Bored Panda got in touch with archeologist Arie Amaya-Akkermans and he was kind enough to answer some of our questions. First and foremost, we were curious to hear what common misconceptions laypeople like myself often have about archeology. 

“First of all, archaeologists do not excavate dinosaur fossils! That's the work of Paleontologists. And secondly, the myth that archaeologists are Indiana Jones types. It is true that some kinds of archaeologists, like physical and zooarchaeologists, deal with bones, but the information they gather from them, although fascinating, doesn't lead to the kind of spectacular answers people in pop culture expect.”

“Bones give a lot of information about a person's (or an animal's) nutrition, the economic history of their societies, their pathologies, circumstances of death, and the environments they lived in, but the question of human origins is still far away from resolution, especially because it cannot be solved -- insofar as our complex origins are composed of many different beginnings, and given that we created ourselves, we have many origins. About Indiana Jones: It is a caricature of colonial archaeology,” he shared with Bored Panda. 

“The cliche of white men with fedora hats and servants. Not all archaeologists are excavating; some are in museums, others are working in archives, or work as cultural theorists, heritage experts, or processing data for survey technologies. But most importantly, since the appearance of "Ancient Aliens" on Netflix, there's the idea that archaeologists are busy with the question of extraterrestrial life, but that's far from the truth.”

“Archaeology in fact is heavily invested in de-bunking pseudo-archaeology because its theories are often, and not in completely transparent ways, connected with white supremacy around the belief that ancient non-Western societies couldn't be as technologically advanced. Lastly, archaeology isn't just about the ancient past. Archaeology could be sometimes also about the recent past, or even about the future, it could treat the 20th century as much as the Middle Ages.”

“The tools and methodologies of course would change, but today as much as archaeology studies the Babylonians and the Greeks, it is also interested in the modern ruins of Detroit or Beirut, the garbage of American cities, the bombardment of Gaza, or the social landscapes of mining. Christopher Witmore, a prominent American archaeologist, correctly points out that archaeology is the only discipline that has an adjective, "archaios" (ancient), rather than a noun, as its prefix.”

“From this, we learn how unconventional its position in the sphere of modern knowledge is. Archaeology is about human duration rather than antiquity (says another archaeologist, Dan Hicks). Archaeologists today are part of a cultural wave of materialists and posthumanists, including philosophers, environmentalists, contemporary artists, and social scientists, trying to understand our time -- contemporaneity, risk society, the imbalance.”

Naturally, we were curious to hear how he ended up in this fascinating field. “I didn't arrive at archaeology in the traditional pathway: I was always sensitive to archaeological material and discourses, and in general, thinking about the past, because of a background in Classics, but after many years working with contemporary art, particularly in the Middle East, I was excited by the ways in which contemporary artists engaged with the remote past,” he shared with Bored Panda.

“In a way, there was this intuition that it was a part of the present, materially, politically, and intellectually. This suspicion was confirmed by archaeological theory of the last thirty years. So I began becoming more informed about extended conversations between art, archaeology, and philosophy. In the end, it wasn't the excavations or the magnificent temples of the past that really blew me away, but a discipline that thrives in its own paradoxes, its uncertainty, and the awareness of the impossibility of many of its projects.”

“Though archaeological facts are "true" and "certain" in the eyes of the public, who expects to find in them the naked truth about our past, the truth is that all facts in archaeology are interpretations, they belong in certain models, paradigms and theories about the past, but when tested against the whole of reality, they're poor replacement for the excitement, agony and uncertainty of living with the past.”

“There are other disciplines that deal with this of course, but in my mind, only archaeology is preoccupied with how these things are experienced not only by humans, but also by our monuments, our landscapes, and even by things we cannot see, because they've been buried thousands of years ago, or 6 months ago after an earthquake, or forgotten in the trenches of a civil war. This paints also a picture of a science that doesn't have clear borders or objects of study, and well, that's true, it's one of its strengths.”

Given the host of new things found every year and the fact that the past is finite, we were curios to learn just how much there is still “out there.” “I think the answer really depends on what one believes archaeology will find or ought to find. Is there so much more to say about the Egyptian pyramids, Babylonian cities, and the Mayas? Yes, absolutely. But the modern age, although it is the birthplace of archaeology, has also been incredibly destructive for archaeological sites. On the way to knowledge, we have plundered and destroyed so much. So my belief is that we should focus on understanding not only what we have, but also what we have done.”

“Modern archaeological destruction is part of the story that archaeology will tell in the future. There are museums that hold tens of thousands of artifacts that have never been studied, there's too much stuff, the publication is very slow, and major scientific discoveries are rare. We still don't have a clear picture of what we have done. I'm not advocating for an end to excavations, but we could definitely excavate a lot less.”

“Something that is fascinating right now, for example, is the application of digital archaeology and artificial intelligence to study archaeological sites and artifacts without the invasive, destructive nature of excavations. In fact, there's an incredible amount of archaeological knowledge we have from photography, video, and aerial surveys of archaeological sites.” 

“I remember for example when David Gill and Christopher Chippindale, experts on the antiquities market, harshly criticized American curator Pat Getz-Preziosi's writing on Cycladic art, claiming that so many secrets of the Cycladic islands are yet to be revealed. But according to Gill and Chippindale, more than 80% of the sites have been completely destroyed by looters. So the archaeological imagination (and ambition) might be infinite, but archaeological heritage is very much a limited edition. An object might look in a museum, but a destroyed site cannot be fixed.”

“There are avenues that archaeology is exploring today which I feel are incredibly innovative and intellectually revolutionary. For example, the work of people like Christopher Witmore or Oliver Harris is very different from one another, and their ideas that the past is made by human and non-human things, and the implication for both theory and practice that we're not unique in the universe (as humans), neither are so totally differentiated from other species or from our landscapes and monument.”

“Rather, we have all emerged together, and are constantly evolving, in relation to each other, in really complex assemblages of time, memory, space, life, death, matter, ritual, etc. To understand these relations, at the very surface of our world, so full of contradictions and paradoxes, seems to me more interesting and adventurous than excavating our way down to the magma.” You can find more of Arie Amaya-Akkermans’ work on Instagram, X, and his personal page and you can find a link to the exhibition at the Sadberk Hanim Museum here.