Talk:Nationalism and archaeology

Sources & articles mentioning it

Dacians

Nationalist historiography - this has a number of sources

[[Bettina Arnold, i Pseudoarchaeology and nationalism: essentializing difference," in Archaeological Fantasies. Edited by Garrett Fagan. …I've got the book and the pdf of the chapter is here.

Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology by Kohl, Philip L., 1946-; Fawcett, Clare P CUP 1995[1]

Nationalism and Siberian Archeology of the 19th Century

Nationalist Theory and Politicization of Archaeological Resources: Manifestations in Iraq by Andrew Vang-Roberts

review of Margarita Diaz-Andreu, Timothy Champion, eds.. Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe

This book covers:1. Nationalism and Archaeology: An Introduction Margarita Diìaz-Andreu and Timothy Champion 2. The Fall of a Nation, the Birth of a Subject: The National Use of Archaeology in Nineteenth-century Denmark Marie Louise Stig Sørensen 3. French Archaeology: Between National Identity and Cultural Identity Alain Schnapp 4. Islamic Archaeology and the Origin of the Spanish Nation Margarita Diìaz-Andreu 5. Archaeology and Nationalism: The Portugese Case Carlos Fabião 6. Nationalism wihout a Nation: The Italian Case Alessandro Guidi 7. Three Nations or One? Britain and the National Use of the Past Timothy Champion 8. Building the Future on the Past: Archaeology and the Construction of National Identity in Ireland Gabriel Cooney 9. German Archaeology and its Relation to Nationalism and Racism Ingo Wiwjorra 10. "Drang Nach Westen"?: Polish Archaeology and National Identity Wlodzimierz Rączkowski 11. The Faces of Nationalist Archaeology in Russia Victor A. Shnirelman 12. Nationalism Doubly Oppressed: Archaeology and Nationalism in Lithuania Giedrius Puodžiūnas and Algirdas Girininkas 13. Is there National Archaeology Without Nationalism? Archaeological Tradition in Slovenia Božidar Slapšak and Predrag Novaković 14. Epilogue Miroslav Hroch

Nationalism and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote past Philip L. Kohl in my documents folder

Archaeology and nationalism Chapter Author(s): Ulrike Sommer from Key Concepts in Public Archaeology

an article on Alternative archaeology from the same book.

What Does Archaeology Have to Do with Nationalism? downloaded

Creating Suitable Evidence of the Past? Archaeology, Politics, and Hindu Nationalism in India from the End of the Twentieth Century to the Present downloaded

[https://eds.p.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=a5027de0-b8a6-4ad9-aa68-f9450ee747d8%40redis Scuffles, Scoops and Scams: The Construction of Prehistoric Knowledge in Newspapers August 2016 Centaurus 58(3):135-147]

"Our Ancestors the Gauls": Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doug Weller (talk • contribs) 15:22, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Hindutva, Mythistory, and Pseudoarchaeology Cynthia Ann Humes Numen Vol. 59, No. 2/3, Alternative Archaeology (2012), pp. 178-201 (24 pages) JSTOR open access (I think, I've got it in any case)

p 501 chapter on "Ethnic conflict" in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology Volume 1y Neil Asher Silberman · 2012 - a snippet: "represent “cultures" defined by recurring artifacts or stylistic details, and that said assemblages might be equated with an ethnic group, is misleading. Anthropological and sociological studies indicate that material “cultures" do not directly correlate with ethnic groups. The notion that the past was made up of an archipelago of detached islands of “fixed" cultures is challenged by the ample evidence of regular cultural exchange between groups—a “cultural conversation" that incrementally altered the identities and material assemblages of these ethnic groups." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doug Weller (talk • contribs) 14:56, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

[2]

"Excavations in Jerusalem today are firmly under the control of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a government organization that grants no permits to Palestinian teams in the city and only rarely approves them for foreigners. Fundamentalist Christian as well as Jewish groups with overt religious agendas pour money into costly digs. Israeli leaders regularly cite archaeological finds to strengthen their claim to the Holy City, whereas a host of international organizations denounce any excavations—no matter how impeccable the scientific method—in areas considered occupied."

and more. Doug Weller talk 12:12, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

A pov source might have some use to find more that isn't.[3]. Doug Weller talk 12:13, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Pseudoarchaeology and Nationalism: Essentializing Difference - pdf from 2006, Archaeological Fantasies. Edited by Garrett Fagan. …[4] Doug Weller talk 15:26, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

What sections should this have?

Something on hoaxes or nationalistic descriptions of sites, etc. Effect on what archaeology is done and what is ignored, although what is ignored is often what Bruce Trigger calls "colonialist archaeology", eg in Africa Europeans weren't interested in much more than the paleolithic. Some key examples, maybe by country? Doug Weller talk 13:29, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Some frauds are accepted without careful scrutiny because of nationalism, eg Piltdown Man and the Japanese Paleolithic hoax. Doug Weller talk 16:54, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

This is a very interesting topic: I will add some sources for S. Asia and C. Asia. TrangaBellam (talk) 21:23, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

@TrangaBellam: Despite the fact that it's only a stub with most pinched from elsewhere, I've made this live as I'm not sure whether the medical treatment, ie chemo and probably surgery, will give me a lot of time to work on it in the near future (hopefully it will extend my future!). Any help will be very appreciated. I'm also working on Gunung Padang. Doug Weller talk 14:22, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Chapter on "Pseudoarchaeology and nationlism" by Bettina Arnold in "Archaeological Fantasies" ed Fagan

Looks useful Doug Weller talk 17:31, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Pseudoarcheology has a section "Nationalistic motivation"

• The assertion that the Mound Builders were a long vanished non-Native American people thought to have come from Europe, the Middle East, or Africa.
• The Kensington Runestone of Minnesota held to prove Nordic Viking primacy in discovery of the Americas.
• Nazi archaeology, the Thule Society, and expeditions sent by the Ahnenerbe to research the existence of a mythical Aryan race. The research of Edmund Kiss at Tiwanaku would be one example.
• The Bosnian pyramids project, which has projected that several hills in Visoko, Bosnia are ancient pyramids.
• Claims within pyramidology in support of British Israelism and the idea that the ancestors of people of Great Britain built the Giza pyramid complex. This includes the idea that the pyramid inch was a basis for rejecting adoption of the metric system. British Israelists have also claimed that the Hill of Tara in Ireland contained the Ark of the Covenant. They excavated the hill in an attempt to prove the Irish were part of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
• Piltdown man
• Neolithic hyperdiffusion from Egypt being responsible for influencing most of the major ancient civilizations of the world in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and particularly the ancient Native Americans. This includes Olmec alternative origin speculations.
• Jovan I. Deretić's Serbocentric claims in the ancient history of the Old World.
• Romanian protochronism also uses pseudoarchaeological interpretations; for more pieces of information, see the Tărtăria tablets, the Rohonc Codex's Daco-Romanian hypothesis, or the Sinaia lead plates.
• The theory that New Zealand was not settled by the Māori people, but by a pre-Polynesian race of giants
• White supremacist claims of a superior Tartarian Empire that colonized the world.
• Claims representing the perspective of Afrocentrism that Black people should be credited with creating the first civilizations.

References

Doug Weller talk 08:23, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

China (potential section)

I am thinking for organization it would make the most sense to have sections for notable examples from different nationalist movements. (And perhaps a few additional sections like a brief overview of nationalism?) I'll try to look into a few examples and gather sources and wikilinks on the talk page first. China came to mind first because of the Mao Zedong quote "Let the past serve the present."

Potential sources:

Newspaper articles

• "Digging up China’s past is always political", archived full text, 'For since the birth of Chinese archaeology in the 1920s, it has been inseparable from claims that China boasts the oldest unbroken civilisation on Earth.'
• "It’s a golden age for Chinese archaeology — and the West is ignoring it", archived full text, 'Under Chinese scholars such as Li Ji, however, archaeology quickly became a discipline closely intertwined with traditional history and attached to a particular story. The dominant narrative has presented the origins of Chinese civilization as rooted in a singular source — the Three Dynasties (the Xia, Shang and Zhou), situated in the Central Plains of the Yellow River valley in Henan province, Shaanxi province and surrounding areas.'
• "The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To", '“In terms of advanced scientific research on the mummies, it’s just not happening,” said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who has been at the forefront of foreign scholarship of the mummies.'

Scholarly via Wikipedia Library

• "NATIONALISM AND ARCHAEOLOGY: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past"', 'The development of Chinese archaeology during this century cannot be understood apart from the early Western-initiated excavations (e.g. JG Andersson at Yangshao, Davidson Black at Zhoukoudian) and the anti-imperialist sentiments they fueled, particularly in terms of what were perceived to be their denigration of Chinese civilization and assessment of its derivative character (Tong 1995:184–88). The consequent backlash still profoundly affects the practice of archaeology in China today. Whether the cradle or nuclear center of Chinese civilization is restricted to the middle reaches of the Yellow River or extended to encompass essentially all the Han-dominated regions of contemporary China, its origins are pure and unsullied by any diffusionary processes, especially those emanating from the West (Falkenhausen 1993, 1995). After the revolution and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the infrastructural state support of archaeology and its guiding theoretical model—Marxism—were initially patterned on the Soviet model, but expanded or contracted for internal reasons, such as the Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which time archaeologists were persecuted and antiquities destroyed on a massive scale (Tong 1995). Archaeology and nationalism in China remain closely interrelated today.'
• "Absorbing the “Four Borderlands” into “China”: Chinese Academic Discussions of “China” in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.", 'Seemingly from its first establishment, archaeology in China assumed the heavy burden of seeking the origins of Chinese civilization and drawing the boundaries of the Chinese people. Take the case of Li Ji 李济, honored as the "father of Chinese archaeology": Li studied anthropology at Harvard University, and his primary interest was explaining the composition and origins of the Chinese. The title of his 1923 doctoral dissertation at Harvard was "The Formation of Chinese People." [...] As Zhang Guangzhi 张光直 noted, the primary characteristic of Chinese archaeology in the 1950s was nationalism.[42] The incipient archaeology of this era, whether exploring the prehistoric Stone Age or excavating Shang Dynasty ruins, always based its understanding or interpretation of archaeological findings on the need to answer a question (primarily the theories of the native origin of Chinese civilization, or the pluralistic fusion of the Chinese people). [...]'
• "Reflections on Chinese Archaeology in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century", 'Two points are worth mentioning. The first is that the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica early on made the decision to designate the site of Yinxu, at Anyang in Henan, as the one archaeological site on which to concentrate its considerable manpower and material resources and the training of archaeologists. Second, Marxism was the only social-science theory some archaeologists brought in to help them interpret the archaeological material from these Yinxu excavations. [...] before 1950, Chinese archaeology was mainly characterized by its close ties with nationalism. After 1950, beside its continued but somewhat weakened nationalism, archaeology's development closely follows the national political developments.'
• "Who Invented the Bronze Drum? Nationalism, Politics, and a Sino-Vietnamese Archaeological Debate of the 1970s and 1980s", 'Communist victory in China and Viet Nam brought about a process of historical reconstruction in both countries, guided by two important principles, Marxism and nationalism. The research of sensitive topics concerning the past relationship between the two countries, such as the issue of the origin of the bronze drum, was always permeated by a strong nationalistic spirit. When the two countries enjoyed good relations from the 1950s to the mid 1970s, that spirit was hidden with a Marxist internationalist coating. Hence, the Vietnamese and Chinese scholars made their own nationalistic claims while never openly accusing each other. For example, both Wen You and Ðào Duy Anh published their works regarding bronze drums in the 1950s: Wen was the first Chinese scholar to attempt a modification of Heger's classification and propose a Chinese origin of the bronze drum, while Ðào made the claim that the bronze drum was invented by the Lac Viet in northern Viet Nam and was then spread to other areas. Their works went unnoticed for about two decades. It was not until the late 1970s that the Chinese and Vietnamese scholars began to accuse each other of blending academic work with chauvinist or nationalistic agendas. The breakdown of Sino-Vietnamese bilateral relations in the late 1970s brought nationalism to the forefront in both countries, thereby overriding the internationalism of the previous years.'
• "Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological Nationalism in China", 'Much attention has been focused on the recrudescence of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s [...] This essay discusses the part played by paleoanthropology in the construction of Chinese racial nationalism. It focuses on the official popularization of claims that Peking Man and other fossilized hominids-members of the primate family to which modern humans belong-evidence the unequalled longevity and unity of the Chines e people (Zhonghua minzu). The latter are, in turn, conceived as the core of a sui generis "yellow race" (huang zhong) that, owing to its longstanding coherence, is biologically distinctive. This notion is propagated despite the modern non-Chinese origins of th e concept of a "yellow race," the initial unrelatedness of the concept to skin color, and the Chinese tradition of distinguishing themselves from other Asians by their white skin (Dik6tter 1992; Bonnett 1998; Demel 1992).'
• Archaeology and politics in China: Historical paradigm and identity construction in museum exhibitions, 'The central argument I wish to make here is that the way the past, and in particular the distant, prehistoric and proto-historic past, is presented in Chinese museums reveals a process of entrenchment of the standardized narrative of Chinese history, with a powerful sense of connection and continuity between the past, no matter how distant, and the present.'

Wikilinks

• Tarim mummies
• Beauty of Loulan
• Princess of Xiaohe
• Cherchen Man
• Marxist archaeology
• Peking Man
• Li Ji (archaeologist)
• Yellow River civilization
• Yangtze civilization
• Liao civilization
• Yinxu
• Written Chinese

Rjjiii (talk) 07:37, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

@Rjjiii Looks very good. I'd appreciate it if you could. I will mention that as I'm sure you know and something I've tried hard to avoid is talking about history rather than archaeology, ie the study of material culture. I really appreciate this as the article as a lot of unrealised potential. Isn't the Wikipedia Library a fantastic resource! (Hm, looks like a question but needs an exclamation mark). Doug Weller talk 13:33, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I took some time before finally coming back to draft the section. I have China as a level 2 heading right now, just because there are not yet other countries. I left a comment at the top of the section to bump it down to level 3 as soon as other countries are added to the article. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ(talk) 07:51, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Rjjiii Thanks. Doug Weller talk 09:16, 10 September 2023 (UTC)