This paper explores how Civilization VI: Babylon Pack perpetuates colonial and Orientalist narratives originally rooted in nineteenth-century Western archaeology of West Asia. It argues that early excavations, such as those conducted by Austen Henry Layard at Nineveh, produced archaeological finds as well as visual and textual frame-works of hierarchy and ‘civilising’ missions. These frameworks continue to shape popular representations of ancient West Asia. Through a detailed examination of Civilization VI and its Babylon expansion, the paper illustrates how the game’s visual design, its portrayal of Hammurabi, and its core mechanics, such as ‘colonialism’ and ‘natural history’, perpetuate these ideological legacies. The immersive and interactive nature of video games intensifies their cultural impact, embedding inherited stereotypes in contemporary perceptions of the past. However, their popular-ity also provides opportunities for critical engagement. By recognising the colonial genealogies of archaeological imagery, scholars can gain a better understanding of, and challenge, how digital media continues to ‘play’ with the power structures of the past.

In this article, Épidemaïs, the Phoenician merchant in the comic series Asterix the Gaul, and other characters representative of ancient West Asian cultures, namely the Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, Assyrians and Medes, are analysed with regard to their historically accurate or stereotyped representation. Even if it has already been made clear several times that the characters and their narratives in the comic series should not be understood as historically accurate, such accuracy is repeatedly attributed to them. First, it will be demonstrated on the basis of some well-known case studies why this is the case. In a subsequent step the results will be applied to an analysis of the West Asian characters. It will be discussed whether the historical reference dominates or whether they rather represent stereotypical characteristics that associate them with the time of their creation in the 20th century, and how to deal with these results.

The article examines the links between archaeology, nationalism, and (crypto-)colonialism using the example of Iran. The starting point is that archaeology has not only been a scientific enterprise but also a deeply political endeavour since its emergence. The central question is how archaeological knowledge has been instrumentalised in colonial and post-colonial contexts to construct national identities – often marginalising or ignoring cultural plurality. Particular attention is paid to the concept of crypto-colonialism, which describes the paradoxical power relations in formally independent but de facto partially subjugated states such as Iran. In the area of conflict between adaptation to Western standards and self-assertion through recourse to an idealised pre-Islamic past, an archaeological practice developed that actively supported state power. Case studies are used to analyse the role of archaeology as an instrument of knowledge and power. The aim is to show the entanglements of researchers and to provide impulses for a critical-reflexive, decolonising archaeology.

Looting and trafficking of archaeological objects is a worldwide problem, which often becomes more severe during armed conflicts – two examples being the looting of Iraqi museums and archaeological sites after 2003, and the plunder of Syrian heritage during the civil war. Shocking images of archaeological destruction have attracted significant media attention in so-called ‘Western’ countries. In some situations, the reporting of European news media on the obliteration of what is perceived as ‘world heritage’ can even inspire public outrage. Between 2014 and 2015, the shock value of cultural destruction wrought by the terror group IS was used to draw attention to conflict-related antiquities trafficking, portraying the illicit antiquities market as a main income source for the terrorists. This sensationalist reporting has roused public concern and arguably even led to a moral panic. The antiquities market has reacted defensively to this portrayal, and used the overblown figures and tenuous allegations of terror financing seen in the media to discredit research into and regulation of the antiquities trade. In this paper, I discuss the consequences of this discourse and the continuing lack of voices from Western Asia therein.

Over the last decade, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has developed the concept of necropolitics as a biting critique of the Eurocentricism of Foucault’s biopolitical discourse. Building on Mbembe, the art historian Dan Hicks has advanced the concept of necrography as a productive paradigm by which the looted objects in museum collections might be analyzed as legacies of colonial despoliation. He suggests that a necrography of looted objects provides the desperately needed context that has been stripped away from them in the service of Western European and American colonial efforts. Using Hicks’s work as a blueprint, this paper provides a preliminary necrography for the “Captive Being Flayed,” or the so-called Wellesley Eunuch [Wellesley Davis Museum; 1883.1]. In so doing, I attempt to answer the funda-mental questions: What is our responsibility to the objects in our care? And, more importantly: How the curation of these objects extends the orientalist impulses out of which they were procured, allowing them to metastasize into new lieux de memoire as satellites of decaying empires?

Both volumes of Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains (1849a) include a frontispiece dramatizing the removal and transport of a winged bull from Nimrud. The illustrations inspired a series of sequels propagated in Layard’s subsequent publications, popular news media, and cloth prints. These drawings have received significant attention because of their striking resemblance to reliefs found in Court VI of Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace at Nineveh (seventh century BCE). The similarities are generally assumed to be a coincidence. Based on an analysis of archival material, I will argue that Layard was inspired by Assyrian reliefs in crafting the illustrations. In fact, most illustrations showing the modern transit of colossi were produced after Layard and Hormuzd Rassam had excavated Court VI of the Southwest Palace at Nineveh, with its reliefs depicting the ancient transport of a winged bull. I show that many of the striking parallels between the ancient reliefs and modern images are manufactured by twin interpretive processes: (1) the reading of Layard’s techniques back into Sennacherib’s reliefs and (2) the active appropriation of Assyrian compositional elements into updated versions of Layard’s frontispieces.

Vocabularies of space define the world. Yet, despite their apparent conceptual authority (Harley 1989), the lineages of cartographic entities are often blurred, accidental, and produced from etymologies only imperfectly understood by their users. Drawing on a recent study on past and present meanings of the term ‘Mesopotamia’ (Rattenborg2018), this paper reviews the inadvertent, if now firmly embedded separation of past and present spaces of the state of Iraq in Western – and global – discourse. Though widely conceived of as a textbook example of colonialist discursive dispossession of a nation’s heritage (Bahrani 1998), the argument advanced here is that ‘Mesopotamia’ – in the sense that we understand it today – is an unintended by-product of British military nomenclature defined during the First World War. Its widespread application as a cultural-historical shorthand, utilized with great enthusiasm by generations of archaeologists, epigraphers, and historians, came about comparatively late, fusing the trappings of an age-old signifier with the versatility of a physical space shaped by very modern events. As such, ‘Mesopotamia’is itself a freak accident of history, the vestige of a haphazard etymology far removed from the simple biographies attributed to it by contemporary commentators. This rather ironic state of affairs is reviewed through a discussion of its continued reaffirmation and widespread use in spatial discourses of archaeological and historical scholarship, arts trade and antiquities trafficking, and in popular media worldwide.

In light of the numerous current crises and wars, one may question whether it would even be useful to discussthe history of archaeology, particularly that of the colonial past and present of West Asia. As editors of this themeissue, we believe it is, since it continues to have a significant effect on the contemporary world. The macro-regionof West Asia remains at the center of global and regional politics, which can be traced to historical developmentsthat occurred at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Our conviction is that a greater understandingand critique of the history of our discipline and the inherent colonial practices will foster a more comprehensiveunderstanding of the current state of the massive conflicts shaping regional politics on West Asia.

Despite being, by their own description, ‘the product of five hundred years of struggle,’ some external supporters of the Zapatistas have attempted to search for historical precedent for the movement, composed mainly of indigenous Maya people from Chiapas, Mexico, in pre-conquest Maya societies. This article interrogates the credibility of such interpretations and considers the motivations and assumptions underlying attempts to identify continuities between the Precolumbian Maya past and the Zapatista movement. It is argued that, besides from advocating a prefigurative politics that represents a radical departure from the Marxist revolutionary ideology that characterised the twentieth century, part of the novelty and appeal of neo-Zapatismo is that it is said to be rooted in indigenous Maya practices and traditions. The fixation on identity politics and hostility towards alternative political or economic possibilities in recent decades had resulted in an overemphasis on the ‘indigenous Maya-ness’ of the movement, to make public discourse more amenable to the Zapatistas’ wider goal of radical democratic transformation and struggle against neoliberal capitalism. The identification of links between the Precolumbian Maya and the Zapatistas form part of such attempts to ‘prove’ the indigenousness of the movement, which has become integral in constructing its revolutionary ‘authenticity.’

More than an entire archaeological generation has passed since “post-processual” critiques up-ended the world of archaeological theory, and we now travel through a rich and varied theoretical landscape that draws inspiration from scholarship from the natural sciences to the humanities. Our collective obsession with new methodologies still threatens to overwhelm our interpretive frameworks, as advances in science, geomatics, and AI offer ever more precise tools for data recovery and analysis. Against this backdrop, and with metrics looming ever larger as the primary criterion of intellectual success, it is perhaps not surprising how few archaeologists today read the source literature from which we draw our dominant theoretical frameworks. Like their predecessors a generation ago, most archaeologists still engage in the mining-and-bridging strategy that Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt (1993: 3) described during the peak of the post-processual era: grab a current approach from the social sciences or humanities and cobble it into archaeological shape, without fully understanding the source field from which it originated. Few archaeologists today cite Immanuel Wallerstein when they invoke some revisionist world-systems model, and still fewer mention Benedict Anderson when discussing variations on imagined communities. We are not unique among scholars in doing this, as such ideas become deeply embedded in our interpretive world. Yet understanding how this intellectual current shape-shifts as it wafts across the field of archaeology requires returning to its source. James Scott has been a more important contributor to these currents of the last several decades than I suspect most archaeologists recognize.

This essay employs James Scott’s (1990) concepts of hidden and public transcripts to explore shifting power relations during the Iberian encounter with early modern Japan. Introduced by Charles Boxer (1951), the term ‘Christian Century’ is sometimes used to refer to the dynamic period of contact between Europe and Japan between 1543 (the first recorded arrival of Europeans in Japanese waters) and 1639 (the expulsion of all Iberian merchants and missionaries from the archipelago). This was Japan’s first global moment, a time of intense cultural contact with Europe and new links with India, Southeast Asia, coastal Africa and the Americas. While the dynamism of the period makes the phrase ‘Christian Century’ inapt in certain respects, it will be used here (without scare quotes) as a convenient label. The question of the nature of power is central to my discussion. Japanese archaeologists and premodern historians often work with a view of power which, in the terminology of Michael Mann, is both intensive and authoritative. Intensive power “refers to the ability to organize tightly and command a high level of mobilization or commitment from the participants”, while authoritative power is “actually willed by groups and institutions” comprising “definite commands and conscious obedience” (Mann 1986: 7–8). Such a view of power is arguably appropriate for the ‘absolutist’ regime of the early modern Tokugawa era (1603–1868), but can hardly be applied to the Kofun period (250–700) when an early state first appeared in the Japanese Islands. For instance, the influential proposal made by archaeologist Yukio Kobayashi in the 1950s that the distribution of a particular type of bronze mirror in the third century reflected the spread of state power now seems like a clear over-interpretation (cf. Edwards 2006). In Mann’s (1986) IEMP model of the sources of social power (ideological, economic, military and political) situated within overlapping networks, the bronze mirrors analysed by Kobayashi were a source of ideological power, but the extent to which they also supported economic, military and political power remains an open question.

Scott returned time and again to the topic of how states produced land cadasters (and vice-versa). “[A] state cadastral map,” he wrote in Seeing Like a State, “created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law” (1998: 3). This is lyrical and axiomatic. But best of all, not content to point out the artificiality of a system, Jim pressed on to pursue the purpose states had in simulating powers. The cadaster performs a kind of ontological alchemy: it not only helps to create state capacity, but it grounds it in ways of knowing (as law, as science) which are discursively fixed and unquestionable, with obvious political benefits. As he did with everything from moral economies to grain baskets, Jim always forged ahead to think through why forms of control worked – how they served state projects – and not just expose them.

When you read about James Scott, you commonly come across words such as ‘provocative,’ ‘contrarian,’ alongside ‘counter-narrative’ – such are the attempts to place his histories as outside the mainstream of thought. For this reason alone, his work is so worthwhile. He has always offered a striking perspective that can have a lasting influence on how you view things thereafter. In a way, he finds the blind spots in much of historical and cultural perspectives, and shows us how much we miss when not shining the light in such directions. I maintain here that it is the anarchistic elements of Scott’s thought that leads him to address the blind spots of others. He developed his anarchist perspective increasingly throughout his books, culminating in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012). At first, he described how he characterized political organizations in his lectures and seminars in ways in which he found himself noticing how much they shared with anarchist perspectives, finding himself saying, “Now, that sounds like what an anarchist would argue” (Scott 2012: ix; see also 2020: 64; Holmes 2023). So, he began to explore anarchist theorists more closely, and in the process he even taught a course on anarchism at Yale. We should note that his anarchism is not at full throttle. After all, he did only offer “two cheers” (2012) for it, not three, but the weight of his scholarship is surely towards the anarchist side. In this sense, Scott represents one of the few prominent intellectuals that opted to work in this vein, alongside the contributions of Noam Chomsky (2005, 2013) or David Graeber (e.g., 2004, 2009, 2020). There are also several works that collect together scholars working in this direction for the social sciences, social movements, and theory (e.g., Shukaitis et al. 2007; Klausen and Martel 2011; Lilley and Shantz 2015; Levy and Newman 2019), all of which reveals that there’s been an increasing turn to this line of thought, after a period in which Marxist thinking was more common in the academy. Here, I discuss how Scott’s lifework has had an important influence on archaeology, anthropology, political science, and history through his theoretical approach in addition to several concepts that he developed that have been useful for considering political dynamics at various scales, in ancient early states (and their peripheries) to contemporary states and non-state regions such as the zomias of Southeast Asia. Throughout, I emphasize how Scott’s thinking upends so many common perspectives about political dynamics.

James C. Scott was the most incisive theorist of the state for people who are ambivalent about the state’s existence. He was a major theorist of power, revealing the covert weapons that groups without formal, coercive power wield against the state and its representatives. He pioneered ethnography in political science, insisting throughout his career on dangers of neglecting local context and knowledge. In doing so, he expanded our understanding of politics to include the politics of peasants, pre-state, and stateless people. Despite Scott’s eminence and his relevance to central questions in the field, his thought remains at the margins of political theory. The field has barely begun to mine the potential of Scott’s scholarship for new insights and research programs. If there is a theme that unifies Scott’s major works, it is the need to dispel state myths and to uncover and examine social and political life that are omitted or distorted by state agents (among whom are academics, especially political scientists). Scott dedicated his career to overcoming a major blind spot: that much of our evidence is produced by states. He consistently applied an “anarchist squint” to political life, illuminating features that otherwise remained invisible (Scott 2014).

At the time of working on this paper (December 2024), I attended a session organized by Bidar Research Institution in Tehran, where a young feminist was presenting the results of her M.A. dissertation on the Iranian women’s movement, One Million Signatures Campaign, in the 2000s. When I questioned the application of theories developed to study the agency and political action of subaltern groups, particularly Asef Bayat’s work, one member of the audience responded that this is not relevant to feminism and women’s movement. Nobody provided a counter argument, but a young male student mentioned another work by Bayat, Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, where he discusses the agency of ordinary women in the Iranian post-revolutionary society. He briefly discussed the relevance of Bayat’s work to the exploration of women as a subaltern group. In Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Asef Bayat (2010) introduces the quiet encroachment of the ordinary. Drawing on James Scott’s everyday forms of resistance, Bayat discusses how subaltern groups such as the poor and women seek “life chances” through quiet encroachment in daily life in post-revolutionary Iran. He claims that “in many authoritarian Muslim states, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, where conservative Islamic laws are in place, women have become second-class citizens in many domains of public life. Consequently, a central question for women’s rights activists is how to achieve gender equality under such circumstances” (Bayat 2010: 96). Bayat answers this question in the framework of Scott’s theory: “Women resisted these policies, not much by deliberate organized campaigns, but largely through mundane daily practices in public domains, such as working, playing sports, studying, showing interest in art and music, or running for political offices” (Bayat 2010: 97). Bayat calls this “feminism of everyday life” (2010: 96). This short narrative brings me to the point that I want to discuss in this paper: the application of theories of political action and the resistance of subordinate groups in feminist and gender archaeology. I briefly discuss the relevance of subaltern studies generally and James Scott’s “everyday forms of resistance,” then turn to the methodological and socio-political outcomes of this expansion for feminist and gender archaeology. Finally, I discuss two examples to demonstrate the significance of daily life as a site of conflict and resistance.

James C. Scott, political scientist and anthropologist, passed away on 19 July 2024 at the age of 87. He was Sterling Professor of Political Science and Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University – and a farmer. His scholarship focused on agrarian societies, state power, and forms of political resistance. Scott conducted extensive fieldwork in southeast Asia. A prolific writer (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott), Scott’s books inspired scholars across many fields – and many of us in the editorial collective of Forum Kritische Archäologie (FKA) as well. His work has influenced our perspectives on the mechanisms of state power and ways of resisting or avoiding it. His challenges to traditional narratives of state formation and state control and the alleged powerlessness of the marginalized have helped us as archaeologists to think about material traces of ‘everyday forms of resistance’, ‘hidden transcripts,’ and ‘weapons of the weak.’

This article explores how archaeo-politics generates violence woven into everyday life by analysing Israel’s archaeological apparatus in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). In light of former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to the Tell Seilun archaeological site, I examine how state and non-state actors exploit archaeology to legitimise territorial claims. I argue that archaeo-politics is not limited to a revisionist self-awareness and the way that current politics uses, misuses, and abuses archaeology. It encompasses the subtle and pervasive ways in which violence is embedded in state structures, norms, and power dynamics, ultimately perpetuating not only spatial injustice and exclusion but also becoming a factor in fuelling ongoing cycles of Israeli settlers’ oppression and direct violence against Palestinian subjects. The article investigates how archaeo-political violence is materialized through Israel’s archaeological state and non-state apparatus operating within frameworks of settler colonialism and entrepreneurism. By scrutinising American officials’ fixation on archaeological sites in internationally recognised occupied territories, I question the motives behind these activities and explore the forms of violence they engender that go beyond physical harm. This analysis contributes to understanding how archaeology is weaponised within contested landscapes, revealing the complex relationship between heritage, power, and structural violence in contexts of ongoing settler colonialism and military occupation.

Richard Bussmann, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cologne, recently published the book The Archaeology of Pharaonic Egypt: Society and Culture, 2700–1700 BC (2023, Cambridge University Press), which places people at the centre of an analysis of the so-called “Pyramid Age” of Ancient Egypt. The book focusses on life “in the shadow of the pyramids” by exploring aspects of daily life (and death) as well as social interactions beyond the traditional Egyptological focus on royal and elite spheres. Bussmann examines cross-cultural themes such as urbanism, materiality, non-elite culture, political and religious practice, gender roles, and perceptions of the body. As a comparative approach to ancient societies and as a study drawing heavily on anthropological and theoretical concepts, the book raised the interest of the FKA Editorial Board. To allow us and the author to critically reflect on some of the issues raised in our discussion, we took the opportunity to pose a set of questions to Richard Bussmann, which he kindly answered.

We live in a paradoxical world in which humanity has accumulated more wealth than ever before – but we have distributed it less equitably than ever before (e.g., Christiansen and Jensen 2019). This is not a new insight. Most archaeologists, at least since the Processual – Post-Processual debates, acknowledge that they work within inequality. As Gabriel Moshenska (p. 49),1 quoting Collingwood puts it: “I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight.” This quote nicely encapsulates the intent of this important Archaeology as Empowerment theme issue that marks the 10th anniversary of Forum Kritische Archäologie.

RG: So, Yannis, having read and reread the essays, I thought we might exchange a few impressions and respond to some of the challenges that have been offered in them, whether directly or indirectly. One of the first things that struck me, both in this set of papers and in other reactions to ANR (published, online and in academic settings), is how varied and “undisciplined” they are: each response seems to spin off in a different direction! I know that it was our intent and hope to engage a diverse readership, but I began to wonder whether there is true communication, as Despina Lalaki suggests there should be, or if we are talking to ourselves and past each other. I’m also thinking of the eye-rolling reproach that I often encounter, not least from colleagues within the profession, of those who would prefer that we ‘stay in our lane,’ do what we do best and what we are paid public money to do; that is, dig, publish and tell stories about the past. Why trouble the world with our half-baked meditations? And now we have gone and lured more well-intentioned, mostly young scholars to join us in this pointless exercise!