An uncomfortable truth?
But this antiquary’s direct descendants are those bearded men in Time Team digging trenches in soggy English fields or circling in helicopters to reveal the geometry of our ancestors’ labours. Not just archaeology, but all sorts of amateur passions – brass-rubbing, architectural history, every kind of yen to collect every kind of old clobber – have their origins in the activities of these bewigged gentlemen (it seems to have been a wholly masculine business). It was antiquaries who invented local history. If you live in an English county, its first history will almost certainly have been compiled by some batty clergyman with time on his hands who corresponded with the Society of Antiquaries.
Source: Guardian Arts Blog
It’s received wisdom that Archaeology grew from Antiquarianism. I attended a talk at a TAG conference by Ronald Hutton who argued that this might not be so. For some reason a past is important to most disciplines. Even Computing courses have been known to start with Babbage’s Difference Engine. It’s hard to underestimate its importance in C++ programming, but it’s probably about as relevant as the phase of the moon. It may be interesting but for practical programming it just doesn’t matter.
The connection between archaeologists and their past in contrast probably does. One reason is that unquestioned assumptions made by previous archaeologists can pass on and become increasingly irrelevant. The other is that if you spend your days up to your elbows in the past of other professions you may start thinking about your own. You’ll also find, if you’re an archaeologist based in the UK, that almost everything interesting has already been whacked open with a pick-axe and plundered by antiquarians. At least physically we follow in their footsteps.
However Hutton, if I understand him correctly, argues that the reason archaeologists follow antiquarians isn’t a simple case of evolution. Instead he looks to the increase in archaeological activity in the UK in the 1920s and asked why it happened. What there is in the UK is an influx of ex-soldiers who have seen the remains of other countries and, with the invention of the aeroplane, have a different perspective on the past which isn’t being satisfied by antiquarianism. Instead of collecting artefacts, there is a move to collect data which includes the context of the artefacts. To make sense of this data ideas are corroborated against other ideas about the past, of which History is the strongest influence. From this point of view archaeologists and antiquarians could be viewed as being in competition with each other. During the talk he read a few stories of local dignitaries and antiquarians being shocked at what was occurring at archaeological digs.
This would leave two blocs both with a direct interest in the material remains of the past, and the antiquarians would be more likely to have the funding of the gentry. In this way it became desirable for archaeologists to appropriate the past. Antiquarianism was adopted to be moulded by archaeologists, who claimed the mantle of antiquarianism.
It’s an interesting view, and if it’s right then it could be necessary to rethink some other archaeological truths. One would be that artefactual analysis without archaeological context is not archaeology. In English, it would have to be accepted that art historical work on unprovenanced antiquities it a hangover of the 19th century, not work which will be used as archaeology continues to develop. Many archaeologists would agree with this, but it removes a support for the decreasing numbers who would not.
It could also mean more honesty in our approach to museums. If antiquarianism was not archaeology then does it really make sense to refer to the Elgin Marbles as having any connection to classical archaeology? This is where I would argue Classicists are ahead of Archaeologists. They take the concept of Reception, how the discipline of Classics has been built up since the 18th century much more seriously than Archaeologists. The number of archaeologists working on reception of archaeology is a non-zero number, but I’d hesitate to say it was a thriving sub-field. I’d be delighted if anyone left comments below to prove me wrong.
Where does this leave the Antiquaries in Britain, 1707-2007 exhibition at the Royal Academy? Is it a collection which should be a celebration, or a warning about involvement with the remains of the past? Or has Antiquarianism become part of the past’s rich tapestry itself?
