History of Archaeology
Lesson Objectives: Understand the sociopolitical context of the
development of archaeology.
Who are the major figures in the early history of archaeology, and what social groups and subgroups did they belong to? What kinds of people are not represented? Most were wealthy Western men.
Why does the textbook begin with an account of looting at Slack Farm, Kentucky? It illustrates several issues. First, most archaeology began with looting, until practitioners figured out it would be more interesting and worthwhile to keep associated information and provide better reconstructions of the past, not just pretty artifacts for hanging on the wall. But looting and artifact collecting is still with us, in a much bigger way thanks to fancy New York and London auction houses, illegal antiquities dealers, eBay, and the general greed mentality of the current decades. People either want to make money, or they want to have something unique that is not being made anymore, as a part of their self-identity.
Much of classical archaeology began as the accumulation of treasures by colonial powers. Giovanni Belzoni [show his picture and others to illustrate all this] was a strongman in a circus before he began hauling around stone monuments yanked from Egyptian tombs for the British government in the nineteenth century, and Lord Elgin grabbed sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens for the British Museum. Most museum collections are from looted sites where proper archaeological excavation has not been done. Now we supposedly know better and realize that taking an artifact out of its context destroys its scientific and archaeological value. But the image of Indiana Jones running out with the golden idol only is not too far from 1930s archaeology in many other countries.
Are we now free of the idea that we must save ancient treasures in lands where the poor dumb people do not know how to care for them themselves? What about the campaigns to prevent the Taliban from defacing and destroying ancient Buddhist monuments since they are images thought to be opposed to Muslim beliefs?
Can archaeology be used for political purposes? It is said that during the first Gulf War Saddam parked his planes and tanks next to famous monuments of Mesopotamian civilizations, knowing the U.S. would not bomb them. Hitler used archaeological data to prove the superiority of Germanic culture, where all the great ideas originated, and promote Nazi ideology. Do we use archaeology for any political purposes? Sure; there is identification with past ethnic groups and pride in heritage, establishing claims to lands or other things, promotion of ideas and styles modeled on those of the past.
Who are the historic figures discussed in your text and well-known as archaeological pioneers? Besides those mentioned above, we can look at Thomas Jefferson in our own country, who excavated a mound on his property; Stephens and Catherwood in Mesoamerica, publishing books and drawings of monuments; and surveyors Squier and Davis in the eastern U.S. doing the same for mounds and earthworks.
Among the many others, Thomsen and Worsaae stand out in nineteenth-century Denmark because they established the three-age system. What is it based on? Technology is its foundation, demonstrating our Western ethnocentric bias, which we must keep in mind throughout the class. Likewise, the early anthropological models of cultural evolution in stages assume a unilineal pattern or even multilinear, normative development throughout the globe. But this is not necessarily the case. However one defines bands, tribes, and chiefdoms, a particular culture does not necessarily go through such stages or end up at some predetermined point. Cultural evolution, like biological, is not teleological; that is, it does not have a direction or an end point in mind; it is simply change.
What about diversity among archaeologists? Were all early archaeologists rich white colonial or other capitalist guys? Not necessarily. There are many others whose stories are only now being discovered or emphasized. I recently finished work on a book about women who did archaeology in the southeastern U.S. beginning early in the twentieth century (Grit-Tempered, White et al. 1999), and there are now many many works on women’s contributions (e.g., Parezo 1993). It was a black cowboy who discovered the Folsom site, where archaeologists realized that people and extinct Ice-Age animals coexisted in the U.S. (Preston 1997, Meltzer et al. 2002:7).
The politics of archaeology can be rough on its practitioners. In Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), an archaeologist was fired less than a half-century ago for suggesting that Great Zimbabwe and other ruins were the work of indigenous Shona people and not white traders (e.g., Kuklick 1991, Ndoro 1997). There are many such examples of who is left out of the archaeological record and out of the ranks of archaeologists.
How does past looting differ from that of today? Though in the past mostly the wealthy colonial administrators claimed ancient items for themselves or their governments, now everyone wants to collect. You can buy artifacts looted from sites around the world on the Internet. There are many blue-collar, working class as well as middle-class looters who do not care about preserving the past, though ethical collectors are willing to utilize archaeological methods and collaborate with professionals. In most countries outside the U.S., any archaeological remains become the property of the state once they are discovered. This is only the case in the U.S. if they are found on public lands. Archaeological materials on private lands can usually be collected or destroyed with no penalty unless they are involved in projects using public money or projects large enough to have regional impacts or otherwise governed by local preservation ordinances.
Archaeologists consider it unethical and unprofessional to buy and sell artifacts, much as physicians would not buy and sell livers or kidneys. But what is subsistence looting? In poorer regions where finding an ancient pot or statue would mean immediate government control, the peasant farmer who unearths such an artifact might instead quickly sell it to a dealer to bring money so an impoverished family will to be able to eat. What is the anthropological view of such a practice? The situation has no easy answer. It is very much the same as with international drug traffic. It starts at the local level with very small compensation and usually subsistence farmers, but gets transformed radically on the way to the streets of New York or Miami. One answer is education.