Author: Materiality of Migration

Since the Republic of Georgia established independence in 1991, disputes over the Russian-backed separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have repeatedly devolved into active combat. Warfare erupted most recently in 2008, when the Russian-Georgian War ended in ceasefire without resolution. During the five-day war, over 145,000 ethnic Georgians were forced out of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since the war, churches in the occupied regions have been renovated to cover Georgian architectural elements and inscriptions, and to take on Russian features. For Georgians, the renovations at Ilori are part of a larger process of forced migration, internal displacement, and ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia.

One of these sites is the Ilori Church, an eleventh century Georgian Orthodox Church in Ochamchire, Abkhazia. Without the ability to return to Abkhazia or to stop the renovations, a group of Georgian people have started to construct a new version of the Ilori Church in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. Some are internally displaced people who were forcibly pushed out of Abkhazia during the war, while others have familial or ancestral ties to the region. Whether they grew up in Ochamchire or Tbilisi, all of them felt a drive to create a community gathering space for those who feel a personal loss over the church. With movement limited by protracted conflict, a new church fills the community need for a space to worship, gather, and connect—to each other, to their homeland, and to their ancestors. Volunteers provide the labor to construct the new church, part of a planned complex that they lovingly refer to as “Little Abkhazia.” Yet, the Tbilisi church bears little resemblance to the original building. Rather than an architectural replacement, the new church is a place of gathering for those who yearn to return to Ilori. The new Church evokes memories of family members lost to the war and an inaccessible homeland, and seeds hope for an eventual return to Abkhazia.

 

Gracie Golden the Administrative Coordinator at the Penn Cultural Heritage Center. Her anthropological research focuses on cultural heritage, borderization, and displacement in Georgia.

This boat made its final journey in Spring 2018. The boat has no name or indication of country of origin, but Tunisian water bottles tucked under the hull on the landward side give us a clue. This plexiglass boat bears no resemblance to the small wooden fishing boats used by locals, thus we suspect that it served to transport undocumented migrants across the Sicilian Channel from Tunisia to Sicily. The boat is smaller than those unseaworthy wrecks shown in the news, highlighting the differences in the forms that forced migration can take, even in the same part of the world. Clothing and personal items from landing sites nearby allow us to infer that this boat would have been used by a small group, probably young men, probably Tunisian nationals, who by making the crossing were repeating a behavior with a deep, millennia-long history.  After getting off the boat the travelers on that last voyage would have, if lucky, dispersed into the Sicilian countryside either on foot or by car. The boat therefore represents the maritime portion of a longer journey, perhaps one it made many times before being abandoned. From its burnt out state and missing engine, it has undergone changes since landing on this quiet shore in western Sicily. Who destroyed it, the travelers or locals? We cannot know. This boat nonetheless tells of small-scale voyages in both directions that together form an enduring shared history that national borders cannot suppress.

 

Emma Blake and Robert Schon are archaeologists at the University of Arizona and Co-Directors of the Arizona Sicily Project.

This straw plate was woven during the Hekayya Heritage Project, a participatory heritage project for women and children in rural Idlib, Syria. The project aimed to revive Syrian handcrafts which are at risk of being forgotten or suppressed and make them relevant to contemporary life. All over Syria, rural women wove straw for household use until the mid-twentieth century. This plate is called the Rabo’a K’aab (plate with a base), or the “hospitality plate,” and was used to offer guests fruits and sweets. The plate is a copy of a traditional one, which was used some 50 – 100 years ago.

Historically, women wove straw objects when rural areas suffered poverty and were used to be self-sufficient using available resources. This plate was woven in late 2018, during unrest in northern Syria. It symbolizes the role of women, the hospitality of rural areas in general, and presents an example of physical and conceptual migration and movement. In 2019, this object “migrated” from Syria to Turkey, then to Berlin, Germany. In 2019, this object “migrated” from Syria to Turkey, then to Berlin, Germany. A similar object is in Ethnological Museum of Berlin, which also “migrated” in the late nineteenth century from Syria to Berlin. Its concept and design- like our entire intangible heritage- were transferred from one generation to the next.

The women who worked this project were forced to flee many times. During the project, they were thankful to stay home, and they insisted on staying “home” despite the harsh situation. Last year, their town was bombed heavily, and the inhabitants had to flee. We have had no contact with them and no information about their whereabouts. This contribution is dedicated to them, wherever they are.

I have this object at home. For me, it symbolizes my rural origin and belonging. It also represents the Hekayya Heritage Project, which I worked on with passion; it was “weaving hope in difficult times.”

 

Mariam Bachich is the Director of the Hekayya Heritage Project.

In the mid 19^th century, the Yucatan peninsula was the center of a massive indigenous rebellion. The Caste War of Yucatan (also known as the Maya Social War) is generally acknowledged to have been one of the longest and most successful indigenous rebellions in Latin American history.  The rebellion started in July of 1847 when Maya forces from Tihosuco attacked and burned to the ground the houses of ladino families in the neighboring town of Tepich. During the rebellion, the entire region of the Yucatan became a war zone and was virtually abandoned. A massive migration of people caused towns in the entire region to be left to the rapidly growing jungle. Many of these Maya people disappeared into the surrounding jungle – living a semi-nomadic and semi-agricultural life for many generations. In the 1930s the region, including the town of Tihosuco, was gradually resettled from the north as Maya people looked for new hunting areas and agricultural land.

The church in Tihosuco is called the Templo del Santo Niño Jesús. It was destroyed in 1866 following a ferocious siege by Maya rebels against government forces garrisoned in the church. The top photograph shows the still destroyed church in 1970 as the town begins to grow following reoccupation in the 1930s. Only the central part of the church was being utilized for services. The bottom photograph is from 2015 and shows the restored church. However, the entrance façade was never rebuilt in order to always remember ‘the blood spilled during the war.’

This building, as exemplified by these photographs, represents:

• the power of the church during the colonial period in Mexico,
• the massive indigenous rebellion in the mid 19^th century,
• the destruction of the church and forced migration of hundreds of thousands of people from settlements throughout the peninsula,
• the slow, more gradual migration of Maya people back into the region in the middle of the 20^th century.

 

Richard M. Leventhal is a Professor in the University of Pennsylvania Department of Anthropology and the Director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center. He has done extensive archaeological field research in Belize, Mexico, and other parts of Central America for over thirty years, and currently works on the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project.

A boat intercepted in Italian waters, brought ashore, and impounded at Pozzallo in November 2018 preserves one movement in a series that spans deserts, detainment camps, and other liminal spaces. Port registries list 264 migrants on board, following departure from Misrata, Libya a few days earlier. Our project in early July 2019 served as a salvage operation involving archaeological recording and memorialization; the 13.66-m repurposed wooden fishing boat was scheduled for court-ordered demolition in the coming week.

More than 1000 objects of clothing, supplies, and other uses speak to an uneven mix of genders, ages, and backgrounds. Their distributions hint at shipboard inequalities, ad hoc communities, and onboard routines, including among those unaccustomed to the sea. Common food packaging and water brands may distinguish bulk provisions; individual items—from date paste and processed cheese triangles to toothbrushes and diapers—might be tucked away in knotted plastic bags hung from nails between frames. Foil rescue blanket wrappers and paper masks recall the vessel’s interception by Italian authorities, whose footprints add another layer to the story.

Perhaps the most common items left aboard are dozens of synthetic blankets, thick and thin, in assorted solids and patterns. Their labels are lost, fabrics worn, edges frayed, surfaces stained and speckled with chips of blue paint from the deck. The corners are often stretched, knotted, or tied with bits of string or fishing line, revealing changing functions along this and other segments of the journey: bedding, covers, and pillows for sleeping; coats, hats or scarves for warmth; floor covers; shade providers; space markers and partitions; baby slings; rucksacks and more. More commonly associated with safety, family, and the comfort of home, these blankets now signal displacement.

Bits of nylon and plastic rope and strips of fabric, thicker in most cases than those tying blanket corners, dangle from the metal-framed superstructure that had originally offered canvas for shade: makeshift handholds akin to the straps on buses or subways. Like the rough planks over this structure and the cabin designed to add space, or the cement poured between frames to lower the hull’s center of gravity, simple adaptations transform the traditional Mediterranean fishing vessel into something functionally unrecognizable. But the harrowing journeys to which they bear witness reveal the ongoing imperative for safe rescue and disembarkation, and the affirmation of global human rights.

 

Elizabeth S. Greene is an Associate Professor of Classics at Brock University. Justin Leidwanger is Associate Professor of Classics at Stanford University. They are the Co-Directors of Project U’Mari.

Forced migration originates in the transatlantic system of slavery in which Europeans removed 12.5 million people from Africa to the Americas from 1517 to 1867. The 1.5 million who died in the Middle Passage are said to have returned to Ginen, a hidden spirit realm beneath the sea.

My friend Gina A. Ulysse gave me two calabash gourds, which Vodou practitioners use to “feed the spirits” (manje lwa).

I dreamed of a mermaid guiding me to the sacred island at the center of Lake Enriquillo, called Lake Xaragua by the indigenous Taino. The salty lake is a remnant of a prehistoric sea channel that once traversed the island; a Dominican farmer gave me a fossil seashell found in nearby fields. When I awoke, I felt called to place the shell in the calabash, and later added small pink shells from Great Bay, Jamaica.

This material-spiritual assemblage represents a (or re-gathering), from Xaragua to Xamaica, commemorating not only the Middle Passage, but also those undocumented migrants and forced deportees who traverse Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and those who continue to be lost today when boats carrying refugees from Haiti sink beneath the seas. Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous spiritual practices reanimate the ancestral meanings of specific places, names and invisible powers. The nested round forms of the calabash, the seashells, and the islands themselves, recreate what Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite called “the subterranean unity” of these “terraqueous archipelagoes”.

In my book Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene, I connect the long-standing demand for slavery reparations with a new demand for climate reparations. Against slavery, colonial extraction, and indigenous genocide, this material-memory object honors the ancestors in the Hidden Ocean and hopes for rebuilding local food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture to enable these islands to avoid further forced climate migration.

 

Mimi Sheller is the Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy Professor of Sociology and a Graduate Faculty Member in Communication, Culture & Media at Drexel University.

My recent work deals with the current destruction of my homeland, Syria. Large numbers of my fellow Syrians have been forced to set out on a modern-day exodus of biblical proportions, often abandoning their homes with nothing but the clothes they are wearing. They carry the heavy burden of impossible traumas that will haunt them and their children for generations to come. Many of the refugees do not make it alive to the shores of safety and have been buried in various parts of the world with the word “unknown” written on their gravestones. Lost deals with the fate of so many Syrians who attempted to seek refuge in Lesbos, Greece. This piece is made from children’s clothing and is cut to form one maximum flat surface, thereby bringing back the clothing item to its origin as cloth. Finally, it is dipped in plaster. This clothing item holds the ghost of its past and acts as evidence of and a gravestone for its recent carrier–the person who never managed to reach the shores of Lesbos and instead drowned in its dark waters.

The cloth also holds script in both Arabic and Greek stating:

 

Issam Kourbaj is a Syrian-born Fine Artist and Lector in Art at Cambridge University.

Migration-forced, coerced, or otherwise compelled by violence and capitalism- is racialized movement. Borders materialize perceived difference; create excuses and conduits for othering, departicularizing people’s specific histories and how they flow through the world. How people become racialized when flowing over borders is steeped too in the unearned privileges some of us hold based on our national, gendered, religious, and class-based affinities.

Carry-on room only. Since the destruction of the World Trade Centers in 2001, international travel restrictions have continued to tighten. Airlines and other transport organizations have capitalized on these restrictions by stringently regulating what travelers can and cannot bring with them, how much space each traveler will receive (in order to maximize the number of bodies per cubic foot that can be arranged like sardines into a given aircraft), and who can pass freely without extra qualification. I arrive to the Yucatan, 21″ rolly carry-on in hand.

I make my way by bus to the interior where I meet a man, Lucio. “American?” He asks. His English startles me. Not because he speaks it but because he speaks it here where my journey’s taken me. Here, on the interior, English is considered a rare skill. “Me fui mojado a Denver” he told me, “por eso, hablo un poco de inglés.” He tells me his story- migrant, not traveler. How important the difference. “When will you return? Vayamos mojados?” He grins, “Me mete en su maleta? Hace tiempo que no he visto a los Estados Unidos.” Later he tells me, “I thought it would give me a chance I couldn’t make here. Pero, nadie me dijo- it was hard. I didn’t understand what it would be like. I would never tell anyone else to do it. But… if I need to, I’d do it again.”

Mojado. A racial slur originally put on Mexican migrants who waded across the Rio Grande, gathers momentum with each passing, precariously tipping between bigotry and banal description- depending on the speaker. I pass freely into Mexico. Blue passport, no visa. Smiling. Not white. But not mojado either. Lucio’s appropriation of the slur and conscription of me into it pushes the limits of the racialized capitalism we both know, differently, yet intimately. Mojado- wet, water, rivers flowing, “floods of migrants.” As though the borders they corss could literally be toppled, drowned, made to disappear beneath the sea.

If only.

 

Tiffany Fryer is Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.

The European refugee crisis highlights an archaeological vacuum in the study of migration in Greece. Beginning in 2016, the Greek government built 50 refugee camps in the countryside to house 60,000 migrants who were trapped along their journey to northern Europe. The camps were built on sites that had been variously used in earlier moments in history, but whose earlier material history had been erased, forgotten, or superseded. The juxtaposition between old and new sites of trauma highlights a great scholarly lacuna to be filled by archaeologists, anthropologists, and heritage specialists.

Since its foundation as a nation-state, Greece has experienced continuous episodes of both inward and outward migration. The countryside is covered with forgotten sites of displacement that have received little documentation, commemoration, and certainly no excavation. From its beginnings in 1821, the nation state has deployed archaeology to exonerate antiquity and provide a convenient disguise to the unresolved traumas of modernity. An idealized golden age of white marbles has obfuscated ethnic cleansing, civil wars, mass executions, economic collapse, famine, and depopulation. Consider the period of 1893-1924, when one in every four working-age males migrated to the United States contributing to a third of the national GDP through remittances; or the 1923 Greek-Turkish exchange of population, when 1.2 million refugees from Asia Minor were resettled in 2,089 settlements newly built by the League of Nations; or the period after World War II, when one in every four Greek villages was destroyed rendering 18% of the population homeless. Arguably, migration is one of the most stable aspects of Modern Greek history.

The photograph above intentionally deflects attention away from the archaeology of contemporary refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Held in hot spots on the Aegean island or dispersed in camps on the mainland, the recent migration wave is creating a new landscape of displacement with unique challenges of materiality, preservation, luting, commemoration, and violence. Rather than studying those new sites in a temporal vacuum, however, we propose a diachronic archaeology of the recent past. This archaeology includes sites like the medical center in Thebes built in 1950 to serve the needs of an internally displaced population ravaged by the Nazi occupation during World War II and the ensuing Civil War. It was built by a Greek diaspora who had migrated to the U.S. a generation earlier during the last crisis. Finding themselves on the side of a superpower that had recently liberated their homeland from the Nazis but also supported a Civil War, the Greek diaspora became inadvertent participants in the theater of America’s Cold War and the politics of the Marshall Plan. The medical center in Thebes was the second of twelve regional centers funded by Greeks in the U.S. through AHEPA. The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association was founded in Atlanta in 1922 to battle the violence the Ku Klux Klan exerted against Greeks during the rise of nativism that had marked Greeks and other immigrants as non-white outsiders. AHEPA’s mission was to create a progressive assimilated Greek America while also supporting greater causes in Greece (beyond the remittances sent by individual families). One of the organization’s earliest campaigns was to send relief to the 1928 Corinth earthquake. During World War II, AHEPA and other diaspora organizations like the Greek War Relief Association displayed their patriotism to both Greece and America by intensive fundraising.

The building stands on the ancient acropolis of King Oedipus and across the street from a spectacular archaeological museum displaying the ancient and medieval splendor of Thebes (including a Crusader tower that was used as a prison in the 19th century). Unlike the Thebes Archaeological Museum, the building pictured above is unmarked; its dedication has been removed. Within the first three months of its opening in 1950, it served 6,648 patients. The facilities were incorporated into the national health system, but the center was decommissioned around 2002. Some rooms in the building are used by community organizations and local preservationists commissioned a feasibility study to convert the building into a cultural center. Attracting state or private funding has not been successful.

As a ruin of humanitarianism, the medical center highlights a number of additional spatial alignments. Just below the archaeological museum lay the remains of an earlier episode of humanitarianism, a neighborhood built by the League of Nations in 1927-1931, the “Synoikismos” that housed refugees from the destruction of Smyrna (Izmir). Traces of the small houses (originally numbering 300) from the 1920s are still visible among the renovations of its inhabitants. A cultural organization of refugee survivors actively maintains the traditions and memories of the displacement and links to the homeland in Turkey.

In March 2017, the city of Thebes opened a refugee camp for 700 undocumented migrants from Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani, and elsewhere who had crossed the sea in rubber boats into Lesbos. The camp was installed within an abandoned knitting factory, 5 km south of the city center. This new installation was funded by the European Union and included early medical supervision by Doctors Without Borders. Heralded as a model refugee camp with prefabricated containers and accommodations for minors, the camp is now plagued with the common difficulties that many of such impermanent installations phase once made permanent.

I have intentionally chosen a photograph from the abandonment of the 1950’s medical building to exemplify the archaeological dimensions of migration in Greece. The absentee diaspora that once paid for the construction of the building has disappeared (although the AHEPA made significant medical donations to the current refugee crisis). The centrality of the building on Oedipus’ acropolis makes sense within a horizontal overview of the city’s topography from antiquity to the present. During 2011-2016, Stephanie Larson and Kevin Daly of Bucknell University lead an excavation at the Ismenion Hill cemetery in Thebes. Focusing on antiquity (with significant discoveries from the medieval period), their work has already added to the displays at the Thebes Archaeological Museum. At the same time, the excavation has played a promising role in coordinating modern and contemporary voices with the archaeological experience. In Athens, Larson co-directed food provisions for the 5th School Squat, where 500 new migrant families occupied the abandoned building. Academics, intellectuals, and expats fundraised and delivered the food supplies while also incorporating the project into community-based-learning curriculum of Arcadia University’s program in Greece. In September 2019, the Greek police evacuated the 5th School Squat and relocated its inhabitants to the military base in Corinth. Paradoxically, the ancient site of Corinth—like Thebes—is excavated by American archaeologists. Jan Sanders, director of the Arcadia University program, continues to coordinate food support to the residents of the Corinth camp, who had previously lived in the 5th School Squat. The camp is located across the street from the forgotten site where Americans operated an orphanage for 2,700 children displaced by the Armenian genocide in 1915 and again in 1923. And yet a hundred years earlier, there was the 1829 site of Washingtonia, the earliest documented refugee camp in Greece built by the American medical doctor Samuel Howe in Ancient Corinth. By 1896, when American archaeologists inaugurated the Corinth excavations, Washingtonia had ceased to exist. Its location remains conjectural (and a subject of a recent study to locate it). Like the AHEPA medical center of 1950, the Near East Relief orphanage of 1923, or Washingtonia of 1829, the sites of Greece’s humanitarian relief need to be archaeologically recovered and incorporated into the materialities of memory, the curriculum, the national narrative, museums, tourism, truth-and-reconciliation.

Working on the margins of official archaeology (along with Larson, Sander, and others), we must imagine an archaeology of care focusing on humanitarian relief across the ages. The reluctance to study modern migration’s stratigraphic layers leads to the illusion that the recent arrival of refugees is unprecedented or that it constitutes a crisis. The archaeology of the contemporary world in Greece promises the possibility of an interesting alliance on the fringes of Classical Studies that has dominated the archaeology of Greece both nationally and internationally. There are no illusions that the documentation of a 1950s Greek-American medical center, a 1920s orphanage, or even an 1820s settlement bearing George Washington’s name will ever garner the same cultural capital as the famous city of Oedipus. The layers of modern suffering and relief hidden within the Greek countryside offer opportunities to decolonize the old syllabus and, at the same time, naturalize the current crisis into a new dialogue about history and human rights.

 

Kostis Kourelis is an Associate Professor of Art History at Franklin & Marshall College.

This T-shirt belongs to a 33 year old man who we will call Hassan for his protection. Hassan is originally from Syria. Since 2017, he has held refugee status and lived in a small village in northern Scandinavia. He hiked and took cars, boats, trains, and buses from his home in Syria to Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and up through the dangerous forests of Serbia and Hungary.

Hassan’s T-shirt is pictured here inside out. He says:

“See this secret pocket? This my mother sew for me, on the inside but you can’t see from the outside…she sew this for me, before I leave Syria to Europe. She say I can keep my passport and some small money, where no-one can see…Now, I keep this T-shirt because this is the T-shirt that get me here [to Scandinavia]…between Serbia and Hungary, there are many smugglers and mafia that we pay for to get us through borders… they lead us to a trap, and the trap was one woman with a small gun and two knives… and they have electricity sticks [tasers], and big flashlight. They stop us and take all our things from us – money and documents – but they didn’t notice my secret pocket that my mother sewed, with my passport in and some money. So, this t-shirt, it is very special to me. Very special.” 

The passport, also pictured here, poking out from the pocket of the T-shirt is wrapped in cling-wrap to protect it from sweat, sea, rain, and snow throughout Hassan’s journey.

The meaning of these utilitarian materials changed over the course of Hassan’s migration journey. They have come to symbolize his country, resilience, and bravery; they also materialize the love between mother and son. These objects help to maintain a tangible connection between Hassan and his home, a place to which he can never return without forfeiting his refugee status. Hassan uses these objects to come to terms with his own experience of forced displacement and its place in the wider story of exodus from Syria in the wake of the war and state violence.

 

Rachael Kiddey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford.