The history of archaeology, largely written for archaeologists by archaeologists, has rarely ventured into the history of ideas. This lacuna is surprising, as the few times that historians of ideas have examined the history of archaeology, their contributions have improved understandings of the field's disciplinary past. Arnaldo Momigliano (Reference Momigliano1950) was the first to propose an intellectual history of antiquarians. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, however, that Momigliano's ideas affected the history of archaeology. At that time, Stuart Piggott (Reference Piggott1989) published on the antiquarian imagination, and Krysztoff Pomian (Reference Pomian1987) analysed the relationships between antiquarians and collections. Similarly, in the field of prehistoric archaeology, Wiktor Stoczkowski (Reference Stoczkowski1994) examined the pre-scientific ideas that had shaped modern narratives in human evolution, and, from a broader perspective, Bruce G. Trigger published his influential A history of archaeological thought (Reference Trigger1989). As these examples illustrate, the history of ideas has inspired interesting scholarly works on the history of archaeology, albeit in relatively limited numbers.

It is in this tradition that we can situate Alain Schnapp's latest work. Professor Emeritus of classical archaeology at Université Paris 1, Schnapp is globally recognised as one of the leading voices in the study of the history of archaeology. In 1993, he published La conquête de passé: aux origines de l'archaéologie (Schnapp Reference Schnapp1993), a book in which he examined the connections between antiquarianism and modern archaeology. Since then, he has published many new insights into the history of archaeology. This assiduous book continues this remarkable record. As the title indicates, Une histoire universelle des ruines examines the different conceptualisations of the idea of ‘ruins’ in a number of Western and non-Western cultures, including the ancient Near East (Chapter I), classical antiquity (Chapter II), ancient China (Chapter III), the Middle Ages (Chapter IV), Islamic civilisations (Chapter V) and the Renaissance (Chapter VI). Schnapp argues that the French Enlightenment elaborated the idea of ‘ruin’ as “an object of concern and admiration [an object that] tells the story of the passage of time and its devastating effects and, at the same time, reveals a monumental splendor that inspires the imagination” (p. 14). While the idea of ‘ruin’ is a modern one, Schnapp suggests that the link between memory, materiality and history that is at the core of this notion was already present in a number of former civilisations and cultures, from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. Une histoire universelle des ruines retraces the history of this concept both meticulously and comprehensively, examining a considerable number of texts and documents from wide-ranging languages and cultures. Equally impressive is the theoretical discussion, which is both vibrant and sophisticated. Schnapp introduces an excellent synthesis of the traditions in the history of ideas with recent discussion on the history of archaeology (e.g. Moro Abadía & Huth Reference Moro and Huth2013; Murray & Spriggs Reference Murray and Spriggs2017). In short, I have no doubt that this impressive tome will become a reference point for decades to come, for specialists and students interested in the notion of ‘ruins’ and the history of archaeology.

That said, I conclude by reflecting on how this book may be received. The universality of the idea of ‘ruins’ may be the first issue. Schnapp's central premise is that most people are interested in remains from the past. There are, however, alternative views; Gordillo, for example, argues that “the absence of a concept of ‘ruins’ […] is, in fact, widespread among subaltern populations all over the world” (Reference Gordillo2014: 8). It is, perhaps, important to note here that Schnapp does not deny that the concept of ‘ruins’ has early nineteenth-century Western origins, indeed he explicitly outlines this in the introduction. It was at that time that Chateaubriand established links between the materiality of the past, the passage of time and the constitution of memory (Schnapp Reference Schnapp2020: 10). That the concept of ‘ruins’ is a Western one does not, however, invalidate the author's claim that peoples from other times and other places have reflected on what we (modern Western scholars) call ‘ruins’ in an analogous (but not identical) way. In other words, Schnapp does not reduce the diversity of ideas about ruins into a monolithic conceptualisation. Quite the opposite, he examines the plurality of ways in which people have thought about these vestiges of the past.

The second point is a consequence of the virtue of the book, namely its truly remarkable use of literature on the history of ruins. The book compiles an impressive number of texts and documents (originally written in Greek, Latin, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and other languages) into a single volume. While, as I have mentioned, comparative approaches have been called into question, Schnapp's idea that there are plural and diverse views of ‘ruins’ is what makes such a compilation possible. In this context, few scholars would disagree that historians of archaeology should examine past conceptualisations of archaeological remains to try to learn how these materials were understood by the peoples who created them. I think, however, it is both capricious and misleading to discard all comparisons between present and earlier understandings of the past. After all, the essential issue is not whether the idea of ‘ruins’ is universal (the answer to this question depends on different understandings of what ‘universal’ means), but whether we can use this concept in a critical way, as a tool to understand better a variety of views on the past. It is precisely this latter ambitious task that is brilliantly undertaken by Schnapp in Une histoire universelle des ruines.