editors and contributors have put in painstaking effort to create a collection of essays of great substance that will serve for many years as a major resource on Anatolian citadels, fortresses, and their defensive structures as cultural artifacts and as sociospatial phenomena in their specific historical contexts. Readers may be puzzled to find such a heavy representation of the Iron Age coupled with a focus on medieval Byzantine and Seljuk Anatolia, but the book illustrates the state of the discipline of archaeology/architectural history in the Anatolian context. Revised Publication Abstract
People are drawn to places where geology performs its miracles: ice-cold spring waters gushing from the rock, mysterious caves which act as conduits for ancestors and divinities traveling back and ...forth to the underworld, sacred bodies of water where communities make libations and offer sacrifices. This volume presents a series of archaeological landscapes from the Iranian highlands to the Anatolian Plateau, and from the Mediterranean borderlands to Mesoamerica. Contributors all have a deep interest in the making and the long-term history of unorthodox places of human interaction with the mineral world, specifically the landscapes of rocks and water. Working with rock reliefs, sacred springs and lakes, caves, cairns, ruins and other meaningful places, they draw attention to the need for a rigorous field methodology and theoretical framework for working with such special places. At a time when network models, urban-centered and macro-scale perspectives dominate discussions of ancient landscapes, this unusual volume takes us to remote, unmappable places of cultural practice, social imagination and political appropriation. It offers not only a diverse set of case studies approaching small meaningful places in their special geological grounding, but also suggests new methodologies and interpretive approaches to understand places and the processes of place-making.
People are drawn to places where geology performs its miracles: ice-cold spring waters gushing from the rock, mysterious caves which act as conduits for ancestors and divinities traveling back and ...forth to the underworld, sacred bodies of water where communities make libations and offer sacrifices. This volume presents a series of archaeological landscapes from the Iranian highlands to the Anatolian Plateau, and from the Mediterranean borderlands to Mesoamerica. Contributors all have a deep interest in the making and the long-term history of unorthodox places of human interaction with the mineral world, specifically the landscapes of rocks and water. Working with rock reliefs, sacred springs and lakes, caves, cairns, ruins and other meaningful places, they draw attention to the need for a rigorous field methodology and theoretical framework for working with such special places. At a time when network models, urban-centered and macro-scale perspectives dominate discussions of ancient landscapes, this unusual volume takes us to remote, unmappable places of cultural practice, social imagination and political appropriation. It offers not only a diverse set of case studies approaching small meaningful places in their special geological grounding, but also suggests new methodologies and interpretive approaches to understand places and the processes of place-making.
Moving Landscapes, Making Place Harmanşah, Ömür
Journal of Mediterranean archaeology,
01/2011, Volume:
24, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The urbanization of Syro-Hittite (Luwian and Aramaean) states is one of most complex yet little explored regional processes in Near Eastern history and archaeology. In this study, I discuss aspects ...of landscape and settlement change in northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia during the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200-850 BC), and suggest that the emergent geo-politics of the region involved the foundation of cities and construction of specific types of commemorative monuments including rock reliefs, steles and city gates. While defining new forms of territorial power, these monuments linked local polities to a shared Hittite past through their literary and visual rhetoric, and a discourse of inherited agricultural land. To contextualize the subject matter, I first discuss the gradual southward shift of an imperial center of power from central Anatolia towards Karkamiš and Tarhuntašša at the end of the Late Bronze Age, arguing against the widespread models of a sudden collapse of the Hittite Empire followed by dark ages. Furthermore, I present archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the formation of the regional state Malizi/Melid. This Syro-Hittite kingdom established itself in the Malatya-Elbistan Plains in eastern Turkey during the first centuries of the Early Iron Age as one of the earliest political entities to emerge from the ashes of the Hittite Empire. Monuments raised by Malizean 'county lords' in rural and urban contexts suggest a picture of a fluid landscape in transition, one that was configured through the construction of cities, and other practices of place-making.
This article investigates the making of Assyrian landscapes during the late second and early first millennia B.C.E. From the late 14th century B.C.E. onward, the Assyrians designated the emergent ...core of their territorial state as the “Land of Aššur” in their royal inscriptions. However, over the course of the next several centuries, the cultural geography of the Land of Aššur was continuously redefined while gradually shifting northward from the arid environs of the city Aššur to the well-watered and resourceful landscapes around the confluence of the Tigris and the Upper and Lower Zab Rivers. Contemporaneously, the landscapes of the Upper Tigris basin (southeastern Turkey) and the Jazira witnessed extensive settlement and cultivation as Assyrian provinces and frontiers. Drawing on archaeological survey evidence and a critical reading of the textual accounts of urban foundations, this paper argues that such mobility of Assyrian landscapes was part and parcel of broader processes of environmental and settlement change in Upper Mesopotamia. Assyrian annalistic texts point to an elaborate rhetoric of landscape that portrays state interventions in the form of city foundations and building programs, construction of irrigation canals, planting of orchards, opening of new quarries, and settlement of populations. Furthermore, the making of commemorative monuments such as rock reliefs and stelae allowed the Assyrian state to inscribe symbolically charged places in foreign landscapes and incorporate them into the narratives of the empire. By drawing attention to the long-term trends of settlement in Upper Mesopotamia during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages and the agency of landscapes, the article contextualizes the Assyrian political rhetoric of development at the time of a highly fluid world of geographical imagination.
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