ABSTRACT
The history of the archive is an archaeological history, just as to archive is an archaeological act. While most national archives in operation today opened in the mid-1800s, and with other specialist archives continuously being gathered, their contents, purpose, and guardians are not dissimilar to the ancient archives. Archives usually serve to provide public and institutional access to information. Donna Haraway reminds us that "Nature is constructed, constituted historically, not discovered naked in a fossil bed or a tropical forest". The history of the archive as a history of memory and record-keeping is always a relation of power. The perception of the archive as the neutral holder of records is part of the influence the archive holds in forming a historical narrative. The collected objects form an archive that is not about the chronology or facts of the genocide, but the personal archive, an untranscribable temporally looping archive of loss.
