How Green Was My Valley
We, some relatively enlightened citizens of Turkey, are proud of living in the part of the world where the archaeological record roams. One feels spoiled to get in the car and drive an hour to reach a major Bronze Age, Greek or Roman city and observe it in situ. In other words, to live in İstanbul (or by the same token in many other cities) where the dig may be carried out down the street (or for the treasure hunter, inside one’s own house!) is a privilege. Moreover, from pre-history to Byzantium the layers overlap on top of each other in a single location to baffle the archaeologist as to which one to destroy to go into deep history: the limit is the geological record, but even then there may be a touch of homo sapiens briefly contemporaneous with geological events. When the borders of the nation-state encompass Çatalhöyük and Göbeklitepe, the wise women and men should understand that patriotism takes on a new meaning and that solidarity is with ‘humanity’ and ‘nature.’ Meanwhile, this requires a kind of amnesia regarding history and a blind eye on contemporary politics. As of now, the whole of the Fertile Crescent to include a part of Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and by extension Palestine, is drenched in blood for a long time, just as half the ‘natural’ citizens of Anatolia had been purged either by exile or by genocide in the past one hundred years or so. Now, we are left with the abundance of archaeological evidence, meanwhile devoid of oral history and a sense of continuity. Still, we feel special to be living on these lands, ie. in comparison to someone living in the New World.
Or, is that the case? What good is archaeological evidence if it is not articulated to ask questions on major contradictions of human existence and civilization as we know it? Which questions should be asked to bridge the gap between the archaeological object and the political human? The premise of “The Dawn of Everything,” an extraordinary book by (late) David Graeber and David Wengrow is exactly this. Through a dialogue of ethnographic record and remnants of the material past, it offers insights into some of the most crucial aspects of social organization, politics and economy throughout history and pre-history. Just as Foucault does in “The Archaeology of Knowledge,” the authors refute major discourses built around the respective fields of archaeology and anthropology, such as the origin(s) (of hierarchical societies and the state, etc.) and the theories of social evolution following the chain of bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states, etc. On a slippery ground, their balancing act to re-interpret prehistoric archaeology and practices of indigenous societies leads to one of the most important questions of our time: How did we get stuck? (in relations of gender, race and class, in the rituals of labor and leisure, in the affairs of modern state, private property, slavery and the Roman Law, and with many facets of inequality) Reading the book, the term ‘freedom’ enjoys a deep-historical significance, not only in freedom from tyranny for many societies of the past and present, but also in the flexibility of complex social organization to avoid coercion and forced labor, in the rejection of sedentary lives, of surplus production, of private property, of agriculture as we know it and in other aspects of subsistence and leisure. What David Graeber claimed in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” is extended in this book over other affairs of human existence to conclude that at its core the humans have been both resourceful and altruistic for thousands of years, and still are given the right conditions of socio-political organization: positive vibrations.
So, back where we started: Now we understand that our conceptions regarding the human past, archaeology, anthropology and geography have to be reshaped. The painstaking effort of the field archaeologist running for a lifetime usually on a single site is extremely valuable. The mute object found on site requires a thousand relations and comparisons to be rendered meaningful in regard to human lives and society at large. The life of this object should be followed throughout the past until it disappears from human lives, and possibly after if it reappears once more. And most importantly, the significant material remains from prehistory (and the ones possibly outside history) are distributed over the surface of the entire earth, sometimes in synchrony, and in many cases displaying similarities of form and related rites, but also indicating acts of thinking complex political subjects. So, in between the linear narrative leading to the civilized world (from out of Africa to hunting and gathering, and to agriculture) and the claim on the indigenous societies representing the true past and the lost eden, we have to look for the cracks through which the conception of a new society would flow.
May 2022