ANTHROPOLOGY 235,



ANTHROPOLOGY 235,

ARCHAEOLOGY & ANTIQUARIANISM

processual questions (that focus on how? and why?) are at the heart of modern archaeology

archaeology relies on material evidence of the past

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James Ussher (1581—1656)

Archbishop of Armagh & Primate of All Ireland

Author of the Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti

(Annals of the Old and New Testaments), 1650-1654

Antiquarian “backward-looking curiosity”

Hesiod of Ascra (Greece, ca. 700 BCE), Works and Days

REMEMBER: “BCE,” Before the Common Era and “CE,” Common Era are preferred over the somewhat more familiar but inappropriately exclusive terms “BC,” Before Christ and “AD” Anno Domini, respectively…both systems refer to the same point in time, roughly 2009 years ago.

King Nabonidus of Ur, Babylonia (ruled 556-539 BCE)

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Cuneiform-inscribed clay cylinder describing repairs on the temple of the moon-god at Ur by King Nabonidus, with a prayer for his son, Belshazzar. 6th century BCE, Iraq.

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The Danish physician and antiquary, Ole Worm (also known by his Latin name, Olaus Wormius), 1588-1655. One of the first scholars to straddle the line between pre-modern natural philosopher and modern empirical scientist.

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The frontispiece from Worm’s Museum Wormianum (1655) depicting his early 17th-Century “wunderkammen” or “cabinet of curiosities”

See:

for a high-resolution illustration of an even earlier wunderkammen depicted in Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale published in Naples in 1599.

William Stukeley, England (1687-1765)

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Stukeley’s depiction of the stone circles and causeways at Avebury, England from his book Abury, a Temple of the British Druids, 1743

Thomas Jefferson, USA (1743-1826)

Charles Lyell (1797-1875), Principles of Geology (1833). Subsidiary title: “An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation”

Uniformitarianism ( analogical thinking

Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868),

Somme Valley, France. First widely-reported discovery of associated prehistoric stone tools and fossils of extinct animals.

John Lubbock’s (1834-1913) best-seller,

Prehistoric Times (1865)

Charles Darwin (1809-1882), On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)

Articulation of the formal concept of EVOLUTION

C. J. Thomsen (1788-1865) & J. J. A. Worsaae (1821-1885), Denmark, Guidebook to Northern Antiquities (1836). The Three-Age System

typology & seriation. (Typology is the sequential, ordered arrangement of objects from the past. Seriation is the arrangement of artifacts in a chronological or developmental sequence)

ethnography and archaeology

(including ethnographic analogy)

Edward Tyler, England (1832-1917)

Lewis Henry Morgan, USA (1818-1881)

Ancient Society (1877)

Morgan’s “natural progression” of human societies:

savagery ( barbarism ( civilization

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Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-1972), human paleontologist

(not an archaeologist, but not a fictional character, either!)

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This is not an archaeologist.

This is an actor portraying a fictional antiquarian “raider”

(not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

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This is also not an archaeologist.

This is another actor portraying a self-described “tomb raider.” That is, a fictional antiquarian…

And, just in case you’re not clear as to the definition of “raider”:

raider ['reId((r)]. Noun. Plunderer, pillager, looter, spoiler, despoiler, freebooter, pirate. Someone who takes spoils or plunder (as in war).

The concept has nothing whatsoever to do with archaeology!

It’s never a good sign when archaeologists, or any other scientists, are converted into comic book heroes – especially when what those characters do is by no means heroic!

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The Bottom Line:

Archaeology seeks to understand and explain the past…

Antiquarianism seeks to describe and exploit the past…

Stated another way, archaeology’s goal is, in part, to correct common misperceptions about past human behavior…

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