Author: Daniel Golan
Editor: Teni Gomez
Artist: Marya Cao
In November 2024, the world feels more fragmented and uncertain than ever. President-elect Trump waves to crowds of adoring fans in America after his electoral win, while promising to evict refugees and other minorities. Closer to home, Starmer treads a delicate political balance between asserting British identity and refuting the ethnonationalist claims of the far right. As political entanglements increase, war brews and people clamour for a unifying identity, making the questions of the past more necessary to answer. Our collective understanding of the past hangs by a tight thread, and if we are not careful, the winds of history will blow and the whole edifice will come down with it. In this article, I would like to explore identity—one composed, nurtured, and sustained through our relationship with objects.
In November 2023, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis sat down with BBC host Laura Kuenssberg to discuss the possible return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum, a digitised screen displaying the Acropolis behind them. When questioned about where the sculptures “look better”, the PM claimed that “the answer is very clear”. The following day a media frenzy ensues, reporting a political spat between Mr. Mitsotakis and the British PM at the time, Rishi Sunak, who took the position that we own these sculptures as a nation and that this debate is therefore null and void. As expected in our current politically hostile environment, the country suddenly forgot all about it, however, I remained fascinated. Several weeks before, I had visited the British Museum myself with a cohort of international university friends. Every room we entered had contested objects—objects that spoke to a history, a collective understanding of a world, a shared interpretation of nature, stories, and communities outside the context that they were born into. Conversations ensued about the objects and what they meant to my friends, which made me think this was something worth exploring.
In the beginning, archaeologists believed that their role was to establish a true narration of history. In other words, to compare objects in order to establish a historical chronological order. They believed that this would lead to a correct analysis of historical events, a timeline of the creation of objects, and a comparative tool to understand the growth and decay of societies. However well-meaning these archaeologists were, they were fundamentally misguided, and their narrow-minded interpretation led to a hyper-diffusionist worldview. Hyper-diffusionists believe that two or more similar constructions or objects cannot have been made without inspiration or contact with another social group. The issue with this viewpoint is its correlation with the racist eugenics’ movement of the time—that is, hyper-diffusionists believed that it would be impossible for societies that they thought of as being “primitive”, to come up with an innovative technique without inspiration or contact with other more “enlightened” societal groups.
Along come the 1960s, the end of the great World Wars, and the entire planet clamours for freedom. The outdated interpretations of archaeologists could not provide a wide enough frame of knowledge, so a multifaceted approach was required to differentiate between sound and valid scientific interpretations and those that were biased. These new archaeologists would not simply recover and manipulate data; they would focus like the scientists of their time on hypothesis testing: deduction, replicability, and predictability—this was the motto of the “New Archaeologists”.
For all the confidence and optimism of the 1960s, the 1970s came with a more apprehensive view on the possibilities of science as an applied method in archaeology. Archaeologists realised that the scientific method, in spite of its benefit of evolving the previously inadequate references of cultural historians, could not provide a full picture of the society they studied. And so, archaeology splintered—some used science, others aligned more with anthropology, and others used economic and sociological frameworks, like Marxism, to study their respective society and object histories. Now we have arrived at a moment in history where archaeology is a broad discipline—its academics engaged in a serious moral endeavour to uncover truths about the past, both so we can benefit from a greater appreciation for our ancestors, but also so we can learn from them.
Why has this not been applied to the political sphere where politicians still use old-fashioned archaeological interpretations to form their identities? When the spat between the Greek and the British PM ensued, I realised that this was due to a lack of understanding of the historical process that archaeology itself has been through. Archaeologists today know that a singular frame of reference has no hope in providing a grand overview of a society. Yet, politicians, and even the general public perhaps, use modes of interpretation that do not accurately assess the life stories of objects in the manner that they deserve. As the world turns and national arguments over object possessions continue to ensue, I hope we can all take the time to ask ourselves: what do these objects mean to us, and to what end will we refuse to accept the full breadth of context in which they deserve to be viewed?
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