In my introductory archaeology course this semester, we started with a discussion of the 25 Grand Challenges for Archaeology, identified by Keith Kintigh and colleagues in 2014. My students expressed surprise that war and conflict was, in their view, so underemphasized in comparison to other questions about leadership, hierarchy, and human-environmental interaction. To them, it seemed obvious that violence should be one of the most robust areas of inquiry for archaeology. It’s hard to blame them. At the same moment they were asking the question, their phones were flashing in their backpacks with news alerts about protestors being tear gassed and murdered in the United States and in Iran, immigrants and activists being detained and disappeared, updates on the kidnapping of Maduro, rumblings of a Greenland invasion and potential subsequent world war, and reminders of ongoing violence against Palestinians by the Israeli state. In this context, I have to imagine it is difficult to understand how our discipline could be concerned with anything in the human past besides the history of war and violence.

Eighty years after the Second World War and thirty-four years after the end of the Cold War, we stand, once again, on the precipice of global conflict. This is not coincidental. Major conflicts recur with troubling regularity, often when the lived experience of previous wars has passed away. And while I am sceptical of ‘generational’ theories that attempt to identify cyclical patterns in national histories (Strauss and Howe 1992), it seems to me that reflec-tions on perceived past failures or national humiliations often congeal and combine at critical junctures to create new conflicts. Many current conflicts have been initiated by powerful septuagenarians with no personal experience of war and a highly idealized, chauvinistic view of the past. The cycle of vengeful destruction continues, as every new generation of old men attempts to re-fight their father’s war.

Gewalt gegenüber war ich noch nie besonders aufgeschlossen. Bis jetzt habe ich noch keinen Menschen körperlich attackiert und sofern ich es verbal tat, habe ich es sofort bereut und mich meist umgehend entschuldigt, selbst in Situationen der Selbstverteidigung. Bedingt durch gängige Narrative bezüglich Männlichkeit entsprachen meine Handlungen niemals etwas Heldenhaftem. Tatsächlich habe ich mich selbst auch immer schwach dabei gefühlt. Verschiedene dieser körperlichen und verbalen Konfliktsituationen ließen in mir die Frage aufkommen, ob Menschen diese schon in der Vergangenheit eher gewaltvoll gelöst haben und falls nicht, ob die dann genutzten friedlicheren Handlungsweisen der Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart übernommen werden können. Die Er-gründung dieser Fragen zum menschlichen Verhalten entwickelten sich später zu einem Hauptantrieb, mich dem Studium der Prähistorischen Archäologie zu widmen.

When I initially received the call for contributions to Orienting Archaeology towards Peace, I was unsure how I could contribute to the challenging question of how archaeology and the heritage sector might promote peace and justice. Almost immediately, the persistent question of archaeology’s contemporary relevance in a world characterized by ongoing crises, violence, and injustice came to mind. While I was conducting my PhD research, I observed the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, the subsequent hijacking of a revolution – first by conservative Islamic politi- cians and then by the military – and the rapid transformation of a once hopeful country into an even harsher yet stable dictatorship, all from the distant and strangely insulated microcosm of an excavation house in the Egyptian Nile Delta.

According to the National Monument Audit (Monument Lab 2025), the United States is home to at least 15,758 war memorials. In contrast, only 1,221 sites are associated with peace. War memorials are sponsored by federal, state, and local agencies, as well as privately-funded ones in cemeteries, city parks, and traffic circles from organi-zations as diverse as the Daughters of the Confederacy, the National Park Service, the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and the Vietnam Veterans of Oregon. Many of the peace memorials, which represent a little over 2% of the total recorded in the audit, could have just as easily ended up in the war column. They often do double duty – memorial-izing dead soldiers or victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the Holocaust in order to make a negative plea for peace.

The recent waves of violence engulfing major regions of the world did not start with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Sudanese civil war, Hamas’ attack on Israel, or the Israeli bombardments of Gaza, Lebanon, or, more recently, Iran. But there is no question that these acts of aggression as well as the responses they have elicited have brought the planet ever closer to another world war. Attacks on civilians and non-military infrastructure, such as hospitals, schools, and water supplies, abound. Massive bombardments, including strikes on oil facilities and nuclear plants, add dramatically to environmental damage, global warming, and to the potential for a nuclear catastrophe. We at Forum Kritische Archäologie are convinced that as archaeologists we cannot simply sit on the sidelines at times like these. With this set of contributions, we hope to initiate a discussion that reaches out widely into the community of archaeologists and cultural heritage specialists and does so without geographic limitations. We pose the question: how can archaeology and cultural heritage contribute to peace? We do so from the perspective that archaeology and cultural heritage have frequently been mobilized in ways that exacerbate conflict. Can we position these fields and the ways we work so as to promote peace and justice, bridging national, regional, ethnic, religious, and other borders? And if so, how?

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.