Colonial archaeology’s erasure: How Baghdad’s antiquities dealers reshaped global museums—while local excavators were written out of history
Original framing: “Letters reveal forgotten role of Baghdad antiquities dealers in early 20th-century Kish excavations” — Phys.org
The most glaring omission in the original framing is the absence of the voices of the Baghdad antiquities dealers themselves, whose families and descendants are still grappling with the legacy of this erasure. Marginalized voices here include not only the dealers but also contemporary Iraqi archaeologists who have spent decades challenging the colonial narrative, such as Dr. Lamia Al-Gailani Werr, who has advocated for the recognition of Iraqi contributions to archaeology. Their perspectives reveal how this erasure is not just historical but ongoing, with modern institutions continuing to prioritize Western narratives over local ones. Restoring these voices would mean centering the dealers as active agents in their own history, rather than passive figures in a Western-led story.
The erasure of Baghdad’s antiquities dealers from the narrative of Kish’s excavations is not an isolated oversight but a systemic feature of colonial archaeology, where local knowledge was extracted, commodified, and then dismissed as irrelevant to the ‘official’ history.
This case reveals how power operates in knowledge production—not just through physical control of artifacts but through the deliberate suppression of the intellectual and material labor of marginalized actors. The dealers, operating at the intersection of trade, scholarship, and survival, were both victims and agents of this system, their contributions obscured by the same institutions that now claim ownership of Mesopotamian heritage. To correct this, solutions must move beyond repatriation to include reparative storytelling, co-authorship, and the restoration of local knowledge systems as living, dynamic forces. The trickster dimension here is critical: the dealers’ very existence as intermediaries exposes the fraud of the ‘discovery’ myth, while their descendants now hold the key to rewriting history on their own terms.