Companion Encyclopedia of Archaeology

Graeme Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134921935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

This comprehensive, fully illustrated Companion answers the need for an in-depth archaeology reference that provides authoritative coverage of this complex and interdisciplinary field. The work brings together the myriad strands and the great temporal and spatial breadth of the field into two thematically organized volumes.In twenty-six authoritative and clearly-written essays, this Companion explores the origins, aims, methods and problems of archaeology. Each essay is written by a scholar of international standing and illustrations complement the text.

Part I

ORIGINS, AIMS AND METHODS

1

DISCOVERING THE PAST

Alain Schnapp and Kristian Kristiansen

THE ANCIENT FOUNDATIONS OF A SCIENCE OF THE PAST

One of the oldest references to archaeological practice appears on the base of a statue found at Memphis in Egypt, of Ka Wab, one of the sons of the pharaoh Keops (c. 2700 BC): c. 1300 BC Khaemois, the son of the pharaoh Rameses II, had added an inscription in which he explained that, during work in the estate of Memphis of which he was in charge, the statue of a prince, precisely identified, had been found and honoured with cult status (Gomaà 1973). Another example comes from Mesopotamia, where German archaeologists found in one of the sixth-century BC levels of the palace of Babylon a group of statues including some that dated to the third millennium BC, and where Nabonid, the last king of Babylon, has left an extraordinary account of the excavation of the great sanctuary, the Ebabbar, carried out in order to recover traces of the constructions of his predecessors (Schnapp 1996:13–17). These included the famous Hammourabi, to whom he attributed, probably correctly, a foundation tablet found during the work. In China, we have evidence from as early as the fifth century BC for the interest of scribes and emperors in collecting and identifying bronze age cult tripods.

Though latecomers to the world of writing, the Greeks knew that their modest alphabetical letters had a quality that no hieroglyph, no cuneiform inscription, nor ideogram possessed: they had an apprenticeship so easy that everyone could become master. In contrast to the writing systems of the ancient empires, the Phoenician discovery of alphabetical writing, completed by the Greek invention of the use of vowels, revealed a powerful tool for the preservation of memory, giving voice to those who dared to say ‘I’ where scribes for the reckoning of kings wrote ‘we’. The birth of history—investigative history—is inseparable from that of the historian who began to speak, name himself, and assert his autonomy against the anonymity of the scribes: with the alphabet, writing is no longer servant. Thus, together with the sciences and philosophy, historical enquiry—historié—was born in classical Greece. Herodotus did not entrust to stone or mud-brick the recounting of a conquest or a victory: he set out for his readers the result of a personal enquiry, a confrontation of evidence, and offered his reader a text which transformed the arts of memory into history.

In order to create this new literary genre, it was necessary to use sources other than those of imperial chancelleries, to refer to models other than those of the rhetoric of the sovereign. It was necessary, like Herodotus, to combine seeing and hearing, to enquire about the mores, origins and customs of very diverse peoples. The sophist Hippias explains in Plato's Hippias Major (285) the reasons for his success, the fact that he mastered a new discipline which dealt with ‘the genealogies …with the science of the past (archaiologia)’. For sure, this archaiologia is very different from what we now call ‘archaeology’, but the idea of a science of the past showed that monuments have their place beside documents. Ever since then, the observation of ruins and the collection of ancient objects became an integrating part of a vision of the past which claimed history as a knowable totality. Archaiologia in Greek and antiquitates in Latin designated a category of objects and of facts that a particular type of scholar sought to collect and interpret, as a way to systematize the evidence of the past.

A well-known text of Xenophon shows that the ancient philosophers had an intuition about the existence of fossils. On the origins of Egypt, Herodotus wrote, in support of arguments that Egypt had originally been a submerged gulf, ‘I have seen shells on the hills and noticed how salt exudes from the soil…the soil is black and friable as one would expect of an alluvial soil formed of a silt brought down by the river from Ethiopia’ (Herodotus The Histories II.10, 1954 Penguin translation by A.de Sélincourt). Archaiologia as a systematic observation of the traces of the past led naturally to the description of the varied marks of history on the earth. In the first century AD, when Pausanias visited the ruins of Tiryns and Mycenae, he was intrigued by the extraordinary architecture of the two sites and attempted to interpret them by establishing a chronology compatible with the myths of archaic history: ‘there are parts of the ring-wall left’, he wrote, ‘including the Gate-with-Lions standing on it. They say that this is the work of Kyklopes, who built the wall of Tiryns for Proitos. In the ruins of Mycenae is a water source called Perseia, and the underground chambers of Atreus and his sons where they kept the treasurehouses of their wealth. There is the grave of Atreus and the graves of those who came home from Troy, to be cut down by Aigisthos at his supper party’ (Pausanias Guide to Greece II.XVI.6, 1971 Penguin translation by P.Levi). His efforts to explain and interpret these remains distinguish him from the Assyrian and Egyptian scribes: he did not try to force a continuity, but to explain the reasons for a break between what we now term the Mycenaean Bronze Age and Archaic and classical Greece. The weapons of Homer's heroes were still visible amongst the treasures of the temple; verification of the tradition was possible by inspection of their manufacture and material. It does not matter much that Pausanias gives us no information about the way in which the temples were able to make a collection of such weapons: what is important is that he established a relationship between tradition and material facts.

The philosophers and antiquarians of the Graeco-Roman world were able to establish the antiquity of man and a chronology which, even if it was not absolute, suggested a considerable time difference between men of these unknown times and those of mythical times. They sensed that natural phenomena, such as the evolution of plants and animals, could unite to lay the foundations of a human prehistory. By elaborating a theory of stages—hunting, pastoralism, agriculture—they introduced for the first time a rationality in the development of ways of life and technology. They did not hesitate, as the Roman poet Lucretius suggested in the first century BC (De Rerum Natura V, 1283–7), to affirm that the progress of mankind was a progress in technology which, from stone to bronze and then to iron, was linked to the capacity of man to extract nature's minerals. However, we must not consider that this vision of the past was generally accepted: primitivist ideas of the decadence of man since the golden age, cyclical theories, of myth as explanation, all struggled against the rationalist explanations that our vision of the history of human science has confirmed. In its flashes of intuitive enlightenment, however, as in its original observations, the vision of the past that we have been bequeathed by Graeco-Roman antiquity constitutes for historians—and in particular for archaeologists—an appeal to humility, to doubt, and to the examination of the evidence.

What differentiated the Greeks and Romans from the Egyptians or Assyrians, therefore, was not their concern for the past but their way of being interested in it and of writing history. Within this newly established intellectual sphere, several types of history emerged. This diversity explains how it was possible for a descriptive history which sought to classify societies, institutions, and objects to blossom alongside a political history. The work of a historian such as Varro cannot be dissociated from the work of philosophers who, in trying to define the uniqueness of the human species, laid the foundations for a history of evolution in which mankind was the biological and social subject.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE GRAECO-ROMAN MODEL OF HISTORY

With the progressive break-up of the Roman empire, not only did institutions and social practices disappear, but also the framework of intellectual reference (Rodocanachi 1914). Even though, in the West, culture was going to merge with the Graeco-Roman tradition for hundreds of years still, the intellectuals of the Middle Ages never exercised the liberty, time, or facilities of their classical predecessors in classical antiquity. The difficulties of these times, the wars, the consequences of multiple invasions, do not explain everything, however; the loss of the influence of the model of ancient education, together with the affirmation of a Christian culture which was suspicious of the idolatry manifested in the ancient texts, monuments, and objects, also had something to do with it. In the great disorder which ravaged the West, bishops and monks became the devoted guardians and the defenders of Letters. Clerics had to eradicate from the countryside the numerous traces of paganism, because the type of history that the new reigning dynasties reclaimed had to justify their rapid fortune and assert their affiliation with a prestigious past. Scholars writing saintly hagiographies not only undertook to expunge the ancient literature from the works which could threaten the sacred writing, but they scarcely sustained any interest in digressions on the origins of their species—they had enough to do to establish that the Franks, like the Romans, were the descendants of the Trojans and to reconcile the Revelation with Graeco-Roman history, the only history available (Beaune 1985; Kendrick 1950).

Everywhere were the remains of fortifications, works of art, gigantic monuments such as baths and aqueducts, but they did not arouse admiration or astonishment because people in the sixth and seventh centuries AD had neither the time nor the inclination to muse on their long history. What concerned them was to live with them by converting them, modifying them or (most frequently) destroying them: a ruin was not only a vestige of a vanished past, it was, according to circumstances, an object to be made useful or removed. For the people of the early Middle Ages, the rapport with the past became one of continuity: there was no sign of a rupture between the Roman empire and their own daily lives, so why should they make one? German chiefs set themselves up in the palaces of Roman governors; peasants took over abandoned villas; princes took the marble from great villas to cover the walls of their own residences; bishops salvaged columns, statues and sarcophagi to decorate their churches and tombs; and clerics in the unstable calm of their libraries hunted out quotations of ancient authors (Adhémar 1996; see also Mennung 1925 and Wright 1844). For all of them, their interest in the past was primarily utilitarian.

THE RECONSTRUCTION AND RECUPERATION OF THE PAST

In laying claim to the Western Empire, Charlemagne was better placed than his predecessors to inherit the grandeur of Rome, and his claim was not without cultural consequences, for Antiquity became again an inspirational source and model. With the reading of ancient texts, the taste for discovery of the sources of the Graeco-Roman culture spread. The great abbots of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as those of Saint Benoît sur Loire, Cluny and Saint-Denis, made pilgrimages to Rome and experienced for themselves the monuments of antiquity (Adhémar 1996). The first accounts of journeys to Italy appeared at this time, and in Rome itself an interest in protecting its buildings emerged. In northern Europe, too, there is the first evidence for observations of the monuments of the past: thus in AD 1009 a Carthusian monk of Quimperlé tells us that Rudalt and Orscand, sons of the bishop of Vannes, gave a gift of land to the monastery of Saint Cado, land on which there were many heaps of stones, the first mention of the prehistoric megaliths of Brittany (Mortet 1911). These were mentioned as topographical markers, though, not as a potential source of history—for the objects found in the earth to become historical signs it was essential that the vision of the observer should itself be a historical vision, a condition that was rarely fulfilled in the Middle Ages or in Antiquity.

It was in Italy that a new feeling for Antiquity emerged: at Modena, Pisa and soon in all the peninsula, people were no longer content just to recover remains but made use of them in architecture and the plastic arts. The emperor Frederick II embodied to perfection those princes of the Middle Ages who sought to use all means to establish the continuity between the ancient and medieval worlds (Weiss 1988). Elsewhere, however, the interest of other European nations in the Graeco-Roman past seemed to diminish. The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed the integration of barbarian invaders and Classical history: the English and French, for example, both laid claim to their Trojan origins, whilst some scholars spiced their accounts still further with a dash of Jewish history and chansons de geste (Adhémar 1996). Over time, the Romans became confused with Charlemagne, the Graeco-Roman divinities with the Islamic demons of the chansons de geste: theatres, amphitheatres, temples became the towers of Roland, the palace of Pepin the Bref, the gates of Ganelon. In the middle of the thirteenth century all ruins were essentially Saracen, and the crusades replaced the German invasions in the popular imagination. With urban expansion, the destruction of Roman monuments reached a scale never before known—the chronicles record massive demolition of the amphitheatre of Trêves, the murals of Poitiers and the arenas of Nîmes and Le Mans, for example (Adhémar 1996). The rural and urban landscape was profoundly changing, and with it regional history.

In the cities of northern Italy at this time, scholars such as Petrarch, the most celebrated editor of Livy and Cicero, embarked on writing treatises on Roman history; his taste for the ruins of Rome marked the rediscovery of the town. The work of such scholars established the break between the present and the past and dictated that Antiquity should be treated as a historical object, investigated by visits, descriptions, and studies of objects such as inscriptions and coins. The Italian scholars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries laid out the path of humanism by preparing a return to Antiquity which was not merely a purely literary experience, or even the rediscovery of certain plastic forms, but the systematic comparison between the monument and the text (Weiss 1988). The fifteenth-century antiquarian Cyriaque of Ancona was one of the first people since Varro to tackle the question of the truth of the written sources: monuments, coins and inscriptions were now sigilla historiarum, ‘seals of history’.

RENAISSANCE ROME, THE CAPITAL OF HISTORY

If the intellectual movement that was to overturn history (and the sciences!) in Europe was Italian, it was because the Italians found themselves at the confluence of two movements which were like the poles of the Renaissance: they were th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Part I: Origins, Aims and Methods
• Part II: Themes and Approaches
• Part III: Writing Archaeological History
• Index