Siste viator is a phrase often inscribed on Roman tombstones. It means “Stop, traveler,” and it usually precedes an epitaph in which the dead reaches out and “speaks” to the living passerby. The allusion sprang to mind when writing a review of this volume for an audience that might see “Greece,” “Israel,” and a whole lot of marble on a book cover and be inclined to keep going. Doing so would be your loss.
Archaeology, Nation, and Race may be one of the few more positive things to come out of the pandemic. Born out of a seminar at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, it flourished in ongoing lockdown conversations between Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis, two scholars steeped in the histories, historiographies, archaeologies, and complexities of the two countries, Israel and Greece, respectively. It is presented in the form of a dialogue but not an artificially forced or quippy one. Rather, the two authors leave few holds barred as they take on their ambitious subtitle: “Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future.”
Archaeology’s colonialist credentials are not news, of course, and Greece and Israel have long been recognized as nations whose deep pasts and archaeological treatments profoundly shaped modern senses of state and self. Many of the conversation’s individual touchpoints—the Acropolis, Masada—are also familiar subjects of analysis and controversy. Where Greenberg and Hamilakis press inexorably, however, is on the processes, visible and disguised, that underlie these manifestations. Crypto-colonialism, in line with the work of Michael Herzfeld, defines both countries, marked by aggressive forms of independent national pride and heritage that mask and occlude the actual global forces at work.
Everyone who stops and reads will derive benefits from the book. For myself, I found the close juxtaposition of the two perspectives, Greek and Israeli, fruitful and occasionally very moving. There is no attempt to equate the two—indeed, far from it—but the comparisons provoke questions and explanations from the two authors that go further than they would have perhaps alone.
The explicit discussion of race and racialization will attract others. Although it is now well established (and increasingly accepted in popular understanding) that ancient white marbles were brightly painted and the celebration of classical “whiteness” is a neoclassical trope, the politics of race in Greece otherwise has rarely been a highlight of any analysis. Hamilakis goes to town on this point. Greenberg, in turn, writes of racial biases in the region (workforces allocated by “fitness” for various tasks) that continue to this day. He also probes the fraught tensions over claims of indigeneity (Palestinian natives versus incoming settlers) and how archaeology was and is deployed to promote superior Jewish entitlements to the land (“Make us indigenous, but like no others; prove that we were here first, but scientifically!” [p. 115, italics in the original]). The joint discussions of national acts of “purification” and “whitening” make for painful but instructive reading.
Aligned with these concerns are some highly trenchant criticisms of recent work in archaeogenetics, notably the work of large ancient DNA labs in North America and Europe (Harvard gets a particular shoutout). Others have expressed similar concerns to what is voiced here, such as the emphasis on mass migration and population movements that transferred “cultures” from place to place and the problem of anachronistic ethnonyms (“Minoans,” “Phoenicians”) reifying ethnically homogeneous groups that never existed. Greenberg and Hamilakis emphasize the links to past racial paradigms and the behaviors they justified, and both provide some chilling examples of outrageous misuses of scientific data in popular and media presentations (this article is cited on p. 144: “Netanyahu: Archaeology, DNA Prove Palestinians Not Native to Land of Israel,” Jerusalem Post, July 7, 2019). One of the more pressing issues in archaeology, I would argue, is to broker better communication and exchange with archaeogeneticists and, perhaps more importantly, their graduate students. Such studies are not going away, and they do have many productive and provocative insights to provide; however, it seems time for some tempering and rebalancing of the Eureka! enthusiasm.
Hamilakis and Greenberg are extremely well known for their politically engaged public stances, Hamilakis most recently for his work on forced and undocumented migration. Greenberg’s assessments and criticisms of Israeli archaeology in the West Bank (and his calls for ceasefires in Gaza) are met with deep hostility. You are not likely to agree with everything argued in this passionate and polemical book, but it will undoubtedly give you pause for thought.
Siste viator, welcome to the conversation.
