Entangled Temporalities in Mari (How the Lost City of the Euphrates Became a Lost Site)

Entangled temporalities in Mari raises the question of the close interweaving between field research and the construction of a historical object, one of the most famous city-states of the sumero-akkadian world. Working on this site, which has been severely damaged by the Syrian conflict, means unravelling the threads of a complex weave of field situations that turn the site into a veritable palimpsest. On a tell of more than 140 ha, the remains of three superimposed cities, as well as cemeteries, are intertwined. They have been partially cleared and left to erode, occasionally restored, then subjected to one of the most intense looting operations of the Syrian conflict. Untangling these threads means conducting an investigation that leads from the current situation in the field to a dual archaeology: that of the archives of the archaeological mission and its history, and that of a city  conceived as an object of history, progressively constructed along the lines of stereotypes typical of archaeological Orientalism. After reconstructing this framework, we propose a dynamic vision of the evolution of a site and then of its monumental center, through a re-evaluation of the documentation as a whole.