Introduction: The Power of Place at the U.S. Overseas Research Centers, Heritage Diplomacy, and Archaeology

The Power of Place

In her formative work, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Dolores Hayden (1995) argued convincingly for the inevitable connection between the natural environment of a location and the people who occupy it. The U.S. Overseas Research Centers (ORCs) are the very embodiment of Hayden’s power of place—a space for people, foreigners and locals, to engage in a single location. For over a century, the ORCs have been the primary setting where American researchers in the humanities and social sciences and in-country scholars, students, and locals meet each other and foster the seeds of collaboration. In so doing, not only are these places key incubation areas for academic knowledge production, but also nodes of heritage diplomacy. The hope of the respective ORCs is that they provide neutral spaces for active, dynamic, and positive exchanges of ideas that inspire on-the-ground research and educational engagement. Ideally, ORCs put scholars “in the thick of things” and fulfill a diplomatic mission of the U.S. government: people-to-people interaction and the establishment of long-term networks, which promote mutual understanding and respect. Contributions in this issue establish that ORCs are powerful places in the eastern Mediterranean. In this issue, we have asked individuals who interact routinely with ORCs to reflect on their experiences. Contributions discuss a robust lecture series, typically standing room only, attended by Jordanians and foreigners, the conservation and documentation of a monument in Egypt, an excavation co-directed by an Armenian and a U.S. national, an educational space to explore the archaeology of the region by Cypriot and U.S. undergraduates, and multi-sited research forming the basis for a PhD dissertation. While acknowledging the colonial past of many of the ORCs, this collection illustrates the changing nature and missions of these organizations.

With a current emphasis on empowering local researchers, students, and others through collaborative projects and shared interests with U.S. contemporaries, the following articles highlight the networks that can and do arise from fellowship programs at the American Center of Oriental Research in Jordan (ACOR), the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus in Armenia (ARISC), the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI), and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC). These case studies depict the ORCs through a progressive lens, slowly shedding their colonial foundations with greater emphasis on these places as shared spaces of consultation, negotiation, and partnership between individuals dedicated to research into the past and present of not only specific countries, but also the region.

A Short History of the ORCs

The legacy of the ORCs begins with the traditional triad of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1881), the American Academy in Rome (1894), and the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (1900) (see Luke and Kersel 2013: 19–25). As might be expected of these late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century creations, they were very much colonial enterprises, and very much linked to the burgeoning and increasingly dominant perspectives in the U.S. academy on classical scholarship, the interaction between religion and the past, and archaeology. Established as outposts in foreign lands, the centers supported U.S. academic endeavors, while also displaying a commitment to culture, furthering one of many U.S. diplomatic goals (Luke and Kersel 2013). With the changing geopolitical realities in the region, the establishment of new states and territories, World War I and its aftermath, the ORCs attempted to refine their missions and thus shed their identities as bastions of colonialism. Rather than remain (whether real or perceived) agents of the state, they sought to be more inclusive, collaborative, institutions with a primary focus of mutually beneficial and local scholarly interaction, exchange, and oversight.

If the first wave of ORCs responded to the growing influence of the United States in foreign affairs in the early twentieth century, the second wave of ORCs responded to the internationalism embedded in the post-World War II climate...