This document summarizes Margarita Díaz-Andreu's talk on archaeology and colonialism from multiple perspectives. She discusses how nationalism and colonialism influenced the development of archaeology as a discipline in the 19th century. Colonialism shaped the organization of archaeological knowledge through discourses, hierarchies between colonial powers and subaltern groups, and the infrastructure developed like museums, universities, and heritage administration. However, patterns of institutionalization varied across colonies. She also examines informal and internal colonialism and how nationalism replaced imperialism after decolonization. While archaeology aims to interpret the past objectively, its knowledge is still culturally interpreted and subject to historical biases.

1. Archaeology and Colonialism:
Multiple Perspectives (II)
Margarita Díaz-Andreu
ICREA, UB
ICREA colloquium
Archaeology and Colonialism:
multiple perspectives
23 January 2018

2. Archaeology Colonialism
Critical analysis of the
history of archaeolgy
Past material culture
PERSPECTIVE OF THIS TALK

3. 2009 – Historical dictionary
2011- Postcolonialismo
y Arqueología
2012
2009 – Gordon Childe
2012 2013
The Ethics
of Arch
Tourism
2007
2016
Some of my work on the history of archaeology…

4. 2018
My talk today is based on an article
that will be published shortly

5. “Historians [and archaeologists!] are to
nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan
are to heroin addicts. We supply the essential
raw material for the market”
(Eric Hobsbawm 1993: 3)
Let me start with a quotation…

6. But… why I am talking about
nationalism if the colloquium is
about colonialism?

7. New Imperialism

8. Archaeology is not value-free
discipline
• It is widely accepted today that archaeology is
not the value-free, neutral social science it was
previously thought to be
• nationalism (Díaz-Andreu 2007 – A world history
of 19th c archaeology. OUP):
– stimulated the very creation of archaeology as a
discipline
– informed the organisation of archaeological
knowledge
– guided its very infrastructure
• New Imperialism? / Colonialism

9. Industrialisation / capitalism
need for
- new markets
- cheap labour
nationalism
What was new in
New Imperialism

10. 19th century
EMPIRES
• United
Kingdom
• France
• Russia
• US
EMP. IN DECLINE
• (Ottoman
Empire)
• (Austria-
Hungary)
EXTINGUISHED
• Spain
• Portugal
• The Netherlands
• Denmark
COLONIAL POWERS IN THE NEW IMPERIAL ERA
(1800-1900)

11. 19th century
G
I J
Imperial
centre
COLONIAL POWERS IN THE NEW IMPERIAL ERA
(1900-1945)
• United Kingdom
• France
• Russia
• US
At the very end
• Germany
• Italy
• Japan
1900-1945

12. Archaeology and colonialism
• Did colonialism stimulated the very creation of
archaeology as a discipline? NO (it was nationalism)
• Did colonialism informed the organization of
archaeological knowledge?
• Discourses
• Subaltern
• Hegemony
• Resistance
– Did it guided its infrastr.?
Earlier in this presentation…

13. Discourse - progress as the motor of historic
development
‘What early man must
have been like’. A late 19th
c studio portrait of
Australian Aborigines

14. discourses and networks of communication
International Congress of Prehistoric
Anthropology and Archaeology 1906. Monaco
Journals Specialised congresses

15. Classical material culture
as the model for any
other monument
Discourses and
models
Borobudur. Indonesia
Parthenon. Greece

16. Subaltern (‘of inferior rank’)
Archaeologists in the imperial metropolises
… vs archaeologists in
the colonies
Hozmuzd Rassam
(1826-1910)
Austen Henry Layard
(1817–1894)
Budge,Wallis
(1857-1934)

17. Auguste
Mariette
(1821–81)
director of
Egyptian
Antiquities
Museum
director
Ahmed
Pasha Kamal
(1851-1923)
1st Egyptian
curator at
the Museum
of Antiquities
Museum of Antiquities. Cairo. 1878

18. Hegemony (domination by consent)
and resistance
Osman Hamdi_Bey (1842-1910)
Museum Director
Organised legislation to ban the export of
antiquities

19. Raden Saleh (1811-1880)
Indonesia
Rajendra Lal Mitra (1822–91),
the first of India’s Sanskritist

20. Did colonialism guided
the infrastructure for arch
created in the colonial
world?
MUSEUMS(LEARNED
SOCIETIES)
HERITAGE
ADMINISTRATION
UNIVERSITIES
Legislation
(foreign schools)
journals conferences

21. Yes, but different patterns of
institutionalisation
Archaeological
Survey of India
Foreign School
(EFEO)
Society
Museum

22. National Museum
of Batavia (Jakarta)
(Indonesia). 1868

23. Administration of Archaeology
Archaeological Service
of India. Created in 1861
Alexander Cunningham
Archaeological Service
of the Netherland Indies.
Established in 1913
Nicolaas Johannes Krom (1883-1945)

24. Foreign schools
Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), founded in Saigon in 1900

25. Colonies – a multiple meaning
• So far I have been talking about the
archaeology in the formal colonies
• However there are other types of colonies
– Informal colonialism
– Internal colonialism

26. Informal colonialism
• Informal imperialism—i.e. the cultural
imperialism exerted by the European powers
over other parts of the world that are
politically independent
Emil Hübner
(1834-1901)
Albertini, Eugene
(1880-1941)
Pierre Paris
(1859-1931)
• Spain as an example

27. But a country can be colonised
and be a colonial power at the
same time!

28. Internal colonialism
• DEF - the Europeans’ settling in territories,
already dwelt in by non-state societies, whose
rights to the land – and to the history of that
land – are not considered
• Examples:
– Lack of development of archaeology in the US
(anthropology is enough)
– Archaeological remains go to Natural History
museums

29. Internal colonialism – example in Latin
America (excavations without
permission of local owners)
(Ganger 2010)

30. Gregorio Chil y Naranjo at El Museo Canario
Antiquities room at La Cosmológica (La Palma)

31. What happened after decolonisation?
• India & Pakistan (1947), Burma &
Ceylon (1948), Indonesia (1949),
French colonies (1950s and early
1960s)
• Cold War: Korean War (50-53),
Vietnam (55-75)
• transition from imperialism to
nationalism
• reverse reading of the imperial
narrative nationalist reading
of the new nations' past

32. Nigerian politician, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa -
the first (and last) prime minister after Nigeria's
independence in 1960
our antiquities and traditional
arts are Nigerian.... [O]wing to the
absence of written records, the
old arts of Nigeria represent a
large part of the evidence of our
history, it is necessary to protect
and preserve our history and
artistic relics because of their
importance to Nigeria and in
order that our people today and
in the future may study and get
inspiration from them
Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (1912-1966)
From colonialism to nationalism

33. Nationalism and the language of the
past
• For a nation to have a future it needs to have a
past
• The new countries kept the colonial boundaries
• The basic frame of the historical (and
archaeological) accounts built during colonialism
was kept
• As the past in malleable, the way in which the
historical building was interpreted changed after
decolonisation

34. If the past is subject to cultural
interpretation
Is
archaeological
knowledge
reliable?

35. Is it more reliable than this?

36. Archaeology’s value
• Archaeology is a scientific discipline
• It aims to interpret past material culture with
as much honesty and care as evidence allows
• Rigorous methods: excavation, analysis,
experimentation ...
• Can we have definitive answers? No. There is
a limit on what archaeologists can say about
the past

37. Why is history of archaeology
useful?
• To be aware of the historical baggage
that archaeology has
• To try to minimize its impact, thanks to
academic criticism
• To encourage self-criticism, analyse
ourselves as historical figures and try to
minimize the impact of our own
identities, including national and post-
colonial identities.