Antiquarianisms: Contact, Conflict, Comparison

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Introduction: For a More Capacious History of Archaeology

BENJAMIN ANDERSON AND FELIPE ROJAS

This is a book about antiquarians and antiquarianisms: people who are interested in and knowledgeable about the material traces of the past, and the cultural and intellectual apparatuses that support their endeavors. Traditionally, the term antiquarian (or antiquary) has denoted specifically early modern European men who turned their attention to things (such as coins, medals, and stone-cut inscriptions), as opposed to literary texts, in order to explore Greek and Roman as well as regional European antiquity (thus Momigliano 1950, a foundational essay¹). Roughly analogous practices have existed in other times and places, for example, at various moments in Chinese history. Fittingly, scholars of China have used the term antiquarianism to describe the endeavors of experts such as connoisseurs and collectors of bronze vessels and rubbings of ancient inscriptions (e.g., Hung 2010). It is therefore appropriate that one of the first forays into the comparative history of antiquarianism addresses the similarities and differences between European and Chinese traditions (Miller and Louis 2012).

More recently, the word antiquarianism has been extended to include a much broader range of practices beyond the undertakings of literate and leisured scholars. This is how the term is employed in the volume World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives, edited by the prominent historian of archaeology Alain Schnapp (2013). Schnapp’s book covers antiquarian traditions as diverse as those of ancient Mesopotamia, pre-Columbian Mexico, medieval Egypt, and contemporary India. This is also how the term is used here. In the pages that follow the reader will encounter figures familiar from traditional accounts of early modern European interest in the past, such as Paolo Giovio (1483–1552) and James Stuart (1713–1788)², but also a series of people—often anonymous—who have received at best passing mention in histories of archaeology and antiquarianism. These include indigenous experts on the pre-Columbian past in colonial Mexico and Peru, and local interpreters of antiquities in the provinces of the Roman and Ottoman Empires. Additionally, multiple contributions to this volume investigate what we could call non-antiquarian and even anti-antiquarian attitudes, including those of communities and individuals in contemporary Ethiopia who maintain a conscious and deliberate indifference towards the material remains of their past, as well as inventors of fake antiquities in sixteenth-century Mexico and eighteenth-century France.

The scholarly conversation in which this book participates was given impetus by the magisterial histories of archaeology and antiquarianism written by Bruce Trigger (1989; 2006) and Alain Schnapp (1996 [1993]). This volume builds on that work, most directly on the model of Schnapp (2013), by offering fine-grained case studies of antiquarian practices from different parts of the world. However, whereas the essays in Schnapp’s World Antiquarianism tend to present snapshots of discrete traditions, the contributors to this volume explore the dynamics of interaction between antiquarianisms.

We approach the study of antiquarianisms with two principles in mind. The first, we suspect, is generally accepted by contemporary archaeologists and historians. Political, financial, and other asymmetries regularly obscure alternative discourses about the past, even those that in practice directly inform the dominant discourse. A more comprehensive history of archaeology should strive to detect and recover alternative discourses (often from patchy or hostile sources), and also recognize motivations, interests, and practices that could be radically different from those of modern European antiquarians and contemporary archaeologists.

The second principle is closely related to the first, but has received less scholarly attention, especially from historians of archaeology (note however Hamilakis 2011: 63): all antiquarian traditions are, inevitably, traditions in contact. Every discourse about antiquity emerges and develops in dialogue and conflict with alternative discourses. While the notion of a discrete antiquarian tradition may be heuristically useful, its limitations should also be explicitly acknowledged. Even the hegemonic practices of modern European antiquarianism and contemporary archaeology, whose power and apparent ubiquity frequently obscure the existence of divergent approaches, are themselves influenced, informed, threatened, and energized by alternative ways of engaging with antiquity.

By now the existence of antiquarian interests in many times and places has been demonstrated, even if their universality has also been forcefully contested (as, for example, by Alfredo González-Ruibal in this volume). Therefore, instead of continuing to fill in the picture by producing further examples of antiquarian traditions from additional regions and eras, this volume proposes to explore contact and conflict between antiquarian traditions, in other words, the dynamics of antiquarianisms as they interact with each other. Fine-grained case studies of traditions in contact will allow us, first, to counteract Whiggish narratives of the history of archaeology as a secure, steady march toward the currently dominant tendencies of the discipline; and second, to appreciate the distinct contours of antiquarianisms within their specific historical and cultural contexts instead of gauging them all by the standard of European developments.

The need for finer detail is especially acute in the treatment of pre-Renaissance endeavors and in cases where texts are patchy, biased, or nonexistent. When the very long-term history of antiquarianism has been probed (as by Schnapp and Trigger), discussion of pre-Renaissance antiquarians has tended to emphasize apparent similarities to modern European practices at the expense of differences. Elite individuals whose concerns are partially commensurable with those of early modern European antiquarians come to stand in for entire periods; thus Herodotus for Greece, Pausanias for Rome. The result is that such figures inevitably seem ahead of their times. And yet, as archaeologist Susan Alcock (2002) has demonstrated through close attention to material evidence from Roman Greece, conflict about the meaning of the past was endemic and pervasive in the past (see also Van Dyke and Alcock 2003, with a much wider geographic and chronological scope). As their frequently polemic tone indicates, Herodotus and Pausanias were not alone, and, in addition, when viewed in their milieu come to seem much less like us than before. While religious devotion has played an almost insignificant role in antiquarian and archaeological endeavors since the early modern period, for example, one should not overlook the religious dimension of Pausanias’s and even some of Herodotus’s antiquarian interests. Their cases can hardly be unique. The challenge, accordingly, is to imagine a history of archaeology that might explore diachronic change across the long term while preserving synchronic disagreement about and variance of approaches towards the past. Indeed, we should expect that robustly multivocal accounts of the interpretation of the material remains of the past at specific places and times will suggest new explanatory models for long-term change.

Accordingly, many of the chapters that follow attempt to place individual protagonists in a deeper and messier social field than is usually found in global histories of archaeology and antiquarianism, thereby revealing unexpected connections, dissonances, and enthusiasms. Greater historical depth and social breadth, in turn, enable us to move beyond simple dichotomies of folk and elite, vernacular and official, indigenous and colonial. We aim to trouble, if not demolish these binaries. We are convinced that this expansion of the notion of antiquarians will facilitate dialogue between the history of antiquarianism and both the archaeology of memory (Alcock 2002; Bradley 2002) and the study of indigenous archaeologies (e.g., Watkins 2000; Atalay 2008). These fields have remained fairly independent, but they have much to offer each other.

The core of this book deals with the Spanish colonies in the Americas (Chs. 4–6) and the provinces of the Ottoman Empire (Chs. 7–9). These regions offer ideal scenarios for exploring contact and conflict between notionally distinct antiquarian traditions. Both the New World and the sultan’s realms were prominent arenas for the activities of European antiquaries, who upon arrival encountered—even if they did not always recognize—existing antiquarianisms. Some of those local, non-European traditions have been probed in recent literature under the rubric of indigenous archaeologies (for the Americas see Hamann 2002; for Ottoman Greece see Hamilakis 2007: 73–74; 2008, as well as Bahrani et al. 2011). Cultural differences of various sorts (e.g., religious, economic, and political) posed obstacles to dialogue between antiquarians of differing background, as did conceptual differences that we might call ontological (for example, concerning the nature of time and the agency of objects).

The two regions also exhibit salient differences. In the Americas, the activity of European antiquarians was often directly tied to the operations of a single colonial and missionary state, a point highlighted in the contributions of both Byron Hamann (Ch. 4) and Steve Kosiba (Ch. 5). In the eastern Mediterranean, by contrast, the situation was more convoluted. The gulf between European antiquaries and the state apparatus was much wider than in the Americas. During periods of weak central authority, moreover, provincial governors constituted a third, semi-independent interest group which itself existed in a complicated relationship to religiously and linguistically diverse local communities. In her study of the antiquarian activities of a governor in Ottoman Greece, Emily Neumeier (Ch. 7) demonstrates that the colonial-indigenous dichotomy is, at best, unable to represent the complexity of such constellations, and, at worst, misleading.

The Ottoman Empire was moreover home to those Classical and Biblical antiquities in which European antiquarians saw their own origins. European claims to superior knowledge vis-à-vis local interpreters of the material remains of the past, as well as the concomitant suppression or misidentification of local discourses, are explored in the contributions of Eva-Maria Troelenberg (Ch. 8) and Benjamin Anderson (Ch. 9). American antiquities, by contrast, do not so obviously appear in the classical texts on which learned Europeans were raised, although many of those Europeans attempted to understand American realia by analogy to classical models. The extent to which the histories of Classical and American antiquities are intertwined can be surprising: as Giuseppe Marcocci (Ch. 6) shows, the same forgeries that shaped the conceptualization of the remote past in Renaissance Viterbo also informed an influential Franciscan friar’s account of pre-Columbian history in central Mexico.

Dissent and discord among antiquarian traditions are ubiquitous in this book; but what is the role of comparison? To begin, comparison of analogous yet distinct arenas of antiquarian interaction, along the lines of the three paragraphs above, should facilitate a more refined account of the specific cultural and historical pressures under which knowledge about the past has been and continues to be produced. Furthermore, and most crucially, comparison should make us aware of how our own assumptions, prejudices, and limitations shape our apprehension of other approaches to the past. We must examine the grounds on which the strange has been reflexively removed from the history of archaeology. For example, Felipe Rojas (Ch. 2) calls attention to antiquarian traditions in the Greek and Roman world that little resemble our own, but which were demonstrably familiar to those intellectuals who are usually considered forerunners of European antiquarians and archaeologists. The opposite also holds true: sometimes the apparently familiar is in fact radically other. As Alfredo González-Ruibal (Ch. 3) argues, there is no reason to assume that interest in the past is a human universal like language or music.³ On the contrary, many people have had good reasons not to cultivate an interest in the past (cf. Connerton 2008 on the roles of forgetting, as opposed to remembering, in the shaping of community identity). In our desire to discover alternative antiquarianisms we might fundamentally misunderstand opposing and wellfounded impulses to forget, ignore, or neglect the material traces of the past.

Faced with the question of radical otherness, there are at least two ways forward for the comparative study of antiquarianisms. Rojas in his contribution proposes a less historically freighted term, archaeophilia, that might accommodate a broader range of phenomena than those customarily subsumed under antiquarianism. Anderson, by contrast, proposes a narrower, theoretical definition of antiquarianism that might cut across the colonial-indigenous divide. It is no surprise that this volume’s editors and the respondent, Peter Miller (Ch. 10), have most directly addressed the question of comparison. After all, we are the first to have had the benefit of reading these thoughtful and stimulating contributions all together. We are confident that subsequent readers will propose new answers of their own.

Notes

1. For Momigliano a key difference between antiquarians, on the one hand, and historians, on the other, was that the antiquarians were primarily compilers of documents (including coins and inscriptions), while the later were analytical narrators.

2. Paolo Giovio was an Italian polymath, who collected classical antiquities and also realia from the New World in his villa on Lake Como, which he called Museo. James Stuart was a British antiquarian best known for his handsomely illustrated volumes on The Antiquities of Athens , which he produced with Nicholas Revett.

3. The universality of such interests is often assumed and sometimes even stated explicitly. Consider, for example, the following statement of archaeologist Paul Bahn (1996: 8): Most human beings have some interest in the past: indeed, together with the fact that we know we are going to die and that we are uniquely capable of destroying our planet this may be one of humankind’s distinguishing characteristics.

References Cited

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Archaeophilia: A Diagnosis and Ancient Case Studies

FELIPE ROJAS

This paper was incited by the suspicion that the ways in which humans throughout the world have used material remains to explore and explain the past have been—and, hopefully still are—more varied than archaeologists or historians usually recognize. Variety should be expected, since the mental processes by which one determines that the past was a certain way are, to say the least, multiple and complex. The hypothetical links binding things in the present to chronologically remote events involve, for example, ideas about causality, ontology, and agency that are not natural or self-evident, as well as agendas, practices, and social structures that, obviously, are culturally specific. Historians of archaeology have demonstrated that human interest in material remains that are old (or imagined to be old) is widespread and frequent, although perhaps not universal (as Alfredo González-Ruibal reminds his readers in Ch. 3 of this volume). Despite that recognition, there is still much to be done to investigate the heterogeneity of human interactions with the traces of the past, especially in places other than Europe and in times before the Renaissance. This paper is a contribution to that investigation.

An expansive and inclusive history of archaeology and antiquarianism could begin by asking the following three questions of specialists working in different cultural settings:

I. Who are the antiquaries, if we may call them such, or—if we decide to disregard the contemporary meaning of the word archaeologist and to attend instead to its Greek etymology—we could ask, who are the archaeologists, i.e., those knowledgeable about ancient things?

II. What, if anything, do they consider archaeological evidence? Or, less anachronistically, what things do they recognize as meaningful traces of the past?

III. How do the antiquaries imagine themselves to be historically associated with those traces of the past in which they are interested?

As I point out below, all of these questions resonate with contemporary issues in academia and beyond. They seem especially relevant to current debates in archaeology (about, for example, cultural heritage management and the challenge of attending to local, non-specialized voices in the production of historical narratives) as well as in anthropology (especially those regarding the possibility of understanding or even studying ontologies different from modern Western ones, on which see Steve Kosiba in Ch. 5 of this volume). My expertise lies in the so-called classical Mediterranean so I ground my discussion of these questions using evidence from the Greek and especially the Roman period. Instead of producing lists of possible answers for each of them (by responding to the second one, for example: coins, medals, statues, etc.), I concentrate on cases that, from our contemporary perspective, seem outlandish. My aim is not to strain the reader’s belief with bizarre examples, much less to mock the perceived error of ancient investigators of the past, but rather to show that even within relatively wellstudied cultures such as those of ancient Greece and Rome, the pluralism of ancient archaeological or antiquarian thought has been overlooked or at least seriously understudied. If this is true for Greece and Rome, such neglect must be even worse in the case of traditions that are less familiar to modern Western archaeologists and historians. What was considered a trace of the past in Bronze Age China or in the pre-Columbian Amazon? Who cared about antiquities in Aztec Tenochtitlan or in the Kingdom of Aksum? How did antiquaries in Neolithic Anatolia or in Mongol Samarkand imagine themselves to be connected to the things they recognized as antiquities?

Readers may wonder whether such questions can be answered at all, even if we narrow our scope to ancient Greece and Rome. Some may object, claiming that they involve insuperable anachronisms and cultural differences that elude translation. Luckily for those undertaking this project, similar difficulties have been confronted already by historians of other fields of knowledge who have chosen to ask themselves whether it makes sense to speak, for example, of ancient Greek science or of Aristotle as a scientist when practices that we can understand broadly as scientific (or, in our case, archaeological) were part of very different social and cultural dynamics than those of science (or archaeology) today, and when the word science did not exist in Greece and Aristotle did not apply for grants or manage a laboratory (Lloyd 2009: 153–171).

Those wishing to ask What was ‘archaeology’ in antiquity? have several options available to them. The easiest and least interesting is to declare the entire notion an oxymoron and to ignore it, ideally after determining a more or less random moment after the European Renaissance in which archaeology purportedly begins to exist and concluding that any event before then cannot be meaningfully considered archaeological, or even antiquarian. The historian of science David Pingree would have deemed this option unacceptable. In a seminal essay that informs my own discussion, he argued that:

it is the historian’s task to seek out the origins of the ideas that he or she is dealing with, and these manifestly lie, for astronomy [which was Pingree’s specialty], in the wedges impressed on clay tablets [in ancient Mesopotamia] as well as in the observed motions of the celestial bodies [Pingree 1992: 557].

Pingree was objecting to historians of astronomy who refused to count astrological omens, for example, as part of their remit, because they were not, by modern standards scientific, even though it was demonstrable that some of the ideas and practices that those historians would consider properly astronomical found their origins precisely in such omens. I share Pingree’s dissatisfaction with presentist approaches; apart from being self-centered, they are ahistorical.

Another option is for historians of archaeology and antiquarianism to try to find embryonic analogues of our present-day selves in the historical and archaeological record, in other words, to look for proto-archaeologists and proto-antiquarians in antiquity as others, such as the historian of science George Sarton, once looked for proto-scientists. (Note, for example, that Sarton organized his monumental Introduction to the History of Science prosopographically: Thales, Anaximander, Cleosthenes, etc.) Though slightly less reductive, this approach is also inadequate because the chances of finding our hypothetical predecessors are minimal—although, as shown in section I below—not altogether nil. The risk of anachronism, however, is enormous. If the Greek historian Thucydides cannot be considered the colleague of a modern historian, as the classicist Nicole Loreaux (1982) memorably contended, much less could he be considered the colleague of a modern archaeologist.

A third and bolder option is to define archaeology so generously that it does not appear as a uniquely modern western phenomenon. Pingree’s words, mutatis mutandis, may again offer some guidance:

… my interest lies not in judging the truth or falsehood of these or any other sciences [in our case, of ancient archaeological or antiquarian interests and practices], nor in discovering in them some part that might be useful or relevant to the present world, but simply in understanding how, why, where, and when they worked as functioning systems of thought and interacted with each other and with other systems of thought [1992: 554].

The dangers of proposing a more capacious definition of archaeology are many, the principal of which is diluting the specificity of the term to the point that it ends up describing almost any interaction with old things. One of its main advantages, however, is the possibility of recovering some of the variety and complexity of how humans have interpreted or manipulated things to explain or explore the past.

Perhaps what we need to do instead is to come up with a different word, a word that can describe both our own archaeology, as we understand it, and also, more generally, interactions with the traces of the past that, although attested in other times and places, are radically different from our own. I propose the neologism: archaeophilia, which I define as the urge to explore and explain the past by identifying, interpreting, and manipulating things that are (or are imagined to be) old. The word has a medical ring to it, which is purposeful, but needs to be qualified. It does not designate an extreme aberration (like necrophilia or zoophilia or even Hellenophilia¹). Instead, it describes a common itch.

In what follows I tackle the three questions posed above using several examples of archaeophilia from the Greek and Roman Mediterranean.

I: Who Were the Antiquaries?

Throughout the twentieth century, European and American historians and archaeologists working in the Mediterranean and Near East noted similarities between their own interests and practices, and those of the people in the past whom they studied. Those scholars wrote articles with varying degrees of sympathy for their ancient subjects, using titles such as Archaeologists in Antiquity (Van Buren 1925), Greeks and Romans as Archeologists (Wace 1949), Thucydides as Archaeologist (Cook 1955), and the much more recent and theoretically sophisticated—note the parentheses—Babylonian Archaeologists of the(ir) Mesopotamian Past (Winter 2000). Much of that work was synthetic; indeed, several of the earlier pieces amount to lists of archaeological incidents. But even in-depth analytical studies unapologetically described people in the past as engaging in archaeology. Take, for example, the historian Christian Habicht’s assessment of Pausanias:

In little more than one page (II.16), Pausanias describes the myths that are told of Mycenae’s foundation, the destruction of the town by the Argives in 468 B.C., and the ruins as he saw them, beginning with the famous Lion Gate (II.16.3–7). This single page is the origin of what may be called professional archaeology [1986: 29].

Or consider archaeologist Susan Alcock’s evaluation of the protagonist of Philostratos’s Heroikos (an ancient literary fiction that is concerned with the relationship between present and past, especially as attested in material remains):

From a modern perspective, even the figure of Protesilaos himself could be seen as a kind of archaeologist, digging down into layers of tradition, exposing, retrieving, assessing. Places and things, burial and recovery—in other words a material context—are central to interpretations of the Heroikos [2005: 159].

The lexical problem of what to call people like Pausanias or Thucydides or even Philostratos’s fictional Protesilaos—antiquaries, archaeologists, or past-loving-creatures, as suggested by Peter N. Miller at the conference from which this volume arose—may seem inconsequential, except that it