narrativerehearsal:

rudjedet:

Yes and that.. is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about when we say people need to stop with the whole “ancient objects (of non-white civs) are cursed” because it’s racist.

Like sure I was specifically talking about the “put it back (because i don’t understand archaeology)” people just now, but the whole “put it back (because it might be cursed)” is something we frequently cover as well. Books of the dead don’t contain curses; ancient Egypt didn’t even know curses of the “ooooh spooooky you’re all gonna dieeee” kind, but regardless of all that, the pandemic wasn’t caused by any kind of curse to begin with, much less at risk of being aggravated by anything except the behaviour of modern humans.

You have got to stop connecting, however subconsciously, archaeology to events that have their clear and provable origin in our current society. Ancient artefacts cannot “aggravate” current world events just by their nature of being an ancient artefact previously uncovered; we, however, can. And we do. Putting the blame of that on any item from the past isn’t cool. Putting the blame of that on an item from e.g. Egypt is racist, no matter whether you consciously intend to be racist or not.

There are hundreds of ancient artefacts found all over the world every year. In every country. If people started shouting ‘put it back, what if there’s curses!’ for everything from everywhere then it would be annoying, ridiculous and based on nothing but bullshit, but not racist.

But people don’t shout about curses when things get found in Britain, or France, or really anywhere north of the Mediterranean. The curse worries only come up when it’s Egypt or somewhere else where the ancient/historical culture got fetishised as exotic and foreign. That’s where it stops being just annoying bullshit and shifts into colonial flavoured racism.