Visual Archaeo-Technology and Politics in Southeastern Turkey

Résumé En

What do we mean by Archaeology's politics of vision? The scientific discipline gives us a way to understand and see the past in the present. It produces knowledge about ancient times and creates the material objects which stand for what we know about it. This chapter discusses two techniques, namely the site report and the museum, which facilitate the materialization of the past in order to reflect on the politics of archaeology in the context of a development and dam project in Southeastern Turkey. Site reports and museums, two specific practices that help us visualize the past, I argue, both have effects on 1. Knowledge: they produce scientific facts about the past; and 2. Power: they “intervene” (Abu El-Haj 2001 following Hacking 1983) in the wider social and political realms. Focusing on both science and politics, the paper, in the end, draws attention to the mechanisms behind the production of archaeology’s body of knowledge as well as the effects this body of knowledge and its material forms have in society.