UC Berkeley

The Keban Dam Rescue Project was initiated in 1967 to record and study the history of the Keban region in Eastern Turkey about to be inundated. The project brought scholars of several disciplines together to document, in a relatively limited amount of time, the past and the landscape of this threatened Upper Euphrates area. The international and multidisciplinary salvage excavations are perceived today as a turning point for Turkish archaeology. The archaeological excavations seem to mark a rather unstable moment within the history of Turkish archaeology. Nevertheless, if teams were operating under different theoretical paradigms, in the end, they all agreed that knowledge about the history and prehistory of the Keban region needed be produced scientifically, that is in an organized and systematic manner. This dissertation scrutinizes some of archaeology's taken-for-granted scientific techniques which contribute to the emergence of the field laboratory. As experiments are performed in the outdoors laboratory of archaeology, several divides between nature and culture, present and past, the local and the universal simultaneously occur. Archaeologists thus define their object of research as relating to the universal and past culture of humankind, disregarding other objects of potential research belonging to nature or to the local present. The rescue project at Keban allowed certain kinds of evidence to be selected and made visible while others were, if not completely invisible, marginalized. In the Keban site reports, knowledge about a site is placed to the foreground while the conditions of its production are placed to the sidelines. In other words, as archaeologists make their discoveries visible to the world, they simultaneously make themselves invisible. In addition, local people only make unexpected appearances on the margins of the reports. This dissertation uses the scientific accounts of archaeology to make some of these submerged stories come back to the surface. Viewed from a different perspective --or from a different "situated" stand-point-- the agency of archaeologists, the local stories from villages, the negative effects of dam construction, among other things supposedly excluded from the scientific process of archaeology, can be retrieved and placed to the foreground.