Hélène Maloigne has been a team member of the Tell Atchana Excavations Project since 2012 and the finds registrar since 2014. She gained her PhD at the Department of History at University College London (UCL) with a thesis on the history of archaeology in the Middle East in the early 20th century. She has a BA in archaeology and ancient languages and an MA in archaeology and art history from the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 2012, she completed an MA in Museum Studies at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. Her thesis on C. Leonard Woolley’s Tell Atchana archive was the basis of the exhibition The Forgotten Kingdom. Archaeology and Photography at Ancient Alalakh (September to December 2014, Koç University, ANAMED, Istanbul), which she co-curated with Murat Akar.
Hélène’s research centers on the history and practice of archaeology in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on the interconnection between the creation of archaeology as a discipline, imperialism, gender performativity, friendship, and popular culture. She works on contextualizing the historical dependence of archaeology on power structures and how the discipline as a whole and we as individual archaeologists can acknowledge and understand our past and move forward to a more inclusive and diverse future. She is currently studying the small finds for the forthcoming Volume III of the final excavation reports.
As the unofficial historian of Tell Atchana, Hélène has written about the excavations in a range of formats:
Maloigne, Hélène. 2020. ‘Making use of the Past. The Possibilities of Archaeological Archives’ in Alalakh and its Neighbors: Proceedings of the 15th Anniversary Symposium at the New Hatay Archaeology Museum, June 10–12, 2015, ed. by K.A. Yener and T. Ingman, Leiden: Peeters.
––––– 2017. ‘How Idrimi came to London: Diplomacy and the division of archaeological finds in the 1930s’, Museum History Journal, 10.2, pp. 200–216.
Murat Akar and Hélène Maloigne (eds.), 2014. The Forgotten Kingdom. Archaeology and Photography at Ancient Alalakh. Koç University Press, Istanbul.
You can find some of Hélène’s work online:
Maloigne, Hélène. 2020. ‘Archaeology as Friendship’, History Workshop Online: https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/friendship-and-fieldwork/
––––– ‘Aslıhan Yener’, Trowelblazers:
https://trowelblazers.com/aslihan-yener/
––––– ‘Following Footsteps’, Histories of Archaeology Network (HARN): https://harngroup.wordpress.com/
