The Practice of Archaeology Under Dictatorship

Ex Novo: Journal of Archaeology

By adopting historical and sociological approaches to archaeology, this paper focuses on the development of archaeology in Albania and Yugoslavia and their relation first to fascism and then to communism and socialist regimes. Identity issues based on archaeological discourse in former Yugoslavia and Albania are often perceived and regarded by western scholarship as extreme distortions and abuses of archaeological practice to promote nationalism. By providing a comparative and diachronic perspective, this paper aims to demonstrate that the way in which a society relates to its past is a complex phenomenon, and that political uses of archaeology in the western Balkans cannot be associated entirely with socialist regimes and communist ideologies. It is argued that different uses of archaeology are the product of a complex interaction between the development of archaeological discipline and historical, social and cultural trajectories.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to reveal and present some interpretative issues in different Balkan Iron Age archaeologies that result from long-lasting use of culture-historical approach, and on the other to suggest that future interpretations of the past need to be more reflexive. Culture-historical archaeology is based upon a premise that individuals who are linked by production and consumption of stylistically homogeneous material culture form a group with a feeling of collective identity, whereas recent identity studies vigorously question this approach. Today, the idea about archaeological cultures as relatively stable and homogeneous systems of values characterizing certain group of people is recognized as ethnocentric projections that reflect modern national/ethnic identities and social concepts into the constructed image of the past. A following case study of the "Illyrian argument" – a well known dispute between Yugoslav and Albanian archaeologists and historians on "ethnogenesis" of the ancient Illyrians – shows how culture-historical archaeologies in different sociopolitical contexts, sometimes, beside the same methodology, reach very different conclusions. As a way forward, we suggest a reflexive approach that will be well aware of constitutive interrelations between the past as an object of the study and the present as a context of the research

In the second half of the nineteenth century, prehistoric archaeology came into existence in Europe (Daniel 1964:9). Since then numerous excavations have been conducted, thousands of publications covering various topics have been published, and new theories and methods have been applied to archaeological research. From a small number of pioneering scholars the profession has grown to include the thousands of men and women who are responsible for the present standing of archaeology in Europe. Unfortunately histories of archaeology do not treat all archaeologists equally. Each archaeologist writing the history of the field chooses his/her examples of events and personalities, so a totally unbiased perspective does not exist. Most archaeologists would agree that Marija Gimbutas was a famous archaeologist (Milisauskas 2000); however, in Trigger's (1989), A History of Archaeological Thought, she was not included. A list of archaeologists associated with greatness may be quite different in England from one in Russia.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to reveal and present some interpretative issues in different Balkan Iron Age archaeologies that result from long-lasting use of culture-historical approach, and on the other to suggest that future interpretations of the past need to be more reflexive. Culture-historical archaeology is based upon a premise that individuals who are linked by production and consumption of stylistically homogeneous material culture form a group with a feeling of collective identity, whereas recent identity studies vigorously question this approach. Today, the idea about archaeological cultures as relatively stable and homogeneous systems of values characterizing certain group of people is recognized as ethnocentric projections that reflect modern national/ethnic identities and social concepts into the constructed image of the past. A following case study of the "Illyrian argument" -a well known dispute between Yugoslav and Albanian archaeologists and historians on "ethnogenesis" of the ancient Illyrians -shows how culture-historical archaeologies in different sociopolitical contexts, sometimes, beside the same methodology, reach very different conclusions. As a way forward, we suggest a reflexive approach that will be well aware of constitutive interrelations between the past as an object of the study and the present as a context of the research.

Archaeology enjoys an excellent reputation in the social and political lives of the Balkans and Anatolia, where it has been perceived as an efficient tool for the manipulation of public opinion. Cultural heritage is usually taken as hard evidence for the continuity of the nations' identities and as a commodity that can bring additional revenues. Archaeological narratives are being co-authored by state authorities and the public. Information is being issued by the state and edited further according to the nation's needs as well as public desires and requests. Nationalism has dramatically shaped methods and approaches and raised dividing walls among regional archaeologies in the Balkans. The main nationalist device in Balkan archaeology has been ethnogenesis, which is the search for formations, origins and continuities of ethnic identity. A locally coined public archaeology has achieved multivocality by means of constant interaction between the state and the public. Archaeological information is released after having been filtered by the state, which welcomes feedback in order to adapt and further process its narrations. However, these have already been pre-defined within national antagonisms and conflicts. A translocal approach is suggested as a means to overcome archaeological regionalism and biases originating in national conflicts.

Significant heritage sites from the Communist era in Albania can reveal much about local interaction with and resistance to state authority, and they hold promise as a means of confronting the personal and collective traumas of the recent past. The primary argument is that these sites should be 're-signified' to serve as both memorials and teaching tools for the next generations, rather than erased from the landscape. This kind of 're-signification' of heritage that represents a traumatic past has taken place in post-colonial and post-conflict contexts, as well, and these situations can serve as a model for how this process might work in a post-Communist society. The final two sentences read: "Across Albania, many tangible reminders of the traumas of the Communist past remain unacknowledged, while others have been leveled before their relationship to local memory had been explored. In the coming years, the processes of making heritage and writing history will continue, but Albanians today have the opportunity to employ these processes in a way that heals past traumas and preserves their material heritage in commemoration of local resistance, resilience and inspiration."

I argue that Albanian archaeology is in need of self-reflexivity to better interact with its findings and conclusions during the country's communist past, placing itself within the wider international map of theoretically-informed archaeological practice. Drawing on national and international critiques by Richard Hodges, Mark Petruso, Sally Martin, and others, this paper aims to deconstruct the ideological discourses behind interpretations on Illyrian numismatics in the territory of Albania, while assessing the neo-colonialist rhetoric. Past efforts of Albanian archaeologists to construct a politically dictated historicity are placed in the wider context of highly instrumentalized nationalist interpretations of the archaeological record in Europe. (in Albanian see below)