Flooded Pasts - by William Carruthers (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Flooded Pasts examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event--UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960-80)--to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to "recolonize" it. In this book, William Carruthers asks how postwar decolonization took shape and what role a colonial discipline like archaeology--forged in the crucible of imperialism--played as the "new nations" asserted themselves in the face of the global Cold War.

As the Aswan High Dam became the centerpiece of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egyptian revolution, the Nubian campaign sought to salvage and preserve ancient temples and archaeological sites from the new barrage's floodwaters. Conducted in the neighboring regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia, the project built on years of Nubian archaeological work conducted under British occupation and influence. During that process, the campaign drew on the scientific racism that guided those earlier surveys, helping to consign Nubians themselves to state-led resettlement and modernization programs, even as UNESCO created a picturesque archaeological landscape fit for global media and tourist consumption.

Flooded Pasts describes how colonial archaeological and anthropological practices--and particularly their archival and documentary manifestations--created an ancient Nubia severed from the region's population. As a result, the Nubian campaign not only became fundamental to the creation of UNESCO's 1972 World Heritage Convention but also exposed questions about the goals of archaeology and heritage and whether the colonial origins of these fields will ever be overcome.

Review Quotes

Flooded Pasts is an extremely well-grounded case study of how post-colonial politics in Africa, through its entanglements with archaeology, ended up reproducing colonial mindsets and the oppression of local communities. I strongly recommend it to people who are interested in building bridges between post-colonial histories (of the ancient past or the disciplines that make it) with decolonial action in the present.

[H]is refreshingly critical approach to the subject will undoubtedly transform our understanding of the UNESCO Campaign, beyond a Western Egyptological lens.

As someone who is interested in site histories, I believe that this is the book that all others should be based on from now on. But it is so much more than a site history. It is cultural, archival, disciplinary, and political history.

Carruthers has delivered an epic, encyclopaedic volume that at once speaks to the discipline of archaeology and global development agendas. This book is a powerful and commendable addition to the literature on African studies,

In Flooded Pasts, William Carruthers traces a history of archeology in Nubia in relation to these connected histories of colonialism, hydrology and global heritage in Egypt and Sudan. What emerges is a powerful account of how control over the past was often central to competing visions of potential futures, and how apparently new regimes often found themselves reproducing patterns of thought and practice they claimed to have surpassed. This is an important book and reflects hours of considered and fascinating research.

Rich in detail and carefully argued, Flooded Pasts' multifaceted exploration of the Nubia campaign makes an important contribution to understanding the structural imbrications of knowledge production, colonialism, and nation-building in the Middle East and North Africa... a timely contribution to community-engaged archaeology as a decolonizing praxis.

Today, as one witnesses the violence being inflicted upon modern-day Cairo (also under the guise of the state's modernization and developmental projects), with certain histories deemed insignificant and cursorily erased and others being cheaply promoted with pomp (e.g., the mummy parade; the sphinx avenue celebrations), Flooded Pasts could not be a more timely contribution.

About the Author

William Carruthers is Lecturer in Heritage and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex. He is the editor of Histories of Egyptology.