Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Colonial Archaeology and Agatha Christie meet in this high spirited memoir of the authors marriage to eminent Archaeologist Max Mallowan, and their time spent together living and working on excavation sites in Mesopotamia and the Middle east.
Tell us something about the early figures in archeology, such as Christian Thomsen.
Christian Thomsen [1788-1865] was the first to to invent the idea of the three ages: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. He, and later Oscar Montelius [1843-1921], were both patriotic Danes, who cooperated with the King and the court, who wanted to create a national narrative and create a glorious past that Denmark could allude to and be proud of. Several kings, in other Scandinavian countries as well, were keen archaeologists, getting down there in the mud and digging away themselves.
These Scandinavian kings encouraged the development of a professional Archaeology?
Yes. Generally speaking archeology as a profession could never have emerged without the state nurturing it, fostering it and shaping it as a structured profession. With the spread of subsidized national museums throughout Europe and the appointment of curators came the beginning of national archaeology services, often structured almost militarily, like tax collectors or police, with ranks, hierarchies and local officers in each region or district. Also we see the spread through universities of chairs and professorships of ancient and pre-history. These of course continued to spread and served not only national but imperial interests.
I was surprised to see a book by Agatha Christie on your list: "Come , Tell me How You Live".
Well you see Agatha Christie was married to a man named Max Mallowan, a well-known archaeologist, particularly in the near east. She wrote "Come , Tell me How You Live", in 1946, a tremendously chirpy account of absolutely colonial archaeology, of expeditions in Syria or parts of Iraq and digging up mounds.
It's a fun read, very cheerful, but one of the difficulties of archaeology has is to try to extract itself from being a colonial profession, and one of the very big questions now is what does archaeology mean to indigenous people in post-colonial continents? Does it really mean only the material relics of the past, or does it mean something broader and quite different from old-fashioned Eurocentric archaeology? Could it be that indigenous perspectives are more valid, more interesting than ours?
Read full interview
The history of archeology is a surprising bloody affair. Neal Ascherson, journalist, author and editor of the journal Public Archeology, explains why.
