Why Archaeology? (a Very Short Manifesto by Bori Mohácsi)

From time to time I like to think about why I have chosen the specific field I’m in (well, for now, on the side of). It’s part of my overthinking routine, sure, but it also makes me check in with myself if I still enjoy it as much as when I started some 10 years ago. Basically, if I still see the point of doing it, or I can quit without regret and do something corporate for way more money.

Aside from why not, it’s always been one of my favourite answers to give. Because archaeology is a wordless conversation with the past. It is, of course, history, in a sense that you study the past, and if there is a written source material of your studied era and location, you will have to use it. But archaeology is something different: it is conversing with the remains of societies, with what’s left of tools and cities and treasures and people, physical evidence. It is a methodology that helps you understand what these remains say without words and a tool that helps you interpret it.

Archaeology is data science and hard physical work and art history and anthropology and so much more, and, in the end, it is also storytelling. By connecting the dots of evidence we tell the stories of long lost people and their lives, people who otherwise would not have been remembered, not even as part of a certain population. People who have little to no voice in history books even after the invention of writing: women, children, lower-class people, ethnic minorities, people conquered by a stronger military – people on the bottom. The 99%. I remember when I first started at university, that was what fascinated me the most, and tickled my sense of justice. I get to learn about the non-elite! How they dressed and cooked and traded goods, what actually happened in the meantime of politics and military campaigns. You know, the really important stuff. Life, I guess.

And when you meet this kind of evidence: bones and gold and dust and bricks, stuff that, in the end, you and your beloved are made of… well, you want to do it right. You want to tell the right story. So you have to be good at it. 

That’s why you need archaeology.

Also, digging is a lot of fun.

How the artist in search of becoming a researcher?! Or so What?
Chinara Majidova 
 

After the presentation of my thesis topic, I understood how broad is it and I became confused in my future direction with it. Now I have even more questions in my mind about it than before. The main one is it possible to separate tangible heritage from intangible in “Sovetskie’ neighborhood? Do I want to separate them or it is just for narrowing the topic? What impact it will bring for the community and my hometown with my research?

I started to analyze what I was doing before as the artist and how it is now different from the researcher perspective. In 2018, I and my colleagues with whom we were working on this project got support from Yarat NGO which dedicated to nurturing an understanding of contemporary art and organized “Mehelle” (neighborhood) exhibition.

More information about the exhibition you can find in the links below:

 https://ajammc.com/2018/08/13/mehelle-exhibition-baku/

http://www.yarat.az/index.php?lang=en&page=12&yrtMaincatID=12&yrtSubcatID=0&yrtEventID=1995

From "Mehelle" exhibition. Photo by Mike Raybourne 

The uniqueness of this exhibition was not only in presenting this topic in public between the people who usually attend exhibitions but also that we tried to engage and invite Sovetski residents to the exhibition. İn result, Sovetski neighborhood community was not only presented there as an art and documentary subject but also was invited as exhibition visitors. A lot of people recognized their streets, houses, and people on the TV screens of the exhibition and was a part of Meykhana performance, which took the place at the closing of the exhibition. For the people who is not familiar with Meykhana meaning here is sort description is a distinctive Azerbaijani literary and folk rap tradition.İt was important for us to see them there because they are the one who opened the doors to us to our cameras and shared with us their lives.

From "Mehelle" exhibition. Photo by Mike Raybourne 

Looking to all past now I ask the most important question in for any thesis topic “So what?” What will you research for your thesis?

                                                                                                                                  

So firstly I decided to get more information about the community which was living there. Maybe then I will know where to move.  I know more or less about build monuments but what I know about the community? Who they are? How they appeared there and what were the values of this community?

I started my research from two interesting books one is Bailyn, John Frederick, ed. The Future of (post) socialism: Eastern European Perspectives. 

Which gives information about backyards and Bakuvian understanding: The bakinets, or Bakuvian, lived in Baku and reportedly became a unique ethnos, a “nationality” that encompassed a wide range of nations, including Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Tatars, Ukrainians, Jews, and other nationalities of the southern Caucasus. Diverse in class as well as ethnicity, the bakinets encompassed intellectuals, workers, and even rough- and- ready urban gangs that were, as Stephenson (2015) notes, neither anti- Soviet nor deviant, but rather the product of informal alliances that frequently intersected with formal and state-sanctioned institutions.

From   the movie " In one South city"1969

The second important book for my research now is Hatton-Proulx, Clarence. "Baku: oil and urbanism: by Eve Blau, Ivan Rupnik, and Iwan Baan. It gives the picture of Baku urban planning in the past and present which was changed with the oil boom and Independence.

Besides my research paper, I am also thinking now on collecting more data from the family archives with stories behind which at the end can be the part of a new art project.