FORCED DISPLACEMENT IN THE IRON AGE

Azer Keskin
Department of Anthropology
Binghamton University

Imperialist political entities have commonly displaced people in masses throughout history. In the Iron Age, the Assyrian Empire used mass deportations as a routine strategy for purposes of political domination. Assyrian deportations are studied almost exclusively through Assyrian historical texts and Biblical sources. Such studies are useful, but also complicated by ideological biases in the past and the present. Archaeological methodologies can complement analyses of historical sources, which are not interested in what happened to people after resettlement. More than 30 small single-period Iron Age sites dating to 9th to 7th centuries BC in Wadi Ajij in Syria are a point in case. Archaeological and historical data suggest that these were newly-founded sites in a marginal environment where deportees, likely from the west, were resettled. Spatial patterning of surface finds of various functional types of pottery from these sites is analyzed as impressions of the daily lives of deportees on the landscape.  Similarities and differences between spatial patterning of various sites are examined to get a glimpse of the daily lives of their inhabitants, and to address processes of enculturation following deportations.

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Legislative Legacies – The Development of Laws Regulating the Antiquities Trade in the Middle East

Morag M. Kersel

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

Brown University

mokersel@hotmail.com

The current legal market for antiquities in Israel bears the legislative legacies of a 19th century Ottoman Law and the British Mandate. Rather than reflecting a Turkish interest in cultural heritage, the 1884 Ottoman law was originally created as a measure to ensure that artifacts remained within the boundaries of the far-flung Empire. Subsequent legal initiatives by other overseers of the region (British Mandate, Israel, and Jordan) retained the basic tenets of the 1884 law, resulting in the current paradoxical situation where legal purchase of artifacts is possible in Israel (from pre-1978 collections), but where excavation without a permit is illegal in all areas – Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. Looted antiquities from the Ottoman Empire represent booty, tribute, and symbols of control and resistance. Similarly, plundered archaeological material from the PA and Jordan, routed through the legal market in Israel, continues a colonial legacy as a symbol of control, domination, subjugation, and resistance. This is an investigation of the Ottoman legacy manifest in the legal mechanisms and archaeological record in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority.

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