The Dualism of Contemporary Archaeology
Time Team was an amazing programme. It was educational yet accessible, undeniably British and true to its discipline. Really, it was everything one could wish for from a television programme. Beyond the screens, it was just as successful in blasting a hole into the ivory tower of academic archaeology, the programme’s lack of gatekeeping and obfuscation opening a realm previously exclusive to university departments.
In 2006, its presenter claimed Time Team had published more reports on its excavations in the past decade than every university archaeology department combined, whilst criticising the shortcomings of the activity (or somewhat lack thereof) within the academic establishment. From the passion of the assembled historians and archaeologists in each episode, it is not difficult to believe this may have been the case.
Broadcaster politics and the pursuit of demographic ‘relevance’ destroyed this British staple rather swiftly in the early 2010s. In retrospect, it was the last hurrah for British archaeology before it wholly sank into the same cultural strife engulfing the rest of modern academia. However, it would be unwise to discard contemporary archaeological activities as nonchalantly as one might do with the rest of the humanities. Due to its fundamental characteristics, a unique dualism now exists within the discipline which merits some attention.
Readers will likely be able to guess many of the negative consequences contemporary culture has imparted onto academic archaeology, chiefly since they are the same as in other humanities subjects. These are focussed on the interpretations made beyond excavations in published writing, thus in the part of the discipline which is closest to modern history’s general malfunctioning. Both disciplines suffer from a homogenous progressive politics amongst academics, so generally hegemonic outcomes of that sort are all but guaranteed for the foreseeable future.
This renders discussion of certain historical subjects completely taboo, even when the tangible evidence is revealed by archaeologists, lest academics be seen to support a supposedly ‘toxic’ mindset about the past or something similarly in contravention of their worldviews. History is neither a story of progress, nor a proof of progressive values’ precedence and inevitability, but such facts are amongst those ignored by a paradigm of deconstruction.
Perhaps more disturbingly, for people of any political persuasion, archaeology can prove civilisations are not immortal and can fall in a wave of decisive violence in the right conditions. The anonymous archaeologist Stone Age Herbalist covered the flaws of contemporary academic archaeology in greater detail in an article for UnHerd last year, which I certainly recommend.
As for the other side of contemporary archaeology, the discipline remains defined by recovering tangible evidence of the past from nature, in other words a bedrock of empirical objectivity. If one puts aside the declining rigour of historical interpretations, the basic role of an archaeologist remains vital for our understanding of the past and its transmission to future generations. The past archaeologists excavate is less ‘living’ than, for instance, an extant Tudor manor, but is still has ample potential to animate the mind about how our ancestors once lived and contributes a great deal to our verifiable knowledge of history.
A couple of examples worth praising are in order. First, the ancient city of Pompeii should be at least vaguely known to all readers. After all, it is one of the most impressive archaeological sites in the world, accompanied by the allure of its dramatic demise to Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. About a third of the city remains unexcavated, but is generally off-limits from further work in favour of extensively conserving previously unearthed buildings.
However, excavations restarted over the last few years in areas last dug over a century ago have brought forth a wealth of new discoveries, and digs on a new insula (city block) to relieve pressure on exposed walls have been widely reported for a fresco depicting something reminiscent of a pizza. The story of Pompeii is only growing richer as a result of this new archaeology. Second, a lot less readers will know about cuneiform, let alone be able to read it. Globally, only a few hundred people can competently translate the oldest known form of writing used by the Sumerians and Akkadians, whereas archaeologists have found some half a million clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform. Digitisation projects in recent years have aided the accessibility of these artefacts, but the scarcity of scholars yet hampers our recovery of that past.
Therefore, a paper published in May discussing a new project to translate Akkadian with neural machine translation might revolutionise our knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia. In essence, it uses similar technology to Google Translate to render Akkadian cuneiform as meaningful English phrases or sentences. Accuracy is far from ideal, as formulaic texts are translated with some skill by the program whereas literary texts are practically out of the question, but the prospect of substantial usefulness in the future exists without making Akkadian scholars redundant.
What does all this tell us? Contemporary archaeology derives an ultimately negative trajectory from its academic overseers, but this is indistinguishable from the rest of academia in the current deconstructive paradigm. Whilst the discipline is buttressed by an inherent tangibility and objectivity which still produces new discoveries, it should not be overlooked when discussing a restoration of academia towards renewed sense. Indeed, such a project will start from a better basis in archaeology than any other subject in the humanities.
I severely doubt archaeologists will begin grinding artefacts into dust which reinforce uncomfortable facts about human nature, but similar effects can be achieved more subtly by the custodial institutions. Archives and museums increasingly see their collections through a far more reductive and essentially monochromatic lens, with all the nuance therein of a medieval executioner by trading in absolutes. These institutions have developed culturally modish tactics to bypass their natural approach to tangible history and enable presentism to abound, removal to storage being the bluntest. One should not need to remind readers how much poorer the world will be in terms of future maintained knowledge the longer this persists.
We are almost lucky contemporary archaeology possesses characteristics that cannot let transient perspectives fully dominate. They may become the only tools left in the humanities to fight the entropies of this age, until such time as we remake the others ourselves.
The Betrayal of Lampedusa
“At midnight tonight her borders will be opened. Already, for the last few days, they’ve been practically unguarded. And I’m sitting here now, slowly repeating, over and over, these melancholy words of an old prince Bibesco, trying to drum them into my head: The fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.” – Jean Raspail, Camp of the Saints, Epilogue (1973).
Within the last 48 hours, the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, once host to 6000 Italians, has been overrun by upwards of 18,000 African migrants, the vast majority of whom are military-age men. Some of them have been shipped to Germany, but they continue to vastly outnumber the native population.
Since their arrival, the migrants have taken to fighting amongst themselves, struggling over the island’s waning and already limited resources, with local officials struggling to maintain control. As every astute observer of politics and history will know, violence within the in-group is typically remedied by violence against an out-group, making the possibility of further and more severe chaos, far from a hamstrung hypothetical, a very real threat at this time.
In no uncertain terms, Lampedusa is experiencing an invasion, one which has been instigated without any formal declaration of war between nations yet will afflict the island in much the same way.
Given the nature of this event, I am reminded of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of The Saints, the final words of which provide the opening to this article. The author grimaces as the last outpost of European civilisation, Switzerland, is forced to capitulate to the ‘rules-based international order’, having been outcast as a rogue state for closing its borders amid a continent-wide migrant invasion.
Lampedusa is symbolic of the transformation which has occurred in towns and cities across all of Europe. From England to Italy, from Spain to Poland, from France to Germany, from Sweden to Greece, mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East, as well as Eastern Europe to a lesser and more regionalised extent, has radically transformed the essence of many European settlements, altering them in such a way not seen since Antiquity.
In England, in this year alone, we’ve become well-acquainted with the dire consequences of mass immigration. From rising tensions between the Blacks and South Asians in Peckham to ethnoreligious violence between Indians and Pakistanis in Leicester, divisions which the established order has tried to dilute by promoting anti-white rhetoric in the name of intersectional social justice.
Amid this litany of troubling events, it is easy to forget our European friends face many of the same problems, and that such problems are not an idiosyncratic quirk of the British state.
Unfortunately, similar to such cases, many will not feel sympathy for the people of Lampedusa. Some of native descent in Europe will remark on the inevitability of this ordeal, as if it was apolitical in nature or without a realistic alternative. Erstwhile, some of foreign descent will wryly remark that such an invasion is deserved; if not ‘deserved’, then a change for the better, and if not a change for the better, then negligible happenstance unworthy of press coverage.
Our leaders have known about Lampedusa’s troubles for no less than 20 years. However, instead of preventing such activity, they have spent decades trying to transform illegal migration to a standard bureaucratic procedure. If you can’t beat them, join them!
Since the early 2000s, Lampedusa has been a prime transit point for African and Middle Eastern migrants seeking to enter Europe. Migrants have been paying smugglers to ship them to the island, from which they are transported to the Italian mainland for processing.
Not that any of the processing matters of course. Those without the right to stay, even under Europe’s distinctly liberal asylum laws, continue to live on the mainland, as their deportation orders are barely enforced.
When the Italian government struck a deal with the Libyans in 2004, obliging the latter to accept African immigrants deported from Italian territories, the European Parliament condemned the agreement, and the ensuing repatriations, as unconscionable, unworkable, and quite possibly, illegal.
In 2009, roughly 2000 migrants overwhelmed the island’s asylum facilities. Only capable of accommodating 850 people, the migrants started to riot. How dare the people of Lampedusa be so unprepared for their completely unscheduled, unsustainable arrival!
Catching word of the riot, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) quickly issued a condemnation; not of the traffickers, not of the authorities, or the migrants, but of the Italian people.
In May 2011, roughly 35,000 migrants had landed on the island since the start of the year. By August, the number had increased to roughly 50,000, with most of the arrivals being men in their 20s and 30s. Compared to the recent arrivals, it is clear things have not changed in this respect either.
Following the 2013 Lampedusa Disaster, in which a boat carrying over 500 migrants, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, sank off the coast, resulting in at least 300 deaths, Pope Francis prayed not for the natives, but those complicit in a criminal operation to illegally enter their home.
In 2015, from January to April, over 1500 migrants died on the route from Libya to Lampedusa, making it the deadliest migrant route in the world, and just as was the case two years prior, efforts went towards making the trafficking network more legal, more safe, and more efficient, rather than ending the practice altogether.
Consequently, boats needn’t travel far off the coast of Africa to be brought to the mainland by the EU or the UN. The prevailing political mentality is that migrant deaths in the Mediterranean are best averted when the EU, the UN, or some other official organisation does the traffickers’ dirty work for them, showing little-to-no consideration for the domestic consequences of their precious so-called ‘humanitarianism’.
In the case of Lampedusa, the idea that an island of one community should become an island of two, lacking a tangible sense of common belonging, situates both groups into a state of war, and such a war is unjust, both in the sense it is unnecessary, and in the course which it is likely to follow, assuming it is not dealt with in a fitting manner.
From the Pelagies to the Aegeans, every island in the Mediterranean is the first in a trail of dominoes, each of increasing size, intersecting at every European capital, with every tremor created from their fall being more forceful than the last.
I do not want what has happened in Lampedusa to happen tomorrow, the day after, next week, next month, next year, or ever after. It is the height of political and moral arrogance to plunge an entire community of people, overnight no less, into such existential uncertainty.
To subject anyone, native or foreigner, to such sordid and egregious indignity is to betray every metric of justice, and anything short of mass deportations, the immediate defunding of complicit NGOs, and the destruction of every treasonous convention and law, will amount to nothing but betrayal, a betrayal of Lampedusa and all the peoples of Europe.
Photo Credit.