"Itinerant Objects: The British Museum and the Ottoman Response to Antiquity"
By
Belgin Turan Özkaya
Co-sponsored by the Research Group on Democracy, Space and Technology, Yan Lin Centre
Tuesday, April 11, 12:30 pm
Macdonald Harrington Building, #206
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Meeting ID: 853 5256 6694
Speaker Bio
Belgin Turan Özkaya is a Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Architecture at Middle East Technical University. She received her BArch and MSc in Restoration from the same university and a Ph.D. in History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University. She works on connected histories of nineteenth and twentieth-century architecture and material culture. Among her publications are the collections and special issues, Rethinking Architectural Historiography (Taylor & Francis, 2006, long listed for the RIBA Sir Nikolaus Pevsner International Book Award for Architecture), "Spaces of Vision: Architecture and Visuality in the Modern Era" (Architectural Theory Review, 2007), "Transpositions on the Edge of Europe: Ambivalence and Difference in Architecture" (Journal of Architecture, 2011), "Ambivalent Architectures from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic" (New Perspectives on Turkey, 2014), and a special collection on "Travel" (Architectural Histories, 2016). She was the co-director of the British Academy project, "Ambivalent Geographies," which focused on West Asia as an Ottoman and British zone of influence. Her work was supported by Canadian Centre for Architecture, Koç University ANAMED, Getty Research Institute, and Harvard University AKPIA. Currently, she is working on Itinerant Objects: The British Museum and the Ottoman Response to Antiquity, a book project, and "Ottoman Cultural Mobilities," a collaborative research endeavor. Professor Özkaya is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and co-organized European Architectural History Network thematic conference "Architecture and Endurance" in 2021.
Abstract
In recent decades, earlier hagiographic historiographies of archaeology that revolved around pioneering individuals and magnificent discoveries that purportedly paved the way to a disinterested scientific discipline were critically reassessed. Despite such contestations, some historical tropes proved to be especially resilient necessitating alternative narratives, such as the entrenched historical trajectory based on accomplished deeds overlooking failures, losses, and minor, particularly non-European, actors. In this paper, I revise the latter by zooming in on a footnote in mainstream histories of archaeology about a shipwreck in Shatt al-Arab and on a group of marginalized historical actors. First, I argue that despite the magnitude of material displaced to and put on display in European museums, large portions of excavated material have been either left behind to decay or lost during transit in the nineteenth century. Before the expansion of railways, travel by land, via streams and rivers, or by sea relied on animals, rafts, boats, and steamers, all of which were prone to constraints dictated by distance and the difficulties of topography and seasonality. The arduousness of travel and the transport of massive pieces of antiquities was compounded by the sheer distances that needed to be traveled. "The friction of distance," as conceptualized by geographers, was manifested in the long duration of journeys, sometimes taking several years. My second contention is that during the period I am focusing on, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1880s, archaeology as a discursive field and practice was in the making through the acts of diverse actors and institutions. That included, in addition to European explorers, people from different communities, regions, and echelons of the Ottoman territories, who have been living with the material traces of the past for centuries, and local Ottoman institutions and initiatives alongside the central government. Rather than effects, if we focus on processes and initiatives, without the hindsight of their eventual outcomes and consequences, we can trace the part the Ottomans, both locals and those connected to the central government, played in the "performance" of "Mesopotamian archaeology" in the nineteenth century.
