Authoring the ancient sites of Cyprus in the late nineteenth century: the British Museum excavation notebooks, 1893–1896

Abstract

This paper considers the performance of archaeology in the field. To do so it examines the notebooks recording the British Museum excavations in Cyprus during the period 1893–1896. Archaeologists have described the practices of writing and drawing as a performance that accords archaeology its disciplinary identity. However, there have not been systematic studies of the centrality of fieldwork in the disciplinary culture of nineteenth-century archaeology as there have been for other field sciences. Histories and geographies of science have shown that field knowledge was produced through a variety of spatial practices – including inscriptive practices – whose meaning, processes and intentions were embodied in the material artefacts of science, such as instruments and notebooks. Drawing on that work, this paper locates the British Museum notebooks as material objects of science in the disciplinary landscape of late nineteenth-century Cypriot archaeology and in British classical archaeology more broadly. In doing so, this paper furthers our understanding of how classical archaeology became established as a field-based scientific discipline in the later nineteenth century. This paper argues that the British Museum notebooks functioned as paper tools in the field: they constructed a new interpretative model of the ancient Cypriot artefacts that placed the island within the prehistoric Greek world. This archaeological model was established through the more accurate, schematic, abstracted and numerical syntax of the notebooks. Importantly, the British Museum archaeologists through the use of the notebooks as paper tools created a new entity, the excavated Cypriot artefact, that was firmly associated with the conditions of its discovery and evaluation processes.