L Meskell
Biographic Data
| ID | 20079 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Meskell |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Meskell |
| SIGNATURE | MESKELL L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9087-3611 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 96 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1350 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 95 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 21 |
A Life in Ruins
Frank Matero received his education in anthropology, architectural preservation, and material conservation. As an educator and conservation practitioner, Matero has shaped the discourse and practic
Modelling norm cluster expansion
Recent scholarship has suggested that when norms are clustered together, they become either more resilient than standalone norms or may collide in practice. However, little attention has been paid to how, and under what conditions, norm clusters can evolve over time. This article addresses this lacuna by proposing a new model of norm cluster expansion. The model captures how clusters can evolve incrementally yet substantively through revising fou…
A Series of Vandalisms
Heritage preservation is largely constituted around notions of "threat and care" that play out in regimes of regulation, governance, safeguarding, and promotion. But what if those very threats stem from the authorities and agencies professing to care? While this article discusses national projects that impinge upon diverse monumental histories, its ultimate focus is upon the domestication of heritage conflict in India. This entails extending beyo…
Reconstruction across the Middle East
The twenty-first century has seen near constant crises and conflicts across the Middle East, many of which have had a devastating impact on the region's rich cultural heritage. Confronted by this reality, UNESCO – the world's foremost body designed to promote the protection of heritage – has struggled to meaningfully address site destruction and has been hamstrung by its own institutional inertia. The vacuum created by UNESCO's failures has given…
Australian archaeology and heritage
Teardrops at the Taj
This paper examines how monumental preservation at the Taj Mahal leveraged the broader goals of national and international agencies including UNESCO and other UN bodies, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, to address the wicked problems of pollution, pro-poor tourism, and sustainable development. I suggest that the Taj, and more specifically its future preservation, is bound up in a set of conflictual connectivities and centrifugal for…
Local perspectives on heritage reconstruction after conflict
Local perspectives on heritage reconstruction after conflict: a public opinion survey of Aleppo
Heritage Conflict and the Council
Cultural heritage preservation and protection are increasingly tethered to an international security agenda constituted across multilateral agencies. UNESCO and other organizations have securitized heritage, engaging in military training and peacekeeping, international law and prosecution, and cultural property protection. Following the events in Iraq and Syria, UN Security Council resolutions have instantiated norms of heritage violence, risk, a…
New deals for the past
From the 1930s to the late 1970s, American archaeologists pursued a paired agenda of science and salvage such that their focus on logical positivism converged with US foreign policy towards international technical assistance. River basin salvage archaeology, pioneered in the US by the Tennessee Valley Authority and exported to the Middle East in the 1950s, was a prime example of American Cold War techno-politics that accompanied other internation…
Deploying destruction
Destruction of cultural heritage has increasingly taken center stage in global debates concerning conflict, crimes against humanity, and cultural genocide. From NATO to the UNSC, international bodies and their respective experts are reconsidering how to understand and combat targeted damage in an emerging terrain, where heritage destruction is being leveraged as a weapon of war. Relatedly, those same organizations, alongside government and non-go…
Pyramid Schemes
Carved out of the jungle by American big business, Penn Museum’s project at Tikal to restore massive pyramids and showcase Maya civilization was a direct outgrowth of government, military, and corporate connections. The story of Pennsylvania in the Petén is about American involvement in developing tourism, infrastructure, research stations, training, and the making of Guatemalan heritage citizens. It is also about increasing US government vigilan…
Rebuilding Mosul
Following the devastation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul by the Islamic State, various foreign actors launched initiatives to reconstruct the heritage sites of the city. However, such efforts are underpinned by assumptions about how local people value their heritage, how they perceive its destruction, whether they view reconstruction as a priority and the extent to which they support foreign-led efforts to rebuild their heritage. This articl…
Your Mysterious Instruments”
This paper tracks a world of instruments and global designs in a new era of archaeology, spearheaded by Froelich Rainey in his role as Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Post-WWII scientific development, industrial-military-academic partnerships, and American adventurism were all brought together through Rainey’s archaeological expeditions. During the 1960s, Penn’s field projects were strategically …
The world is not enough
In this article, we reflect on the current socio-political context of the 1972 World Heritage Convention after 50 years rather than its significant achievements and trials throughout its turbulent history. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has already documented and publicized these formative episodes. Instead, we consider the World Heritage milieu today, embedded as it is within a much broader landscap…
Atomic archaeology
This article charts one episode in the history of archaeological field science following the end of World War II and its place within a nascent military-industrial-academic complex. It is an account of how archaeological innovation was tied to, and developed directly out of, US nuclear ambition and the leveraging of "peaceful" atomic research as well as American Cold War collaborations with European allies that successfully combined science, expl…
Rainey and the Russians
This article recounts an untold chapter in the life of archaeologist Froelich Rainey, specifically his ambition to collaborate with Soviet scholars and deploy his personal networks to foster mutual understanding across the Iron Curtain during the height of the Cold War. The picaresque and implausible life of Rainey, who entered wartime Vienna in the turret of a B-52 bomber and was a State Department consultant with CIA connections, frantic anti-c…
Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt
Sketching Lifeworlds, Performing Resistance
Power, persuasion and preservation
This paper examines the modes of persuasion deployed throughout the decision-making processes of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. Through long-term ethnographic, archival and quantitative research, we reveal how the lofty goals of global conservation are elided by national interests and alliance-building. What unfolds in annual meetings is a range of state-to-state threats and exactions, often masquerading as consensus, that guarantees certai…
Developing Petra
This article charts the nascent development agendas for archaeological heritage and tourism at Petra in Jordan. We begin with the early internationalism of UNESCO and its participation programme for Petra followed by the restructuring of American foreign policy interests to embed heritage tourism within USAID projects. A technocratic tourism-as-assistance model galvanised USAID and the World Bank’s interest in Petra, as it did the CIA, the Americ…
Toilets first, temples second
India's BJP government headed by Hindutva icon Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 with a campaign slogan: 'Toilets first, temples second.' Drawing on Gandhi's philosophy and legacy some 150 years after his birth, Swachh Bharat or Clean India is a monumental project with sweeping programs, propaganda, and political agendas. Gandhi famously said that 'sanitation is more important than independence' and Modi has leveraged that sentiment to fuel eve…
A tale of two cities
This article examines the trajectory and fate of Delhi's Imperial Capital Cities nomination, submitted to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2015 for inscription on the World Heritage List. I employ the dossier and events surrounding its withdrawal to reveal the political imbrications of urban conservation, international institutions, neoliberal governance, and colonial histories. First, I underscore …
Journal of Social Archaeology
A comment on the disruption
I want to start by thanking the editors for the opportunity to comment upon this thought-provoking, timely, and ultimately portentous contribution. Wallis has touched upon some of the most pressing
Embedding Ethics Shifting Boundaries of the Anthropological Profession
The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology
This paper traces the conjunction of two interrelated epistemic phenomena that have begun to shape the discipline since the early 1990s. The first entails theorizing social identity in past societies: specifically, how social lives are inscribed by the experiences of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. The other constitutes the rise of a politicized and ethical archaeology that now recognizes its active role in contemporary culture and is en…
Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology
The article evaluates the World Trade Center (WTC) of New York City and Bamiyan Buddhas of Bamian region, Afghanistan as negative heritage of the World. The "World Monuments Watch," a global program to list world monuments has listed the WTC as site 101 in their register of 100 endangered sites. Earlier in 2001, it has featured Ground Zero as a place of heritage. The president and the chairman of the World Monuments Watch has described that the B…
The somatization of archaeology
This paper examines archaeology's somatization. New conceptualizations of sex and gender in philosophy, anthropology and queer theory are discussed. Current formulations of the body within our discipline, such as the fascination with Foucault and power-based interpretations, are at the expense of human agency and individuality. One way of engaging with the lived body, bypassing essentialism and social constructionism, is to view embodied persons …
Unesco's World Heritage Convention at 40
The year 2012 marked the fortieth anniversary of UNESCO's 1972 Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. It remains the major international instrument for safeguarding the world's heritage. The Convention's most significant feature is its integration of the concepts of nature conservation and preservation of cultural properties in a single treaty. Recognizing the increasing threats to natural and cultural si…
Goddesses, Gimbutas and New Age archaeology
For a century a notion of a prehistoric Mother Goddess has infused some perceptions of ancient Europe, whatever the realities of developing archaeological knowledge. With the reverent respect now being given to Marija Gimbutas, and her special vision of a perfect matriarchy in Old Europe, a daughter-goddess is now being made, bearer of a holy spirit in our own time, to be set alongside the wise mother of old
States of Conservation
The title, States of Conservation, deliberately references the two "states" that now occupy critical yet oppositional nodes within UNESCO's 1972 Convention and its conservation agenda. It recalls the State of Conservation (SOC) reports commissioned by the World Heritage Center in conjunction with its Advisory Bodies that relay the condition of World Heritage properties to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. But more critically, "states" here als…
The rush to inscribe
This paper describes new developments and deliberations at the 35th Session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris in June 2011. One of the most striking aspects of this year’s meetings was the vocal challenge to the expert status and authority of the Advisory Bodies (ICOMOS and IUCN) by the Committee in making recommendations for site inscription. By the end of the meetings they had overturned 22 of the Advisory Body recommendations previously…
Archaeological ethnography
Multilateralism and Unesco World Heritage
Why have deliberations over World Heritage sites become such a volatile arena for the performance of international tensions, new political alliances and challenges to global cooperation? Across UN platforms, the failures of multilateralism are increasingly evident. We suggest that decision-making within the World Heritage Committee is no different given that politicisation is now rife throughout their deliberations. Specifically we ask how have m…
Gridlock
Deliberations over World Heritage designation increasingly provide a platform for new political alliances, international tensions and challenges to global cooperation. How has this situation arisen in UNESCO, an organization dedicated to fostering peace, tolerance and international co-operation? Since we now face an ever more interconnected world and our problems are more global they require solutions that traverse nation-states and require them …
"A "Curious and Sometimes a Trifle Macabre Artistry
Comparison of two Turkish Neolithic sites with rich symbolism, Çatalhöyük and Göbekli, suggests widespread and long-lasting themes in the early settled communities of the region. Three major symbolic themes are identified. The first concerns an overall concern with the penis, human and animal, that allows us to speak of a phallocentrism in contrast to the widely held assumption that the early agriculturalists in the Middle East emphasized the fem…
Unesco and the Fate of the World Heritage Indigenous Peoples Council of Experts (WHIPCOE)
In December 2000, a World Indigenous Peoples Forum was held in conjunction with the 24th session of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee in Cairns, Australia. Representatives from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand harnessed the momentum of these events and their location to propose the formation of a new committee, the World Heritage Indigenous Peoples Council of Experts (WHIPCOE). The initiative was taken in response to concerns voiced by indigeno…
Human Rights and Heritage Ethics
This paper discusses the efficacy of applying a framework of universal human rights to resolve heritage conflicts. It considers the pitfalls and potentials in particular heritage settings for both archaeologists and the constituencies we seek to represent. A distinction is made throughout the paper between invoking universal human rights, as opposed to other rights or claims more broadly. Specifically, I ask what does the mantle of universal huma…
Substances
In this article, we argue for a multi-dimensional research strategy incorporating material, social and phenomenological analysis in the study of figurines and other human effigies. We call this approach 'following the material'. To illustrate, we examine two case studies: figurines from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (Turkey) and human effigies from the Formative region of Moche (Peru). We look first at the material substances from which artifa…
Shifting the balance of power in the Unesco World Heritage Committee
This article analyzes whether emerging nations are extending their influence across the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and, if so, how this affects decision-making processes concerning the inscription of sites on the World Heritage List. We use both quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify patterns in decision-making processes regarding inscriptions at the World Heritage Committee sessions. Our results suggest that in the last decade,…
Heritage as Therapy
Since the democratic dispensation in South Africa, heritage as a category has been necessarily framed by the specter of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, its place in wider society, the general underpinnings of amnesty, forgiveness and the desire to move forward as a nation. Human rights activism, truth commissions, and juridical proceedings are powerful mechanisms for dealing with historical trauma. More materially, South African cultural…
The politicization of Unesco World Heritage decision making
Articulate Bodies
The nature of the beast
Taking 'tradition' as the process of 'handing down', which encompasses the ideas of duration, continuity, practice and ritual, this paper examines the Neolithic lifeworld at Çatalhöyük with particular attention to the figurine corpus and plastered installations. Specifically, I focus on two material preoccupations that have intense signification across various media, are repeated in different scales and occur over many generations at Çatalhöyük. …
Imperialism, Internationalism, and Archaeology in the Un/Making of the Middle East
Archaeological materialities and imaginaries have been deeply entwined in colonial rivalries and struggles for self-determination that have lasting legacies across the Middle East. Neoimperial ambitions and conflict over territory, religion, oil, and antiquities have similarly been accompanied by heritage claims and the rhetoric of high cultural humanism. Throughout the twentieth century, foreign occupation and military adventurism emboldened arc…
World Heritage and WikiLeaks
Globalization and world-making projects, like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage program, have changed the stakes for particular heritage sites. Through processes of greater interdependence and connectivity, specific sites are transformed into transactional commodities with exchange values that transcend their historical or material characteristics and thus can be wrested from those contex…
Cycles of life and death
Egyptian data speak to modern interpreters in many ways; through the rich iconographic repertoire, the materiality of houses and tombs and through the vast corpus of writings left to us. At the New Kingdom village of Deir el Medina (c.1500-1100 BC) each of these data sets is available and can be used dialectically to gain a more intimate knowledge of lifecycles and individual life experience. Using excerpts from the documents and personal letters…
Intimate archaeologies
This paper explores the possibilities of reading life histories from Egyptian material culture in mortuary contexts. The burials of partners, such as Kha and Merit, clearly illustrate that social inequality was operative between husbands and wives at Deir el Medina. It demonstrates the social negotiations conducted by family members and the potential social tensions faced at the moments of death and burial. This analysis seeks to recentre individ…
Unesco's project to 'Revive the Spirit of Mosul
Following the devastation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul by the Islamic State (IS), UNESCO launched a project to ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’. This article critically reflects on this UNESCO-led project, drawing on 47 interviews with Syrians and Iraqis, as well as documenting the implications of UNESCO’s efforts in earlier (post-)conflict heritage reconstruction projects in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Mali. Specifically, this article focuse…
World Heritage Regionalism
UNESCO World Heritage regions are historically constructed categories that do not easily map onto global geographies, yet they still continue to have important political and ethical implications in the international arena. Since their inception, regional categories have been at the heart of debates over global representation and equity in the World Heritage Committee. We include the recent controversy over uneven regional representation in electi…
Deir el Medina in Hyperreality
This study provides an archaeological re-appraisal of the prevalent view of Deir el Medina. Before embarking on an analysis of the material, several misleading stereotypes pertaining to the village are deconstructed. The paper concentrates on a possible discourse between archaeological and textual data in a few specific areas of village life: architectural analysis, private enterprise, agricultural activity, and gender. The methodology presented …
Goddesses, Gimbutas and New Age archaeology
For a century a notion of a prehistoric Mother Goddess has infused some perceptions of ancient Europe, whatever the realities of developing archaeological knowledge. With the reverent respect now being given to Marija Gimbutas, and her special vision of a perfect matriarchy in Old Europe, a daughter-goddess is now being made, bearer of a holy spirit in our own time, to be set alongside the wise mother of old
The somatization of archaeology
This paper examines archaeology's somatization. New conceptualizations of sex and gender in philosophy, anthropology and queer theory are discussed. Current formulations of the body within our discipline, such as the fascination with Foucault and power-based interpretations, are at the expense of human agency and individuality. One way of engaging with the lived body, bypassing essentialism and social constructionism, is to view embodied persons …
Mortuary Archaeology and Religious Landscape at Graeco-Roman Deir el-Medina
Mortuary Archaeology and Religious Landscape at Graeco-Roman Deir El-Medina
Post-excavation analyses and interpretations of the site of Deir el-Medina have focused on the extensive New Kingdom documentary and material data. This has usually been at the expense of later periods, although the site demonstrates a broad temporal spectrum, with the construction of a Ptolemaic temple and significant Saite, Ptolemaic and Roman mortuary activity. From the perspective of contextual archaeology, this article will examine some patt…
Engendering Egypt
Watterson, Barbara Women in Ancient Egypt Tyldesley, Joyce Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt Robins, Gay Women in Ancient Egypt Montserrat, Dominic Sex and Society in Graeco‐Roman Egypt
Bodies of Evidence on Prehistoric Cyprus
This study takes as its point of departure recent discussions in sociology, anthropology, queer theory, and masculinist and feminist studies on the contextual constitution of sex and gender, with its surrounding debates. We explore the adoption and implications of the body as a phenomenon in archaeology and its connection to power-centred theories. As a case study, we use a body of data comprised of prehistoric Cypriot figurines (Chalcolithic and…
Electronic Egypt
Unlike many regional archaeologies the study of Egypt has always had widespread appeal, from archaeologists to Afrocentrists, orientalists to occultists. According to one web-site, 'Egypt dominates the history of the world.' This ever-popular fascination has spilled over into the electronic media since the inception of the Internet. Thus, Egypt proves to be a telling casestudyin net politics and potentialities. Simply typing the word 'Egypt' into…
Archaeology Under Fire
An archaeology of social relations in an Egyptian village
Running the Gamut
Intimate archaeologies
This paper explores the possibilities of reading life histories from Egyptian material culture in mortuary contexts. The burials of partners, such as Kha and Merit, clearly illustrate that social inequality was operative between husbands and wives at Deir el Medina. It demonstrates the social negotiations conducted by family members and the potential social tensions faced at the moments of death and burial. This analysis seeks to recentre individ…
Consuming Bodies
This article explores the legacy of ancient Egypt in popular culture, from the 19th century onwards - through the theme of consumption. A range of media is covered including literature, film and performance. I argue that Egypt has been a constant mirror for contemporary culture in terms of the body, sexuality and the Orient. In the West, Egyptian bodies have always been consumed, literally or metaphorically and in the 1990s a commodified Egypt ha…
Oh my Goddess
This paper suggests that the goddess movement is becoming increasingly intertwined with mainstream archaeology, an illustrative case being Çatalhöyük. This is another salient example of the public's avid consumption of archaeology and its multivalent imagery. Yet there are additional, fundamental issues of a more philosophical nature to consider. For example, feminist practitioners might consider interrogating the very ontological bedrock on whic…
Anthropology and Egyptology
The Crest of the Wave
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Archaeologies of Life and Death
The Egyptian village of Deir el Medina, well attested in the New Kingdom as a settlement site (ca. 1550-1070 B. C.), continued to be the focus of mortuary and ritual practices from the Third Intermediate period into Late Antique and Islamic times. Data from the site are particularly rich and offer a rare opportunity to witness large-scale temporal change in mortuary practice. To date, no comprehensive syntheses have addressed the range of funerar…
Writing the Body in Archaeology
Cycles of life and death
Egyptian data speak to modern interpreters in many ways; through the rich iconographic repertoire, the materiality of houses and tombs and through the vast corpus of writings left to us. At the New Kingdom village of Deir el Medina (c.1500-1100 BC) each of these data sets is available and can be used dialectically to gain a more intimate knowledge of lifecycles and individual life experience. Using excerpts from the documents and personal letters…
The Egyptian Ways of Death
Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt
Illustrations and Tables xi Acknowledgments xv Conventions xvii CHAPTER ONE: The Interpretative Framework 1 CHAPTER TWO: Locales and Communities 17 CHAPTER THREE: Social Selves 57 CHAPTER FOUR: Founding a House 94 CHAPTER FIVE: Love, Eroticism, and the Sexual Self 126 CHAPTER SIX: Embodied Knowledge 148 CHAPTER SEVEN: Cycles of Death and Life 178 Postscript 208 Notes 211 Bibliography 215 Index 233
Archaeologies of Social Life
Prologue. 1. Individuals, Selves and Bodies. 2. Feminisms, Gender Trouble and Sexuality. 3. Body and Soul in the Archaeology of Egypt. 4. Mapping Age, Sex and Class at Deir el Medina. 5. Accessing Individuals at Deir el Medina. Epilogue. Notes.References.Index
Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology
The article evaluates the World Trade Center (WTC) of New York City and Bamiyan Buddhas of Bamian region, Afghanistan as negative heritage of the World. The "World Monuments Watch," a global program to list world monuments has listed the WTC as site 101 in their register of 100 endangered sites. Earlier in 2001, it has featured Ground Zero as a place of heritage. The president and the chairman of the World Monuments Watch has described that the B…
The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology
This paper traces the conjunction of two interrelated epistemic phenomena that have begun to shape the discipline since the early 1990s. The first entails theorizing social identity in past societies: specifically, how social lives are inscribed by the experiences of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. The other constitutes the rise of a politicized and ethical archaeology that now recognizes its active role in contemporary culture and is en…
Memory's Materiality
History (62 works) · Political science (56 works) · Sociology (50 works) · Law (48 works) · Archaeology (46 works) · Politics (37 works) · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation (36 works) · Archaeological Research and Protection (33 works) · History (33 works) · Law (31 works)