Records of Dispossession: Archival Thinking and UNESCO’s Nubian Campaign in Egypt and Sudan

Link to Seminar: https://youtu.be/WO84-qUJovI (Please note that the seminar will be available for viewing until the 27th of July)

** Live Q&A session on Monday 1st of June, 4 P.M. To participate, please email to africanarchaeology.cambridge@gmail.com ** 

In this talk, Dr William Carruthers (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of East Anglia) will discuss the creation of architectural and archaeological archives in newly independent Egypt and Sudan during the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, organized by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). This initiative took place in the contiguous border regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia from 1960 until 1980 in response to the building of the Aswan High Dam. Contingency in these archives demonstrates the necessity of acknowledging the (post-) colonial social and historical conditions in which they were produced. UNESCO’s campaign sought to record ancient remains that would be submerged by the High Dam’s floodwaters. During the campaign, UNESCO set up ‘documentation centres’ that helped codify what knowledge about Nubian architecture/archaeology might be archive-worthy, producing index cards dedicated to this purpose in Egypt (concentrating on monuments) and Sudan (centring on archaeological sites). This practice – echoed by other organizations involved in the work – was often purposefully forgetful of contemporary Nubia, whose material traces were also soon to be flooded. Nevertheless, such practices rendered visible other unauthorised histories of Nubia that subverted archival knowledge production: histories of local involvement with the campaign and now-submerged Nubian settlements.

William Carruthers is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia. He holds a PhD (2014) in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. Carruthers was previously a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow (2014–15) at the European University Institute, Florence, and a Gerda Henkel Stiftung Postdoctoral Research Scholar (2016–18) at the German Historical Institute London.