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In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: a History of Classical
Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,
by Stephen L. Dyson, 2006. New Haven (CT): Yale
University Press, ISBN-13 978-0-300-11097-5 hard-
back £30 & US$45; xv+316 pp., 40 ills.
Nicola Terrenato
Classical Archaeology is the only eld of archaeology
for which the qualifying adjective is a value judgment.
So it is not surprising that its history can be told in iso-
lation from the rest of the discipline without too many
problems. What was perceived as the hallowed past
of the dominant Western powers could not be safely
confused with that of decadent Orientals or of savages
from the new worlds that were being colonized on the
strength of a postulated cultural superiority. White
marbles could not be in the same discourse as African
bronzes without risking a miscegenation that awoke
profound anxieties. This was especially true in those
places, like Prussia or America, where there were no
Classical remains to embrace as sources of identity
and standing in history.
Steve Dyson’s book is a wide-angle picture of this
peculiar scholarly universe, embracing two centuries
and many dierent national traditions in classical
studies. Beginning with the awakening of a systematic
classical archaeology in the second half of the 18th
century, the author takes his readers to the UNESCO
excavations at Carthage in the early 1970s. The lower
chronological limit is a reasonable, if perhaps predict-
able, choice, especially given the existence of Alain
Schnapp’s excellent work (1993) on archaeology in
pre-modern times. The decision to leave out the debate
of the last few decades is a bit disappointing in a book
that healthily makes no tall claims to being a dispas-
sionate account. In fairness, though, Dyson has not
shied away from speaking his mind elsewhere about
the recent history and present condition of classical
archaeology (e.g. Dyson 1993; 1985). Indeed, this book
comes aer two other major book-length contributions
of his to the history of Classical archaeology (Dyson
1998; 2004). It is worth observing in this context that
reexive accounts of the history of the discipline
have been and are increasingly among the very few
Trojan horses that can smuggle some measure of
abstract thinking in a chronically under-theorized
and empiricizing discourse such as the classical one.
Dyson clearly understands this well and must be com-
mended for a lifetime of tireless eort at bringing the
archaeologies of Greece and especially Rome a lile
closer to those of all the other parts of the world.
Given the prominence of classical education in
many Western nations, the book needs to cover a vast
range of local scholarly traditions and academic struc-
tures, from German state-funded central archaeologi-
cal bureaucracy to British amateur societies or agenda-
heavy Vatican archaeology. The reader is transported
across Europe and North America at a breathless pace,
meeting larger-than-life characters such as Wolfgang
Helbig or Eugenie Sellers Strong only to have them
disappear from sight in order to move on to the next
sketched context or debate. While such a fast-moving
discursive landscape may induce a sort of reexive
motion sickness, the rewards are considerable. It is
only when the whole modern phase of the discipline
is painted in broad strokes that its strange, unique
nature can be fully appreciated.
Long envied and resented by other archaeolo-
gies, Classics is really a victim of that very centrality
that has entailed lavish funding, great museums and
academic visibility and prominence. These resources
actually came at a steep price in terms of ideological
independence and freedom of opinion. The budding
and booming nation-states that needed the Classics
as a propaganda prop always at hand, like a well
groomed lapdog that could consistently do useful
legitimizing tricks, kept it on a much shorter leash
than most other disciplines. Dyson correctly empha-
sizes that while the Fascist and Nazi regimes made a
particularly blatant use of, respectively, the Roman
and Greek past for their turgid claims of cultural
and racial superiority, other late nineteenth and early
twentieth century Western governments were simply
a lile subtler and less direct in pressing the Classical
past into their service.
There is, of course, no such thing as a neutral
archaeology of Greece and Rome (or of any other
place) in Western on non-Western culture, but there
are denitely dierent degrees of proximity and
coupling between dominant ideologies and certain
specialist discourses about the past. There is lile
doubt that Classics has always been at the worst
end of the spectrum. This is, paradoxically, the only
aspect of it that makes it still arguably relevant in
our post-colonial and globalizing world. Why else
should we care so much about what happened in two
Mediterranean peninsulae during a paltry millennium
and a half at most? There is only one only vaguely
defensible answer to the embarrassing question that
world archaeologists (and, worse, deans ...) around
the globe are posing, implicitly or explicitly: at least
for a short while, we all still need a strong and intel-
lectually free-ranging archaeology of what went under
the name of the Classical world, if only in order fully
to deconstruct the many received ideas that still hang
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over from the scholarship of the Romantic period. This
will not only have the local value of redeeming bits
of the human past from interpretive norms dictated
by out-dated modern political concerns but it will
also, more importantly, undermine cross-cultural
paradigms that originated in the Classics but have
become global conceptual straitjackets for many
other archaeological discourses. State, citizenship,
democracy, to name but a few, will be understood
dierently once we take away most of their classical
foundations.
Works like the one reviewed here undoubtedly
advance the cause of political and epistemological
self-awareness among classical archaeologists. Dyson
authoritatively explores a number of unsavoury
issues whose long shadow is still inuencing current
practices. Antiquarianism and the related antiques
trade are clearly exposed as being responsible for the
decontextualized approach to collection-quality port-
able artifacts. Indeed, an entire chapter is devoted to
the emergence of the ‘Great Museums’. Once again,
no other archaeology has the highly dubious honour
of such a close intertwining with nineteenth century
western history. It is a sobering narrative of national-
istic competition, espionage, colonial exploitation and
outright looting that, taken in its entirety, explains a
lot about the later developments (and lack thereof) of
the discipline.
Dyson, for instance, competently retraces the
rise of the ‘big dig’ paradigm. In the late nineteenth
and the early twentieth centuries, the main Western
nations rushed to occupy most of the major urban
sites in the Eastern Mediterranean, in a sort of mini-
ature imperialistic expansion. What emerges clearly
is the virtual absence of any real hypothesis-driven
strategy. Museums need to be stocked, coloured ag
pins need to be planted on maps and ‘beards’ need to
be provided for spies. While the eldwork can at times
be of excellent quality, not much space is le for the
formulation of autonomous research agendas. These
big digs, which have now oen run for many decades
practically uninterrupted, are still key landmarks in
the academic landscape of power, in ways that are
foreign, if not inconceivable, to other archaeologies.
To this day, rising in the ranks of big dig hierarchies
can oen make careers just as easily, if not more,
than having luminous ideas. The fate of Italy, in this
context, is of particular interest and brilliantly brought
out in the book. It was, early on, prime real estate in
the big dig game but, with the advent of nationhood
in the late 1800s, it tried instead to become an active
player in places like Crete or Libya, while essentially
closing down its own archaeological frontiers to
foreign missions. As a result, the archaeology of Italy
lagged behind that of Greece or Turkey even as its
own economic conditions were drastically improving.
Paradoxically, the theoretical advantage of being the
only industrialized nation with an internationally cov-
eted archaeological heritage turned out to be a severe
handicap, illustrating perfectly the perverse eects of
Classical archaeology being politically charged to the
extreme. Aspiring archaeological colonialists could not
allow themselves to be colonized at the same time.
In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts is by far the best avail-
able compendium in any language, and its appearance
should be saluted as an important step in the slow,
ongoing process of the normalization of Classical
Archaeology. It also whets our appetite for more,
namely for the rst explicit aempts at new theoreti-
cal movements in our rather mummied discipline.
Sooner or later, the golden chains that have kept us
tied so closely to high-level politics will be completely
shaken o. Dyson is spurring us on by rubbing our
noses in the peculiar and somewhat unedifying past
realities of the discipline.
Nicola Terrenato
Department of Classical Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor
Michigan
48109
USA
Email: terrenat@umich.edu
References
Dyson, S.L., 1985. Two paths to the past: a comparative
study of the last y years of American Antiquity
and the American Journal of Archaeology. American
Antiquity 50, 452–63.
Dyson, S.L., 1993. From New to New Age archaeology:
archaeological theory and Classical Archaeology – a
1990s perspective. American Journal of Archaeology 97,
195–206.
Dyson, S.L., 1998. Ancient Marbles to American Shores: Classi-
cal Archaeology in the United States. Philadelphia (PA):
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Dyson, S.L., 2004. Eugenie Sellers Stron : Portrait of an Archae-
ologist. London: Duckworth.
Schnapp, A., 1993. La conquête du passé: aux origines de l’ar-
chéologie. Paris: Carré.