Eduard Gerhard: Founder of Classical Archaeology?

Abstract

It is difficult for us to imagine that archaeology is a relatively recent discipline, whose establishment dates to the middle of the nineteenth century. Its development has been so rapid and the interest elicited by its discoveries so strong that it seems to be a science as ancient as it is canonical. We should not be misled, however: if the taste for the past, the passion for collection, the observation of the earth, are practices as ancient as the earliest humans, archaeology in the modern sense of the term was only constituted as an autonomous and recognized discipline at the moment it was able to emancipate itself from bric-a-brac, from the impossibility of dating objects and monuments with certainty, from the barrier that separated the history of man from the history of nature. The moment of that rupture, which transformed the old antiquarian quest into actual archaeology, coincides with the middle of the nineteenth century and the advent of the positive sciences. It consists in an upheaval of the first order affecting the humanist domain as well as the natural sciences, anthropology as well as geology or paleontology. It is interesting to examine the conditions under which research in Antiquity, traditionally dependent on philology, was able to elaborate its own model of development by freeing itself from the primacy of text over monument, from the cult of the work of art in favor of the history of material culture, from the centrality of universal history in favor of the diversity of regional and local histories. This work, begun in Germany with Johann Winckelmann, in France with the Comte de Caylus, in England with the “Society of Dilettanti,” took shape in a private international society founded in Rome in 1829. The “Instituto di Corrispondenza