gonzález 2006 the dream of reason an archaeology of the failures of modernity in ethiopia

8/10/2019 Gonzlez 2006 the Dream of Reason an Archaeology of the Failures of Modernity in Ethiopia

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Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 6(2): 175201 DOI:10.1177/1469605306064239

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

175

The dream of reason An archaeology of the failures of modernity in Ethiopia

ALFREDO GONZLEZ-RUIBALStanford Archaeology Center,Stanford University,USA

ABSTRACTModernity is central to the concept of archaeology. It is not only partand parcel of the modern project, but it also throws light on the consti-tution of modernity itself. Although archaeologists usually reveal thehigher degrees of oppression and alienation brought by the modernworld, they consider that modernity is, in the rst place, a productiveprocess, in that it gives rise to new things be they good or bad. Theyalso tend to consider it successful in an evolutionary sense: whereverit appears, modernity wins at the expense of other rationalities, socialforms, material cultures and economies, imposing its reason. This istrue in most cases, but it is not necessarily so. This article explores thedestructive side of modernity through a case study from Ethiopia. Forthis purpose, I will use archaeology to engage with a landscape wheremodernity has brought immense devastation and has eventuallyfailed.

KEYWORDS

archaeology of the present borderlands communism globaliz-ation modernity rubbish ruins war


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176 Journal of Social Archaeology 6(2)

A STORM IS BLOWING FROM PARADISE

Where we perceive a chain of events, he [the angel] sees one single

catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in frontof his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make wholewhat has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has gotcaught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer closethem. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back isturned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is whatwe call progress. (Benjamin, 1968 [1955]: 25960)

Power struggles erupted within the new African states, with the opponentsresorting to, and exploiting, all means possible: tribal and ethnic conicts,military might, corruption, murder. At the same time, the new states provedto be weak, incapable of performing their most basic functions. And all thiswas occurring during the Cold War, which the East and the Westtransplanted onto the terrain of Africa. A salient characteristic of this warwas that the problems and interests of the weaker, dependent countries wereutterly ignored, their affairs and dramas treated as strictly subordinate tosuperpower interests, [with] no independent signicance or weightwhatsoever. (Kapuscinski, 2001: 129)

Since the late 1990s, several authors have asserted that archaeology isinextricably linked to the modernist project from an ontological andepistemological point of view (Olsen, 2001: 43; Thomas, 2004: 435).However, archaeology is also linked to modernity by its interest in the riseof modern societies and the impact of modern societies in other cultures.Indeed, since Deetzs (1977) seminal work, several authors have beenengaged in the archaeology of capitalism (Johnson, 1996; Leone and Silber-man, 1995; Patterson, 2000), one of the main pieces of the modern puzzle.The questions addressed have to do mainly with the origins of modernityor capitalism, the character of the new society with the increasing import-ance of class, race and gender divides (Dell et al., 2000) and the role of

material culture in the process. In a certain way, we could say that thearchaeology of modernity is quite modern, given its interest in progress,construction, production, control, order, individuals. Less attention is paidto the worlds shattered by modernity: for example, the decadence of pre-industrial villages with the exodus towards industrialized cities or the effectsof the slave trade in African communities. We know how cities grew andhow slave plantations thrived, with their respective quotas of oppression,but we know far less about the villages that were abandoned by impover-ished peasants or sacked by slave traders in the wake of these processes.

Modernity is especially destructive when it goes completely wrong. Whatare the dark sides the collateral damages of the modern project? War,genocide, alienation, mass destruction and mass dispossession have beensome of the unexpected and murky outcomes of the Age of Reason, yet


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177Gonzlez-Ruibal The dream of reason

they have been frequently overlooked by archaeologists (but see Schoeldet al., 2002). The critique of modernist narratives in archaeology hasinvolved the deconstruction of evolutionary thinking, the colonialist impli-

cations of archaeological discourse and the bond between dubious Westernprojects (such as nationalism) and the study of the past, among other things.Nevertheless, apart from criticizing the foundations and political entangle-ments of our own discipline, the nefarious effects of modern utopias can beapproached in other ways by archaeologists. We can look at the archaeo-logical traces of rampant modernity: industrial ruins, abandoned villagesand towns, refugee camps, concentration camps, prisons, battleelds, land-lls, totalitarian architecture, mass graves, lands razed by nuclear disasters.

One of Goyas most famous engravings shows a man, leaning on a desk,sleeping. It is obvious by the forced position and the papers and pen spreadover the desk that this is somebody that fell asleep after exhausting intel-lectual work. Out of his head spring up nightmares in the shape of dreadfulanimals: ghostly cats, bats, and owls. The title of the engraving is El Sueode la razn produce monstruos. In Spanish, this is very ambiguous: it maybe translated as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, thus meaningthat when one stops using the reason, monstrosities appear, or The Dreamof Reason, implying that the ideals of reason, when pushed too far, mayproduce unexpected, aberrant results. It is possible that Goya, having seenthe disasters brought by a bloody revolution and the subsequent warswaged by enlightened France, considered the second meaning even if hewas always considered an afrancesado (pro-French). Other disasters thatwould go well beyond these early miscarriages of modernity were yet tocome: fascisms, world wars, the genocides of the twentieth century,colonialism. For all that, we can say that modernity, and especially latemodernity, is related to destruction and waste at least as much as it is relatedto the production of new things.

By focusing on the ruins and rubbish of modernity and revealing theephemeral nature of capitalist technology, we can deconstruct the concept

of material culture as the modernist super-artefact and the supreme signi-er of universal progress and modernity (Buchli, 2002: 4; also Olsen, 2001:44). After all, we have not only learned that technological innovation is notprogressive but also that it can threaten our existence: from atomic bombsto space garbage (Fletcher, 2002: 3034; Rathje and Murphy, 1992; Shankset al., 2004: 66).

Buchli (2002: 1718) has recently written that The realm of the abject,the realm of the wasted beyond the constitutive outsides of social reality iswhere critical work needs to be done (rubbish studies, divestment studies,

the disenfranchised of globalization, the non places . . . and the generaleffects of late capitalist ephemerality) (Buchli, 2002: 1718). This meanspaying more attention to how things are released,given away, wasted, takenaway, sacriced or disposed of (Buchli, 2002: 16), issues that have already


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been approached by some authors (Lucas, 2002; Rathje, 2001). In myopinion, archaeologists, rather than material culturists, are in a privilegedposition to deal with derelict modernities. Not only the archaeological

method, so akin to forensics, but also the archaeological sensibility seemsespecially suitable for this undertaking. There is, however, some reluctanceto admit that archaeology is basically a science of the abject or of alienatedmaterial culture (Lucas, 2005: 129), though this may be proved by the factthat garbage is basically what archaeologists work with most of the time(Lucas, 2005: 1279; Rathje and Murphy, 1992; Shanks et al., 2004: 80). Oneof the clearest examples of the destructive operations of material culture iswar (Buchli,2002: 13; N.J. Saunders, 2002a: 181,1924; Schoeld et al., 2002),but major projects of social engineering (from resettlement to genocide),forced industrialization, de-industrialization, emigration and colonizationare also inherently destructive and produce enormous amounts of waste.Hall (2000: 14), for example, notes that Europes colonial expansion hasresulted in the scatter of more debris across the face of the globe than anyother phase in more than 2 million years of human history. Camilo JosVergaras book American Ruins (1999) is an outstanding example of themateriality of the abject. His gaze on the post-industrial Americanmetropolis is deeply archaeological. He explores derelict buildings fromVictorian houses to skyscrapers and discarded things bones, neons, rustycars, plaster statues: abandoned, destroyed and recycled material culture,victim of an increasingly changing world, victim of the reckless speed of supermodernity. He photographs their decay through time and capturesthem being re-used by the homeless, prostitutes or drug addicts. He regardsruins as an essential facet to understanding America (Vergara, 1999: 14),but I suggest that they are essential to understanding modernity at large.Hilla and Bernd Bechers photographs from different industrial towns inEurope show the wide dispersion of the aesthetics associated with adecadent modernity (Becher and Becher, 2002). More poignant are otherkinds of ruins that reveal an even darker side of the modernist dream: for

example, the towns and villages abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster.The abundance of web pages 1 devoted to derelict modern landscapes showthat, beyond aesthetics, our post-industrial, supermodern identities arestrongly inuenced by the ephemeral nature of the material world we livein. When we see ruins, as Aug (2003) puts it, we do not see a specicmoment of the past, not even when the ruins are so close in time as a factoryor a battleeld. What we see is time, in its purest, simplest form.

I have examined the social power of decaying material culture elsewhere,through a case study in Galicia (Spain). Modernity implied the thorough

razing of a pre-modern past there, leading to a landscape of ruins, rubbishand shattered memories (Gonzlez-Ruibal, 2005). It is impossible to under-stand the creation of the new world without paying attention to the destruc-tion of the old one. In the Galician case, modernity prevailed: a surrogate


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form of it, an antimodernity in many senses, characterized by chaos,disorder, oppression and obscurity a similar antimodernity to that experi-enced in soviet, post-soviet and fascist states. Drazin (2005: 198) points out

that national policy in communist Romania was not only to build apart-ment blocks, but explicitly destroy alternative forms of home, with theultimate aim of annihilating up to 95 per cent of all old houses (Drazin,2005: 201).

These are good examples of how the dream of reason produces monsters.The case that I would like to explore here is the archaeological remains of communist Ethiopia (197491). Ethiopias Marxist dreams produced amonster of modernity, but one which has been temporarily killed. In follow-ing the path left by the monster, this exploration will adopt the shape of anarchaeological journey through devastated lands. The idea is that anarchaeological sensibility can reveal unconscious optics as Benjamin(1968: 239) would say. Michael Shanks has addressed in several writings thearchaeological fascination for the horror that lies under the surface of things (Pearson and Shanks, 2001; Shanks, 2004). In his opinion, Thearchaeological sensibility says that we only ever have fragments to workupon, that every locale is a potential scene of crime where anything couldbe relevant, that there remains too much to be discovered beneath thesurface of things, and much that we will not like, because the stories we havebeen told are meant to console and quieten us (Shanks, 2004).

Ethiopia is the scene of a crime war, dictatorship, induced famine. Theevidence is everywhere as archaeological vestiges. Usually, grand politicalnarratives, with their coldness, distance and neutrality, conceal deep suffer-ing and intimate stories. This is my impression when reading Marcus (2002)or Bahru Zewdes (2002) otherwise superb books on Ethiopian history.Marcus, for example, emphasizes the thousands of weapons the rulers of Ethiopia were acquiring in the industrialized world since the mid-nine-teenth century (Marcus, 2002: 95, 131, 137). He deals with weaponry in amanner not dissimilar to other imports, except for the further-reaching

political implications of guns. However, I think that we cannot talk aboutthem as we can talk about cotton, steel or canned food. Furthermore, manyhistorians write about big issues, such as communism in Africa, the ColdWar, the Third World, international trade, international politics, globaliz-ation. But what about the local, the personal experiences? One feels theneed to dig beneath grand narratives, to excavate and expose sorrow.Maybe this is based on a necessity to overcome trauma, which can only bedone by exposing and sharing things (fragments, memories, stories). But itis also because we long for justice and because we want people to know.

The unearthing of mass graves produced by dictatorships and civil war inLatin America (R. Saunders, 2002), Yugoslavia (Crossland, 2002) or Spain(Silva and Macas, 2003) is driven by these concerns. So too is the sort of archaeological survey that is proposed here. Archaeology, so deeply


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embedded in the modernist project, may turn out to be, after all, a meansto de-center it and to provide elements for a critical reappraisal. In a sense,then, it could be said that this is archaeology turned against archaeology.

In 1974, Ethiopia jumped from a pre-modern world of monks, medievalkings and feudal lords to modernity in the form of communism. 2

THE BLEEDING FRONTIER

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast.There wasnt even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appearsthat the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign

drooped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out allover the low hull . . . In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, thereshe was, incomprehensible, ring into a continent. (Conrad, 1999 [1899]: 16)

The view of this is unlike any in the world. Before us, as far as the eye cansee, all the way to the distant, misty horizon, lies a at and treeless plain and it is completely covered with military equipment. To one side, stretchingfor kilometers, are elds of artillery pieces of various calibers: unendingavenues of medium and large tanks; enclosures stacked with a veritableforest of antiaircraft guns and mortars; hundreds upon hundreds of armoured trucks, small tanks, motorized radio stations, amphibious vehicles.And on the other side stand enormous hangars and warehouses, the hangarsfull of the body parts of still unassembled MIGs, the warehouses brimmingwith crates of ammunition and mines. (Kapuscinski, 2001: 3078)

These border troubles are of no signicance. In a while they will pass and thefrontier will go to sleep for another twenty years. People are not interestedin the history of the back of beyond. (Coetzee, 2000 [1980]: 125)

The war of attrition during the second part of the First World War (191618)was called by the Germans die Materialschlacht the war of material. This

new kind of war was faithfully and poignantly remembered by Ernst Jngerin his Storm of Steel . What confronted us now he says in the dawn of thebattle of the Somme was a war of matriel of the most gigantic propor-tions (Jnger, 2004: 69). From 1914 onwards, almost all armed conicts havebeen wars of material, in which steel has poured down over soldiers andcivilians alike. Thousands of tons of material culture bombs, shells, tanks,trucks, bunkers, barbed wire, concrete, rubble are mobilized in any modernwar and they do not disappear after the end of the conict: they becomeruins and rubbish folded in landscapes of abjection. Despite some recent

calls of attention to this material side of the modern war (N.J. Saunders,2002b: 101), work done to date tends to focus on consumption, monumentsand artefacts, including trench art or war memorials (Rowlands, 1999; seemost articles in N.J. Saunders, 2004), rather than landscape and materiality


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at large (N.J. Saunders, 2002b: 1067). As Olsen (2003: 93) would put it, howdo we consume a battleeld? Are not soldiers rather consumed by the battle-eld? People and landscapes are shattered by those materials to an unprece-

dented degree, thanks to the means made easier by the processes of modernity mass industrialization, transportation and mobilization. N.J.Saunders (2002a: 106) reminds us of the pre-war rural idylls that were cutand sectioned by trenches and dugouts, industrialized by high explosiveand transformed into wastelands of putrefaction, matriel, the dead and theliving. Mass material war is the military equivalent to mass consumerism.The USA threw 6.5 million tons of bombs, 400,000 tons of napalm and 11.5million gallons of defoliant on Indochina (196473). Shortly before, in 1956,America had produced 3.7 million refrigerators, 4.5 million washingmachines and 3.5 million kitchen ranges (Rathje and Murphy, 1992: 188).Fresh Kills, New Yorks former landll, hosts 100 million tons of rubbish(Rathje and Murphy, 1992: 3). During the Cold War, both America and theSoviet Union ooded Third World countries with colossal amounts of weapons. These have all left scars.

After 17 years of ruthless exhibition of power and civil war, the commu-nist regime of Ethiopia was defeated in 1991 by a coalition of rebel forces,consisting mainly of the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary DemocraticFront (EPRDF) and the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF), butalso the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liber-ation Front (OLF). Unexpectedly, the greatest African army 313,000soldiers and the most advanced Soviet weapons collapsed. Eritrea got itsindependence, Ethiopia became a federal state and communism vanished.In the 1980s, Ethiopia devoted 43 per cent of its budget to defense (Patman,1990: 279). Between 1977 and 1987 it received US$8 billion worth of weapons from the USSR, and satellites (Patman, 1990: 259), a gure thatincluded around 138 military aircraft (MIG-17, 21, 23), 1300 tanks (T-54/55,T-62) and 1100 armoured vehicles (BMP, BRDM, ZSU) (Patman, 1990:Table 14, with additions): the effect of the deterritorialization of the Revol-

ution (Donham, 1999: 122). At the same time, around one million peopledied of starvation or starvation-related diseases in 19845. This, like thesubsequent war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, was a pre-modern war inpost-modern times (Negash and Tronvoll, 2001: 97103).

In 1991 Colonel Mengistus soldiers abandoned their brand new militarytechnology and returned home. This abandoned technology still lies whereit was either left or destroyed by the enemy. As Kapuscinski (2001: 313)notes, it is possible to bring a tank to Ethiopia and it is possible to re withit, but, when it breaks down, or someone torches it, there is really nothing

to be done with the wreckage. Astonishingly quick, tanks become archaeo-logical artefacts, monuments to the failures of modernity.Benishangul is a region in western Ethiopia, along the Sudanese border,

around 600 km west from Addis Ababa, the capital of the country. It has


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been depicted as a no-mans land, always shifting hands between empires,states and colonial territories (Triulzi, 1981). But this is a state perspective:a vision from the powerful center. In Benishangul, the margin is the center,

it lies at the heart of the cultural experience of its inhabitants. It is a placeof mixture and miscegenation, but also of resistance. Due to their strategicposition, between the Sahel and the Ethiopian Highlands, Benishangul hasbeen crossed by all sorts of armies time and again,as well as by slave raiders,adventurers and colonists. Each crossing has left its scars.

As any other frontier, Benishangul is a uid territory, a land of transitionand movement, but also of violence and war.

One can cross the articial frontier between Ethiopia and Sudan quiteeasily. Until very recently,it depended on the war in southern Sudan. In mostof the borderland it can hardly be noticed that one has passed a line thesame thick savannah at both sides of the imaginary line, the same people,the same languages. There are some spots, however, where the boundary ismade more physical, more dense: Gizen, Kurmuk. We have tried to crosstwice through Kurmuk and failed both times. In Kurmuk, the frontier isphysically riddled with a series of abandoned trenches, sniper holes, fencesand barbed wire, as well as by a couple of guard posts and barriers. Militaryrubbish is scattered, half-buried, throughout the trenches. War debris repre-sents the more solid and identifying materiality of the place: there is onlyone brick-made building in the village, devoted to administrative purposes.The rest are imsy adobe and wood huts, with some sheets of corrugatediron. Kurmuk was razed in 1987 by the Sudanese army in its ght againstthe southern rebels. Hospitals, schools and a water reservoir were demol-ished by artillery from Sudan (James, 2002: 265). The place is now sprayedwith anti-aircraft ammunition, probably used by the Sudanese PeoplesLiberation Army (SPLA) to repel the army of the Islamic government. Weknow that both Kurmuk and Gizen were again taken by the SPLA later thesame year. The Sudanese government developed a campaign in the MiddleEast to gain support in order to recover these settlements, which were

presented as cities of the Arab homeland (James, 2002: 267). A few ruinedshacks amidst mangos and acacias in the middle of Africa transformed intoa mythical place of struggle among civilizations: the local made global agood example of the pulverized space of postmodernity (Gupta andFerguson, 2002: 68). In January 1997 the SPLA conquered Gizen again. Acommuniqu was issued by the rebel army, stating that

[T]hey captured 12 T-55 tanks, eight 122mm howitzer guns, nine 120mmmortar bombs, three 12-Matra 107mm rockets, six 106mm anti-tank guns,fteen 82-mm mortar bombs, forty nine rocket-propelled grenades, four

American-made bazookas, thirty three DSHK machine guns, thirty fourPGM guns, 677 AK-47 ries, 212 G3 ries, 20 lorries, 12 eld communicationradio sets and a huge quantity of assorted ammunition and a quantity of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. (Miheisi, 1997)


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They also claimed to have killed 1260 government soldiers. Matriel war inAfrica: weapons from the USA (bazookas), Germany (G3 ries), France(Matra rockets), Belgium (PGM guns), the Soviet Union (T-55 tanks,

DSHK machine guns). Modern material culture from all over the planetoverows the poorest countries of the world. It becomes necessary to doan archaeology of globalized war. Inventories, numbers, lists of weaponsand casualties say almost nothing. The web pages of Matra (now Siemens),Heckler und Koch or FN Herstal, military ventures that supply in one wayor another killing technology to Africans, are outrageously aloof and clean.Archaeology is not about cleanliness. Furthermore, it can deconstruct(ideological) cleanliness. As it has been said, archaeology has to do with theabject. And what is more abject than the remains of war?

We managed to pass through Gizen in 2003. It was a truly archaeologicalexperience.

The frontier space in Gizen, unlike that in Kurmuk, is devoid of any realmarker: no barbed wire, nor fence, nor barriers. The landscape of acacias,mangoes and palm trees is very much the same for a long stretch. Thereare, however, some archaeological traces that hint at the peculiar nature of this place. First, there is an abandoned building which recalls an old customshouse. The materials employed in its construction (brick, concrete) and theshape are out of place in a village of thatch and mud houses. Abandonedas it is, it still fullls a function, materializing a notion of frontier. However,the line is marked very physically in another way: the space near thecustoms house is slashed open with zigzag trenches and sniper pits. Theiroriginal function was obviously not marking the frontier, but they mark itnevertheless, and they categorize the frontier as a place of ghting anddeath. They demarcate a space in perpetual tension. When were thesetrenches made? It is hard to say, given the continuous state of war in thearea during the last 20 years. We can blame the war in southern Sudan,between the SPLA, supported by the Ethiopian communist regime, and theIslamic government, or the Ethiopian war, between the communist regime

and their many enemies (EPRDF, TPLF, Oromo Liberation Front). Thetrenches and dugouts could have been prepared by any of the warringparties and later occupied by others friends or enemies time and timeagain (Gizen and Kurmuk have been changing hands continuously duringthe last two decades). All the frontier wars are gathered together and mixedinto these particular sorts of material culture.

What about the small nds? Could they help us to furnish a date? Therewere 7.65 mm bullets, the standard caliber of the AK-47 although severalother weapons found in the area use the same ammunition (Mosin Nagants,

from the Second World War, or Simonovs, widely used by the Vietcong).They may be related to the 677 AK-47 ries mentioned in the SPLAcommuniqu of 1997. Other small nds were 20 mm bullets. These belongto anti-aircraft guns and machine-guns attached to armored vehicles. Both


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the 7.65 mm and the much larger 20 mm ammunitions were shot bySudanese soldiers, by SPLA rebels, by Tigrean and Amhara rebels(EPRDF) and Oromo guerrillas (OLF) ghting against the Derg (the

Committee: the communist government) and by the troops of the Dergthemselves. These bullets are not innocent things. They have a dark aura.An empty shell casing, left by a projectile red against another humanbeing, is not like a potsherd. A ton of hand grenades is not the same as aton of cotton. Both bullet and sherd convey stories and both gather dramaand intimate experience. But bullets speak of fear, hate and suffering, madeworse by the dreadful situation in which African wars are fought. A 20 mmbullet can blow someones head off, it can tear an arm apart and a personcan bleed to death, while being frantically dragged through a thick andbrittle bamboo forest. The forest and the trenches packed with debris of war conceal a tragedy that will never reach the books of history in its rawestform.

Past the trenches, there is dark and vast mango forest and then a river,the Tumet, a wide bed of sand and pebbles during the dry season. We arenow in Sudan. How do we know? The soldiers we meet along the path nolonger have AK-47 but British FN FAL. British neocolonialism: these weresold to Sudan when it was already an independent state. Material cultureacts as an ethnic marker, but it also informs us of macropolitics, macro-economic relations mapped up into local and intimate tragedies.

The Sudanese side of the frontier appears to carry fewer scars. Still, thereare archaeological remains everywhere. Some of the buildings were likelybuilt during the British colonial rule. They are marked by bullet holes andgrafti. One piece of grafti reads Commandos and displays a warlike logoof a winged-skull (reality imitating bad ction). The doors of the barrackshave been painted green the color of Islam. Amidst some of the British-style buildings, there is an abandoned operating table from the 1950s. It liesoutdoors, glittering under the sun. Perhaps it was a souvenir from colonialtimes? Curiously, the Sudanese soldiers do not occupy these buildings

except for bartering: the frontier is an open market. They live in a smallcluster of mud huts, dotted with palm trees, located a few hundred metersaway from the more durable colonial premises.

What are the manifestations of modernity in this frontier? Shells,trenches, a rusty operating table. Modernity is torn to pieces and looksabsurd among mud huts.

Asosa, the capital of Benishangul, is located 100 km from Kurmuk andGizen. It sits very close to the steep escarpment that falls to Sudan. Asosais also a frontier town. During the Sudanese Civil War, the SPLA had a base

here (James, 2002: 267). After the Derg, Asosa has been converted into animportant political and economic center for the region. However, we canstill encounter the scars of war everywhere. Archaeological traces take theform of artefacts, structures, tombs. Along a dirt track southwards, and


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protecting the access to the city, we nd a Soviet T-55 tank entrenched in adeep hole. It aims nowhere (Figure 1). 3 A dozen meters to the right thereis a small grove of mangos; 7.65 mm bullets and some rusty 122 mm

howitzer shells lie scattered through the area. A cannon lies not far away.Its wheels have been looted. The place speaks of a erce battle. The tank,probably having run out of fuel, was embedded as xed artillery. We knowthat the Oromo Liberation Front attacked Asosa, previously held by Dergtroops, during a retreat in 1988. A modern hospital built by the USSR wasrazed to the ground in the wake of the battle (Patman, 1990: 267). Amassacre of all those deemed sympathizers of the communist regimeensued. Around 300 people, including women and children, were murderedoutside Asosa (Young, 1999: 327).

Some 25 km southeast from Asosa is the small town of Bambasi. At aplace called Anbessa Chaka (The Forest of the Lion), both sides of theroad are littered with the waste of war: anti-aircraft guns, military trucks,shrapnel. An interview conducted in 2005 in a neighboring village shed lighton the events that produced this. We were told that two battles were foughthere, one in 1990, when the war against the Derg was nearing its end, andthe other one in 1992 (cf. Young, 1999: 3278). The former took placebetween the communist army and Oromo pro-independence guerrillas(OLF), the latter between the OLF ghters and the army of the new

Figure 1 An entrenched Soviet T-55 tank in Asosa


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government (EPRDF). Many of these battles have left no documentationand their remembrance is contingent on the participants and witnessesaccounts. My informants sadly remembered how they had to bury hundreds

of corpses left behind by the regular army, in order to avoid diseases spread-ing from the rotten bodies, while at the same time fearing the reprisals of the victorious guerrillas for helping the enemy. When the last witnesses die,only the archaeological remains will speak of these terrible events. Yet thearchaeological record is not so nuanced take an anti-aircraft gun mountedon a truck in Anbessa Chaka, for example. We cannot tell with certainty if it took part in the rst battle or the second one. From the point of view of political history it is of limited help, given the ne-grained data needed bythe historians of the contemporary world. But this war machine may tell of many things that historians, reading ofcial documents or newspapers,cannot. If we look carefully at the rusting carcass of the machine, we willsee hundreds of small holes perforating its metallic sheet. There is a bigger,more circular hole in the platform that supported the machine gun. Aroundthese vestiges, there are many exploded 20 mm cartridges. Most likely, thetruck was driven over a landmine. The explosion destroyed the truck, per-forated with fragments its panel, and ripped apart the anti-aircraft gun(Figure 2). The same explosion set off all the cartridges transported by thetruck. More than likely, everybody in the truck was killed, either from theforce of the explosion or the ying shrapnel. This means at least a driverand a co-driver, but photographs of the period show all kinds of militaryvehicles overcrowded with soldiers. Archaeology may not inform us indetail about specic events (On 27 June 1990 government troops wereattacked and defeated by the Oromo Liberation Front), but it speaks of perforated, dismembered bodies, of very concrete, tangible episodes thatconvey the horror of the event and personal experiences better than manymonotonous ofcial les.

Archaeology, as Laurent Olivier (2004) has pointed out, is not abouthistory, but about memory. And ruins are not about history, but about time.

What is the role of the archaeology of the present if most of the featureswe explore are already extraordinarily well documented? I think, as Shanks(1997) says, that our mission is rescuing the ineffable, mediating theuncanny. It is also about revealing the aura of things. Benjamin (1968:2245) bemoaned the demise of the aura in the age of mechanical repro-duction. For him, serial reproduction overcomes uniqueness. But the Sovietwar machinery in the middle of nowhere has something unique. Despitebeing a typical industrial product, each tank fossilizes a particular episodeof violence, despair, hatred or relief. The effects of time on their steel shells

and their location in the landscape add to their uniqueness. Moreover, aswith many modern ruins in Ethiopia, we can talk of abandoned war machin-ery as lethal and sinister works of art, in a Heideggerian sense, because


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they change the world around them (for the mere fact of standing up therein permanence, [the work of art] gives things its face and men the vision of themselves) and because they show as much as they conceal (Heidegger,1995: 35). In this tension or battle ( Kampf ) between revealed truth andobscurity, between what can be and cannot be known, is where the work of art lies.

Not far from the small town of Bambasi there is a rocky hill, that rises

high above a thick bamboo forest, called Kunda Damo. It hosts an archaeo-logical site from 2000 years ago that has yielded some potsherds and stonetools (Fernndez Martnez,2004). There is, however,a more recent archaeo-logical layer in the site. The place is littered with hundreds of rust-eatencans. Kunda Damo was once an outpost of the Derg army. There are noshell casings nor are there any other war remains on the surface, so mostlikely no battle ever took place in or around the hill. But it is impressive tosee so many food cans from a period the 1980s when hundreds of thou-sands of people were starving to death in many parts of Ethiopia. Soldiers

were well fed with Russian canned food. In a sense, this particular site isexemplary of the dramatic history of the 19845 famine. Ironically, Ethiopiadoubled its food exports in 1984 (a portion of it went to Europe), when the

Figure 2 Exploded 20 mm shells in Anbessa Chaka (Bambasi)


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very same year 1 million people died from starvation (Girma Kebbede,1992: 78), and around US$50 million were spent in the celebration of the10th anniversary of the Revolution (Donham, 1999: 13; Girma Kebbede,

1992: 77). This was more than all the external relief aid sent to alleviate thefamine that struck the country that same year. Archaeology can unearthand bring to light the absurdity of a doomed political regime. Is there anybetter metaphor for representing the banality of evil than a trivial andinsignicant can?

The surroundings of Asosa are now densely settled by peasants from thefamine-beaten region of Wollo, in the Highlands of northeastern Ethiopia.Peasants were massively re-settled by the Derg in the 1980s (see later). Intheir houses, and also in some local homesteads, we nd helmets re-used asdrinking troughs for hens. Some of them are American M1 helmets, usedby the Ethiopian army in Haile Selassies times,after the Second World War.They were given, along with tanks and other weapons (several milliondollars worth), to the Emperor by the USA, who were eager to have ananti-communist stronghold in Eastern Africa (Marcus, 1983: 1067). Thereare also Russian helmets, employed by the Derg army. Again, archaeo-logical remains talk to us about global events: these helmets cannot bedetached from the wider context of the Cold War. They are intimatelyconnected with decisions taken in Washington and Moscow. Yet they arealso linked to a very local and personal experience of war, dispossessionand suffering. They act as a metaphor of globalization: in those rustyhelmets lies an insoluble tension between the global and the local. Whowore these helmets? Markos, one of our friends in Asosa, was abductedfrom his hamlet in the bush, when he was still a child, and taken to ght inEritrea with an RPG anti-tank gun. He is a member of the Komo group, aNiloSaharan-speaking community of slash-and-burn agriculturalists fromthe connes of the EthioSudanese borderland. But his local worldsuddenly collided with global politics one day around two decades ago,when he was recruited by the Derg army. His Chinese or Russian rocket

launcher was probably one of the rst foreign-made products he had everused.

The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been matureenough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not beensufciently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society [. . .]

Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiarybombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a newway. (Benjamin, 1968 [1955]: 244)

It is immoral to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into the developmentof homicide means when millions starve and are devoid of everydaynecessities. (Mikhail Gorbachev, quoted in Patman, 1990: 257)


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CATHEDRALS IN THE DESERT

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a

document of barbarism. (Benjamin, 1968 [1955]: 258)Ethiopia will not come to Socialism by bull and wooden plough. (ColonelMengistu Haile Mariam, quoted in Patman, 1990: 275)

Keep the yoke and the ploughshare in the granary, We will plow with themwhen good days come. (Amhara song, quoted in Getie Gelaye, 1999: 193)

Modernity, for many Ethiopians, has been experienced under the cloak of war. But it has also come under other robes. Millions of Ethiopians sufferedre-settlement and villagization between the early 1970s and the late 1980s

(Dessalegn Ramato, 2003; Pankhurst, 1992; Tadesse Berisso, 2002), in aphenomenal initiative of social engineering. Mass displacement came withmodern agricultural technology: tractors and large collective silos(Figure 3) superseded plows and small family granaries. A typical modernistnightmare, the new villages were designed as perfect Hippodamian layouts,allowing a strict control of people and activities. In some places, squarehouses were made to replace the traditional round ones. The impersonalnames of the new settlements Village 1, Village 2 and so on also reveal

Figure 3 Abandoned collective silos in Amba 14 (Asosa)


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the de-humanizing character of the resettlement process. This can berelated to a wider effort of encadrement incorporation to structures of control by the Derg (Clapham, 2002: 14). The obsession with transform-

ing and ordering space with the aim of transforming and re-ordering societyis typical of totalitarian regimes (Buchli, 1999; Ghirardo,1989; Jaskot, 2000),although its origins can be traced back to the Enlightenment. It is then thatarchitecture and urbanism began to be regarded as a function of the aimsand techniques of the government of societies, in which order, hygiene andmorals have a prominent place (Foucault, 2000 [1982]: 349). In Ethiopia,similar enterprises had been undertaken by American missionaries, asshown by the perfect regularity and military appearance of Protestantmissions (Donham,1999: Fig. 14). Ironically, this previous modernist experi-ence made the Revolution more attractive for those who had been exposedto the evangelistic creed (Donham, 1999: 823). Not all attempts to re-spatialize society are intrinsically reactionary or violent (Tarlow, 2002), butthose promoted by twentieth-century dictators certainly were, mainlybecause of their compulsory, de-humanized nature.

Fascism in Italy, like other totalitarian regimes, was metaphoricallydescribed as a construction yard and Mussolini as the builder and architectof the Italian reconstruction (Ghirardo, 1989: 24). What this rhetoric didnot take into account was all the things fascism was destroying: fromtraditional villages and historic urban houses to ancient monuments. Theeffect of the dramatic spatial re-ordering in premodern communities couldnot be more devastating from a cultural, social and psychological point of view. Donham (1999: 1), in his ethnographic study of Ethiopian Marxism,has pointed out that revolution is the concept most central to modernism.And there is nothing more repulsive to a peasant society than dramaticchange. The modern utopia, based on assumed European Marxian prin-ciples and a Soviet praxis, was aimed at creating a new society from scratch,irrespective of the local peculiarities settlements based on kin andsymbolic principles, the fact that many peasants already controlled their

own means of production or that land was not central to many groups(Donham, 1999: 27, 31). The process bears some similarities to constructivedreams of other communist states. Victor Buchli (1999: 44) has shown howin the Soviet Union metal and concrete were identied with the Revolution,as opposed to the wood massively used in traditional peasant houses fromthe Tsarist era (Buchli, 1999: 44). The new materials metaphorically stoodfor Russias modernization and industrialization, while pre-revolutionarymaterial culture was equated with dirt. Similarly, clean corrugated iron inEthiopia was to supersede lthy straw and wood, although this goal could

never be achieved. As in the Soviet case, the replacement of material wasbased both on hygienic and ideological reasons. By 1990, the re-settlementproject had proved unprotable in social and economic terms and thepeasants were allowed to de-villagize, leaving behind a terrible legacy of


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ecological disasters, ethnic tensions and spreading of illnesses among thehost populations (Dessalegn Ramato, 2003: 537). Thousands of the re-settlers dismantled their huts and reconstructed their previous homes

(Tadesse Berisso, 2002: 118).Again, traveling through Ethiopia is an archaeological journey into thedarkest heart of modernity. All experiments in industrialization and inten-sive farming either failed or were suddenly abandoned after 1991. This hasled to an unexpected return to the premodern ways of life that were aban-doned with villagization. Traditional churches thrive, work parties haveregained importance, elders are trusted again with the organization of thecommunity, and family plots substitute large collective elds (Pankhurst,2002). Nevertheless, many people (among them my informants from Village14) complain that they have lost many advantages that they enjoyed duringthe communist period. Such advantages included mechanized agriculture,which facilitated their work, free seeds, free electric mills and free andaccessible health services. Astonishingly, tractors, electric mills and collec-tive silos have been replaced now by plows (Figure 4), quern stones andsmall granaries in domestic compounds. The lasting improvements of thecommunist regime seem to be an unprecedented extension of literacy andthe end of feudalism, paradoxically those aspects less related to moderntechnology.

The surroundings of Asosa were settled with Amhara people from thenortheastern Highland province of Wollo between 1980 and 1984 in orderto alleviate the pressure on this famine-beaten and badly eroded region.Nowadays, around 100,000 inhabitants of Benishangul-Gumuz are of Amhara origin, i.e. 22 per cent of the whole population (Census, 1994). Wemiss Wollo very much, the elders tell me time and again in Amba 14. Thebirthplace is now remembered as a lost Eden they were snatched from andit recurs in our conversations. As in other parts of Ethiopia, immigrantswere distributed in ambas , independent villages laid out on an orthogonalplan. To these ambas large plots of collective land were allotted. There are

around 20 of them in the surroundings of Asosa. Ideally, they were endowedwith communal facilities clinics, schools, silos, barns, stalls and agricul-tural technology tractors, trucks, harvesters. They were designed as islandsof modernity amidst an ocean of wilderness. Today, machines are left disem-boweled, rusting under the sun. Most modern buildings lie deserted andhollow, besieged by the encroachment of traditional domestic compoundsand threshing oors. Part of the modern debris is processed by local smithsin the production of premodern technology: sickles, knives or spears. In astrange and ironic twist upon modernitys notion of progress, parts from

tractors and trucks become plowshares and fragments of tanks becomespears. A similar recycling of modernity, and especially its war matriel, hasbeen observed in other landscapes shattered by conict, such as Vietnam(Hickey, 1993: 232). In some Ethiopian villages, tires from agricultural


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Figure 4 Abandoned tractors in Bambasi (above) and a Highland settlerplowing near Bambasi (below)


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machinery are used as threshing boxes or troughs. Collective silos that wereconceived to store large cereal crops are now mostly abandoned or used byindividual families to store rewood. Communist-founded villages are no

longer distinguishable from other traditional settlements in Ethiopia.Modernity has melted into the air, or rather, into the smiths furnace.The ruins of modernity are especially poignant in places like the

premises of the Tana-Beles project. This was a colossal enterprise in thelowland region of Metekel devised by the Italians in 1985. It was the timeof Bettino Craxi, when corruption poisoned Italian politics to an amazingdegree. Craxi collaborated with the scum of African dictators (Siad Barre,Ben Ali, Mengistu Haile Mariam) and several companies grew rich withabsurd development projects. The Tana-Beles plan consisted in severaldams, channels and irrigation schemes that involved an extensive clearanceof the local forests (75,000 ha) and a massive re-settlement of Highlandfarmers in order to increase food production. The aim was twofold: doubleEthiopias hydroelectric power and save from starvation 200,000 peasants.This was conceived without any regard to the human and ecological impli-cations of such a megalomaniac enterprise, like many similar macro-projects in the Soviet Union some of them glimpsed in Kapuscinskis

Imperium (1994). The project included a rice-processing factory, a pipefactory, a plastic factory, a clinic, guest houses, ofce buildings, housing forworkers, a meeting hall, an airport, etc. Metekel was described by theEthiopian authorities as extremely fertile and deserted like most areasthat received settlers (Clay and Holcomb, 1985: 163, 168). It is fertile butnot deserted: it is inhabited by a group of swidden cultivators the Gumuz who have preserved their traditional way of life against all odds. Since theMiddle Ages, they have endured enslavement, dispossession of their landsand even simple extermination (James, 1988). Italians tried to bringdevelopment and civilization to the densely forested savannah of Metekeland they failed. The project was a neocolonial one, and that explains itsresemblance with older colonial enterprises. From an archaeological point

of view, they generate a very similar form of rubbish. The Tana-Beles projectcan be described in three words: globalization, waste and ruins.The local needs of Ethiopians collided with global concerns. The project

started in 1988 with an initial expenditure of US$300 million. In order tocarry out the hydroelectric and irrigation plans, ve dams had to beconstructed, as well as channels that could bring water from Lake Tana(Africas second largest lake) to the Beles river, a tributary of the Nile. Andthis is where problems began for Ethiopia: Egypt blocked a loan from theAfrican Development Bank, fearing that the project would consume too

much Blue Nile water (Kendie, 1999: 158). Cairo has asserted repeatedly itsdecision to go to war if Ethiopia tries to divert water from the Nile. Thus, theplan could not be brought to completion. And nobody thought about the80,000 human beings stranded against their will in a hostile and remote land.


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And then there is waste. The Tana-Beles project has to be contextualizedin other failed development policies of the First World in the 1980s. Italyspent around 195 billion lire to build, as somebody put it, cathedrals in the

desert (Paronetto, 2002). Some of these schemes are mentioned by van derPutten (1995), and include a useless dam in Mozambique. An unusabletextiles factory in Ethiopia. A superuous university in Somalia. A hugecentral hospital in a region populated by nomads. A chemical fertilizerfactory where there was no electricity. Hundreds of silos of unusablematerial. The export of redundant, unusable or harmful products. Yet theseabsurd undertakings had their winners: the businessmen hired by theWestern governments to carry out the development plans. An engineer of the Tana Beles project confessed that the more we spent, the more weearned (Rossi, 2004). With a government willing to pay for everything, nomatter how ludicrous the request, a whole pipe factory was built in the Belesvalley, which worked only for the time needed to furnish materials. It wouldhave been much cheaper to bring the pipes from elsewhere (Rossi, 2004).

And nally ruins. Global politics and thoughtless expenditure conspiredtogether to produce a post-apocalyptic landscape: abandoned factories,warehouses, administrative buildings, guest houses, roads and bridgesthreatened by the forest. Only 30,000 out of 80,000 re-settled people remainin the area. Others died of malaria, famine or diarrhea; some managed toescape. This devastated landscape is even more depressing for those whopinned their hopes on the project for developing the country. An Ethiopianscholar, Tesfaye Tafesse, complained in a recent interview: Sadly, what yousee there now are relics machinery, bulldozers and lots of property(Taddesse, 2003). Facing these ruins of modernity, it is hard not to bring upConrads description of a Belgian outpost in the Congo: I came upon aboiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading up the hill. It turnedaside for the boulders, and also for an undersized railway-truck lying thereon its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as deadas the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machin-

ery, a stack of rusty rails . . . I discovered that a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasnt one thatwas not broken. It was a wanton smash-up (Conrad, 1999 [1899]: 1719).The irresistible overabundance of modernity.

Salini Costruzioni have created an archaeological site in the middle of the lowland jungle. The dream of reason produces rubbish.

We visited the Tana-Beles in 2003 and 2005, almost 15 years after it wasabandoned. The forest is now slowly eating the buildings (Figure 5). It is aghostly place: large landscaped avenues, with street lamps and trees. Lots

of metallic containers everywhere. European-style ofce buildings ankingthe avenues. At night, the lamps still glow with phantom light. The airdromeis full of weeds and bushes. The gas station is taken by cows and sheep thatgraze peacefully among the rusty Agip tanks. There is an abandoned control


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tower and a blown-up anti-aircraft gun near the landing strip. We slept ina long corrugated-iron-roofed building where the Italians used to be hosted.Indoors it is dismal and uncanny. Outside, there is an empty swimming pooland trees and lianas sprouting everywhere. Two Italian engineers werekidnapped by the EPRP (Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Party) in 1987.Some 30 soldiers and guerrilla ghters died in the operation. Months later,

another Italian was kidnapped, to be released a year later. One Italian diedof malaria. The re-settlement of people from the Highlands killed morepeople than famine during its implementation in the 1980s.

The place is no longer modern. The peasants from Highland Ethiopia re-settled around these buildings, like those in Asosa, are returning to theirtraditional ways of life. Their neighbors, the Gumuz, have never abandonedthem. They walk through dusty trails among the disturbing ruins of factoriesand machines, men with their bows and arrows, women carrying calabashesand rewood. Tractors, ofces and street lamps are the past here; bows,

pottery and digging sticks, the present. Dreamers of progress dreamt of cutting history off at the pass (Donham, 1999: 130), but history struck back.From tractors to plows; a reversed stratigraphic sequence, archaeologistswould call it. An evolutionist nightmare: the dream of reason.

Figure 5 The entrance to the rice-processing factory in the Tana-Belesproject, as it was in June 2005


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TITANIC

Archaeology has been portrayed as an ally of the worst modernist dreams,including colonialism and fascism. This alliance has implied a strong engage-ment with modern technologies of representation, surveillance and control a fact perhaps best expressed in its often unacknowledged relationshipwith the military (cf. Chadha, 2002; Witmore, 2004). In this article, I havetried to show how archaeology, despite its strong involvement in all thingsmodern,can still adopt a critical stance towards them and especially towardsmodernitys most abject by-products. With this intention in mind, andrunning against the common tenet, I have approached modernity as aninherently destructive process. Archaeology working on what is left from

the past (ruins and rubbish), as Michael Shanks reminds us (Pearson andShanks, 2001: 913) seems particularly suitable for unveiling the darkestside of the modern project. I have resorted to an archaeological sensibility or poetics (Shanks,1992: 18093) for undertaking a journey through land-scapes of abjection: territories devastated by war, famine, disease and forcedre-settlement, all fostered by a dream of reason gone berserk. Furthermore,by exposing the ironic and painful end of supermodern technology inEthiopia, I have tried to deconstruct the weakness and contingency of ournotions of the modernist super-artefact (Buchli, 2002: 4), still as present in

archaeology as they are in common Western thought.

Figure 6 The Titanic picture in a Bar in Nekemte (Oromia)


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Although now the passion is fading away, James Camerons Titanic is stilleverywhere in Ethiopia. You can see Leonardo di Caprio in T-shirts and thesinking ship on bars and shops murals (Figure 6). Why are the Ethiopians

so fond of the lm? Is it not ironic that in a country where millions of peoplehave died of hunger, war and disease in the last two decades, the Westerndrama of the Titanic, where a few thousand whites died, could provoke anyemotion? In fact, most Ethiopians have never watched the movie. Theysimply know what it is about. And it is about the failure of modernity.Modern technology sinking, helpless before Nature. The ship was a colossal,pharaonic work of the most advanced technology of the moment, oatingover the sea. It is hard not to see there a metaphor for the Tana-Beles project,the Derg kolzhozes, the model farms, the military landlls, the industrialrubbish along the roads, sunk in the jungles and deserts of Ethiopia.Although, in different senses, both the Titanic and the Derg were dreams of reason. And they both sank to the bottom, leaving a trail of corpses behind.

AcknowledgementsFirst of all, I want to thank the people from Benishangul-Gumuz who have providedinformation for this article. I am especially indebted to Tesfano Tesfaye and his family,as well as to the people from Amba 14 (Asosa) for their hospitality and collabor-ation. Also, I am very grateful to Geremew Feyissa, Dawit Tibebu and GeremewYenesew, who have been much more than reliable translators. This article is basedon eldwork carried out in four seasons between 2000 and 2005 in Benishangul-Gumuz National Regional State (western Ethiopia). It is part of a wider archaeo-logical and ethnoarchaeological project directed by Professor Vctor M. FernndezMartnez (Departamento de Prehistoria, Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Thearticle owes a lot to our conversations. Fieldwork was funded by the UniversidadComplutense de Madrid and the Direccin General de Bellas Artes (SpanishMinistry of Culture). The writing of the article has been possible, thanks to aMEC/Fulbright post-doctoral fellowship,which funds my stay at the Stanford Archae-ology Center. I want to thank Bill Rathje, Chris Witmore and Vctor Fernndez fortheir attentive reading of different drafts of this article and for their many valuablesuggestions, which have improved the article. I am also grateful for the insightfulremarks offered by several anonymous referees. Any errors remain my own.

Notes1 A few good examples:

www.thederelictsensation.comwww.ghosttowngallery.com

www.abandoned-places.comwww.forgotten-places.com

2 In fact, the drift towards a Marxist-Leninist regime was not completed at leastuntil 1977. A penetrating summary of the Revolution is offered by Donham(1999: 1335; 12250).


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3 Further photographs related to this article can be found in:archaeography.com/photoblog/authors.shtml#Alfredo

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ALFREDO GONZLEZ-RUIBALis an MEC-Fulbright Post-DoctoralFellow at the Stanford Archaeology Center and a member of the StanfordMetaMedia Lab. He has conducted archaeological research in Spain,Ethiopia and Brazil, exploring the failures of modernity and their impact

in traditional communities. His interests include the archaeology of thecontemporary past, ethnoarchaeology, the material culture of non-industrial societies, colonialism, globalization and domestic space.[email: [email protected]]

gonzález 2006 the dream of reason an archaeology of the failures of modernity in ethiopia

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