“Archaeology is not just touching things, but being touched by things”

2023-05-29 01:42:40

The hard part is reading the past in a pile of dirt, not seeing the future in the coffee grounds in a dirty cup. The issue is complicated when, in addition to reconstructing the events that ended the lives of ancestors, science is understood as an ethical event that does not set temporal or spatial limits. “For me archeology is, above all, an exercise in compassion.” With this phrase Alfredo González Ruibal has just turned against that academic majority of his trade, which is convinced of keeping objectivity vacuum-packed. “Because I am moved by the remains of a woman raped in a war, am I going to be less scientific? No! ”, He maintains.

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Further

“Archaeology is a way of feeling with the other, the one whom we have never met, from whom decades, centuries or millennia separate us. Is it so strange to get emotional with those who had to bury their own massacred in Koszyce 5,000 years ago? Is it so difficult to put yourself in the place of those who found their wives, sisters or daughters murdered? Ruibal declares war on death every time he excavates a site and, now, in the book that he has just published: scorched earth. A journey through the violence of the Paleolithic to the 21st century (Criticism). “So that the dead remain alive in our memory”, writes the scientist to give a reason why he dedicates himself to the archeology of violence.

This book is an infallible antidote to the romanticization of war and the epic battle posed by illustrators like Ferrer Dalmau, sculptors like Salvador Amaya, novelists like Arturo Pérez-Reverte, or essayists like Elvira Roca Barea. He says that the intimacy that archeology reveals is also that of the most sordid violence. At the foot of a grave, neither fanfares nor the comfortable drums of fiction sound. “War is, above all, a waste of life and matter, and for this reason its archaeological trace is always excessive: the pits, the piles of bones, the monumental fortifications, the weapons,” he says. That’s why he dedicates the book to his daughter, so that she never has to see the scorched earth. That is also why he loads the end of these archaeological chronicles with 45 pages of bibliography, so as not to waste time with shamans from the past.

The anti-war horror

Is he dedicated to investigating the horror of the human being? “The book is terrible for all the cases I tell, but it is optimistic even if it seems strange. Dismantle the myth that man has been excessively violent. Archeology shows that there was always extreme violence, but in an exceptional way. We have not dedicated ourselves to constantly killing ourselves, ”he underlines. Reveal the horror to show that horror is not the norm. “Yes, and thanks to the horror there is no more horror. We see it in Ukraine: why hasn’t it turned into World War III? Because the memory of horror is very effective. The archeology of horror is very effective in this”, adds Alfredo González Ruibal.

It is a book about violence that deals with memory, which tries to be erased so as not to leave a trace of guilt. Delete to free the guilty and to create a clean memory of the past. The pride of the past goes through a bleaching of horror. And archeology counteracts: “It exposes the crimes and shows how behind every glorious and epic story there is a dark side.” An archaeologist is the killjoy for patriots. “One of the reasons for writing this book was a reaction against this reactionary neo-epic, with the imperial glories of Hernán Cortés or Blas de Lezo. Always a very nationalistic, sublimated and highly camouflaged violence. The traditional values ​​fit very well with the traditional warlike feats, with the leading man, victor and hero”, says the author.

In the name index we find a disturbing piece of information: the term with the most citations is “children”. A book dedicated to lifting the traces of violence and the most reviewed is childhood. He says that archeology does not discriminate, it is the testimony of what has happened. “And what happens in wars is that children are killed. That the massacre of non-combatants is common. And in some cases it becomes normative, you have to kill the children. It is so horrifying for any culture that we tend to forget about it and not talk about it. We are not talking about civilians, we are talking about four-year-old children, ”he explains.

“Doing archeology of violence affects you,” he summarizes. “Some are affected more and others less. It is impossible not to feel touched. Archeology is not just touching things, but being touched by things,” he says. That’s why he thinks it’s impossible to get out of this the way you came in. “It is possible that I leave you with a pessimistic residue from witnessing so much horror,” he says.

empathize to understand

In the book he also dismantles another false debate of our days: presenteeism. The archaeologist is committed to the remains of the past, according to González Ruibal. “In the book I insist that we have to establish a bond of empathy with the people of the past. I don’t understand making history without feeling those people from the past as people, without worrying about them. If I don’t worry about them, why do I study them for eight hours a day? I need to empathize with people from the past. Because they deserve to be remembered as people, not as historical data.” It is by placing himself in the place of those people that he can understand their past, for example, what Egyptian society was like 5,000 years ago, what was the concept they had of the body or of violence. Empathizing is understanding.

Alfredo González Ruibal is uncomfortable for the most conservative academics, but he is also annoying with those who prefer to ignore the laws of democratic coexistence, such as the Historical Memory Law. He stands up to the foundations of Francoist ghosts and to those who left flowers at Franco’s grave, in the Valley of the Fallen. In scorched earth It shows that it is not possible to review the past without a moral position.

Nor is it possible to write the archeology of violence without reviewing the dictionary of terms we use to talk about the past. “My job as a researcher is to clarify the terms and try to understand whether we can call violence war or genocide or ethnocide… Which concepts best explain what is happening. The fact that I say that there was no genocide in America, because there was no systematic and organized murder of all the indigenous peoples of America, does not mean that I do not understand that violence as abject colonial violence, which caused extreme suffering to millions of human beings. Ethical positioning and scientific rigor go hand in hand”, says the archaeologist.

and optimism

The radical change in the history of violence occurs when societies decide that excessive violence cannot be perpetrated and must be prosecuted. The bodies of war victims begin to hide and leave no trace after World War I and World War II. It is then that archeology enters into action to recover the truth of the victims and discover the responsibility of the executioners.

González Ruibal points out the ability of archeology to make us connect with the past, to feel close to people who have been dead for thousands of years. It happened to him when he visited the museum in Tyrol where Otzi, the late Neolithic snowman, who appeared frozen in a glacier in the Alps almost 30 years ago, is found. As he left the visit, his partner told him that he had felt sad for Otzi. “We feel compassion for a man we don’t know who has been dead for 5,000 years. That is a tremendous power of archaeology. I don’t know if we are aware of this, ”he indicates.

“With war it happens as with capitalism, which seems a natural phenomenon. But for thousands of years we have lived without capitalism and we will live without capitalism again ”, he maintains. In this way he wonders why the same thing will not happen with the war. “In Europe there was no war until the fourth millennium BC. That form of extreme violence that is war does not have to be our future. The worst thing we can do is think that everything is inevitable”, says Alfredo González Ruibal, the archaeologist who pursues the past to build a better future.