Memory’s materiality and archaeologies of memory in places, landscapes, monuments, objects, bodies February 19, 2009

Fresh kills, Staten Island, New York...

“Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory” Neitzsche

history vs. memory (official) history (collective) memory written/literate culture oral culture institutionalized narratives multiple fluid stories monuments, memorials, museums anti-memorials, spontaneous monuments, residues, ruins, places and environments of memory authority of archives shared experiences, collective remembrance prosaic, narrative, ideological poetic and creative fixed, bounded and mummified dynamic and fluid- performed inscribed anchored to the past by the body always discursivediscursive/non-discursive

Archaeology? “Little bastard sister of collecting?” questions of memory and its materialized forms of the past palimpsest: 1.Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed to be reusable after any writing on it has been erased. 2. In extended use: a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multilayered record. 3. Physical Geogr. Of a landscape or landform, esp. a glaciated topography or a drainage pattern: exhibiting superimposed features produced at two or more distinct periods. 4. Geol. Of a sediment or deposit: that has been reworked since it was first laid down.

world as a palimpsest landscape an archive of past human practices and cultures? Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus from Bibliothèque nationale de France

Example of an architectural palimpsest in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada Whenever spaces are shuffled, rebuilt, or ruined, shadows remain.

Susa, Iran

Bisutun, Iran

Tal-i Malyan, Iran

Survey archaeology and world landscapes

Athenian Acropolis in ealy 19 th c.. Edward Dodwell, Views in Greece (1821)

Parthenon and its historical “burdens”

Stripped Parthenon and the Athenian Acropolis

Mesopotamian practices of remembering and the building as a repository of history, an archive Akkadian words of bodily orientation and the sense of time warku: back, future panu: front, past

How is memory sustained and (re-)configured? ritual performances, festivals, commemorations (gatherings) construction activity, building practice (technological knowledge) oral traditions, oral culture, storytelling, desire archiving, collecting, hoarding, digital storing, back-up (museums, mementoes, computing) production of texts, annals, inscriptions writing of official histories visual representations, imaging, imagining mapping the world: located, site-specific practices (topographies of remembrance) also known as “worlding of the world”

Neolithic in the Near East: early sites of socialization “neolithic revolution”: domestication of wheat, barley, sheep, goat: early settled communities (ca 10,000 to 6000 BC)

gobeklitepe site before archaeology

gobeklitepe landscape

“starting as a sacred spot...”

gobeklitepe pre-agricultural social interaction and cult practice, feasting, visual/architectural culture

gobeklitepe archaeology of a ritual place

gobeklitepe pillars and animal iconography

Photography: Berthold Steinhilber