My roundtable contribution inevitably starts with a critique of the field the scholarly utility of which we as contributors wish to defend. The study of the antique sciences (including the history of archaeology and heritage) still has marginal standing in science studies. So does the Middle East as a geographical region, which until recently enjoyed little scholarly interest in the field. The persistent Eurocentric research agenda of science studies has been questioned, however, with the recent call for a “global history of science.” This ambiguous term has triggered new methodological challenges, but it has also created new trenches.

As for the first “stigma,” international professional associations in history of science still give colleagues studying fields such as archaeology only the ambiguous option “other” in their drop-down menu of subdisciplinary categories (e.g., biological, medical, and chemical sciences, physics, and astronomy) on their conference abstract submission sites. While this “double-handicap”—both disciplinary and geographical “othering”—might explain its marginalization, the latter is still unjustified. The scarcity of publications on the history of antiquarianism and archaeology can largely be explained through the founding role the history of physical science played in the field a few decades ago. But it was precisely through research in ancient history of science that we came to know that some of the earliest accounts of mathematical, medical, and scientific knowledge are embedded within artifacts, such as Ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets themselves excavated in the 19th century. In this context, both science and the history of science are inevitably linked to objects, archaeology, and the Middle East.Footnote ¹

We might argue that different “departments of knowledge” in the modern period, such as the earth sciences and astronomy, have themselves always been strongly linked to antiquarianism. As renowned science historians such as Martin Rudwick and Simon Schaffer have shown, stones, space, science, and empire cannot be detached from one another.Footnote ² After all, expeditions rarely had a single purpose: often set at the same sites, namely the field and the museum, antique objects and botanical and zoological specimens were collected alongside one another in the 19th century by amateur antiquarians and natural philosophers such as Paul-Émile Botta, making the seperation of natural history and the history of artifacts unwarranted. This essay refuses to attest to such binaries. Rather, it introduces ideas on how science studies can provoke new discussions on archaeological pratices in the Middle East and challenge the eurocentric narrative of its histories in order to understand the material history of a contested landscape.

Take the example of Botta, who, in addition to his roles described above, was a European diplomat and thus embedded in political and imperialist contexts. Perhaps precisely because archaeology hinges on its colonial past, its history has long been told as a continuing narrative of Europe's involvement in the region. This one-dimensional narrative was perpetuated by “two-dimensional” documents in archives that surround these objects: a history that is told through flat objects such as paper, card catalogues, or the many photographs in the (mostly European colonial) archives derived from the excavations once conducted by these museums and in universities. A particular imperial vision underlies many of these archives: consequently, they are rarely neutral in value. As Christina Riggs has recently argued, they feed into Eurocentric master narratives of history and science even as they are housed or fixed in postcolonial contexts.Footnote ³ Storage devices and archives thus dictate and perpetuate the narrative from which they derive, and the very act of using these archival materials in these repositories unreflexively risks leaving their troubled origins unchallenged. Here, the history of technology, a strong subfield of science studies, could offer a three-dimensional clue to the one-dimensional problem: practices such as aerial photography themselves, after all, transformed the Middle East's contested landscape. Highly politicized, Antoine Poidebard's aerial photography and archaeology of Lebanon is an example that provides two ways of seeing and constructing this geography from above during the Mandate: on the one hand, by its “wondrous caravans” (referring to its Islamic past), and on the other, by the “traces of Rome” (referring to a “classical past,” i.e., its ancient Roman past).Footnote ⁴ Such technologies, images of objects, and description are not value-free, and they show us how power relations shaped the linkage between stones and landscape.

The rise of the nation-state led to new forms of legitimizing and memorializing the past. But how should we consider this phenomenon across borders? Within the context of the 19th century, Europeans took Iraq's (as they did Egypt's) ancient history as their own, claiming Iraq as the cradle of “Western civilization.” For some, this also justified leaving it in the hands of European archaeologists alone. Both European and Middle Eastern historians have started to revisit the history of European archaeology in the former Ottoman lands.Footnote ⁵ Nevertheless, a dominating Eurocentric approach is still reflected in the scarce postmodern literature on this subject, with so-called “local” and “indigenous” practices—awkward terms that do not sit easily in the history of science—of preservation such as co-habitation and recycling only recently having experienced a rise in scholarly attention. Even as nation-states gained independence, Europe's continuing scholarly control over artifacts went hand in hand with maintaining colonial control. This issue still deserves critical attention today as standards for preservation continue to be set according to Western parameters.Footnote ⁶

Rather than “a celebratory focus” on single archaeologists, a social history of science could take into account that knowledge constantly circulated within complex networks in which both people and objects acted as agents.Footnote ⁷ In a recent volume on Histories of Egyptology, William Carruthers has urged scholars to make use of recent literature in the history and sociology of science to attend to the ways disciplined knowledge was made and to look at its (successful or unsuccessful) application, the resistance it inspired, its representation (e.g., in political contexts or museums), and its circulation in order to “relate the history of that knowledge far beyond questions of who did what, when, and where, or what political orientation they had when they did it.”Footnote ⁸ Objects play a role in this history too. While the Cyrus Cylinder, for example, is claimed as an important object in the history of Western civilization, several countries in the Middle East claim it to be a symbol of their own past.Footnote ⁹ Biographies of scientific objects can trace the trajectories of such artifacts and the knowledge they generated: why and what kind of knowledge about the past mattered, and to whom. A closer collaboration with archaeologists might help to show as well that some objects survive simply due to their materiality: pots, clay tablets, and cylinders are more likely to survive than textiles and this has a direct impact on our knowledge of the past. Understanding these contested and constructed landscapes enforces the point that people, objects, and the knowledge attached to them are never scientifically and politically stable across boundaries.

As countries such as Iraq and Syria face unprecedented disorder, violence, and destruction, we need new answers to what archaeology and heritage was, is, and can be in the future. Science studies has not yet addressed these questions, though it has a role to play in the debate. Recent work in the history of science on the “sciences of the archive” and “endangerment and its consequences” has brought to light critical approaches to the subject that question the value of preservation per se.Footnote ¹⁰ Scholars have shown that the imagined past of an object threatened with extinction is never unrelated to an imagined future in which its preservation will potentially be of value. But what in the Middle East is of value, and for whom? To find answers, it is crucial to embrace the tensions between archaeology and heritage and shed new light on their authoritative roles as means to preserve the past. While archaeology, for example, is as much related to destruction as it is to preservation, “heritage” does not necessarily demand that objects become (Western) scientific objects or museological trophies without a function. Knowledge of the past comes in different guises, and science studies can embrace different ways of preserving the past.

Examining the logic of taxonomies and categories, science studies is traditionally strong in the history of collecting, but it must go beyond established museum histories. Studying more carefully the actual objects in collections in the Middle East or examining the logic of “exile museums” (such as Gaza's heritage in Geneva or the Afghanistan Museum in Bubendorf) would be a start, but museums—least of all in Europe—cannot be the only sites of interest. Local resistance toward European forces has not been fully acknowledged in the field and few have considered the variety of approaches, technologies, and practices regarding preservation by local institutions and people. Science studies has also a long-standing tradition of examining the emergence of disciplines—for instance, the way antiquarianism became archaeology as a university discipline. But it must leave behind the teleological and linear narrative that always leads to the establishment of disciplines and institutions.

Scholars in the field are indeed moving away from the history of institutionalized science towards a “history of knowledge” in which “scientific practices” as much as ideas become the focus. Such a turn is a precondition for studying regions such as the Middle East, for we cannot automatically assume that everything results in Western notions of institutionalized “science,” the term in itself being a problem when it comes to translation and concepts. What is at stake, moreover, in many of the issues already raised here, is ethics. Studying the recycling of objects as an act of preservation, or the practices of reworking and recontextualizing the material past, could provide new answers and avenues for both historians of science and of heritage.Footnote ¹¹ We might also consider novel approaches and alternatives to established notions of preservation in light of these. Such approaches were common in the past and are found most prominently in antique spolia, when ancient objects were—as some still are—often fully embedded in the ordinary domains of contemporary life and subject to multisensory observation, having coexisted alongside various other antique and modern constructions over time. However, they are also to be considered problematic because they often move beyond recognized legal and ethical frameworks. Yet many illicit excavators today risk prosecution anyway and are therefore not usually subject to a nuanced (scholarly) debate.

The largest challenge for science historians in the future might thus be that certain values about the past are not universally shared. This can lead to conflict, such as those over destruction and protection in Afghanistan or Iraq. Methods from anthropology, political science, and sociology, in particular science and technology studies, could serve as tools to examine, for example, the extent to which antiquity laws in the (post-) Ottoman lands differ(ed) from European contemporary ones. This leads us to our same familiarly inconvenient questions: if the cultural heritage of the Middle East and knowledge about it need preservation, be it in written or material form, how, by whom, and for whom should it be done?Footnote ¹²

Questioning these archaeological practices and the default definitions of “preservation” not only would challenge what is widely accepted as the moral and normative logic of “heritage,” but might also help establish new historical narratives. Viewing forms of recycling as preservation would cut through the view of a simple chronological succession of linear time. It would present history of science “from below,” which takes into account not only scientific, institutionalized, and professionalized interaction with the past, but also the seemingly ordinary and profane human involvement with material histories and forms of knowledge production. Talking of archaeology in the singular and as a unified practice, according to Yannis Hamilakis, imposes a universalist and hegemonistic discourse that always links archaeology to progress and modernity.Footnote ¹³ Historians of science must uncover, to use an archaeological metaphor, how these concepts and practices became embedded (or did not) when addressing questions of knowledge making in the “premodern and modern” Middle East.Footnote ¹⁴

European colonialism launched a new age of “scientific archaeology” in the Middle East, but the rise of independent nation-states had similarly profound effects on concepts and practices of archaeology in the region. Control of archaeological sites was increasingly placed in the hands of local universities and departments of antiquities. But different regimes had different preferences and it was—once again—unclear what kind of knowledge should be preserved and which past should be written about.Footnote ¹⁵ Antiquity is not always Antiquity with a capital “A.” Certain places, objects, or areas are valued by certain parties, while others are ignored. Often a regime's interpretive orientation was concerned with modern political symbolism, focusing on “golden ages” to legitimize nationalism and using metaphorical references to ancient peoples to support nationalist ideologies. Islamic heritage, long neglected by European colonial forces, only became the focus of Egyptian and Iraqi authorities in the late 20th century when it became important for building a national identity. Earlier this year, militant members of Islamic State destroyed one of the key sites of ancient Mesopotamia, Nimrud in today's Iraq. In a kind of counter-iconoclastic gesture to the “West,” these objects were destroyed because the West had ordained to preserve them as part of a universal history they had made their own. Nineteenth-century Western archaeologists once unearthed objects that have since become vulnerable and can once again turn into dust. Eleanor Robson explained recently that Islamic State has destroyed some excavated buildings while a large majority of the recently destructed sites are still undug.Footnote ¹⁶ The ironies and tragedies behind this ought to make us think ever more carefully about the role of antique preservation against their ongoing destruction, for Western concepts of the former can provoke the latter; indeed, here preservation and destruction appear more as accomplices than as antonyms.

As nations and borders continue to be fluid and contested objects come under threat, which past should be preserved is not clear. The topic is highly charged as it is and many audiences often expect historians of archaeology to take sides, while historians often feel that their job is to bring new arguments, a more nuanced vocabulary, and historical facts to the discussion. Yet we should not shy away from these topics; not only would science studies itself profit from such engagements, but because one of its key themes of enquiry is “knowledge making,” science studies might also make the crucial point that knowledge about the past is in itself always a construct and is subject to the social conditions, technical parameters, and political structures surrounding it. Objects and the knowledge about them are not stable but are a part of political and scientific networks within nation-states and beyond. If science studies can rephrase this question of knowledge, power, and preservation, it might succeed in developing new approaches and methods to understanding the material and political logic of contested landscapes themselves.