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"As Silberman insists, archaeology may always be an unavoidably political enterprise. When, then, does one deem the use of the remote past as overly politicized or excessively nationalistic and on what grounds? Do we criticize Saddam Hussein’s deliberate manipulation of Mesopotamia’s glorious past to justify his attempted annexation of Kuwait, or condemn the late Shah of Iran’s triumphal celebration of 2500 years of Persian monarchical rule, held a few years before his own dynasty collapsed, simply because we dislike these figures and disagree with their unsuccessful policies? Are the constructions of our own pasts or national identities more acceptable because they are ours?
The cases reviewed here provide guidance and clarify, at least, two issues. First, although archaeological interpretation may constitute a form of narrative and may always be both a scientific and poiticaifliterary enterprise, most contributors would insist that there are evidentiary standards by which archaeological reconstructions can be evaluated and emphasize more Silberman’s qualification of the discipline’s “obligation to adhere to scholarly standards of logic and evidence” (p. 250). For example, Anthony’s deconstruction of the noble Aryan and the Great Mother ecofeminist myths in Indo-European archaeology is predicated on the ability to distinguish plausible from unbelievable reconstructions of archaeological data. He forcefully decries the fashionable relativism of post-processual archaeology and insists: “If we abandon our standards for choosing between alternate explanations, we abdicate any right to exclude explanations that promote bigotry, nationalism, and chicanery” (p. 88) and “Nationalist or racist agendas are only encouraged in an intellectual environment where the ‘real’ world is visualized as a web of competing ideologies, all of which are equally true and all of which are equally false” (p. 185). In other words, the historical and contemporary distortions of archaeological practice discussed here graphically illustrate the limits of the archaeology as storytelling metaphor: one story is not as convincing as another...
The question of how national consciousness reaches the extreme levels of intensity we witness today must be explored historically. To paraphrase Hobsbawm, nationalists create nations (that is, groups thinking of themselves now as nationalities), not the reverse, a fact illustrated by the famous statement of Massimo d’Azeglio delivered at the first meeting of the parliament of the newly united Italian kingdom: “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians” (cited in Hobsbawm 1992a:44).
Likewise, it is doubtful that most “Greek” subjects of the Ottoman Empire, who were mainly peasants living at the southern end of the Balkan peninsula, would have become agitated over the naming as Macedonia vaguely demarcated territories to their north prior to the nineteenth- century political liberation movements which freed them from the Turkish yoke; such movements, in turn, were initiated and led by intellectuals — foreign and local — whose yearning for plitical freedom was stimulated and abetted by their Romantic vision of classical Greek culture, a vision continuously reinforced throughout the nineteenth century by archaeological discoveries of the ancient Greeks (for a comparative analysis of nineteenth-century nationalist movements that stresses the role of intellectuals in their development, see Hroch 1985).
Prior to their nineteenth- and twentieth-century awakening, most “Greeks” would have exhibited an ethnic consciousness similar to that recorded for “Ukrainian” peasants by a British observer in May 1918:
Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole, or an Ukrainian, he would probably reply that he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked “the local tongue.” One might perhaps get him to call himself by a proper national name and say that he is “russki,” but this declaration would hardly yet prejudge the question of an Ukrainian relationship; he simply does not think of nationality in the terms familiar to the intelligentsia. (Colonel Jones, “The Position in the Ukraine,” cited in Suny 1993b:50—l)
So much for Moni Topou and the scented breeze of the land caressing the gyataphani and the karyophili...
National awakening thus is associated with political movements which were directed towards the construction of independent nation-states or for more autonomy within such states...
Since archaeologists typically uncover murkier and more remote pasts than historians, we are even more subject to critical scrutiny. Hobsbawm (1992b:3) tellingly has evaluated his own profession by means of a striking metaphor: “For historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts; we supply the essential raw material for the market.” Archaeologists (and perhaps linguists, folkiorists, and ethnographers) must be compared with the concocters of even more powerful hallucinogens, which distort the past to the likening of nationalists intent on demonstrating the uniqueness of their people... Hobsbawm’s metaphor may be in need of further revision: rather than just the producers of raw materials, historians and archaeologists may occasionally resemble more the pushers of these mind-bending substances on urban streets, if not the mob capos running all stages of the sordid operation."
--- Archaeology in the service of the state: theoretical considerations, Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology
