WHEN I SAW PROFESSOR LAMBERG-Karlovsky for the first time, he looked past me. He walked to the far end of the room and sat at the head of the table, so that the windows backlit him. He was one chair away from me. Everyone stopped talking.
He set down an inch-thick, unlabeled manila folder. Rumpled yellow loose-leaf papers—lecture notes—poked out the top and sides. They were so old they look chewed, but he didn’t touch them once during class. For close to an hour, he spoke entirely from memory.
“Welcome!” he said. His voice was strong and resonant, the accent vaguely Continental. “There’s no textbook available to cover the area that I intend to cover.” There was one, once—“but it’s out of date. It’s something that I did a long time ago.” He’s been here for forty-seven years, I reminded myself. When he got tenure, Jane was still alive, I thought. He is the textbook.
“We’ll talk about Egypt, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, up to the Indus Valley, the major civilizations, cultural complexities in each area. Our approach will be to try and see similarities and differences in the emergence of these civilizations. What is similar in the evolution of, quote, ‘urbanization, civilization, literate communities’?”
I compared the man in front of me to that picture of him from the ’68 season of Tepe Yahya. At nearly seventy-five, he was barely diminished by age. His frame was still imposing. His nose had grown bulbous, and his stomach had given way to a comfortable paunch, but his white hair was still thick, puffing around his ears. His brow ridge had become the most remarkable part of his face. It extended down over his eyes, carpeted by thick eyebrows that stretched up to his forehead. His nose was almost aristocratic in its excess.
“We will see throughout the semester that archaeology, unlike when I first became an archaeologist, today archaeology stands with political issues. It advocates certain aspects.” For example, Saddam Hussein used to say about Iraqis that “we invented writing.” “True,” Karl said. It was invented in Iraq. But, of course, there was no Iraq five thousand years ago. “Archaeology has a remarkable penchant for modern political purposes,” Karl said. “It’s used.”
No one else was taking notes. They were all just listening. I tried to take mine more discreetly.
Archaeology is an investigation, he explained, but it can also be an act of power—of finding the data and then controlling the story. “Every nation-state wants an important past,” Karl said. So, often, the ruling parties will commission archaeologists. But sometimes the past that archaeologists find is not what the powers want them to find.
His hands, I noticed, shook slightly, and he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He did have a gold signet ring on his pinkie, but I couldn’t make out the image on the crest. His nails—I chastised myself for being a little creeped out—were long and very clean.
Karl segued into the history of archaeology. He explained that the importance of the past to the present comes in waves—pulses, he called them—and that we were in a moment when the past was seen as very significant to the present.
He described the long period of time between the Romans’ interest in antiquity and the Renaissance’s renewed interest. “It was a thousand-year night.” Then, gathering steam, he delivered the rest of his lecture almost like a sermon, pressing his finger pads together to emphasize his points. Archaeology started less as a science than with travelers, adventurers—people who went to the Near East with the Bible to see whether or not there was ever a Jericho—and colonizers. “That’s why you go to the Louvre in Paris, or to the British Museum, or to the Pergamon in Berlin, or to the Egyptian Museum in Turin: to see some of the great antiquities of the nation-states of the Near East.
“The colonial aspect is still very much with us,” Karl continued, bringing us up to the present. His enunciation underlined his words: These rich nations—England, France, Germany—went in and plundered other nations, collecting their past and controlling it, by being the ones to interpret it, to give it significance and meaning. “Archaeology is the handmaiden of colonialism.
“Now I will say one personal aspect of the Near East. I have spent a goodly number of decades working in the Near East, but the Near East is a tough neighborhood today…I worked. I had worked. I worked for over ten years in Iran.” It was his first stumble, and it seemed interesting that it coincided with the site that he, Jim, and Jane had excavated together.
He continued: “Nation-states, now, are terribly invested in archaeology. They want to know their pasts—not through the filter of a Soviet interpretation of what their past was, but on their own terms.”
And here again, as I had during the whole class, I felt seen. I was struck by the parallels between Karl’s lecture and the experience of pursuing Jane’s story. But I was also hesitant to trust that these echoes existed outside of the fact that I was listening so hard for them.
“Thursday we start at 9000 BC,” he said.
I put my pencil away and ran down the stairs. Of course I would be back Thursday.