Art in Paradise: Destroying the Past

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I was struck by a passage in an article about the looting of Iraq's museums and damage to sites (James Heflin, 'Art in Paradise: Destroying the Past', The Valley Advocate June 16, 2011). Professor John Russell after discussing how Coalition soldiers "dug trenches through undisturbed earth, filling thousands of sandbags with, well, no one knows what important archaeological material".

It's the kind of thing that happens all too easily in war, when immediate concerns trump all else. It is only in their wake that the devastation gets measured. Russell, in a piece he penned in Art Journal in 2003, said the loss of such objects provoked, in him and others in his field, the kind of grief one feels when faced with the loss of a loved one.

That is a pretty good description of I would feel encountering a site trashed by artefact hunters to such a degree that its viability as a source of information about the past is severely compromised. But then look what Russell goes on to say:

He writes, "It was as if people long dead, people I had come to admire, had died again: The people who, ten thousand years ago, took the time and developed the skills to create sculptures of the heads of birds at the hunter-gatherer village of Nemrik, for reasons we can only guess at, and the person who valued one of these small sculptures so highly that he died holding it in his hand when the roof of his burning house collapsed." Russell evokes "...the Akkadian rulers of Nineveh, who knew how to put a face to the idea of kingship, and the conquerors of Nineveh, who knew that art was no match for vengeance. The image of Saddam's bronze head dragged through the streets while being showered with abuse would have looked very familiar to them, as would the mobs surging through the Iraq Museum."

For him its all about objects the Nemrik sculptures (excavated by a Polish mission), Akkadian royal statues, Saddam's head. But destroying the past is not about objects. I have been struck when I have gone to the annual meeting of medievalists in Kalamazoo just how much US conceptualisation of the Middle Ages is based around what is portable, the literature, paintings, musical traditions, and the latest buzzwords and fashionable books written by US authors. The nitty gritty grubby potsherds and snailshells, iron slag and roof tile don't really get much of a look-in to their brand of historiography. I would say a continental medievalist and a US one are discussing a different middle Ages. Perhaps here lies part of the problem we have discussing the wider issues with people engaged in collecting and commerce over there, when even the scholars promote an artefact-based picture.
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