Archaeology in the Reign of Amanullah
Archaeology in the Reign of Amanullah
The Difficult Birth of a National Heritage
Focusing on the modernizing and nationalizing reign of Amanullah Khan in the 1920s, Annick Fenet’s archival study of the early years of the Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan (DAFA) shows the fraught nature of these interactions. Even as Fenet shows that Afghan politicians possessed only a limited sense of the possibilities of a politics of patrimony in the 1920s, over the following decades the new methods and discoveries of the French archaeologists would radically shift the ways in which Afghan intellectuals constructed their past. The arrival of archaeology marked a decisive changing point in Afghan understanding of their past, even if it opened up a pre-Islamic history that would be rejected by late-twentieth-century Islamists after being celebrated by the nationalists of the middle decades of the century.
Keywords: Afghanistan, History, Memory, Archaeology, France, Museums, DAFA, Middle East, Central Asia, Historiography
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