Because of the comments published in last Friday’s “Haaretz” (also Bonn’s “General-Anzeiger”) about “latent anti-Semitism” being a possible contributing factor to opposition to the excavation of the medieval Jewish area and construction of a Jewish museum, pressure is on to fire the leader of an excavation that has been running in Cologne since 2008.

Cologne is in North-Rhine Westphalia, by the way, where the state has decided to end all funding for archaeology by 2015 (there is an online petition on that one), and where they are finally trying to anchor the “polluter pays” principle into law, years after Germany ratified the Malta Treaty...

This is only the latest in a long number of attacks on the site director, which have included accusations that he faked some evidence, that he was alternately delaying construction of the museum or rushing into building the museum, that the excavation was pointless because nothing would ever be found, etc. It’s all documented in so many newspaper articles that you would think this was the most important site since Troy, but… most of them are directed against the director himself…

Among his accomplishments: he introduced Single Context Planning to Germany back in the 1990s (and so far as I know, Cologne is still the only place that ever adopted SCP, and then rejected it when he was “replaced”).

Anyway: a very good example of the conflicts between archaeology and politics, a theme which keeps getting analysed in terms of “Nazi Archaeology,” without anyone ever considering the lessons that can be learned from the past, and how we should act now, in the present...

 <http://www.ksta.de/koeln/archaeologische-zone-sven-schuette-soll-versetzt-werden,15187530,22329460.html> Sven Schütte soll versetzt werden
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