Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Revisited

Abstract

Ancient Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, located in modern Iraq, was a multiethnic imperial capital city in Mesopotamia. Founded by Seleucus I Nicator in the late fourth century BCE, the city was conquered by the Parthians in 141 BCE and eventually superseded by nearby Ctesiphon. An excavation sponsored by the University of Michigan, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art explored the site over six seasons from 1927 to 1937. Per antiquities laws instituted under British Mandate rule, finds from the excavation were dispersed between those U.S. institutions and the Iraq Museum. This dissertation examines this excavation—and the collection and archive it produced—as a legacy collection. It probes three frames for the Seleucia excavation: the colonial context of British control of Iraq between World Wars I and II; the excavation’s approach to artifacts (consequential for object recovery and documentation); and the history of and discourse around “nonexpert” labor on the excavation in Iraq and on the collection in Detroit. These frames are prerequisites to understanding the excavated corpus—its contours and its limitations—and thus the site, and to advancing a more equitable archaeological practice. Chapter 1 offers a backdrop discussion of legacy collections and archaeological archives, with particular attention to archival practice. A description of extant archival resources offers a window into archival process and a resource for future Seleucia researchers. The context of the British Mandate in Iraq is presented in Chapter 2, which outlines intertwined political and archaeological developments in interwar Iraq. The consequences of British rule on interwar archaeology in Iraq were not limited to antiquities laws: a case study of British Royal Air Force involvement at Seleucia illustrates British colonial facilitation of foreign archaeological practice. The results from the Michigan excavation at Seleucia remain under-published and under-incorporated into knowledge about Seleucid and Parthian Mesopotamia. Partially due to ruptures of 20th century global events, this is also a consequence of excavation practices. Chapter 3 identifies a view of finds as objects—not contextualized artifacts—dually rooted in the project’s initial Biblical goals and its practice of acquiring objects under division for sponsoring institutions. The second half of the dissertation considers “nonexpert” labor as a key aspect of knowledge production about Seleucia. A review of previous scholarship on archaeological labor in the Middle East and Africa (Chapter 4) offers frameworks drawn from history/sociology of science and critical histories of archaeology. These frameworks are applied to Seleucia in Chapters 5 to 7, which examine the (in)visibility of and discourse around Iraqi excavation workers in Seleucia’s publications, archival texts, and archival photographs. Details about excavation roles and individual excavation workers are also offered from archival evidence. This discussion recognizes the decisions of individual workers, made within the excavation’s overall object orientation and recovery strategy, as shaping the extant artifactual corpus. The lens of “nonexpert” labor shifts to the U.S. in Chapter 8, which is focused on a Works Progress Administration project in Detroit, contextualized by other New Deal archaeological projects. Political necessity made the WPA lab workers highly visible, in contrast to the Iraqi workers. These newly presented histories of Iraqi and American contributors to knowledge about Seleucia offer a more robust view into the biography of the Seleucia collections at Michigan, as well as a fuller set of stakeholders.