Coated with Persian sands: small technologies and failure of archeological surveys of ‘Luristan Bronzes’ in the southwest Iran (1925-1941)
Ata Heshmati ([email protected])
PhD candidate in The History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto
This chapter aims to portray an interwar snapshot of what I call "technoprospecting" in Iran. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, which coincided with the early years of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s ascendance to power, certain historical circumstances that included forgery, looting, and illegal excavation of early iron age artifacts of Luristan and Kirmanshahan, gave rise to a new systematic surveys of small traditional craft and local technologies of western and southwestern agrarian and nomadic populations of Iran. Based on the existing literature in the history of bioprospecting, I have defined “technoprospecting” as organized surveys of ancient artifacts and technologies through modern mapping, engineering, and cartographic tools. In this chapter, I will extend technoprospecting from infrastructure and mapping in chapters 1 and 2, to contemporary and ancient crafts in order to generate industrial jobs and lifestyle for recently settled tribespeople. Hence, these surveys were inevitably intertwined with the state’s development and “pacification” programs that implicated many forced migrations and ethnic displacements in southwestern regions of Iran, including Luristan, Khuzistan, and Fars provinces.
I will focus on the American art historian Phyllis Ackerman (1883-1969) and the Hungarian-British surveyor and archeologist, Aurel Stein (1862-1943) who represented two different styles of surveying Persian antiquity and arts in interwar Iran, both attempting to discover the origin of the “Bronzes of Luristan.” These small objects were fantastic and naturalistic figured statues, disc pins, bracelets, swords, daggers, axes, and idols, which had become highly sought-after artifacts in the post-WWI antiquity market. While Stein, as a methodical and academic scholar of Western Asia funded by the British Museum, failed to uncover any metalworking in his lesser-known surveys of Western Routes of Persia in 1935-6, Ackerman as a philosopher and art expert/dealer, made successful guesses and produced interesting findings about the chronology of bronzes. Her theories were discarded by later scholars because they were partially made based on forged artifacts in her collection.
Luristan Bronzes indicated a sophisticated level of technology among ancient indigenous nomadic populations of Iran but assigning any chronology for them was almost impossible in the 1930s. These small objects filled the cultural gap before the Achaemenid empire, and provide an evidence for the existence of sophisticated art forms, metallurgy, and probably connections with eastern or western civilization. The pre-historic colonies of bronze-casters and horse riders with distinct techniques were contemporaneous with Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations hence they extended the historical imagination of Iranians about themselves.
However, Ackerman’s gender, citizenship, and disability had caused her not to be able to do any field work on the subject of archaeology. The lack of any data about the vertical earth level from which these objects were dug up provided this rare opportunity for her to offer useful clues to guess the chronology and origin of Luristan bronzes. Her innovations in style complicated the disciplines and methodologies of archeology in the interwar period. The problem of unreliability of regular dating techniques in the absence of any burial data led Ackerman to rely heavily on the morphological or stylistic resemblance between the collection at hand and those already dated in in other parts of the world. She identified two western and eastern categories for the bronzes later in the 1960s was called Orientalization hypothesis. Her methodology, too, was replicated with additional evidence dug up in later excavations in the 1970s.
Researcher Bio:
Ata is a PhD candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST), University of Toronto. His research primarily focuses on the history of crafts and small technologies in Iran and West Asia in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. In his doctoral work, he investigates the rise of multinational systematic surveys of Persian crafts and local technologies, which emerged partially within the Pahlavi dynasty's nation-building efforts in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on the concept of “technoprospecting,” Ata investigates how these surveys sparked a trans-Asian search for indigenous technologies in southwestern Iran, technologies that held potential for the development of infrastructure, industry, commerce, and technoscientific enterprises. This paper is a part of the third chapter of his dissertation.
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