When archeology is mentioned, I always remember that witty remark by Agatha Christie, whose husband was a distinguished archaeologist. The first lady of crime fiction once said that it was great for a woman to be the wife of an archaeologist. "Because the older you are, the more interested you are in him."
In Montenegro, things seem to be somewhat different - the "older" the archeology is, the less the country is interested in it. Perhaps this is not unusual for a country whose (then/now) elite participated in the project of creating an "older and more beautiful Dubrovnik" twenty years ago.
Archeology is, undoubtedly, in many ways, one of the great stories of this world. The only space where history exists realistically, even if only in fragments. The idea of (re)constructing a whole image from fragments is important for both art and philosophy. Foucault's capital study from 1969 - "The Archeology of Knowledge" (L'archéologie du savoir) proved to be one of the most influential books of the XNUMXs and XNUMXs.
One of the most lucid parodies of the possibility of misreading the past was also given by a philosopher. Lesek Kolakovski's witty text – The Legend of Tsar Kennedy, is a story about how the future, radically wrongly, could read our time in completely accurate detail...
And what is happening with Montenegrin archaeology? After, unfortunately, the former Archaeological Collection grew into the Center for Archaeological Research, now the Ministry of Culture decided to demote that institution to a "department" and move it to Cetinje. (And that "department for terrestrial archaeology", as if the military ministry was making a new systematization.) The fact that next to Podgorica there is the largest archaeological site from ancient times, an entire Roman city (Doclea), obviously did not seem like a sufficient reason to anyone. to think about a step forward - an archeological institute and a serious archeological museum, but the matter, like in the past with the communists who closed theaters in Montenegro, and still convinced us that it is better to have one instead of five theaters, will end up with a step backwards. Department near something, even outside Podgorica. So that old whining about the only capital city that doesn't have a Faculty of Philosophy seems almost out of place: well, almost every town in Serbia, Bosnia or Croatia has an archaeological collection or some kind of small museum. But someone thinks that the Montenegrin capital (even) doesn't need it.
And it's not that they couldn't (and had to) know. I remember the kind of attention (professional as well as the wider) public attracted by the articles prepared and/or written by my colleague Slobodan Čukić in the Archives section - about the archaeological treasures in the area of Jezera, Malesia, Gradina, Duklja... Also in the same section, there were also published capital works of the doyen of Montenegrin modern archaeology, Mrs. Olivera Žižić.
A few years ago, I wrote about how the concept of a ministry that supervises, controls and finances everything is disastrous for Montenegrin culture, where institutions actually serve only as a "flow boiler" for the distribution of money from the ministry - namely, this must result in a centralized culture that is very generous to her minions/servants in all possible fields - from literature to music or film... But nothing really new or important will come out of that concept: the servants of power are the apostles of a mediocre, palanquin worldview.
In convincing experts that (only) that is the right way - arguments like - if you don't listen to us, you are against the state of Montenegro were heard again. This is the formulation used to legitimize every possible stupidity in Montenegro. Of course, the one who works in this way does much more against Montenegro: Montenegro can only be destroyed by those who lead it (this way).
In Montenegro, it seems that the archeology of "burying" is much more appreciated and more interesting to the top of the state, instead of the usual one, which implies digging up, removing everything that gets in the way of understanding something in its entirety. Even this upside-down archeology has taken off: look at how the strategies of burying and hiding are multiplying. Let's say, the deportations from the beginning of the nineties. For every impulse that led things to clarification - whose role was what, who was responsible - there was an orgy of burying, hiding, actions in which even some of the actors showed not only astonishing imagination, but also anthological shamelessness. And those "burying archaeologists" are an interesting phenomenon. I am glad that, sooner or later, everything will be known about them. And who financed their "work" and how "reliable findings" were served to them, and what was the logistical support of the local terrainmen.
Here's a job for future archaeologists: after all, in this science, even garbage tells the story of what an era was like...
Bonus video:
