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Abstract
Empires produced some of the ancient world's grandest monuments. No doubt that helps to account for successive major exhibitions recently mounted at the British Museum. The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army closed in April 2008, having drawn more visitors than any other since Treasures of Tutankhamun in 1972 (British Museum 2008: 66). There followed, from July to October, impressive and intriguing pieces on Hadrian, the Roman Emperor of the second century AD. The attention to large political systems is timely (James 2008: 201). Twenty-five years ago, Donald Horne (1984: 252) went so far as to declare that ' in the popularisations … of the huge storehouse of … artifacts … that are such an extraordinary feature of our age. … we may find the only real potential for giving substance to human liberation '. Is this feasible in practice; and, if so, is a state museum with business sponsorship a likely place to find such enlightenment? Studying the archaeology in Hadrian , with The First Emperor as a foil, enabled us to assess these questions.
... In Taiwan, would the use of such terms seem as innocently funny as they seem to people in, say, London? 12. Compare James (2008a, 2008b, writing in Antiquity, a scholarly journal and not a newspaper that might reach the wider public. ...
In recent years, a seemingly never-ending tour of blockbuster exhibits featuring China’s First Emperor’s terra-cotta army soldiers organized by Chinese state-sponsored agencies have been staged around the world, notably in European and American museums, and usually with great success. This essay asks why, at this juncture in history, museums and their audiences have been so curiously willing to accept and engage in the admiration for empire that is encouraged and cultivated in these exhibits. To be sure, several answers are possible. This essay suggests that in Western countries, a widespread loss of faith in democracy has engendered admiration for empire and authoritarianism, which extends even to the First Emperor of Qin, the dictatorial creator of empire in ancient China—even as, in China itself, he remains heavily resented by many thinking people for his brutal and infamously bloody program of empire building.
Moctezuma, Aztec ruler
was the last of four big temporary exhibitions about ‘world rulers’ that the British Museum has put on in the past three years. Moctezuma was the king who received Cortés and the Conquistadores in 1519 and was killed the next year in their custody. The previous three exhibitions were on the First Emperor of China, the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, and Shah ‘Abbas, respectively.
Hadrian
and
The First Emperor
were archaeological (James 2008a, 2008c). So was
Moctezuma
. It ran from September 2009 to January 2010.
Kingship is evidently in vogue among London’s galleries. During
The First Emperor
’s showing,
Tutankhamun
entertained on the other side of the river (James 2008b); and the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted
Maharaja
during
Moctezuma
’s run. There are good reasons for thinking about kings in any society, regardless of political constitution, because, in their coronations, their deeds and their deaths or funerals, they are ‘collective representations’. Whether as heroes or as scapegoats, democracies tend to promote ‘celebrities’ by the same token and, as well as governing, perhaps monarchs, ancient or contemporary, served and serve that function too. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists have tackled these themes through comparison and so have archaeologists, with epigraphy, iconography and the excavation of palaces and tombs (Blanton et al. 1996; Quigley 2005).
Ideology, as part of culture, is an integral component of human interactions and the power strategies that configure sociopolitical systems. We argue that ideology is materialized, or given concrete form, in order to be a part of the human culture that is broadly shared by members of a society. This process of materialization makes it possible to control, manipulate, and extend ideology beyond the local group. Ideology becomes an important source of social power when it can be given material form and controlled by a dominant group. We illustrate this process using three archaeological case studies: Neolithic and Bronze Age chiefdoms of Denmark, the Moche states of northern Peru, and the Inka empire of the Andes.
As a beginning graduate student in anthropology in the late 1970s, I took my required core course in the archaeology of complex societies from one of the leading scholars in the discipline. The semester was spent developing data-rich theoretical models for the emergence of social inequality, ranked societies, and the origins and functioning of early states. Discussion of empires, the largest premodern states, filled less than an hour on the last day of the semester (admittedly with the acknowledgment that this was a topic worthy of further study). Similarly, in the last major assessment of the status of North American archaeology published on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Society for American Archaeology (Meltzer et al., 1986), the only article on complex societies addressed primary state emergence (Wright, 1986). Larger and later states were not considered. That this volume considers an article on the archaeology of empires a worthy contribution attests to some significant changes in disciplinary focus over the last 20 years.
Conrad's discussion bears little relation to the generally accepted outline of Peruvian prehistory. He presents evidence that is not evidence in support of a weak and untestable hypothesis. Since he is apparently unacquainted with a substantial body of recent and current research, he has launched superficial and absurd criticisms at the proposition that changes in climate are reflected in changes in human society and culture. Not only is this theory substantiated by a growing number of independent studies, but ironically enough Conrad joins their ranks by supporting my hypothesis about climate and culture in late prehistoric Andean cultures. His shallow arguments opposing cultural materialism do not deal with issues and are far from convincing. Altogether his work appears to belong to a previously unidentified archaeological specialty, the Archaeology of the Absurd.