The apartheid of antiquity

Abstract

The term ‘antiquity’ can be used in different contexts to describe both the prehistoric past and the classical age of Graeco-Roman civilization in the western part of the Old World, a usage which glosses over the ways in which the experiential and discursive surrounds of these two pasts have been, and to some degree still are, radically different. This paper develops the notion of an ‘artefactual apartheid’ of the material remnants of the ancient past, beginning in the seventeenth century – a process grounded in the emergence of opposing methodological terrains as the appropriate means of studying different classes of ancient material culture. This shift is considered as profoundly intertwined with the politics of the colonial and postcolonial eras, and the roles archaeology has played within them.

Keywords:

• Antiquarianism
• megaliths
• postcolonial critique
• prehistory
• classical antiquity
• William Stukeley

Acknowledgements

Earlier drafts of this paper were read by Zoë Crossland, Terence D'Altroy, Severin Fowles and Nan Rothschild and I wish to express my appreciation to all of them for their thoughtful responses and critiques. Also, thanks are due to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and insightful feedback and to Peter Van Dommelen for his valuable editorial comments. Arguments and debates with the Cohort influenced my thinking on much of the material presented in the paper, and they, as always, have my thanks and friendship. Any errors or misinterpretations remain my own.

Notes

1 The early Christian response to megaliths should nevertheless not be seen as uniformly negative, and it is clear that many such sites were incorporated into early Christian landscapes (Bradley 1987; Williams 1998).

2 Excavations at Pompeii began in 1738. Its remains were largely brought to the attention of British audiences through the work of Sir William Hamilton (1764–1800), the British ambassador to Naples and a well-known antiquarian.

3 Individuals such as Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838) and William Cunnington (1754–1810) were instrumental in re-establishing Stukeley's regimented pattern of scientific fieldwork as the appropriate means to ‘know’ prehistory (Trigger 1989: 113).