What exactly is archaeology for? The question has slowly become essential, under the groaning weight of new technologies and the collapse of the post-processial paradigm. Younger scholars are baring their teeth and scouring artefacts for trace residues of ancient genomes, and older veterans scowl and sigh whilst contending with the looming icebergs - migration, invasion, replacements and most significantly - the return of embodied culture.
Archaeological science, like all science, is a function of the past and present. Past ideas and present concerns. Since the 1950’s it has undergone numerous shifts in perspective, veering from skepticism to active politicisation. I want to examine archaeology today with two values in mind, the two I believe vie with one another for the throne of importance - Truth and Democracy. Truth feels somewhat of an obvious choice for an academic discipline - but democracy? - since when has this been the supreme value outside of politics? In a sense the two are connected, but we must first look to the past to understand why.
Impious Renaissance
Chancing upon physical objects which clearly belonged to an older era is one of the confusing pleasures of being a thinking ape, one which can mentally project some time and place which is not the current moment. Fossils, animal bones, stone tools, pottery sherds, even entire ruins or buildings, all have been found and used in some way. A common reaction is to leave these places alone, lest evil spirits or misfortunes attached to them become hostile - even today we feel glimmers of this sentiment with tropes like ‘the abandoned insane asylum’ or old burial ground at night. Nascent antiquarian stirrings began in the most developed old civilisations - the Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greek - all of which sought magico-religious power through manipulating old artefacts, or even resurrecting forgotten temples. Both the Chinese and the Greeks recognised a progression in change through the materials: older forms of pottery, bronze, iron, and so on. They also recognised cultural continuity. Later peoples would explain the existence of flint arrowheads and axes as the work of natural forces, thunderstones, or as proof of fairies, elves or other small beings.
It wasn’t until the Renaissance that we saw the genuine creation of a self-conscious concept of antiquity, which stands apart in all its glory as a separate and distinct epoch of human civilisation, one with continuity in the form of the Roman church, but also in law. Unearthing the pagan world changed the medieval world, the rediscovery of artworks, architecture, medicine, philosophy, military history, languages, poetry, literature… a searing vitality which coursed through Europe and altered its destiny. Antiquarianism nurtured a seed of disinterested scholarly research, overturning older approaches to written history. For example, when the Italian Renaissance humanist Polydore Vergil was invited by England’s Henry VII to write a history of his nation, Vergil began by demolishing all the chronicles - the Arthurian mythology, the imaginations of monks and the unverifiable royal pedigrees stemming from Athens and Egypt.
Men of antiquarian taste rushed to fill the historical gaps, supported by governmental initiatives to protect monuments and build collections of artefacts. 17th century Sweden, Denmark and England, amongst others, rebuilt their national stories through secular and progressively objective pursuits. With the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and European contact with non-literate peoples all over the world, antiquarianism had to move from a study of antiquity to the study of pre-history. Evolutionary thought provided a much clearer non-Biblical model for explaining the riddle of how some cultures were still using stone tools when European ships appeared on the horizon. Science was tied to progress, which was itself born of a vision of European Man, astride the globe, improving and driving it forwards. Archaeology was midwived into existence in response to the growing problem of ancient human remains and artefacts - stone tools in France, ancient skulls in Germany.
The early functions of archaeology
I would suggest that archaeology-proper in the 19th century had two main functions:
To determine the age and chronology of mankind and its stages
To understand the evolutionary forces which led to social and cultural change/progress
The development of a self-contained, systematic study of prehistory, as distinguished from the antiquarianism of earlier times, occurred as two distinct movements, the first of which began in the early nineteenth century and the second in the 1850s. The first originated in Scandinavia with the invention of a technique for distinguishing and dating archaeological finds that made possible the comprehensive study of prehistory. This development marked the beginning of prehistoric archaeology, which soon was able to take its place alongside classical and other text-based archaeologies as a significant component in the study of human development using material culture. The second wave, which began in France and England, pioneered the study of the Palaeolithic period and added vast, hitherto unimagined, time depth to human history.
-A History of Archaeological Thought (2006) Bruce Trigger
The concept of different ages was not new: Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, Virgil, Lucretius, Michele Mercati, Bernard de Montfaucon, Nicolas Mahudel and many others had developed models of the ‘ages of man’ - often linked to physical materials such as gold, bronze, iron, stone.
It took however, the diligence and hard work of a Danish scholar - Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) - to properly ground the three-stage model in reality. Thomsen was fortunate and canny enough to realise that Danish archaeologists had kept records of what artefacts were found on what site and what excavation/hoard/tomb. Knowing this he could carefully assemble a chronology of artefacts and demonstrate that they did indeed appear to process from stone to bronze to iron - a system we still teach children today. Thomsen’s work was made more difficult by the realisation that stone and bronze tools were still made during the iron age, so he patiently classified each type of object, noting when certain bronze tools appeared with iron ones, and which did not. His relative dating system was revolutionary.
Almost immediately the debate became a question of evolution vs introduction. Did these new technologies develop in Scandinavia, or were they brought there through waves of migration? The Scandinavians were unequivocal - change is a result of outside interference. This question has never been satisfactorily solved, and it likely never will. The evolutionist looks at the two forces of change - independent invention and diffusion - and adds migration, borrowing and parallel invention. Did two identical forms of kinship systems separated by oceans reflect a common ancestor or independent innovation? These were the types of arguments that have raged ever since.
Indeed, Lowie's highest accolades are reserved for Tylor's "serene willingness to weigh evidence" for and against diffusion in the following cases: Pan-European paleolithic tools; the piston bellows of Madagascar and Indonesia; North American and Old World pottery; the Old and New World bow and arrow; the Australian, African, and American theory that disease is caused by an intrusive stone or bone; the game of parcheesi as played in Mexico and India; and various myths found in both the Old and New Worlds.
-The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) Harris
Another question lurking in the background here was psychic unity. Did all of Mankind share the same mental and psychological substrate? If so, then we can expect to see convergences of objects, social organisation and motivations.
By co-operating with geologists and paleontologists, early archaeologists developed and built models of prehistory which came into sharp conflict with the orthodox Biblical timeframe. Deep time was unsettling and exciting, prompting serious questions about how Man had developed from a lowly rude stone-wielding savage into the contemporary European middle class (to flatter archaeology’s main audience of the day). These questions have never been resolved - dating stuff, understanding the linear sequence of events and explaining how and why things changed?
Race, Nationalism and Culture - archaeology’s next function
The Napoleonic era helped provoke a backlash against Enlightenment values. The rise of romanticism and ethnic nationalism followed from French ambitions to rule Europe, each small province in previously multiethnic and multilingual regions began clamouring for independence. Alongside this the scientific community began to pay credence to the idea that Mankind was not all the same. Religious teachings about the Fall and split of Man were steadily replaced with competing theories about whether the different races were different species, whether all men had sprung from the same stock, or whether God had designed some other system of origins. European contact with the entire world by the beginning of the 19th century meant that, for the first time, anthropologists and doctors were looking at the total diversity of humanity - from Inuit to Mapuche, Maori to Ainu, Khoisan to Amerindian - and struggling to make sense of it. Darwinism provided a perfect framework for overlaying previous ideas of cultural evolution with biological ones. Biology and culture went hand-in-hand, and culminated in European man - the ladder of civilisation also mirrored the development of the body.
