Maryam Dezhamkhooy MODERNIST ARCHAEOLOGIST
The Nebra sky disk, Egyptian pharaonic tombs, or the ruins of Pompeii – many people think of such millennia-old finds when they hear the term "archaeology". Though literally translated as the “study of ancient things,” this science deals with material legacies of cultural-historical development both distant and contemporary. Iranian archaeologist Dr. Maryam Dezhamkhooy devotes her research to the archaeology of the contemporary past and modern material culture. She is particularly interested in two still rather unknown fields of research whose origins date back to the 1970s: Gender archaeology and so-called garbology – the archaeology of garbage.
“Archaeologists interested in the present are often interested in the dark side of modernity, such as conflict, climate change, waste, or political tensions,” explains Maryam Dezhamkhooy. This forms the common theme of the two research projects that the 40-year-old is currently pursuing as an associate scholar at the Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University: She is researching waste and garbage communities as well as women's resistance to imported consumer goods in early 20th century Iran.
“In my research on garbage, I want to analyze how the politics of consumption and waste change the economy, create poverty, and increase inequality in the world,” she explains. In the 1970s, U.S. archaeologist and founder of garbology, William Rathje, compared waste with census data and concluded that techniques from classical archaeology could be used to draw insightful social conclusions when examining contemporary trash. “Garbage is currently a big problem, not only of poor countries, as many in Europe think, but worldwide,” Maryam Dezhamkhooy points out. She says there are ever-larger piles of trash and growing garbage in the sea, as well as more and more people settling in landfills - she now wants to look at these communities from an archaeological perspective and examine, for example, how climate change affects them or what forms of marginalization they experience. She sees garbology as one of the emerging interdisciplinary fields that can play a leading role in research for sustainability, and can make archaeology "more practical and useful.
Archaeologists interested in the present are often interested in the dark side of modernity.
Maryam Dezhamkhooy
She also sees much potential in gender archaeology, which is rooted in the social developments of the 1970s and is more established in Scandinavia and the USA than in Germany. This archaeological research direction deals with the distribution of roles between the sexes in a given society, starting from the basic assumption that such roles are not biological, but socially determined and learned. "The topic is of particular interest to women, but if we want to change society, we all have to deal with it," the scientist emphasizes. In order to make gender archaeology known in her home country, she has already written her doctoral thesis on men in the Sassanid Empire of Persian antiquity.
In her current gender archaeological research, Maryam Dezhamkhooy is interested in the women's movement in Iran at the beginning of the 20th century, especially its economic significance. After the national revolution, in which women also participated, the Pahlavi regime became Persia's first modern government. At the time, however, it favored state women's organizations and suppressed independent women's movements. From an economic perspective, these women organized against the importation of European products, which nearly destroyed traditional Persian industry at the time. Maryam Dezhamkhooy also considers this research important because the Western world has a false image of women in Islamic countries: they are usually perceived only as oppressed beings. “Women in Iran play not just a leading role in the current protests, they were also very socially active at the beginning of the 20th century and moved a lot,” she emphasizes. “In the meantime, society has changed positively, as shown by the broad support for protests in the name of women's and human rights – a valuable achievement that took more than 100 years.”
Maryam Dezhamkhooy hails from Iran's cultural capital of Shiraz - home of the important Persian poet Hafis, who greatly influenced Goethe. She later worked as an archaeology professor at Birjand University after becoming an assistant professor at the age of 27 following her doctorate.
In Heidelberg, Maryam Dezhamkhooy sees the appropriate “avant-garde academic atmosphere” for her research, "where creativity and the exploration of new territories are valued", which is not usually the case in conservative archaeology. She first came to the Institute of Prehistory and Near Eastern Archaeology in 2016 as a Humboldt Visiting Scholar after meeting Prof. Dr. Thomas Meier, who holds a professorship there and is one of the two directors of the newly founded CAPAS. Whether she will continue to stay in Germany or return to Iran is still an open question. Although she would like to do research in Iran again, she would not like to do it at a university under the current government. “Fortunately, however, there are many libraries and archives where I can continue to do independent research. But as a 'Humboldtian' I can also return to Germany regularly for research stays. This is very important, because I need both scientific and financial support for my research - and I don't want to get it from the current Iranian government.”
(Year of publication: 2022)
