‘There [is] a real sense that the historiography of archaeology [has] finally arrived as a legitimate and exciting field of archaeological research’, state Tim Murray and Christopher Evans in their brief introduction to this collection of historical studies. The articles and chapters, published between 1965 and 2002, were selected specifically to demonstrate, exemplify and celebrate ‘the variability of thought and practice’ evident in this fast-expanding historical field of enquiry. The editors suggest that the grand diversity of methods and approaches used to understand our disciplinary history reflect and acknowledge ‘the creation of world archaeologies, and the multiplication of interests and objectives among both the producers and consumers of archaeological knowledge’.
Meta-narrative is thus dead. There is no one lineal, unifying history as there is no one-world archaeology. Both archaeology and its historical analyses are now multi-vocal endeavours. Hence the editors ask: ‘whether there is an irreducible disciplinary core … whether archaeologists working in different fields, or from different perspectives, have enough in common to engage in meaningful disciplinary conversation’. These are big questions for fragmented times but Murray and Evans strongly believe that historical research will play a vital role ‘in ensuring that such conversations occur, and that they do so in an informed manner’.
We may ask, then, do these papers now, or did they in their era, stimulate conversation? Does the volume succeed as a collection in furthering ‘the exploration’ of our historical and present diversity? Are the selections still relevant? Certainly some of the papers are recognized classics, which affected many of us deeply at first reading. Such papers were recognized as good and useful then, and remain so today. Jacob Gruber’s 1965 ‘Brixham Cave and the antiquity of man’ is a detailed, meaty, archival-based analysis of how and why, for decades, from 1800 onward, evidence of our antiquity was successfully suppressed; it is indeed still instructive to those of us who hold too tightly to dearly held myths. Bettina Arnold’s 1990 paper, which should be read with her 1999 paper (Arnold Reference Arnold1990 and Reference Arnold1999), documents the significance of archaeological evidence to political systems and how archaeology may easily lend authority to oppression. And her analysis is not simple-minded; Arnold (Reference Arnold1990) also describes the little-known ‘opposition’ – such scholars as K H Jacob-Friesen, Ernst Wahle and Carl Schuchhardt, who remained in Germany and dared openly to criticize Kossina and Gobineau’s doctrines of racial superiority during the 1930s and 1940s.
Tim Murray’s ‘The history, philosophy, and sociology of archaeology: the case of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882)’, although not so widely known in its era, accurately presaged the explosion of sociological studies, such as those produced by the current crop of postgraduate students who belong to the newly formed History of Archaeology Research Network (HARN). Michael Dietler’s 1994 ‘“Our Ancestors the Gauls”: archaeology, ethnic nationalism, and the manipulation of Celtic identity in modern Europe’ is a solidly researched cautionary tale of how appeals to an ‘ancient Celtic’ have played ‘important and often paradoxical roles in the ideological naturalization of modern political communities’. The excerpt from Suzanne Marchand’s acclaimed Down from Olympus: archaeology and philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (1996) would rightly be included in any compendium of recent work. Written by a historian for historians, widely known and highly recommended, Marchand’s work exemplifies quality in historical technique. Rightly, too, representative studies by the ‘fathers’ of twentieth-century historiography – Bruce Trigger, Alain Schnapp and Leo Klejn – are appropriately reprinted here. It should be mentioned that Klejn has now completed a two-volume history of archaeology, which we hungrily await. One of the final reprinted articles is Marc-Antoine Kaeser’s careful interrogation of the fashionable idea that archaeology is inherently nationalistic. He refutes this thesis by thoroughly documenting the ‘international character of the first institutionalization of prehistory’ in nineteenth-century Europe.
These texts did stimulate conversation among historians of archaeology when first published and still should today. Some of the analyses in the remaining articles, however, have now been overtaken by more recent research. The volume might have benefited with a brief conclusion in which the editors confirmed the point made in their introduction, that the papers would admirably ‘drive the creation of further variability’.
