Digging up the Present in Marseille's Old Port: Toward an Archaeology of Reconstruction

Abstract

The violent destruction of urban centers during World War II seemed to redefine a given city's history following the unequivocal chronological division between "before" and "after." Through the analysis of the postwar rebuilding of Marseille's historic center, I argue that the temporalities of reconstruction must be understood instead as an ongoing process through which visions of the past and present are projected and re-created in relation to a desired future. By examining the material and ideological relationship between archaeological excavations and urban planning strategies in the reconstruction of Marseille's Vieux-Port, I propose that the focus of the reconstruction was effectively displaced from the traumatic wartime events that had necessitated its rebuilding to the resurrection of Marseille's mythic ancient past. As articulated by archaeologist Fernand Benoît and architecte-urbaniste André-Pierre Hardy, the recovery of the city's ancient traces was less a literal unearthing than phantasmatic projections mapped onto remarkably fragmentary artifacts.