Abstract
Monuments have been a staple of archaeology since the beginning of the discipline and have been used as case-studies for a diverse range of topics. In recent years, monuments have been considered particularly often in studies of social memory. By materializing memorial ambitions, however, the creation of monuments provides a venue for collective memories to be challenged. Despite their outward appearance of strength and permanence, monuments additionally render the memory of their creators vulnerable and open to contestation. In particular, the practice of counter-monumentality, or active and deliberate interventions in traditional monuments, illustrates how the erection of monuments exposes the inherent fragility of memory. Examples from the present and the past demonstrate these points: a statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in Baltimore, Maryland, and a corpus of monumental statues from southeastern Anatolian and northern Syria during the Iron Age.
Introduction
The interpretation of monuments involves a different problem concerning the relationship of human communities to their material worlds than does the standard repertoire of portable material culture. Rather than being versatile signposts of fast-moving social and cultural transformations, monuments stand unchanging, undisturbed by the kaleidoscope of human behavior that surrounds them (Alcock, 2002: 28). For this reason, individuals who engage with a monument—passing by it on the street, gazing it at it, using it as a local landmark—may develop noticeably different, even opposing, views of the thing over time. Reception easily shifts direction, and even at a single moment, there is rarely an association with a monument that is held uniformly across a monument’s interlocutors. Archaeologists have often pointed to the difference between the production and reception of monuments, such as Harmanşah’s (2015: 83–142) observation that landscape monuments created in Anatolia during the second millennium BCE have gone on to be appropriated for multifarious purposes, a process that continues to the present. Reuse is different from contestation, however, and it is in these moments of counter-monumentality—the installation of a thematically opposed artwork before an existing monument, or simply a range of anti-monumental practices such as defacement—that the counterintuitive frailty of memory that characterizes monuments is most starkly revealed.
This article explores how monuments of revered ancestral figures adopt a tendency quite opposite from that intended by their creators; that is, they embody the inherent fragility of claims to legitimacy that are supported through appeals to memory. Monuments’ ability to promote a specific memorial agenda is fragile precisely because of monuments’ enduring material status, not in spite of it. This is the case especially when monuments are no longer in their original places of installation, or their meanings and associations have shifted over time, or their social surroundings have changed at a faster pace than the monument itself. Although it is true that monuments are “archives of public affect…that are embodied in their material form and narrative content” (Doss, 2010: 13), we must acknowledge that once a generation or more has passed since its creation, a monument comes from a time out of mind—not in the sense of a time no longer remembered in the present, but quite literally from the minds of others, opening monuments to a host of new memorial configurations. Studying the counter-monumental strategies that are enacted around monuments can therefore tell us a great deal about how monuments and memory are deployed in the generation and contestation of social memory (e.g. Schwartz, 2013).
I advance these claims through two case studies, both of which involve the veneration of deceased ancestral figures, and both of which have been subjected to counter-monumental practices as a means to chart new associations of memory. The first case is a Confederate memorial statue that stands today in Baltimore, Maryland, and the second concerns a group of colossal royal statues from southeastern Turkey and northern Syria during the Iron Age II period (ca. 950–700 BCE). Data from the first study derives from my own encounters with the monument, archival records, and interviews conducted with individuals involved with a Black Lives Matter-related protest at the site. Information for the second is drawn from archaeological reports and original data from the current excavations at Tell Tayinat, Turkey. Before these cases are presented, however, we need to contextualize the rise of counter-monumentality as a phenomenon of the late 20th and early 21st century Western state in order to extend its potential relevance to the politics of memory in a wider range of times and places.
Monuments and counter-monumentality
Monuments and monumentality have been devoted an enormous amount of archaeological attention (Burger and Rosenswig, 2012; Osborne, 2014a; Thomas and Meyers, 2012). Partially because of the sheer volume of available material, therefore, monuments have featured prominently as evidentiary fodder deployed in the many theoretical debates that have characterized archaeology as a discipline. Archaeologists have turned to monuments and monumental buildings as indexes of the rise of the state and the city (Childe, 1950: 12; Flannery, 1998); as territorial markers (Renfrew, 1973, 1976); as indicators of urban planning (Smith, 2007); as objects whose labor and energy indicate the power of their makers (Abrams and Bolland, 1999; Trigger, 1990); as structures illustrating the expression of power (Moore, 1996); as examples of the unintended consequences of agency (Pauketat, 2000; Joyce, 2004); as a lens into local cultural practices through time (Harmanşah, 2015); and as a convenient entry into phenomenological approaches in archaeology (Tilley, 1994).
Perhaps most frequent, however, are studies probing the relationship of monuments and memory. The literature on memory in the humanities and social sciences—and collective, or social, memory specifically—has grown to a staggering size (see Olick et al., 2011; Misztal, 2003 for overviews). Typically such research draws directly or indirectly on the methodologically holistic approach advocated by Halbwachs (1980) and Connerton (1989), and Nora’s (1997) concept of lieux de mémoire. Within archaeology, memory has been a major concern for at least a decade and a half (Alcock, 2002; Assmann, 2011; Borić, 2010; Chesson, 2001; Hamilakis, 2013; Jones, 2007; Mills and Walker, 2008; Olivier, 2011; Van Dyke and Alcock, 2003; Yoffee, 2007). Typically, by “memory” archaeologists consider how the past was used and manipulated in ancient contexts (Alcock, 2002; Bradley, 2002; Rojas and Sergueenkova, 2014), sometimes using the concept of “citation,” or knowing reference to the past, as a framework (Van Dyke, 2009: 224–225).
One aspect of monumentality and memory that has gone largely unexplored, however, is the phenomenon that contemporary art critics have termed “counter-monumentality,” or the construction of monuments that are specifically intended to challenge monuments’ conventional tropes of scale and celebration. The practice arose in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when the nation felt compelled to acknowledge the Holocaust and other Second World War atrocities in commemorative form (Forty, 1999: 6–7; Huyssen, 1996, 1997). Conventional monuments were recognized as inappropriate due to their glorification of the subject, and thus a radical intellectual problem was posed: how can one best monumentalize a shameful and traumatic subject without seeming to celebrate it? Artists arrived at several creative solutions, such as Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s “Harburg Monument against Fascism” (Figure 1), which consisted of a monolith that slowly descended into the ground over a period of several months as passers-by inscribed their own response to the piece on the monolith itself by means of an attached stylus.
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Another was Horst Hoheisel’s “Aschrott Fountain,” designed to commemorate a 12 m high fountain that had been donated to the city of Kassel, Germany, by Sigmund Aschrott, a Jewish entrepreneur, and that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939. Hoheisel’s monument was a replica of the original fountain in the same location, but inserted into the ground upside down, such that at ground level, the pedestrian sees nothing but the underside of the fountain, into which water pours to be heard splashing 12 m below (Young, 1992, 1999). Since the late 20th century, counter-monuments (German: Gegendenkmal) have been installed in various contexts around the world (Gough, 2006; Strakosch, 2010; Ware, 2004; Wijsenbeek, 2010).
The monument against fascism, Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, by Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz. (Photographs © Studio Shalev-Gerz, used with permission.)
Counter-monuments thus embody qualities quite opposite from conventional monuments: (a) instead of being permanent, they can be fleeting and transitory; (b) rather than glorifying their subject, they problematize it; and (c) as opposed to being a static representation for the viewer to observe, they actively invite and require viewer participation and engagement.
Most recently, however, scholars have come to see counter-monumentality not simply as the creation of objects or works of art to be viewed, no matter how different the experience or the intent behind them, but rather as a dynamic practice, a disjunctive process of performances in which the past and present are brought violently together (Moshenska, 2010: 21–23), similar to the processes of iconoclasm described by Forty (1999: 10–12) as integral to the act of forgetting. This more encompassing perspective acknowledges that resistance to the efforts underlying the usual repertoire of monuments is characterized not only by a different suite of artistic tropes, the creation of new kinds of material traces, but also by the performative actions of individuals and collectives, which may involve the obfuscation or defacement of material. It is thus productive to distinguish at least three different kinds of counter-monumental projects: attempts to address the challenge raised by Young’s Holocaust memorials (the commemoration of traumatic events through unconventional means), dialogic artworks that engage directly with existing conventional monuments through a creative artistic intervention of “unremembering” (Starzmann, 2016: 5), and practices of performative actions (Stevens et al., 2012). The following two case studies include a contemporary example of a dialogic counter-monument and an ancient example of counter-monumental practices. These two cases are presented here not because they inform one another in a direct historical sense, but because they are both illustrative of the great irony of monuments: in the process of materializing a specific celebrated memory in a physical object (sensu DeMarrais et al., 1996: 18–19), monuments simultaneously render that memory vulnerable to contestation and reinterpretation.
The Lee-Jackson Confederate monument in Baltimore, MD
The monument to Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in Baltimore, Maryland, that was erected in 1948, and the events that have taken place in its vicinity in the fall and winter of 2015–2016, is a powerful example of how a monument’s relationship with the memory of the figures depicted is inherently unstable. The monument is a bronze double-equestrian statue of the two generals (Figure 2). The statue, designed by Laura Gardin Fraser, stands 150 inches tall, while the base, designed by John Russell Pope (more famous for creating the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC), adds another 79 inches for a total of just over 19 feet or 5.8 m. The scene depicted is not a generic representation of two soldiers. Rather, it portrays perhaps the two most famous Confederate war heroes—Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and his second-in-command Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—at the moment of their finest glory, the night of 1–2 May 1863. It was then, during the Battle of Chancellorsville, that the two generals met and made the daring decision to divide their forces in two, allowing Jackson to conduct a stunning surprise attack the following day. Jacskson’s offensive led directly to Lee’s most spectacular military victory of the war, yet it came at a high price: Jackson himself was mortally wounded by friendly fire. Deprived of his most capable general, Lee went on to lose the Battle of Gettysburg that summer and, two years later, the war. This specific moment, then, the so-called “Last Meeting of Lee and Jackson,” is one of the most poignant moments of the Confederacy. It is movingly captured by Fraser’s statue, which shows Jackson turning his horse away from Lee, their conversation concluded, while Lee calmly gazes forward to the victorious outcome of their bold tactical decision.
The Lee-Jackson statue in Baltimore, MD. (Photograph by A. Aubrey Bodine, 1948, used with permission of the Maryland Historical Society.)
The poignancy of this meeting has long resonated with Confederate sympathizers, becoming a key text in the “Lost Cause” movement, which provided a revisionist understanding of the war. Rather than seeing the war as the decision to use violent insurrection to maintain an economic structure made viable by enslaved Africans, the Lost Cause movement made the war about states’ rights, turned the advocates of treason into chivalrous aristocrats from a romantic antebellum era, and converted its military leaders into Arthurian heroes whose defeat on the battlefield was caused not by their own mistakes or the superior abilities of their enemies, but by lack of resources and a series of tragic coincidences like the death of Jackson (Foster, 1987; Gallagher and Nolan, 2000; Wilson, 2009). The last meeting of Lee and Jackson could hardly have been better suited to fit into a narrative like the Lost Cause, containing all the elements for a socially structuring myth: heroic actors, spectacular victory, and unexpected tragedy.
Aspects of Lost Cause mythology are present in the Lee-Jackson monument itself. The most obvious of these are two inscriptions that wrap around the statue base directly below the horses’ feet. One is a quote by Lee about Jackson, “Straight as the needle to the pole Jackson advanced to the execution of my purpose,” and the other a quote by Jackson about Lee, “So great is my confidence in General Lee that I am willing to follow him blindfolded.” The two passages are placed to begin at precise points around the base’s perimeter such that the final word of Lee’s quote, “purpose,” and the first two words of Jackson’s quote, “so great,” are beside one another on the front face of the base facing the viewer, who then looks upon the generals while reading the statement, “purpose so great.”
The statue was not completed until after the Second World War, despite the 1928 bequest. It was finally dedicated in a public ceremony on 1 May 1948, the 85th anniversary of the last meeting of Lee and Jackson. This timing is significant, for its installation several generations after the completion of the Civil War divorces its intent from the simple commemoration of recent events, and since this period marks the era following what Loewen (1999: 19) has called the nadir of race relations in the United States.
In this light, it is critical to note the specific location of the Lee-Jackson statue. Its setting in a narrow north–south corridor of the city that is predominantly affluent and white, neighbored on both the east and the west sides by vast poor black neighborhoods, suggests that this location was chosen for demographic reasons. Of course, the statue’s very existence in Baltimore is peculiar. The state of Maryland was not part of the Confederacy and neither Lee nor Jackson had any connection with the city or with the state. (Indeed, both participated in invasions of the state during the Civil War.) It can only be concluded that the statue was sponsored and installed by the white descendants of the south’s slave owning economy, of which Maryland was very much a part (Fields, 1985). The statue was erected to forge a memory associating this community with the Confederate ancestors, but to do so tacitly, much like Taussig’s notion of a public secret, “that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated” (1999: 5), and whose memory relies on an active practice of not knowing.
The public’s use of the Lee-Jackson monument in the years following its erection confirms this association. Once a year, the statue is the setting of an annual “Birthday Ceremony” held by the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to celebrate the birthdates of the two generals (Lee: January 19, Jackson: January 21). This ceremony, for which participants wear Confederate uniforms and period dress, play music from the war, salute the Confederate flag, and present memorial wreaths to Lee and Jackson activates and regenerates a community’s sense of identity by its association with the past. Significantly, the Lee-Jackson Birthday Ceremony takes place the same weekend as the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. (The UDC and SCV argue that the timing is coincidental; critics note the ceremony began in 1987, the year following the first observation of MLK day.) The Lee-Jackson statue and its associated rituals would appear to be a textbook case of the power of monuments to deploy the memory of ancestors to legitimize collective identity.
Yet the Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Grey on 12 April 2015 exposed the lack of homogeneity in the monument’s public reception. Partially in response to the Charleston church shooting in June 2015, in which nine African Americans were murdered by a white supremacist who had earlier posed for photographs with the Confederate battle flag, the nation-wide protest movement challenged the ubiquity of Confederate symbolism. Less than a month later, the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina state house, and the country’s long struggle with the ubiquitous imagery of its Confederate heritage was thrust to the center of national awareness (Gunter and Kizzire, 2016). Discontent regarding the continued existence of Confederate symbols has been only one of many issues raised by Black Lives Matter, but it is in this specific context that the Lee-Jackson statue’s memorial associations were revealed to be far more vulnerable than its size and durability would suggest.
In October 2015, activists created an artistic intervention by commissioning local artist Pablo Machioli to create a work that would stand in front of the Lee-Jackson statue in order to challenge the city’s indirect celebration of Confederate values through its monuments. The final product was Madre Luz (Mother Light), a 10-feet tall statue of a topless, pregnant African American woman with a baby in a sling on her back (Figure 3). Her left hand is raised in clenched fist that is painted gold, and around her legs is a white skirt on which passers-by were invited to inscribe messages of their choosing; photographs of the statue depict hand-written statements like “down with white power,” “love is triumphant,” and “this new purpose is so great!” The installation was fashioned by wrapping local newspapers around a wooden frame. Installed the evening of Thursday, October 29, Madre Luz was removed by Baltimore’s Department of Recreation and Parks by 5 pm the following day, on the grounds that it had been erected on park land without a permit (Figure 3). The lead activist responsible, Owen Silverman, was given a citation (subsequently appealed), and the statue itself was confiscated for several days before being released.
Above: The Madre Luz counter-monument, by artist Pablo Machioli. (Photograph by Lauren Poor, used with permission.); below: Removal of Madre Luz by Baltimore Department of Recreation and Parks officials. (Photograph by Chrissy Abbott, used with permission.)
Madre Luz embodies a number of aspects of the dialogic counter-monument engaging with an existing monument (Stevens et al., 2012). It was female, as opposed to male; it was made of light, perishable materials; it solicited active participation and physical modification from the people around it; and it was created to be impermanent instead of to last for generations. Indeed, the situation closely resembles that of the Goddess of Democracy in Beijing, a plaster statue of a young woman made by students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and installed directly opposite the huge portrait of Chairman Mao (Wu, 2005: 43–50). The Goddess of Democracy was a deliberate provocation to an existing monument, and one whose power lay more in its removal—forcibly accomplished by tank—than in its original existence; replicas of the Goddess of Democracy have since been erected in various locations around the world. Both reveal the power of counter-monuments to the anthropological project, forcing a crack in the homogeneous memory field of the original monument to reveal its intrinsic frailty.
In response to protests across the city, including the installation of Madre Luz, the mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, created a “Special Commission to Review Baltimore’s Confederate Monuments,” a process reminiscent of debates taking place across the world as nations struggle to come to terms with monuments leftover from oppressive regimes, such as Saddam Hussein’s monumentalized Baghdad (Makiya, 1991). In January 2016, the Special Commission submitted a recommendation to the mayor’s office that the Lee-Jackson statue be removed. As of this writing, the mayor has not made an official decision. However, the 2016 Lee-Jackson Birthday Ceremony was canceled by the SCV and UDC. When a handful of SCV and UDC members arrived in plainclothes to lay a wreath, they were rebuffed by protestors in the presence of police officers. It would seem that the relationship between the memories associated with the Lee-Jackson statue and the inhabitants of Baltimore has evolved dramatically.
Critically, however, Madre Luz was not immune from the counter-monumental processes being described here, revealing it to be as demonstrative of monuments’ vulnerability as the Lee-Jackson statue. Once reclaimed by the activists who had installed it, Madre Luz returned to the cooperative artist residence where it had been created. The following morning, artists awoke to find the statue defaced, spray-painted with a notorious racist epithet in several locations and “white power” on the outstretched arm. Surveillance video documents the event, and although the perpetrator’s identity remains unknown, it is clear that it was one of the resident artists themselves. Another resident wrote a poem titled “I Am the Statue” in response to Madre Luz’s defacing, interpreted as an act of aggression against women as well as black Americans, and pasted it on a wall in the building. The poem was promptly torn down and urinated on. These surprising responses to Madre Luz—in a cooperative residence of young artists, no less—demonstrate how the Lee-Jackson statue continues to wield its influence in a widening network of relations. In addition, it is clear that the work of the counter-monument was by no means entirely successful. On the contrary, although it exposed the Lee-Jackson statue to be highly vulnerable to rival memory claims, the counter-monument itself became subject to counter-monumental practices. It is to practices like these that I now turn in a case study from the ancient Near East.
Syro-Anatolian monumental statuary of the Iron Age
During the Near Eastern Iron Age (ca. 1200–600 BCE), a collection of city-states lay in what is today northern Syria and central and southeastern Anatolia (Figure 4). These Syro-Anatolian city-states were occupied by speakers of Luwian and Aramaic, languages that were written in hieroglyphic and alphabetic scripts, respectively, and had close cultural and dynastic associations with the preceding Hittite Empire and Syrian cultures of the Late Bronze Age (Bryce, 2012; Younger, 2016). Although frequently overshadowed in contemporary scholarship by the expansionary Neo-Assyrian Empire of northern Mesopotamia, who completed their conquest of the Syro-Anatolian kingdoms by the end of the 8th century BCE, these city-states constituted a thriving cultural system. Their political economy, which rested partially on the distribution of luxury bronze and ivory goods produced by craft specialists and distributed across the region as far west as the Aegean (Winter, 1976, 1988), drove much of the ancient Near East’s cultural and economic development, especially during the Iron Age II period (ca. 950 to 700 BCE). Archaeologically, the Syro-Anatolian city-states are best known for their capital cities, which include some of the Near East’s most well-known sites, including Carchemish, Malatya, and Tell Halaf, among others (Harmanşah, 2013). These settlements, typically 35–100 ha in size, are characterized by their tripartite morphology—lower town, acropolis, and palace compound—and the decorated orthostat reliefs that lined the walls of their monumental buildings (Orthmann, 1971).
The Syro-Anatolian city-states and their capital cities.
Colossal statues from the Syro-Anatolian city-states during the Iron Age II period (ca. 950–700 BCE).
Comparative view of Syroa-Anatolian monumental statues, approximately to scale. (a) Carchemish, King’s Gate, the seated deified king Suha; (b) Tell Halaf, palace portico column, female; (c) Zincirli, Tor Q near Building J, buried; (d) Malatya, Lion Gate, buried (nose replaced by excavators); (e) profile of a man of height 1.75 m.
Frequently, though not always, the statue is accompanied by an inscription extolling the accomplishments of the king; although consistent in their theme of royal power, these inscriptions are written in all of the major languages and writing systems present at the time: Luwian (hieroglyphs), Aramaic and Phoenician (alphabet), and Akkadian (cuneiform). The opening of the Phoenician-language inscription on the skirt of the royal statue from Karatepe is typical in its association of the statue with the author: “I am Azatiwada…king of the Danunians.” The same applies to the end of the inscription, which concludes with dire warnings of vengeance (Çambel, 1999: 63–67). In one unique case, the seated and horned statue from the King’s Gate at Carchemish, the inscription around its base identifies the statue as a deified deceased king, one Atrisuhas, or “soul of Suhis” (Hawkins, 2000: 101), implying not just that the statues were representations of royal ancestors (Bonatz, 2001: 68–70), but also that they were possessed of a certain life force (cf. Bahrani, 2003).
Despite the inevitable uncertainties in the archaeological record, clear patterns emerge when comparing the statues with one another. One is their frequent placement in monumental buildings such as city gates and palaces that are themselves associated with royal power and urban institutions by means of inscriptions and other paraphernalia (Osborne, 2014b: 206–208; Mazzoni, 1997). The clearest example of this is at Karatepe, where the city gate containing the royal statue was accompanied by inscriptions that explicitly equate the destruction of the gate with the capture of the city. Such strategic siting signals these royal statues to be a major component of a top-down urban planning regime. Another pattern is the statues’ association with active ceremonial treatment, such as cup marks for libations, depictions of rituals and processions in reliefs, and textual descriptions of elaborate ceremonies (Denel, 2007; Gilibert, 2011; Ussishkin, 1975), all of which support the interpretation of these statues as royal ancestors whose memory the statues were explicitly intended to evoke (Bonatz, 2001). But these observations describe the significance of the statues’ context only at the time of their installation and intended use, not their subsequent reception. This treatment, it turns out, included counter-monumental practices that complicate the traditional interpretation of these statues as representations of royal power.
There are three major aspects of the monuments’ post-installation treatment that reveal counter-monumental activity toward the statues: one is complete destruction of the statue, another is the highly localized defacement of specific features of the individual’s body, especially the nose, eyes, and hands, and a third is the deliberate burial of the statue. Of the 17 monumental statues presented here, 11 were discovered in various states of destruction, ranging from a few large chunks of statue to many dozen small fragments. The latter in particular would have required a sustained effort to accomplish, especially in the case of statues made of the extremely hard basalt, and signals an unusually extreme case of a counter-monumental practice. The usual culprit invoked for such unambiguous acts of destruction are the invading Assyrians at the time of their conquest (e.g. Ussishkin, 1970: 128). They are a logical candidate, given their historically attested invasions of the region, and Assyrian destruction may have indeed been the case for some of these examples.
However, there is nothing directly connecting the Assyrians to any of the destruction events, and in some cases, the statues are from regions of the Anatolian plateau that the Assyrian only infrequently penetrated (e.g. Kululu, Palanga). The Syro-Anatolian city-states themselves were constantly in battle with one another over various disputes, and it is equally likely that they took turns destroying one another’s symbols of royal authority during these conflicts. Even more intriguing is the presence of violent conflict within individual kingdoms. We learn from Assyrian inscriptions that the kingdom of Patina, for example, with its capital city at Tell Tayinat, was apparently convulsed by internal conflict surrounding a contested succession during the mid-late 9th century BCE (Harrison, 2001: 119–121)—precisely the time when Tayinat’s two royal colossal statues were made, one of which was smashed to pieces. Likewise, we know that the city-state of Carchemish was home to two coeval dynasties during the 10th century BCE, the so-called “Great Kings” and “Country Lords” (Hawkins, 1995), which may be related to the known reuse of relief orthostats at that site (Özyar, 1998) as well as others, since such internecine rivalries were endemic throughout the region. Equally as plausible as the Assyrians, then, is the likelihood that some of the broken monumental statues were destroyed by citizens of their own kingdoms.
More subtle, perhaps, is the minor defacing that some of the statues have received. Seven of the statues still with relatively complete bodies and heads nevertheless had their noses removed (see Figure 5(b) to (d)). At just under half of the total number of statues, this is too great a number to be an issue of preservation: these monuments were deliberately defaced. Also removed were eyes and eye inlays, though in this case it is more difficult to distinguish defacement from issues of preservation. This practice of nose removal has a Late Bronze Age Hittite precedent where it was conducted to remove the agency of the image, as indicated by contemporary texts and images (Goedegebuure, 2012). This motivation may have been the case for the Syro-Anatolian city-states, and it is possible that the removal of the nose, and sometimes eyes and hands, was intended to rob the ancestor of his or her sensory capabilities, such that it was no longer able to “smell,” “see,” or “touch.” Either way, damaging the face of these statues was another clear act of resistance to the message of royal power associated with the memory of royal ancestors that was presented by the monuments. Particularly intriguing are the cases where both nose removal and total statue destruction are present, as is the case with two of the monuments from Carchemish, the statue from Gerçin, and two from Tell Halaf. Because there are statues that have had their noses removed but were not otherwise destroyed (Malatya, Zincirli), it follows that several of these statues were subjected to various episodes of counter-monumental practices as their reception moved back and forth between different communities of people over time.
Finally, there is one rare but significant treatment of the royal monuments that bears mentioning: the burial of the statue either in a stone-lined pit, as at Zincirli (von Luschan and Jacoby, 1911: 288–289, 362–368), or in an above-ground tomb, as at Malatya (Delaporte, 1940: 35–38, pl. XIV, XXVI–XXXI). A third possible example is the newly discovered statue from Tell Tayinat, deposited in an unlined pit. These events indicate an almost reverential treatment of the statues, as one would bury a human. These burials, which would have involved considerable effort to create, were likely made by supporters of the royal establishment, the most unambiguous message in the archaeological record that the colossal royal figures were accepted as legitimate by at least a portion of the local population. Intriguingly, the Malatya and Zincirli examples both had their noses removed prior to burial, suggesting a scenario in which a disaffected community conspicuously robbed the statue of its symbolic efficacy, at which point another community had little choice but to bury it ritually.
The two royal statues from Tell Tayinat illustrate aptly the diversity of this treatment of colossal statues in the Syro-Anatolian world. The first to be discovered was found in the 1930s excavations in Gateway VII, which controlled pedestrian traffic from the lower town into the acropolis. This statue was found in such a fragmentary state that it could only have been destroyed in a highly aggressive manner. Even with only a portion of it recovered and reconstructed, it is clear that originally it had been extremely large (Figure 6(a)). Because the material is basalt, an incredibly dense stone, it is possible that this destruction was effected by means of a bonfire intended to cause the statue to explode. This obvious example of counter-monumentality—perhaps a result of rival clans’ claims for power, as mentioned above—contrasts starkly with Tayinat’s second royal statue, excavated in 2012, and naming the figure as the king Suppiluliuma, likely the same individual as the ruler Sapalulme mentioned in Assyrian sources in 858 BCE (Weeden, 2013: 12). This statue was found face-down in a pit that cut through a stone surface and a passageway through another possible monumental gate.
(a) Destroyed monumental statue head fragments excavated from Tell Tayinat, Gateway VII. For scale, note the ear visible by the kneeling figure’s right knee (McEwan, 1937: Fig. 11). (b) Perfectly preserved top of monumental statue from newly discovered gate area, Tell Tayinat. (Photograph by Jennifer Jackson, used with permission.)
The depositional motives here are ambiguous. On the one hand, only the upper half or less is preserved, indicating a destructive action, and one of the excavators has justly proposed that its burial under a highly trafficked pedestrian pathway was intended to be humiliating (Denel, 2017). On the other, its deliberate and difficult burial suggests reverential treatment, as does the fact that the upper body, head, and face were found in a perfect state of preservation (Figure 6(b)). If only the most anthropomorphic elements of the statue were preserved in order to facilitate the burial process, as seems plausible, then this is an example of a venerating treatment of an object that bore clear symbolic import. Dating roughly to the same time period as the destroyed statue in Gateway VII, yet deposited in a radically different fashion, this buried monument indicates that for some inhabitants of the city, the royal statue functioned as it was intended, preserving the memory of the venerated Suppiluliuma. Such interpretive ambiguity may not simply be an outcome of the fragmentary nature of the archaeological record, but a result of the fact that these statues were subjected not just to iconoclasm, but iconoclash (Latour, 2002), scenarios in which it is difficult to determine, both on the part of the original perpetrator and the subsequent analyst, whether an iconoclastic act is destructive, constructive, or both simultaneously.
As we saw with the Lee-Jackson statue, therefore, the archaeological record indexes a complex cluster of relationships between the monumental royal statues of the Syro-Anatolian city-states, the memories of the individuals they commemorated, and the communities of people who interacted with them. Besides the state power that created and installed the statues, they were also actively involved with the ongoing negotiations and struggles between social groups internal to the state, between kingdoms, and between the Syro-Anatolian city-states and the Neo-Assyrian Empire. And the window into all of these diverse interactions is not simply the existence of the monuments themselves, but the counter-monumental practices to which they were subjected over the course of their existence.
Conclusions
Appreciating accurately the relationship of memory and things is a complex undertaking. This is true of all material culture, and especially so of monuments. As objects often deliberately intended to fuse memories of ancestors with collective identity in immutable material form, monuments last as highly visible markers of the past over the course of multiple generations. Yet their very physical permanence provides a venue for memories to be challenged and new memorial associations to be forged, obliging the analyst to confront how multiple co-existing and occasionally competing social communities deal with one another and with their shared pasts.
While monuments have long been well-trodden ground for archaeologists interested in identity maintenance and memory, dialogic counter-monuments and counter-monumental practices that modify a monument or its surroundings reveal that in fact monuments’ invocations of past individuals and events is counterintuitively frail and vulnerable to modification. For quite unlike the common intent behind a monument’s creator—to create and perpetually reproduce a specific message on the part of a particular individual or community as standard and universal—counter-monuments and related practices of remembrance blow this conceit apart to reveal the actual diversity of social groups that surround a monument.
In the case of the Lee-Jackson monument in Baltimore, MD, the installation of Madre Luz—a perfect example of the dialogic counter-monument with its impermanent materials, invitation for audience participation, and explicit message against an existing monument—exposed that city’s fraught racial heritage by bringing neo-Confederates and their sympathizers into public conflict with communities like civil rights activists, all of whose voices were trying to be reconciled by city hall. Here, the original monument remained the same, while the glorious memories of Generals Lee and Jackson that were intended to be evoked by the sculptor and her sponsors have been at least partially severed from the statue, replaced, or at least complemented, by memories of systemic racial injustice.
The antiquity of the Syro-Anatolian Iron Age royal statues obscures their stories, yet even here consideration of counter-monumentality uncovered a complex series of contested memories not necessarily compatible with the stated goal of the monuments to perpetuate royal legitimacy. While explicitly dialogic counter-monuments were not erected, counter-monumental practices were very much in play. These included the outright destruction of royal statues and the negation of their symbolic efficacy through minor acts of defacement; in some cases, both acts are visible on a single monument. The accompanying historical record suggested a host of plausible culprits for these actions, ranging from disaffected local communities to conquering forces. That these events did not go unchallenged, however, is indicated by the post-defacing practice of ritual interment, a practice that is perhaps best understood as undertaken by someone sympathetic with the monument’s original project—in this sense, not dissimilar from the vandalizing Madre Luz received after it was returned to the studio where it had been fashioned. Counter-monuments and related practices are thus never the end of the story of a monument’s memorial associations. Rather, they constitute merely one episode in a centripetal sequence of relations.
This quality points toward a novel mode of approaching monuments and memory. The unusual status of monuments as existing in social contexts long removed from the period of their formation requires us to acknowledge that the meaning of monuments lies not in the objects themselves, nor strictly speaking in the eyes of their beholders, but in the fluid relationship between them. Such a viewpoint leads to the counterintuitive realization that although monuments may be physically stable, their associated memories are highly mutable. While creating a monument may aid in the perpetuation of memory, it simultaneously opens that memory to criticism and contestation, in the process exposing a vulnerability that can then be capitalized on by processes such as counter-monumentality. In such cases, then, monuments are analytically powerful not only for the strength and clarity of their claims to memory, but for their frailty.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to several individuals who spoke with me about the Lee-Jackson statue and their involvement with the Black Lives Matter protest at the site as well as the mayor’s commission, especially Owen Silverman Andrews, Nate Larson, Pablo Machioli, and Melissa Blount Moorhead. Several colleagues read the manuscript and offered tremendously helpful comments, including Ömür Harmanşah, Matthew Reilly, Seth Richardson, Debra Thompson, and Parker VanValkenburgh. The manuscript was also improved by the helpful suggestions of three anonymous reviewers. Dirk Wicke generously shared his list of Syro-Anatolian statues with me. I thank Esther Shalev-Gerz, Lauren Poor, Chrissy Abbott, Jennifer Jackson, and the Maryland Historical Society for their permission to use their photographs as illustrations.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.