National Council on Public History

Leen katrib, princeton university

Proposal Type

Panel

Seeking

• Seeking Additional Presenters
• Seeking General Feedback and Interest

Related Topics

• Archives
• Material Culture
• Preservation

Abstract

In 1903, Alois Riegl distinguished between ruins & rubble through the recognition of an original form. He defines rubble as a formless pile that reveals no trace of the original creation, thereby no longer conveying age-value. It is a well-known paradox in archaeology that restoration practices result in the double negation of ruins, where the rubble of excavations  is deemed of no value & is destroyed to repackage the ruin as a heritage site that can be examined, documented, & preserved ex-situ. This paper unpacks why the formless piles of rubble were obliterated rather than archived for knowledge production. The paper reframes rubble as  material that can democratize the storage, retrieval, & production of historical narratives.

Description

An eight-centuries-old informal village was dismantled during the 1929 French Mandate excavation of the Temple of Bel in Palmyra. While the site was restored to its Greco-Roman condition, published, and its fragments preserved ex-situ, the rubble of the dismantled village was subsequently obliterated sans documentation. In 1965, the outer layer of Tikal Temple 5D-33 in Guatemala was reduced to rubble then eradicated to publish and move the temple’s underlying layers into a newly constructed museum. And more recently, after fourteen mausoleums were destroyed in a terrorist attack in Timbuktu, UNESCO launched efforts to reconstruct the mud brick structures and clean up the site from material remnants of the attack. The case studies highlight a pattern in the management of post-destruction rubble. Though archaeologists produced the rubble in Palmyra and Tikal, Timbuktu represents a contemporary attitude towards rubble that is increasingly produced by forces other than archaeology: terrorism, nature, economy, etc. International institutions continue to focus on digital ex-situ preservation strategies of destroyed heritage sites, all the while bypassing the question of what is to be done with what remains: rubble.

Against the vast literature on the restoration and ex-situ preservation of ruins in institutions for the proximity to and production of historical knowledge, this session invites contributions that reveal case studies of material cultures and histories that were historically silenced and marginalized by early and contemporary archaeological practices. The session seeks to question why the formless piles of heritage rubble produced in the first destructions were subsequently obliterated rather than documented, preserved, or archived for knowledge production. By engaging these questions, this session will investigate the afterlife of heritage rubble and the implications of preserving and archiving a material that is inherently formless, entropic, and anti-representational.

For this session, I am seeking two things: First, ideas for focusing the proposal and two, potential panelists who share interest in the topic and would like to collaborate on a session. Ideas on how to improve, expand, and edit the focus of the proposal are more than welcome.

If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Leen Katrib, [email protected].

All feedback and offers of assistance should be submitted by July 1, 2018. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.

Discussion