A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past, by Margarita Díaz-Andreu

Abstract

Reviewed by: A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past Robert D. Aguirre (bio) A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past, by Margarita Díaz-Andreu; pp. x + 486. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, £70.00, $175.00. In the massive state edifices that testify to our collective fascination with the past—the British Museum, the Louvre, the Museo Nacional in Mexico City—one easily forgets the archaeologists and collectors who stand behind the objects on display. Museums carefully cultivate an illusion of timelessness, privileging the objective world of artifacts under glass over the subjective, and inevitably messy, world of humans engaged in the field. Studying the history of archaeologists and the cultural forces that produced them is difficult. The history of the discipline has too often been written for its own practitioners, resulting in accounts of heroic discoveries or dry-as-dust surveys with no overarching argument save a positivist march toward scientific rigor. Margarita Díaz-Andreu soars above these tired forms with massive erudition and global reach. Having read apparently everything on her subject in a variety of languages, she has produced a critical history of the discipline's nineteenth-century developments that will serve for years to come as the definitive reference in the field. Its command brings to mind other indispensable works that Victorianists keep within arm's reach, such as George Stocking's Victorian Anthropology (1987), John Sutherland's Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1988), or, from an earlier day, Richard Altick's The English Common Reader (1957) or Walter Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957). Its impressive breadth complements the growing number of specialized treatments by scholars such as Shawn Malley, Virginia Zimmerman, and Andrew Stauffer that have brought archaeology into lively conversation with literary and cultural studies. Díaz-Andreu sets her account of archaeology and the "realms of memory" against parallel histories of nationalism and imperialism (3), drawing varied and incisive connections to natural history, literary and political studies, colonialism and postcolonialism. Drawing inventively on Benedict Anderson, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others, she seeks to offer a "more critical and deconstructive history of archaeology" than has heretofore been available (4). This is a tall order and risks the perils of the sweeping survey, but Díaz-Andreu's focus on nationalism keeps the wide-ranging material in clear focus. The study unfolds in four coherent parts. In part I, she explores the role of antiquities in the early modern era, concentrating on why certain kinds of objects—monumental antiquities from Egypt, Greece, and Rome—became especially prized as symbolic capital during an age that witnessed the emergence of the modern state and the corresponding necessity of rooting identities in a collectively shared past. She then turns to the eighteenth century and explains how the rise of nationalism as [End Page 172] an ideology began to intersect with antiquarian pursuits, and provides a detailed account of developments in France, Greece, and the newly independent republics of Spanish America, while also narrating the birth of the national museum. In part II she considers the much disputed terrain of informal imperialism, exploring comparative histories of archaeology within the context of indirect rule in the Ottoman Empire, Latin America, China, and Japan. Díaz-Andreu also explains how archaeology was funded, whether directly by the state, as on the Continent, or largely by private entities, as in Britain and the United States. In part III Díaz-Andreu considers direct colonial governance, examining South Asia, French North Africa, and the rise of what she calls the "archaeology of the primitive" (278), which dovetailed neatly with emergent anthropological discourses of racial difference and white supremacy that justified imperialism's civilizing mission. In part IV, the author turns her attention to national archaeology in Europe itself, discussing the search for the national past during the Romantic era; the role of nation, race, and language in the period of liberal revolutions (from 1820 to 1860); and finally the impact of evolution and positivism (from 1860 to 1900). Within this book's international, comparativist frame, archaeology is treated as both a product and...