DESTRUCTION Archaeological, philological and historical perspectives

Destruction remains a relatively unexplored and badly understood

topic in archaeology and history. The term itself refers to some form
and measurable degree of damage inflicted to an object, a system or a
being, usually exceeding the stage during which repair is still possible
but most often it is examined for its impact with destructive events
interpreted in terms of a punctuated equilibrium, extraordinary fea-
tures that represent the end of an archaeological culture or historical
phase and the beginning of a new one.

The three-day international workshop of which this volume presents

the proceedings took place at Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, from
November 24 to 26, 2011 and was organized by CEMA – Centre d’Étude

DESTRUCTION
des Mondes Antiques – one of the research centres within INCAL –
Institut de Civilisations, Arts et Lettres. Our aim with organising this
gathering was to seriously engage with destruction as a phenomenon
and how it is perceived by archaeologists, historians and philologists of
the ancient world. The volume is similarly structured to the workshop ARCHAEOLOGICAL, PHILOLOGICAL
which it reflects, with first a series of more theoretical papers and
then following a chronological and geographical order. AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

EDITED BY JAN DRIESSEN

couve-destruction-1.indd 1 26/04/13 17:06

 Embracing destruction

Alfredo González-Ruibal

Introduction

Most sites studied by archaeologists are destroyed – by human actors, by natural

disasters or by the slow effect of post-depositional processes in which human and non-
human agency are combined (Schiffer 1987). In fact, with the exception of burials and
ritual hoards, the majority of evidence retrieved by archaeologists during excavations
comes from deposits that have suffered some kind of destructive action. Despite its
relevance, destruction as a social phenomenon has remained largely untheorized in
archaeology and it has received serious attention only during the last fifteen years. In
this text, I will focus on three issues: the relevance of destruction as an archaeological
theme and trope; the potential of destruction to explore other temporalities and
narratives, and the ambiguity of destruction processes. Although this is a reflection
largely based on my experience as an archaeologist working on the remains of the
20th and 21st centuries, I believe that thinking through modern processes may help us
understand both the deep past and the present.

Destruction as an archaeological theme

Archaeologists seem to have been always reluctant to engage with that which most
distinctly defines their discipline, namely, things, fragments and dirt. For quite a long
time, archaeologists have felt a kind of embarrassment for dealing with just things
and not people (Olsen 2003); material objects instead of ideas, discourses or beliefs.
This rejection of matter is perhaps best epitomized in the great scholar of classical art,
Bianchi Bandinelli, who saw in archaeology’s involvement with humble objects the
negative side of art history, a discipline concerned with the realm of the spiritual (cf.
Carandini 1991: 226-227). Although not as radically, most archaeologists have also
tried to eschew things to recover the intangible, which has been progressively equated
with society, rather than spirit. This attitude has been recently denounced by different
authors, among whom some of the most vocal have been Bjørnar Olsen (Olsen 2003;
2010) and Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore (2008). Other practitioners
of archaeology and cultural studies have defended materiality recently, with more or
less attention to the crude, tangible and sensuous side of things, including Ian Hodder
(2012), Lynn Meskell (2005), Daniel Miller (2005), Bill Brown (2001) and Paul
Graves-Brown (2000), to mention but a few. Interestingly, it seems that it is only when
things have been reclaimed by the social sciences at large, that archaeologists have

37
38 Destruction

felt entitled to argue that their work consist in retrieving the “missing masses” (Latour
2003) of the material world. Of course, this is what they have been doing since the
inception of the discipline, but they have rarely admitted it.
A similar embarrassment is obvious with the fragmentary nature of our evidence.
Unlike other students of things, such as art historians, who usually have complete
buildings, paintings and sculptures (especially from the Middle Ages onwards),
archaeologists work mostly with broken things. This has been generally perceived as
a problem at least until John Chapman (2001) reminded us that fragmentation might
be also informative in itself, because the way artifacts are broken, and specially their
intentional breakage, is as determined by cultural values as any other aspect of society.
In a very different vein, another strong defendant of fragments and remnants has been
Michael Shanks, who has been arguing for the last two decades that archaeologists
do not work with the past, but with what is left from it – traces and fragments – and
that this is not an inherently disabling condition of archaeology (Shanks 2012). On the
contrary, fragments may be a creative way of engaging with the past. Again, this interest
in fragmentation is arising when other, nobler, disciplines, including philosophy and
art history have started paying attention to it. One of Giorgio Agamben’s last books,
The Signature of All Things (2009) is precisely concerned with traces and fragments
and remains appear also in previous works of the same philosopher, such as Remnants
of Auschwitz (Agamben 2002). This concern with the fragmentary is no doubt related
to the destructive nature of supermodernity and the way it exhausts traditional modes
of experience, as Laurent Olivier (2008: 121-126) has aptly described it. It is not
by chance that the First World War, with its systematic dismembering of bodies and
things, saw the emergence of a new artistic language characterized by the obliteration
of meaning, ellipsis, fragmentation and collage, and new tropes of devastation, loss and
injury (Garner 2007). This sensibility has pervaded artistic expression until the present
and helps explain the interest of art in archaeology. However, fragmentation, with its
strong association to ruins and destruction, has appealed artists and intellectuals from
well before the traumatic events of the twentieth century: from the late 18th century
to the mid 19th century (the time associated with Romanticism), it was considered
that, as a fragment, a ruin was more meaningful than when it was part of a whole
(Williams 2011: 95). Curiously enough, although archaeology was born in the same
intellectual environment of Romanticism, the discipline soon rejected fragments and
ruins as unscientific and nostalgic and engaged in a pursuit to restore completeness to
the past, to erase the traces of destruction.
A third source of embarrassment for archaeologists, with materiality and
fragmentation, is the fact that the things with which we most frequently work are
simply rubbish. Saying that one’s job mostly consists in sorting out garbage is not
very glamorous. At least until Bill Rathje (Rathje and Murphy 1992) thought it was
and demonstrated that, like fragments, garbage is more than just an accident. It speaks
volumes about society, including our own, and it actually tells stories that we cannot
find anywhere else. Again, the acceptance of garbage as an honourable object of study
 Embracing destruction 39

came in a moment (the 1970s and early 1980s), when ecological concerns were putting
the issue of recycling and rubbish management under the limelight and when artists
had been playing with garbage for a while (Junk Art, Arte Povera). During the 1980s
and 1990s, archaeologists started seeing rubbish in a different way, as the product of
ritual activities and as a cultural product (Hill 1995). However, theoretical reflections
on ordinary rubbish have not been common until quite recently. Thus, Buchli and
Lucas (2001) were among the first to tackle seriously the implications of working
with dirt, refuse and other abject things (Buchli and Lucas 2001). In turn, Graves-
Brown (2011) has defended that, as archaeologists, we have to embrace the otherness
of materiality, including the abject, actively and wholeheartedly, instead of creating
distances with it.
A similar disavowal has happened with destruction and its effects: ruins (but see
Shanks 1992). The difficult relationship between archaeology and destruction starts at
a very basic level with the logic of excavation: archaeologists have been always aware,
perhaps too much, that digging implies destroying evidence (Lucas 2001a). In that,
our discipline seems quite unique – and tragically so. However, some practitioners are
now trying to leave aside the trope of destruction and revalue the act of excavation as
an original, critical and productive way of engaging with the world (e.g. Lucas 2001a;
2001b; Edgeworth 2012). The other kind of destruction with which archaeologists have
an uneasy relationship is the one that produces the archaeological record in the first
place. Thus, archaeologists have traditionally considered destruction either as an asset
(when it seals undisturbed archaeological deposits) or a problem (when it obliterates
evidence). The debates around the so-called “Pompeii Premise” during the 1980s had
to do with the way in which the original evidence is distorted by abandonment and
destructive processes (Binford 1981; Schiffer 1985). Thus, archaeologists have not
been usually interested in destruction per se except to discover how something had
been constructed or used in the first place. Italian archaeologist Andrea Carandini
(1991), for instance, defends in his book on excavation method that one of the aims
of archaeology is the careful reconstruction of the buildings and sites from the past.
To prove the point, none of the 36 splendid color plates that illustrate his work show
a single ruin: only detailed reconstructions of towns, fortresses and villas as they
supposedly were. Interestingly, in the reconstructions all buildings look brand new,
as if they were synchronous. There is no hint of decay or abandonment: a collapsed
roof, a ruinous house or some broken tiles. Therefore, the attitude is similar to that
we found in relation with fragmentation and dirt. There is a conscious or unconscious
tendency to negate entropy and in so doing to create a sanitized image of the past. This
is in turn related to modernist perspectives on heritage management and conservation
(Lipe 1975; Fagan 2003). However, while archaeologists have devoted themselves,
until recently, to a struggle against ruins and destruction, other scholars have found
them quite revealing. People like sociologist Georg Simmel (2007) or philosopher
Walter Benjamin (1999) did not see in ruins an accident to be bypassed, but rather a
matter of theoretical concern, a source of inspiration and a vehicle to better understand
40 Destruction

the world. Thus, Benjamin’s Arcades Project intended to grasp the essence of the 19th
century not through its monuments, but its detritus, remnants and ruins: “an attempt
to retain the image of history in the most inconspicuous corners of existence – the
detritus of history, as it were” (Benjamin 1994: 505). Other authors have investigated
destruction as an inquiry into the nature of (modern) society (Bauman 2000; Sebald
2004). Archaeologists have been slow at catching up, but there has been a growing
concern in recent years with destruction as a phenomenon meaningful in itself (e.g.
Stevanovic 1997; Meskell 1998; Rakoczy 2008). To understand why archaeologists are
now turning their attention to destructive processes, we have to look, once again, at the
historical context in which we are living: the utter destructiveness of supermodernity
that has inspired artists and scholars is wittingly or unwittingly guiding archaeological
concerns with ruination (González-Ruibal 2008; Dawdy 2010).
Given this background of archaeological disinterest for archaeological tropes, it is
not strange that when the concept of archaeology has been used by people outside
the discipline (such as in the case of Michel Foucault’s archéologie du savoir), it is
rarely to archaeologists themselves that they resort, but rather to other scholars or
artists that have used archaeological or para-archaeological themes. In a recent book
called The Ruins of Modernity (Hell and Schönle 2010), for instance, only one of the
25 contributors cites any reference by an archaeologist. Of course, not all is our fault:
there is also a generalized stereotyping of archaeology that does not correspond with
the real development of the discipline during the last hundred years. Most scholars
and artists are working with an outdated concept of the discipline. It is up to us to
convince them that we are aware of the potentiality of our own resources – including
destruction (Olivier 2008; Olsen et al. 2012; González-Ruibal forthcoming).

Destruction might tell another story

It is common in history to say that periods do not end abruptly: people do not go
to bed one day as Medieval and wake up the following day as Renaissance men and
women. Historical periods have very diffuse margins. Thus, depending on who we
are talking with, Classical Antiquity may end in AD 476, with the crisis of the 3rd
century, or the Islamic invasions of the 7th and early 8th centuries AD. It all depends
on which processes and events we prioritize. At the same time, historical periods
can be astonishingly precise – 1295-1069 BC (the Ramesside period) or 1917-1991
(communist Russia). Archaeological phases are not exactly like historical ones. Usually,
they are both less diffuse and less precise: in archaeology, when things collapse, they
collapse for good. Even if we re-erect or reconstruct an ancient monument, it is just a
building or several buildings, but not the complete materiality of the past. However,
throughout history, it is entire material networks that crumble: roads, aqueducts and
amphitheatres, or hillforts, sanctuaries and burial grounds. Archaeological ends can
resemble very much 19th century paintings of the Fall of Rome. On the other hand,
archaeological phases can be less easily bracketed in chronological terms: material
 Embracing destruction 41

structures continue to work even when the institutions and beliefs that created them
disappear or are destroyed. In a certain way, they continue to determine the life
conditions of the present (Witmore 2006: 280; Olivier 2008). In the last instance, the
difference between archaeology and history has to do with the diverse temporalities
with which both disciplines work (Witmore 2006; Lucas 2010). In the case of
archaeology, we are subjected to the time of things which, as Laurent Olivier has
proved, is different from human temporality. He speaks of a “typological time situated
beyond real [chronological] time” (Olivier 2008: 247). “Thing time” is not necessarily
in-keeping with other times among other reasons because, as philosopher Michel
Serres (1995: 87) has argued, things slow down time. They stabilize relations and
made them durable (Olsen 2010: 139-141). There are old things that refuse to vanish
from our lives – consider a sickle, an axe or a knife, artifacts that have changed little
in almost three millennia (Leroi-Gourhan 1964: 131-132). Other things disappear
silently, after a very long time, without receiving attention from historians, who are
more concerned with political, economic or cultural processes: this is the case with
vernacular architecture in different parts of the world, to which I will return later.
Archaeological periods, with its focus on the life of the material, tend to privilege
destruction: the massive and systematic disappearance and ruination of things mark
the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. Gavin Lucas has recently argued
that the archaeological record is mostly composed of the residues of assemblages
with low reversibility. The more reversible an assemblage is, he says, the less visible
it will be archaeologically. In his opinion, “the kind of change and events that
archaeologists see are of a very particular type: changes in material organisations
with high irreversibility” (Lucas 2010: 356). This is a problem if we want to emulate
the temporality of historical and ethnographic accounts, but, again, what we may
perceive as a flaw of our discipline (like materiality, dirt and fragmentation), it can be
one of its strengths: after all, argues Lucas, these highly irreversible changes are the
most important over the long term. We always use these highly irreversible changes,
which are almost always related to abandonment and destruction, to establish our
periodizations of prehistoric times and we do not always reflect as much as we should
on their implications. A good way of thinking about them is considering what would
recent history look like if we paid more attention to those irreversible changes that
archaeologists tend to privilege in their periodizations. We would find unexpected
continuities and sudden ends marked by extensive destruction.
One could wonder, for example, when the Soviet system ended. Was it in 1991,
when political communism collapsed and the Soviet regime dissolved? What do we
do, then, with those places where the material conditions of communism are still
very much alive? With all the infrastructures that are still in use? After all, the Soviet
regime was not only an ideology, a political discourse, and a form of organizing
and controlling society. It was also a set of material elements that made those things
possible in the first place and that conditioned the public and private lives of people
(Buchli 1999). If the Soviet regime could not have existed without social housing,
42 Destruction

concentration camps, nuclear submarines and factories, maybe we could say that
something of the Soviet era continues to exist as long as these same social housing,
camps, submarines and factories continue to exist. Consider two examples of the
Nachleben of communist Russia. One is an essay by an art critic (Herbert 2011), the
other a book by two archaeologists and an artist (Andreassen et al. 2010). Martin
Herbert writes about a visit to the city of Norilsk in Northern Siberia, the place of
a brutal labor camp during the Soviet period in which thousands died. Despite a
dramatic political transformation, things have not completely changed, as it could be
argued from a historicist perspective: “For the people of Norilsk, totalitarianism is not
entirely vanished. It built the mine they work in and the buildings they live in... The
Soviet system is only half-gone here...” (Herbert 2011: 191). If it is only half-gone is
thanks to the stabilizing qualities of material things. Andreassen, Bjerck and Olsen,
in turn, explored the pristine remains of the mining town of Pyramiden, built in the
arctic island of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago. This place survived as a
Soviet settlement well after the collapse of the regime. Lenin’s bust and the red star
continued to preside over a built environment that had not noticed the end of political
communism in the former USSR. If we follow the time of things, we can argue that
the Soviet regime only came to an end here in 1998, when the place was completely
abandoned (Andreassen et al. 2010). In general, however, the impression that one
gathers from looking at materiality is that real socialism, at least as a material system,
is far from gone.
If we look at abandonment and destruction, the history of the 20th century might look
very different to mainstream historical accounts. When we think of the last hundred
years of history, we invariably consider the World Wars and totalitarianism as the
defining moments, the well-dated turning points of the era. It is not my intention here
to downplay its relevance, but there might be other phenomena more irreversible and
with farther-reaching consequences. If we look at totalitarianism and world wars from
an archaeological point of view, we see that they produced many ruins. However,
there are other processes that have generated incomparably more ruins in the world:
de-industrialization and the end of peasant societies, for instance. Ironically, it was not
an archaeologist, but a historian, who noticed the enormous importance of the latter.
Eric Hobsbawm (1994: 9) wrote that from the perspective of a future historian,
the world wars would seem a relatively inconsequential event. What the scholars of
the future will see more clearly is the disappearance of the agrarian societies that
predominated in the world for the last eight thousand millennia: that is a change with
consequences and one that leaves an immense record of destruction in its wake. In
Galicia, in NW Spain, where I have conducted work on the archaeology of the recent
past, tens of thousands of vernacular buildings lie abandoned in the countryside and at
least as many have been destroyed or are being destroyed by their owners (González-
Ruibal 2005). Some of the villages that are now abandoned have been inhabited
uninterruptedly for the last two thousand years and the architecture itself, although
it has changed many times, it has done so incomparably less in these two millennia
 Embracing destruction 43

than in the last two decades of destruction and reconstruction. As a history student,
I was taught at the university the great turning points of Spain’s recent history: the
end of the monarchic restoration, the establishment of the dictatorship, the transition
to democracy. Although they certainly changed the lives of Spaniards, they left little
trace in the archaeological record and not only there: people worked with the plow
before and after the monarchic restoration, weaved linen cloth in looms, decorated
their wooden yokes with an awl, and ate from a communal pot. There is a history
of materiality – or “material civilization” as the French call it – that is considered
secondary by most historians (although not those of the Annales School!). The silent
disappearance of this material civilization tends to pass unnoticed. Everybody sees
when a political regime is toppled, but not when the last plow is thrown to the fire or
rots in a cowshed. Yet their repercussions might be equally relevant in the long run.
The truth is that those things that inscribed the landscape with an indelible mark have
been granted little space by modern historians: the end of the peasant culture, which
archaeologists will continue to identify in millennia to come as a massive episode
of destruction, abandonment and material shift, is barely mentioned in comparison
to other phenomena. Interestingly, where an archaeologist would see destruction,
historians tend to see construction: the emigration of peasants to cities is described as
a process of creation of a new world – a world of factories, new technology, improved
health and nutrition, increased literacy rates, and political mobilization. They privilege
new technologies, the things that change, not what remains, the things of the past, and
ruins (cf. Witmore in press, also Edgerton 2006).
The story that destruction tells, however, is an important one. It is important because
it affects and represents a large number of people, an entire social group who has
suffered from their subaltern status (cf. Berger and Mohr 1975). Their experiences
of history have been often disregarded, to the benefit of other political and economic
processes in which they played a smaller part (or none). Yet when one talks to Galician
peasants about the past, they continuously refer to the brutal interruption that implied
the advent of modernity during the last half a century: the abandonment of cultivated
fields, the ruins of granaries and the destruction of traditional houses and with them,
all that they stood for. Their discourse is very similar to that of an archaeologist: a
discourse on things that manifests the material experience of a peasant life. It is also
a discourse that emphasizes a change with high irreversibility, as Gavin Lucas would
put it. Unlike other transformations, irreversible ones are often lived as something
deeply traumatic: a world that disappears and will never be retrieved. This of course,
is not necessarily bad, but it is always difficult. To this I will turn in the last point of
this paper.
44 Destruction

Destruction as an ambiguous process

For a long time, destruction has been considered by archaeologists as a negative
index: during the heyday of culture-historical archaeology, destructiveness was
associated with invasions and upheavals, following the tendency to associate
archaeological phenomena and the events that typically characterize political history.
The panorama changed with the advent of processualism and behavioral archaeology,
whose proponents argued for more nuanced interpretations of the formation process
of the archaeological record (Schiffer 1987) and for a closer examination of the
socioeconomic causes that underlie destruction – the Maya collapse, for example,
has been a main concern for processual archaeologists (e.g. Sabloff 1967). Post-
processualism brought a new focus. According to this paradigm, everything is
meaningfully constituted, from the shape of a pot to rubbish disposal (Hodder 1982:
155-161). Destruction, therefore, had to be culturally mediated as well. It is under this
new theoretical influence that we have to understand the interest in symbolic and ritual
destructive processes of the last decade and a half (Stevanovic 1997; Tringham 2000).
Nevertheless, destruction, and particularly massive destruction, is still associated
in our imaginations with a radical break with the past and everything it stands for.
Thus, in Rakoczy’s book (2008), most contributors deal with conflict and war and
in my own work I have been concerned mostly with modernity’s menacing power
(González-Ruibal 2008). However, destruction can be ambiguous for two reasons: on
the one hand, construction and destruction are not as far removed as we may think,
and, on the other, destruction is not necessarily perceived as just negative (such as
devastation caused by war) or positive (such as ritual destruction): there might be
ambivalent feelings at work.
Regarding the first question, construction has almost always entailed some kind of
destruction. This is particularly obvious from the Neolithic onwards, when cycles of
creation and obliteration began to follow each other: it is necessary to fell down the
forest to cultivate or to demolish old clay houses to build new ones on top. In this
case, though, destruction is understood as regeneration and the dismantling of houses
is associated with their continuity (Hodder 2010: 150). With high modernity this link
between destruction and construction has continued, but the balance between the two
has been lethally altered. A new kind of irreversible and damaging destruction seems
to be taking hold of the world. It has been pointed out that destruction is a prerequisite
of totalitarian architecture and that destruction is foreshadowed in every totalitarian
undertaking (Schwab and Beshty 2011: 143-144), but the truth is that it can be found
in all kinds of regimes. Thus, most construction projects entail some sort of destruction
of past materialities (archaeologists are well aware of this) and of other ways of living.
The latter is the case even when the projects aim to preserve a particular past as
heritage (Herzfeld 2010). The scale of destruction in modernity’s creative efforts is
as enormous that it is often difficult to distinguish it from utter devastation: the Three
Gorges Dam in China, for example, has caused the relocation of 1.2 to 1.5 million
 Embracing destruction 45

people, destroyed hundreds of archaeological sites, flooded thousands of houses,

spread new diseases, pollution and brought environmental disaster (Stone 2011).
There is something in the ambiguous relations between construction and destruction
that is not limited to modern times, though, even if it is in the present when it is more
eloquently seen: some building works linger for years, making it difficult to decide
whether the structures in question are under construction or in ruination. The same
must have been the case in the past. Medieval cathedrals and churches, for example,
remained unfinished for years and often suffered from long periods of inactivity. They
must have looked like impressive ruins in the middle of a small town or village. The
entanglement of construction and destruction is, in fact, very visible archaeologically
in sites from different periods. Layers of building and reform often look very much like
episodes of devastation: Parisian intellectuals of the mid-19th century were fascinated
with the field of ruins in which Hausmann’s renovation plans transformed the city
(Jordan 1995: 261; Benjamin 1999). Likewise, the destruction of a place has not to
be necessarily equated with the end. Archaeologists know this, because they routinely
discover traces of occupation in layers of abandonment and destruction. However, the
afterlives of places have not been sufficiently appraised (Dawdy 2010: 775-776). We
have been more interested in periods of splendor, whatever this might mean, than in
the vagabonds and squatters that make themselves at home amidst ruins.
The second element of ambiguity that I have mentioned has to do with the relation
between people and destruction. We tend to think that when something is destroyed
it is because it is considered wrong or evil by a person, a sector within a society or an
entire group. This radical break may be even motivated by hatred, as in the case of
the elimination of historical buildings of other ethnic or religious groups in the former
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan or Germany during the Nazi period. Ethnic cleansing is well
known for producing not just the elimination of people, but also of entire cultural
landscapes, including the memories attached to it. It is actually this kind of purposeful,
hateful destruction that has attracted most attention by archaeologists, anthropologists
and architectural historians (Meskell 1998). The latter have coined the term urbicide
to refer to the targeted destruction of historic cities with political intentions (Coward
2009). Another kind of destruction is motivated by utopian or regenerative aspirations:
this is typical of totalitarian regimes – we can remember the havoc caused by
Mussolini’s desire to restore Rome to its imperial grandeur or Ceausescu’s so-called
systematization in Romania – but not only. Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the
1850s and 1860s, for example, intended to create simultaneously a new, rational city
and a new, well-ordered society (protected against social upheaval): for that, he had
to break with the past in a very physical way. These utopian destructions show either
hatred or disinterest for the past that they annihilate. Both attitudes have been signaled
in Haussmann himself, although the feeling of indifference prevailed (Jordan 1995).
Actually, it seems that if there is an underlying sentiment in destructive processes, it
is indifference towards the past rather than hatred.
46 Destruction

However, what passes as indifference might be far more complex than the term
itself implies. The feelings that are behind the ruination of the past are often mixed
and contradictory. This is the case with British colonial cemeteries in India, studied
by Ashish Chadha (2006). They were not vandalized when the British left, but they
were neither taken care of. They are now overgrown and ruined. In this situation,
they reflect well the ambivalent relationship that modern Indians have towards
the colonial past. A similar, although more problematic, attitude is evident among
Galician peasants in relation to their premodern existence (González-Ruibal 2005).
While it can be said that Galician peasants want to break away with the past and to
a certain extent they show a real hatred and shame towards it, they cannot distance
themselves from it definitively. This ambivalent attitude reflects a troubled experience
of transformation from a premodern to a vernacular modern society. Their ambiguous
rejection of the past is materialized in a peculiar way of abandoning their former
material culture, including houses and objects – sometimes very personal ones. They
are often incapable of destroying the materiality of their old world or that of their
parents. They choose simply to leave it to decay, a process that inevitably – but in a
different, slower way – ends up in destruction. It is very likely that similar processes
and similar attitudes could have occurred in other times and places, especially in
the context of traumatic cultural contact and cultural change. This is the case with
processes of “Romanization”, Christianization, Islamization and colonialism, which
all have in common a profound rearrangement of the relations of people with their
pasts. While the breaking away with tradition has been often depicted in stark terms,
we have to be ready to grasp the ambiguous nuances of a difficult relationship. This
relationship is expressed not only by means of new monuments, practices and beliefs,
but also through the ruins of an order that has been overcome.

Concluding remarks
In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate that destruction is at the heart of
archaeology but archaeologists have only engaged with it reluctantly and in a partial
way. Embracing destruction means accepting its central role in the discipline, both as
a productive metaphor and as a fundamental social phenomenon involving people and
things. For embracing destruction, we have to see it not just as a problematic process
– something that turns the past into an irrecoverable mess of fragments and dirt –
but also as a way of understanding history in a different way. Of course, destruction
is problematic, although perhaps not in the sense that is usually considered. I have
argued here that destruction can be an ambiguous phenomenon from a material, social
and psyschosocial point of view and that archaeologists have to be ready to identify
and interpret this ambiguity. If we are now living in the Age of Destruction, as Laurent
Olivier argues, this should then be the moment for archaeology to thrive, to prove its
value to understand the past as well as the present.
 Embracing destruction 47

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Christopher Witmore for carefully reading an early draft of this
paper and providing insightful comments. The reflections on destruction offered here
also owe much to my colleagues of the Ruin Memories project, directed by Bjørnar
Olsen. Any errors remain my own.

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 Table des matières

Preface 5
Jan Driessen
Ouverture du colloque 7
Marco Cavalieri
Time Capsules? 9
Jan Driessen
Nous sommes à l’âge de la Dévastation 27
Laurent Olivier
Embracing destruction 37
Alfredo González-Ruibal
Deconstructing Destructions 53
Tim Cunningham
Destruction and the formation of static and dynamic settlement structures
in the Aegean 63
Donald C. Haggis
Destruction of Places by Fire 89
Ruth Tringham
Destroying the means of production 109
Anna Stroulia, Danai Chondrou
Living through destructions 133
Simona Todaro, Lucia Girella
Destroying the Snake Goddesses 153
Anna Simandiraki-Grimshaw, Fay Stevens
The view from the day after 171
Dario Puglisi
L’archéosismologie : un cadre conceptuel 183
Simon Jusseret, Charlotte Langohr et Manuel Sintubin
Destruction and Identity 203
Louise Hitchcock

487
488 Destruction

The destruction of the Mycenaean palaces and the construction of

the epic world 221
Manolis Mikrakis
La notion de « destruction » entre oblitération, conservation
et pratiques rituelles 243
Mario Denti
Destructions at the grave 269
Alexandra Alexandridou
The ‘killing’ of a city: a destruction by enforced abandonment 285
Florence Gaignerot-Driessen
After destruction: taking care of remains at the sanctuary of
Eukleia at Vergina 299
Athanasia Kyriakou, Alexander Tourtas
Catastrophe or Resilience? 319
Ryan Boehm
Les séismes comme cause de destruction 329
Ludovic Thély
Spolia and Spoilage of the Archaeological Environment 337
Stavros Oikonomidis
La destruction cyclique en contexte cultuel 355
Laure Meulemans, Sylvia Piermarini
Construction and Destruction 371
Michele Scalici, Alessia Mancini
Poids symbolique de la destruction et enjeux idéologiques
de ses récits 391
Pierre Assenmaker
La destruction délibérée des statues pour des raisons politiques
dans le monde romain 415
Matteo Cadario
The sanctuary of Iuppiter Heliopolitanus at Carnuntum 435
Eva Steigberger, Barbara Tober
Destruction, transformation et refonctionnalisation 449
Marco Cavalieri
Evidence of Destruction in Tell Barri 473
Rocco Palermo