American Archaeologists in Iran, Iranian Antiquities in America

Iran and the United States were once allies and geopolitical partners in Western Asia. Today, as the result of four decades of hostility following the Islamic Revolution, the two nations are bitter enemies. And yet, despite sanctions, proxy wars and mutual enmity, these two nations are durably linked in the form of Iranian cultural heritage stored in American institutions. Indeed, nearly every major art and archaeology museum in the United States has a collection of objects from Iran. Some of these collections are modest, such as those of the St. Louis Art Museum and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Fine Art in Kansas City, whose catalogs list one hundred or fewer items from Iran. Others are massive, such as those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, whose Iranian holdings number in the tens of thousands. Some of the finer pieces on display—e.g., rugs, illuminated manuscripts, metalwork, glazed ceramic vessels and the like—arrived in these museums through donations from wealthy collectors and dealers who acquired Iranian antiquities during various vogues for Persian art. The bulk of these collections, however, comprise more mundane archaeological materials that were brought to America through partage agreements, i.e., divisions of finds between the Iranian government and foreign archaeological expeditions. How and why were so many objects transferred from Iran to the United States over the past century and what has happened to them since?

American Archaeology in Iran, Iranian Antiquities in America will show how the accumulation of Iranian patrimony in the United States is the result of decades of heritage diplomacy, in which Iranian and American archaeologists participated—albeit on unequal footing—in research collaborations, material and educational exchanges, and the cooperative governance of vestiges of the past. Heritage diplomacy between Americans and Iranians had many positive outcomes, including most notably the monumental excavations and restoration work at Persepolis, which remains a symbol of national pride in Iran to this day. Such diplomacy nevertheless also had an extractive edge, resulting in the removal en masse of objects of cultural patrimony and associated records from Iran. These elements of Iranian heritage have remained out of reach for the overwhelming majority of Iranian scholars since diplomatic relations between the two countries were severed by the Islamic Revolution, which left Iranians largely unable to access museum collections in the United States and Americans personae non gratae in Iran.

In recent years, however, exchanges in the cultural heritage sector have begun once again. Stimulated by high-profile court cases concerning disputed ownership claims, American and Iranian institutions have sought to work together to return particular collections to Tehran, compelling leadership on both sides to formally communicate and cooperate with each other. Thus, the history of heritage diplomacy reveals how knowledge production about the cultural heritage of Iran was shaped by, but also at times shaped, American-Iranian relations. I will make this case through a deep archival and historiographic investigation to examine the histories of the institutions and individuals involved, how people, objects, and knowledge flowed between the two countries in light of the evolution of their bilateral relationship since the 1920s.

Three questions guide and motivate this inquiry:

• Why were American museums interested in sending archaeologists to Iran and what impact did their activities have on the development of the heritage profession there?

• How did American and Iranian scholars and diplomats co-create and differentially navigate the policies and practices of archaeological fieldwork and heritage management in Iran from ca. 1925-1978, especially regarding the ownership and stewardship of objects excavated in Iran?

• How can ties between archaeologists and heritage professionals from America and Iran be strengthened in the present and into the future through collaborative research into divided collections shared across borders?

These questions will be answered using historiographical evidence drawn from publications in English and in Persian—the latter of which will crucially provide a counterbalance to the American-centric perspective of much of the literature—as well as from institutional archives across the United States, primarily at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia and North Africa (formerly the Oriental Institute), Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. Ancillary archives pertaining to and oral history interviews with still-living individuals who conducted archaeological fieldwork in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s—e.g., Frank Hole, Henry Wright, Kent Flannery, Rita Wright, Holly Pittman, Matthew Stolper, and Melinda Zeder, among others, as well as Iranian colleagues who participated in these projects such as Hassan Tala’i, Abbas Alizadeh, and Haydeh Eqbal—will also comprise an important source of information. Using these resources, I will empirically focus on the concrete types of negotiations that constituted heritage diplomacy: negotiations over laws and regulations, permits and partage, exchanges of knowledge, skills and expertise, and of course, the ownership and movement of objects. The primary agents in these exchanges are individual scholars, the institutions they represented, and in some cases, politicians, consular, and diplomatic staff from both countries.

By tracing changing patterns in these domains of negotiation over time, my research makes three primary interventions. The first is to re-orient the history of American archaeology in Iran away from a chronicle of who-dug-where-and-when to a critical account of how, why, and to what effect American archaeologists conducted fieldwork in Iran. This will show the lasting impact that American involvement has had on the development of an autochthonous heritage management sector in Iran. The second is to situate the encounters between American and Iranian heritage professionals over the course of the twentieth century in the broader geopolitical context. This will reveal how archaeology has been enlisted in, leveraged for its own purposes, and in turn been impacted by geopolitics. The third is to assess possibilities for renewed heritage diplomacy under current conditions of restricted access to field-sites in Iran for Americans and to collections of national patrimony stored in the US for Iranians. These three interventions will be made from an intellectual stance that recognizes that heritage diplomacy is not an unproblematic concept, nor an unmitigated good. Great care is required not to reproduce historical inequities and power imbalances; in many respects, these interventions will serve to interrogate failures and highlight successes in the past, thereby clarifying what is needed going forward to ensure renewed heritage diplomacy between the United States and Iran does not take a neocolonial form.