Perspectives
Some pasts get studied and funded; others wait. In an essay for Backdirt, the annual review of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, Residua co-director Gazmend Elezi explains why, and what funders and institutions can do about it.
The argument
Elezi chose prehistory expecting distance from politics, and the essay opens by giving that hope up. Archaeological research in the Balkans, he argues, has been shaped by two convergent forces: national institutions concentrate excavation on the periods that anchor ethnic identity, while Western scholarship concentrates on the ancient civilizations it claims as its own origin. Whatever serves neither agenda falls out of view.
The evidence is stark. In roughly a century of prehistoric research in Albania, archaeologists have excavated about thirty Neolithic sites, many through test trenches alone. At Kamnik, in the country's southeast, excavations in 1969 and 1970 uncovered the first pottery kilns known from Neolithic Europe. The discovery remains obscure even among specialists, and for decades the field continued to assume that pottery of the period was fired in the open.
The essay ends with proposals rather than complaint. Funding agencies should rework application criteria that reward alignment with grand narratives, and universities should support scholars working in marginalized regions and periods. The discipline itself should admit non-Western epistemologies as knowledge in their own right, not as substitutes for the mainstream.
The essay
Elezi, Gazmend. 2021. “Marginalized Archaeologies: Systemic Biases and Inequalities of Archaeological Research.” Backdirt: Annual Review of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA 2021:29–33.
Gazmend Elezi is Scientific Director, Archaeology & Analytical Chemistry at Residua. He holds a PhD in Archaeology from UCLA, where his dissertation examined the production, use, and circulation of Late Neolithic pottery from the southern Balkans.
Why it shapes our work
Residua's research programme takes the essay's argument as a design constraint. COMBA, the computational biomolecular archaeology project the Institute is preparing for the 2027 ERC Starting Grant call, validates its framework on the Selenicë bitumen network in Albania, a region the essay shows to be systematically under-studied. JUSTHERITAGE-AI, our Horizon Europe consortium, carries the same commitment into environmental justice across Europe's shared cultural heritage.
The point generalises. Where evidence is gathered decides whose past acquires an evidence base. That is a methodological choice, and we make it deliberately.
Related
Research equityBalkan prehistoryFunding policyEpistemologySee Research area 03 for the laboratory programme this argument informs, and the Programme for the four applications in preparation.