Printer-friendly versionArchaeology
Sixty Years of Scholarship in the History of Art
By Oleg Grabar
 |
Oleg Grabar (back row, second from right) with the 1969 staff of his archaeological team in Syria excavating a site known as Qasr al-Hayr |
It has been nearly sixty years that I have been engaged in an active scholarly life. My first article came out fifty-eight years ago, and there are still now two or three studies in the process of being printed or ready to appear on the Internet. In between lie some twenty books, several of which were translated into at least seven languages, and over one hundred and twenty more or less significant articles.
This considerable production can easily be divided into three groups, whose chronology raises interesting conclusions about the path of research traveled by a historian of the arts of the Islamic world who came into academic existence in the middle of the twentieth century. Whether this path is unique or typical is for others to decide.
The first group consists of traditional research based on the publication of documents, the excavation of new documents, and the significance of these documents within relatively strict chronological and spatial limits. Scholarship of this type is for the most part restricted in its interest and usefulness to other scholars of the same vintage, and it dominates the first half of my creative years. The number of works of this type that would have been initiated by me has clearly diminished with time, even though their scientific quality (or weakness) tends to remain steady over the years.
DNA, History, and Archaeology
By Nicola Di Cosmo
 |
A lecture on archaeological perspectives on ethnicity in ancient China, delivered by Lothar von Falkenhausen, Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was part of the workshop “DNA, History, and Archaeology” organized by Nicola Di Cosmo in October 2010. |
Historians today can hardly answer the question: when does history begin? Traditional boundaries between history, protohistory, and prehistory have been blurred if not completely erased by the rise of concepts such as “Big History” and “macrohistory.” If even the Big Bang is history, connected to human evolution and social development through a chain of geological, biological, and ecological events, then the realm of history, while remaining firmly anthropocentric, becomes all-embracing.
An expanding historical horizon that, from antiquity to recent times, attempts to include places far beyond the sights of literate civilizations and traditional caesuras between a history illuminated by written sources and a prehistory of stone, copper, and pots has forced history and prehistory to coexist in a rather inelegant embrace. Such a blurring of the boundaries between those human pasts that left us more or less vivid and abundant written records, and other pasts, which, on the contrary, are knowable only through the spadework and fieldwork of enterprising archaeologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists, has also changed (or is at least threatening to change) the nature of the work of professional historians.
Technological advances, scientific instrumentation, statistical analyses, and laboratory tests are today producing historical knowledge that aims to find new ways of answering questions that have long exercised specialists of the ancient world. Should historians, then, try to make these pieces of highly technical evidence relevant to their own work? Or should they ignore them? The dilemma is not entirely new. Archaeology, material culture, and historical linguistics have already forced historians to come out of the “comfort zone” of written sources. Archaeologists have by and large wrested themselves free from the fastnesses of the classical texts, and much of their work cannot be regarded as ancillary to the authority of the written word. Satellite photography, remote sensing, archaeo-GIS, C14 dating, dendrochronology (tree-ring dating), and chemical analysis have become standard tools of the archaeologist that coexist with the trowel and the shovel. But the palaeosciences and ancient DNA studies pose challenges of a different order, directly correlated to the greater distance that exists between scientific and historical research in terms of training and knowledge base.
