IN-PERSON IAS Talking Points Seminar: ‘Sudden Coordination’

‘Sudden Coordination’: Early 20th-century field archaeology in the Middle East and the history of ideas

During the interwar period, archaeology underwent a defining period of professionalization but also intense scrutiny by a public eager for news from the past. Crucial to these developments was the role of fieldwork, and the field as a social and professional place of informal and formal encounters. This presentation will explore how archaeologists debated ‘The Flood’ and its importance for the chronology for prehistoric Mesopotamia as the ‘Cradle of Civilization’, both in academic (e.g. conferences) and public settings (e.g. newspapers). The creation and diffusion of these concepts was key to some of the interwar years’ most contested ideas such as the origins of culture, migrations and racial supremacy, and archaeologists used the Old Testament as a battle ground to delineate the boundaries of their science.

Speaker

Dr Hélène Maloigne

(Visiting Research Fellow at the IAS)

Respondents

Dr Martha Vandrei

(Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Exeter)

Dr Eva Miller

(British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, UCL)

Image credit

Katharine and Charles Leonard Woolley at Ur, southern Iraq, c. 1930.

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. 

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