Pôle Archéologie

It is important sometimes to break away from traditional methods of scientific and archaeological writing to consider the broader social implications of our research activities. This paper is an attempt to do so by considering not the ancient subjects of our investigations, but rather the living participants of communities in which we labour. In so doing, many of the details of usual concern—site names, dates and periods, precise locations, artefacts, footnotes, and scholarly references—are not particularly important. Rather, what is of significance in considering the ethics (and beyond) of doing fieldwork are the relationships that we forge within the contexts of our scientific teams, local communities, and the broader public. This paper will focus on the second of these three contexts, namely the local community in which we work.

Archaeologists often come across ancient human burials during excavations. Less often, however, do human burials come across archaeological excavations. This happened though, at a site in southeastern Turkey a few years ago. When a funeral procession interrupted operations on the mound of Ziyaret Tepe, archaeologists confronted the dilemma of maintaining an excavation site as a scientific space in real-world contexts that are anything but sterile (void of contemporary meaning) or controlled (void of competing claims). The funeral event exposed the salience of the mound as both a sacred and scientific landmark, and brought to the fore numerous historical, political and cultural factors that rarely receive acknowledgement in the field or in publication. We outline these various influences on archaeological practice at Ziyaret Tepe, and use this unexpected funeral to advocate for a community archaeology that broadens the value of excavation by respecting a site’s valence as something other than a scientific space.

The ground-breaking ceremony of Istanbul’s Third Bosphorus Bridge took place on 29th May 2013. The date chosen by the then Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to launch the construction of this urban mega-project transformed the inauguration into a commemoration of the 560th anniversary of the Ottoman Conquest of Istanbul by Fatih Sultan Mehmet. After explaining the significance of the 29th May 1453 commemorations in Turkey, in this article, we argue that the building of mega-infrastructures, such as the Third Bosphorus Bridge, has become the occasion for Erdoğan to (re)conquer the city of Istanbul, thus mirroring Fatih Sultan Mehmet more than five centuries ago. In the end, we argue that the “Conquest Festival” in Istanbul today is perhaps more than just a celebration of the 15th century Ottoman siege of the city, but instead a diverted way for the nation to commemorate - without necessarily ever acknowledging it openly - the ethnic and religious “purification” of Turkey during the 20th century.

Home and homeland are never the way we know them. They are highly evocative as concepts, yet difficult to define, and often used in an intertwined, even indistinct way. The Études Arméniennes Contemporaines volume "Home(land)s: Place, Loss and Return in Contemporary Turkey" examines the inherent tensions between the two terms that arise from the dual existence of a home (in exile) in a host society and a distant homeland (imaginary) that is permanently lost. The articles delve into the multiplicity of representations and meanings attached to home and homeland, and highlight the manner in which such places of identification, territories of attachment, and geographies of longing and belonging, are constructed and remembered, but also fantasized and romanticized, and ultimately imagined in past and present-day Turkey.

Faire quelque chose, marquer le coup, ne pas laisser la voix à des velléités réductrices et nationalistes, voilà ce qui nous a motivés à penser ce numéro, à l’occasion des 10 ans des révolutions que l’on a appelées « arabes » mais qui ont affecté le monde et ses sociétés. En tant que chercheur.e.s, beaucoup de supposés et de raccourcis nous ont dérangés dans le traitement de ces processus, on avait donc des choses à dire, il nous restait à choisir un angle d’approche. Solène Poyraz, politologue, travaillant sur les effets de la crise syrienne sur la Turquie, et Laurent Dissard, anthropologue de la Turquie et du Moyen-Orient, choisissent alors d’aborder une thématique cruciale qui semble avoir changé la donne dans la crise syrienne : les Kurdes. Une thématique omniprésente mais souvent traitée à travers un prisme ethnique et macro-politique, ne permettant pas de saisir les éléments du débat.

In many ancient societies, the re-use of graves as well as of entire necropoleis are very frequent, and usually concern individuals of the same group that originally created the funeral space. However, occasionally such re-use testify to the arrival of a new group, which shows more or less clearly its identity, and which disturbs or rearranges the funeral space and/or its contents. We would like to address a series of questions relating to how funeral spaces are appropriated by new groups. How is it possible to identify and characterize such new occupation? How do new groups appropriate pre-existing funeral spaces and manifest their identities, compared to that of the original users? How do they manage human remains and cultural vestiges already present in the graves? Are the original contents removed, pushed aside, or left in situ? What individual and collective memories the new uses ascribed to the old tombs and it is an important part of the process of appropriation? In summary, how do new groups negotiate its identity with regard to the identity of the original group? How can we aim at understanding how and why an original funeral space has been appropriated ? We invite scholars to present case studies from a wide chronological and geographical range to serve as the basis for a discussion about the challenges in these issues. We aim to identify various modes in which appropriation can be determined, how it is expressed, and how groups with different identities can be discerned in grave contexts, so as to create a methodological tool kit when working with graves that may have been appropriated by new groups. A variety of sources and disciplines may be included for the discussion, such as archaeological contexts, inscriptions and texts, architecture, anthropological studies, various analyses in sciences, and so forth.