A Moral Obligation of the Nation-State: Archaeology and Regime Change in Java and the Netherlands in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the (post-)modern Western world, “archaeological” sites, especially sites that contain ruinous buildings, are often regarded as places of great importance; they can give people a sense of belonging to certain ethnic groups, religious worldviews, or civilizing missions. Since the rise of nation-states, these sites time and again came to symbolize a combination of national, cultural, and political origins. Sometimes a ruin was also regarded as a prefiguration of future prosperity, or even as a place that symbolizes a parallel or even lost world. But the spectrum of meanings connected to these places is much greater than this. This can become clear if we look at the ways ruins were depicted and explained in the early modern time in Europe, and in the context of Western colonial expansion.1 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, ruins—“real” ones or so-called follies in landscape gardens—often figured in allegorical explanations that contained strong moral or religious connotations. They functioned as “memento mori”-signs or as warnings against decay and decadence. Western travelers in the non-Western world in early modern and modern times, who encountered “archaeological” sites with ruined buildings seem to have given them more or less the same meaning as they used to do with ruins closer to home.