Absented in Bergama, preserved in Berlin: Towards a reconceptualization of archeological preservation

The article follows the journey of the Pergamon/Zeus Altar from Bergama (present-day Turkey) to Berlin in the late nineteenth century and its reverberations in the present. Drawing on archival research at the Zentralarchiv in Berlin and patchwork ethnography conducted in Bergama and Istanbul between 2022 and 2025, it shows that preservation of the past involves claims of discovery and a spiritual right to preserve and possess that legitimize extraction, displacement, destruction and the reterritorialization of epistemic authority as acts of care, leaving those who lived with the remnants with absence. Reading absence and presence together, I document two interwoven yet divergent regimes of preservation, one built around the material maintenance and exhibition of the Altar in Berlin, the other organized around its physical absence in Bergama. I propose a reconceptualization of preservation beyond material care, one that considers the affective, political, and epistemic practices through which absence becomes a mode of heritage preservation. I argue that the absence of extracted artefacts generates its own preservation regime, which reifies the regime of preserving material presence and, with it, the authority of the institutions that claim to preserve.