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Ed Webb

British archaeology falls prey to Turkey's nationalist drive - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...tanical-erdogan-ata-tohum.html

Turkey nationalism history plants agriculture archaeology Britain UK culture heritage politics Erdogan

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Turkish authorities have seized possession of the country’s oldest and richest archaeobotanical and modern seed collections from the British Institute at Ankara, one of the most highly regarded foreign research institutes in Turkey, particularly in the field of archaeology. The move has sounded alarm bells among the foreign research community and is seen as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s wider xenophobia-tinged campaign to inject Islamic nationalism into all aspects of Turkish life.
  • “staff from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, the General Directorate for Museums and Heritage from the Ministry of Culture and the Turkish Presidency took away 108 boxes of archaeobotanical specimens and 4 cupboards comprising the modern seed reference collections” to depots in a pair of government-run museums in Ankara. The institute’s request for extra time “to minimize the risk of damage or loss to the material was refused.”
  • Coming on the heels of the controversial conversions of the Hagia Sophia and Chora Museum into full service mosques this summer, the seizure has left the research community in a state of shock, sources familiar with the affair said.
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  • The formal justification for the raid was based on a decree issued on Sept. 3, 2019. It authorizes the government to assume control of local plants and seeds and to regulate their production and sales.
  • Turkey’s first lady Emine Erdogan, a passionate advocate of herbal and organic food products, introduced the so-called “Ata Tohum” or “Ancestral Seed” project that envisages “agriculture as the key to our national sovereignty.” The scheme is aimed at collecting and storing genetically unmodified seeds from local farmers and to reproduce and plant them so as to grow “fully indigenous” aliments.
  • Ata Tohum is thought to be the brainchild of Ibrahim Adnan Saracoglu, an Austrian-trained biochemist.  He is among Erdogan’s ever expanding legion of advisers. The 71-year old has written academic tracts about how broccoli consumption can prevent prostatitis. He was with the first lady at the Sept. 5 Ata Tohum event.
  • The professor railed against assorted Westerners who had plundered Anatolia’s botanical wealth and carried it back home.
  • “the archaeology seeds are essentially charcoal, dead and inert.” As for the modern reference collection “we are talking about stuff that was collected 25 to 50 years ago and is not going to be able to germinate.”
  • a “classic nationalist move to dig deeper and deeper into the past for justification of the [nationalist] policies that you are currently putting in place.”
  • parallels with the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who “connected Turkish civilization back to the Phrygians and the Hittites” as part of his nation-building project.
  • “You have these genetic ties to the land through these seeds as proof that our civilization belongs here and has been here since time immemorial. To want to have these [seeds] in the first place is part of the nationalist framework.”
  • The ultimate fate of the British Institute’s seeds remains a mystery. It’s just as unclear what practical purpose they will serve.
  • “Seeds” he intoned, “are the foundation of our national security.”
  • “But in order to get genomic information you only need one or two grains, not the whole collection. What [Turkish authorities] have done is they’ve removed this research resource from the wider Turkish and international community of researchers. It was a nice, small research facility, open to anyone who wanted to use it. Now it’s all gone,”
Ed Webb

'Mind blowing' ancient settlements uncovered in the Amazon - 0 views

www.nature.com/...d41586-022-01458-9

history empire Americas archaeology Amazon

shared by Ed Webb on 26 May 22 - Cached
  • Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, a research team has revealed that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres, featuring 22-metre-tall earthen pyramids and encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways.
  • adds to a growing body of research indicating that the Amazon — long thought to have been pristine wilderness before the arrival of Europeans — was home to advanced societies well beforehand
  • Prümers and his colleagues took advantage of lidar in 2019 when they flew a helicopter equipped with the technology over six areas near sites confirmed to have been occupied by the Casarabe people. The team got more than it bargained for, with lidar revealing the size and shape of 26 settlements, including 11 the researchers hadn’t been looking for — a monumental task that would have taken 400 years to survey by conventional means, Prümers says.
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  • Humans lived in the Amazon Basin — a vast river drainage system roughly the size of the continental United States — for around 9,500 years before the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century. Researchers thought that prior to the arrival of Europeans, all Amazonians lived in small, nomadic tribes that had little impact on the world around them. And while early European visitors described a landscape filled with towns and villages, later explorers were unable to find them.
  • Two of the urban centres each covered an area of more than 100 hectares on average — three times the size of Vatican City. The lidar images revealed walled compounds with broad terraces rising six metres above ground. On one end of the terraces stood conical pyramids made of earth.
  • Prümers points out that lidar images found reservoirs in the settlements, perhaps indicating that this part of the world wasn’t always wet — an environmental shift that might have driven people away. But then again, steady pollen records reveal4 that maize was grown in the area continuously for thousands of years, indicating sustainable agricultural practices.
  • Logging and farming in the Amazon Basin is almost certainly leading to the destruction of important archaeological sites that have yet to be discovered, he says, and a growing interest in Amazonian archaeology could lead to better protection of vulnerable places.
  • These discoveries also counter the narrative that Indigenous peoples were passive inhabitants before the arrival of Europeans. “The people who lived there changed the landscape forever,”
Ed Webb

Mystery of the stones: How Lebanon's Baalbek ruins are a site for the gods | Middle Eas... - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...baalbek-lebanon-ruins-tour

Lebanon history heritage archaeology orientalism

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Baalbek’s 300 years of Roman rule overshadow its 10,000 years of continuous settlement, its prehistoric origins and its role as the wellspring of the valley’s two major water sources – an epicentre of life and fertility.  Its name is formed from two words: Baal, the Semitic lord of the gods and precursor to Zeus and Jupiter; and nebek, the Aramaeic word for sources. The Romans knew it by its Greek name, Heliopolis, meaning "city of the sun".
  • “Baalbek goes back to the beginning of when man settles and there are not that many that have continuously been settled and had a living history,” says Mahlouji, an independent advisor to the British Museum and London-based curator. “It should not be reduced to the folly of a moment in history when those massive Roman temples were built, and to then embed the story of those epic and awe-inspiring stone structures.” 
  • These foundation stones, particularly those of the Trilithon, are one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. It’s unknown how these heavy blocks - more than 10 times the weight of the individual blocks which make up the Great Pyramid at Giza - were lifted into place. The uphill slant of the mound rules out carts, levers and pulleys.
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  • In the 17th century, the West began its colonial expansion into the region - and Baalbek’s Roman complex was ripe for centuries of orientalist appropriation
  • The economic and political growth of Europe occurred alongside what became a rapid decline of Ottoman power in the 19th century, Mahlouji explains. “The Europeans expand their interests in the roots of their own civilization, beyond the glory of Rome and Greece, into the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, and by extension claim their own roots beyond Europe."  
  • “They [Europeans] discover the Indo-European languages, which link to Asia, and their notion of Europe expands into Persian, Egyptian, Phoenician,"
  • In 1920, the French Mandate decreed the Bekaa was officially Lebanese territory and the grand Roman complex became the emblem of the new nation. Its pillars appeared on stamps, banknotes and postcards
  • In 2019, the divide between the needs of the ancient site and those of modern urban residents still exists, if less pronounced than in the past.
  • visitors come to the ruins at the north-western edge of the city, yet don’t enter the city proper
  • The Lebanese government has focused on Heliopolis, adding large parking lots and making the site more accessible - but it comes at the cost of the rest of the city’s attractions. 
  • “What needs to be done is to stop the segregation between what is archaeological, and controlled by the Tourism Ministry, and the living city,” Mahlouji explains. “They’re creating wider roads leading to it, fencing off and making a museum city that is detached from the living city.”  
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