From Antiquarian To Archaeologist

This volume forms a collection of papers tracking the emergence of the history of archaeology from a subject of marginal status in the 1980s to the mainstream subject which it is today. Professor Timothy Murray's essays have been widely cited and track over 20 years in the development of the subject. ?The papers are accompanied by a new introduction which surveys the development of the subject over the last 25 years as well as a reflection of what this means for the philosophy of archaeology and theoretical archaeology.?This volume spans Tim's successful career as an academic at the forefront of the study of the history of archaeology, both in Australia and internationally. During his career he has held posts in Britain and Europe as well as Australia. He has edited The Bulletin of the History of Archaeology since 2003.

Frederick Corbin Lukis, antiquarian and polymath, lived in Guernsey in the Channel Islands from 1788-1871. This book is the result of many years research on his archive held at Guernsey Museum and draws heavily on the material therein, highlighting it to both the general reader and the academic world. It includes an initial look at the history of antiquarianism and the development of archaeology as a discipline with particular reference to the nineteenth century. The development of archaeological study in Guernsey and the development of the museum service are documented, alongside a biography of Lukis’s life in the context in which he grew up. The book includes several illustrations from the museum collections and although the content is based on research it is suitable for readers with an interest in the history of archaeology, museum collections and antiquarianism. This is widely recognized as a growing area of interest in heritage studies.

This book highlights the growing divide in nineteenth-century intellectual circles between amateur and professional interest, and explores the institutional means whereby professional ascendancy was achieved in the broad field of studies of the past. It is concerned with how antiquarian 'gentlemen of leisure', pursuing their interests through local archaeological societies, were, by the end of the century, relegated to the sidelines of the now university-based discipline of history. At the same time it explores the theological as well as technical barriers which arrested the development of archaeology in this period. This is a notable contribution to the intellectual history of Victorian England, attending not simply to the ideas perpetrated by these communities of scholarship but to their social status, relating such social consideration to a more traditional intellectual history to create a new social history of ideas.

In The Antiquarians of the Nation, Francesca Zantedeschi explores how the works of Roussillon's nineteenth-century archaeologists and philologists, who retrieved and enhanced the Catalan specificities of the region, contributed to the early stages of a ‘national’ (Catalan) cultural revival.

Antiquarianism and collecting have been associated intimately with European imperial and colonial enterprises, although both existed long before the early modern period and both were (and continue to be) practiced in places other than Europe. Scholars have made significant progress in the documentation and analysis of indigenous antiquarian traditions, but the clear-cut distinction between “indigenous” and “colonial” archaeologies has obscured the intense and dynamic interaction between these seemingly different endeavours. This book concerns the divide between local and foreign antiquarianisms focusing on case studies drawn primarily from the Mediterranean and the Americas. Both regions host robust pre-modern antiquarian traditions that have continued to develop during periods of colonialism. In both regions, moreover, colonial encounters have been mediated by the antiquarian practices and preferences of European elites. The two regions also exhibit salient differences. For example, Europeans claimed the “antiquities” of the eastern Mediterranean as part of their own, “classical,” heritage, whereas they perceived those of the Americas as essentially alien, even as they attempted to understand them by analogy to the classical world. These basic points of comparison and contrast provide a framework for conjoint analysis of the emergence of hybrid or cross-bred antiquarianisms. Rather than assuming that interest in antiquity is a human universal, this book explores the circumstances under which the past itself is produced and transformed through encounters between antiquarian traditions over common objects of interpretation.

Every civilized society, beginning with that of the ancient Egyptians and Chinese, has entertained a passionate curiosity about its predecessors: we want to know about our past in order to understand and even manipulate our present. The means to that end is archaeology, whose history is the fascinating subject of The Discovery of the Past. Alain Schnapps' study is astonishing in the depth and breadth of its coverage. Beginning with the ancient Greek poet Hesiod and extending thought St. Augustine, Rabelais, Newton, and Thomas Jefferson, he shows that the history of archaeology is not one of uninterrupted progress, but of the rediscovery and reinterpretation -- often erratic -- of forgotten observations. The text is elegantly interwoven with illustrations and descriptions of objects surviving from antiquity, while extensive quotations from primary sources provide a fascinating insight into historical accounts. Contemporary depictions of ancient life, and incidents in its discovery, reveal the excitement of archaeological research.