Journal of Social Archaeology

ARTICLE

Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 6(1): 527 DOI: 10.1177/1469605306060559

Factual claims in late nineteenth century

European prehistory and the descent of a
modern disciplines ideology
MICHAEL FOTIADIS
Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina, Greece

ABSTRACT
Extravagant, fantastic claims about the past are not unique to the late
nineteenth century in European prehistory, yet those from that period
sound especially curious to twenty-first century archaeological ears
and invite reflection: their authors are our direct disciplinary ancestors,
yet, when we find fantastic what they took to be sound knowledge, we
appear to be of a radically different breed of scholars/subjects. In this
article, I explore the nature of the difference, and do so while attempting to re-member the presence in our disciplinary past of those ancestors. At issue is not the nineteenth century ideological context that
made their fantastic claims appear like solid knowledge to them but
the disciplinary ideology that sustains the practice of prehistoric
archaeology today, and from the standpoint of which the nineteenth
century factual claims are curious. This ideology, I argue, descends from
the very nineteenth century scholarship that it now finds replete with
fantasies. Demonstration of this requires that I leave aside the familiar
techniques of todays historicism and treat the difference in terms of
continuity and transformation of the subject.

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KEY WORDS
disciplinary history disciplinary ideology disciplinization
historicism orientalism transformation of consciousness

IDEOLOGICAL DISTANCE AND EXOTICISM, ITS

SYMPTOM
This is an article about disciplinary history: I read late nineteenth century
essays on the prehistory of Europe and I puzzle about the nature of the
distance my discipline, prehistoric archaeology, has since traversed and
about the attending transformation of the prehistorians consciousness.
When we, archaeologists, read nineteenth century essays today (a rare
occasion, since such essays are only of historical interest to us), we usually
overlook the exoticism in their fabric, the fact that the arguments and
knowledge claims of which they consist sound odd, extravagant, indeed
fantastic, to modern disciplinary ears. We are in the habit, it seems, of
pretending that we are already acquainted with that exoticism and, at the
same time, of mistrusting it as a feature merely of the surface of the essays:
an effect of rhetoric, discursive style or manners typical of the late nineteenth century (though the matter hardly ends here, and more will be said
below). I take exception to this pattern in the present essay. I wish to
acknowledge the exotic element in the fabric of the late nineteenth century
essays, to locate it with precision, and attend to it as a puzzle; one that arises
in the act of our reading those essays. I treat, that is, the exoticism such
essays hold for us as a symptom and symptoms excite curiosity, provoke
strings of questions. At the same time, I try to bring my understanding of
the field of ideology to bear on that symptom. This turn to ideology was
initially provoked by the nineteenth century essays themselves roughly:
such essays were meant in their time as scientific accounts, yet they strike
us as ideologemes, that is, constructs laden with (overdetermined by)
ideology. I ask, however, not so much what in the content of the essays is
ideological and to which ideology it belongs (though I can hardly avoid this
issue), but a different question: what is, in terms of disciplinary ideology, the
distance that separates us, contemporary practitioners of prehistoric
archaeology, from our late nineteenth century forefathers the distance
that makes their science of European prehistory sound to our ears exotic?
Concrete examples of that exotic science and my comments on them are
reserved for the second, main part of the essay. Here, I must clarify my main
question and circumscribe the scope of the argument that follows. What do
I have in mind by distance in terms of disciplinary ideology? My argument
will not be that the late nineteenth century knowledge claims were perfectly

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

rational and ordinary in the ideological context of their time (nationalism,

anti-semitism, orientalism, etc.), and that their exoticism today is, all too
simply, a symptom of our estrangement from that context of the fact that
we, of the present, have laid aside the nineteenth century ideological prejudices and are therefore able to assess those knowledge claims for what
they really were, ideology-laden constructs, alien to the ethos of our
discipline. Such an argument would correspond to an empiricist (residually
at least) species of historicism place the knowledge quests of another era
in their ideological context, and their greatest mysteries shall be transparent
to you! Despite countless merits, that species of historicism, so firmly established today in the historiography of the disciplines, appears to me
incapable of ever admitting the past in the genealogy of the present, of
interrogating itself about how that past became the present. It remains stubbornly indifferent to the bearing of past events and circumstances on
present understandings of those events and circumstances. Its lasting effect
is an irreparable rupture between the other era and today, between the
past of a field of practices and its current configuration. Such a rupture is
especially awkward in cases where demonstrable continuity obtains
between the other era and today, as is patently the case with the field of
prehistoric archaeology between the late nineteenth and the early twentyfirst centuries.
And that is not all. You see, also says this kind of historicism, the past
is not, after all, as curious, as exotic as you thought. Those are only first
impressions. They are justifiable, of course, in light of your innocence, your
navet when you are a newcomer in the matter and you have not yet
acquainted yourself with the context of the other era. The exoticism of the
past is thereby declared to be a function of our (initial) ignorance about,
not distance from, the other era. It is not meant to have an enduring value,
it is supposed instead to last only as long as we are in the preliminary stage
of our inquiries. It is accorded the status of a temporary illusion, one that
must be overcome in the progress of the inquiries; else, if it survives to the
end, it turns into a liability, a weakness the scholar ought to be ashamed of
(persisting navet). No wonder contemporary archaeologists reading the
texts of their nineteenth century predecessors are reluctant to acknowledge
their exoticism.1
My own stance is the opposite: exoticism of the sort I identified is a
symptom of historical distance, not nave ignorance. The late nineteenth
century claims about the prehistory of Europe were, I accept, perfectly
rational and ordinary (not at all exotic) in the ideological context of their
time. But no amount of contextualizing, of examining them together with
their context, will ease their curiousness in the context of today. Furthermore, the distance that separates us from our nineteenth century disciplinary forefathers and makes their science of prehistory sound curious to our
ears is not, I submit, simply a matter of us having liberated our thought from

Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

the ideological obsessions that burdened theirs. By distance indeed I am

thinking not so much of plain difference as of road traveled the effect
of time passed on a practice, the authority that attaches itself to gestures,
actions, thoughts when they are repeated over time and become habitual.
So understood, our distance from the late nineteenth century, I will argue,
has been filled with the cultivation of an illusion, a fantasy, which was
already taking shape in the nineteenth century (it is present in the essays I
examine) and which today envelops our reality as its second nature and
sustains our practice. Thus, by placing continuity in the heart of change,
repetition of the same in the heart of difference, I try to take account of the
bearing of past events and circumstances on the present, and circumvent
the problem of the irreparable rupture I noted above.
The fantasy that sustains our practice: this, then, is in shorthand the
notion of ideology I adopt here or, in more words, beliefs tightly knit with
(enacted, embodied in) a practice, serving as justification (rational support)
for that practice, and persisting despite being objectionable on account of
their partiality, circularity, incoherence (contradictions) or lack of correspondence with their purported referent. This presupposes a great deal, for
example subjects and consciousness, but makes no mention of class or
sectional interests, which an ideology is supposed to serve but for which my
argument has no place at this stage. To bracket a complex of beliefs as
ideology is to target those beliefs for critique, to suggest that they are flawed
in some ways; an act of symbolic violence, therefore, as Bourdieu had it
(Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1994), provoking, exposing the critic to counterviolence (Bourdieu, 1991: 153). But to bracket a complex of beliefs as
ideology also is to recognize their generative power, accord them special
importance: such beliefs are foundational in some ways they sustain
practice, in the terminology I have adopted. To my mind, that is, ideology
cannot be treated strictly as a liability, an obstacle we must overcome before
proceeding with the business of true knowledge, a mere negativity. It should
equally be thought of as a positive force, as the element (the dream,
fantasy, or vision) that empowers practice, the constitutive condition of
practice.
A more perplexed issue that bears on my argument is whether agents
ever become aware of the fact that they are in ideology and adopt thereby
a critical stance toward that ideology, or whether they are incurably blinded
by it. Remember, ideology never says I am ideological; . . . it imposes
(without appearing to do so . . .) obviousnesses as obviousnesses (Althusser,
1994 [1970]: 131, 129).2 It seems to me that the answer depends to a crucial
extent on whether one thinks about ideology in a representational or in a
performative idiom. Most of the time discussions adhere to the representational idiom: ideology is taken to be a dimension, a problem indeed, of
our representations of social reality descriptions, knowledge claims, deepseated beliefs, etc. And so,false consciousness,misrecognition,distortion,

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

self-deception and the like are not simply notions we associate with the
work of ideology, they are also terms of the representational idiom, that is,
of the particular way in which we think and speak about ideology. As long
as we stay with the representational idiom, the issue, whether or not agents
are ever capable of putting down their ideological spectacles, seems to me
intractable (as does the related issue, whether agents truly believe in the
ideology they preach). I abide by the representational idiom for the longest
part of this article. When I say, for instance, that the nineteenth century
essays strike us as ideologemes (see above), quite clearly I am thinking of
the essays as representations and I do not usually worry whether their
authors were themselves deceived by, or had misgivings about, what they
wrote; I take their claims at face value.
In the last part of the article, however, I try to abandon the representational idiom. Inspired by Slavoj iek (1989, 2002 [1991]), I adopt the stance
that the work of ideology manifests itself not as a divergence between
reality and our representations of it, in our systematic misrecognition of the
workings of the social universe, but in our performance, in the very unfolding of our action: we perform upon our world as if that world were made
in a certain way, even though it does not escape us (we realize upon every
reflection) that the world is not made in that way. It is our doing, not our
thinking, which submits to, organizes itself in response to a fantasy. Or
and here I am only slightly paraphrasing iek (1989: 32; for variations, see
iek, 2002: 2415) we know that, in our practice, we are guided by an
illusion, but still, we keep on practicing. It follows from this that, were we
to step outside that illusion (were we, so to speak, to let go of the ideological veil that disguises and blurs the true fabric of reality), the effect
would not be to see reality as it really is; rather, practice the whole of
our practice would become disoriented and would call its right to exist
into question. Only by overlooking the fantastic nature of the reality upon
which we perform can we continue performing.3
What iek did was to invert the Marxian phrase that, according to him,
epitomized the work of ideology, they do not know it but they are doing
it, and to recast it as they know very well what they are doing, but still,
they are doing it. The justification iek offered for this inversion was that
Marxs phrase no longer applies to the world today: we live, in a sense, in
a post-ideological era, in which the ideological text is not meant to be
taken seriously, not even by its authors, and people are not fooled into
believing ideologemes (iek, 1989: 2833). Does this mean that people
(scholars included) were more nave, more prone to ideological deception
in the nineteenth century, in Marxs time? Perhaps in a complex way:
ieks justification for the inversion foregrounds subjectivity, or at least
consciousness, and invites reflection on the likelihood that these have
undergone a reconfiguration since the nineteenth century. Where scholars
are concerned, such reconfiguration may be related to the process of

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disciplinization, the development of the particular form of discipline we

practice today in scholarly fields such as prehistoric archaeology. I will
argue, in fact, in the end not only that this is the case, but also that disciplinization and the cultivation of the ideological fantasy that sustains our
practice today are intimately connected, like two sides of the same process.

THE PREHISTORY OF EUROPE

I will illustrate what I called exoticism in the late nineteenth century arguments and knowledge claims with examples from two works, Le mirage
oriental by Salomon Reinach (1893) and The Eastern Question in
Anthropology by Arthur Evans (1896). These essays are exceptionally rich
in claims and arguments that I find exotic, and that is the chief reason for
my choice. It should be clear all along that my subject is not the personalities of Reinach and Evans (and I attempt no comparisons between them
or their essays), but rather impersonal agencies, the ideas, fantasies, figures,
fears, etc., active in their minds. These ideas were widely shared, as is plain
from the essays themselves, where many other scholarly voices beside those
of Reinach and Evans are heard. I attend to those voices as well, and on
occasion I note yet others, when they resonate with the arguments and
claims I examine.
Le mirage oriental (MO) appeared as a two-part article in LAnthropologie and was reprinted, almost simultaneously, as a 74-page monograph
(the page references given below are to the monograph). At the time,
Reinach was 35 and had just been appointed conservateur-adjoint at the
Muse des Antiquites nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Duchne,
1996: xxxvi). The essay was reprinted again in 1896 (Duchne, in press).
The Eastern Question in Anthropology (EQ) is approximately one-half
the length of Reinachs essay. It was delivered as the Presidents address at
the Anthropology Section of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science in its 1896 meeting. Knossos and the Palace of Minos, you will
remember, lay still in the future, but Evans had already visited Crete
(Brown, 1993: 3774) and had been preoccupied with the study of its pictographic and linear scripts (Evans, 1894, 1897).
Both essays acquired significant reputation and were widely cited. In
retrospect they were also credited with having played a decisive role in
reshaping fundamental premises about the prehistoric past of Europe
(Myres, 1933: 2834). Their subject matter was identical. It was the issue of
European prehistoric origins, or more precisely, the legacy of Europes
prehistoric debt to Asia. The present, the 1890s, was a turning point, a time
of radical break with the past that is how both Reinach and Evans
presented the matter to their colleagues: there had been a time, a long period

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

lasting till within quite recent years, when the glamour of the Orient
pervaded all inquiries as to the genesis of European civilisation (EQ: 909).4
From knowledge of agriculture to mythology, from monumental architecture and bronze metallurgy to the superior Indo-European languages and
the art of writing, the foundations of Europe were thought to be the work
of colonists and intermediaries whose origin or homeland was Asia. But
discoveries made in recent years showed that such views were ill-founded.
Scholarly opinion was at last swinging. The moment had come for Europes
prehistoric debt to Asia to be reassessed and be recognized for what it was:
a mirage. Reinach placed the first indications of this change already in the
period between 1880 and 1890: cest alors . . . que sest dessine, timidement
dabord, puis avec une assurance de mieux en mieux justifie par les faits, la
reaction contre le mirage oriental, la revendication des droits de lEurope
contre les prtentions de lAsie (MO: 3); a reaction, therefore, justified by
facts. Evans also spoke of a natural reaction, brought about by more
recent investigations. As a result, [t]he primitive Aryan can be no longer
invoked as a kind of patriarchal missionary of Central Asian culture (EQ:
909); furthermore: The days are past when it could be seriously maintained
that the Phnician merchant landed on the coast of Cornwall, or built the
dolmens of the North and West. And, commenting on Reinachs essay of
three years earlier, Evans noted a degree of exaggeration, but he also
remarked: For many ancient prejudices as to the early relations of East and
West [this essay] is the trumpet sound before the walls of Jericho (EQ: 910).5
Recent investigations and facts, then, as opposed to ancient prejudices and a mirage, not simply Europe pushing Asia off the cradle of
civilization. The present indeed was different from the past so much so
that the established views now appeared to be prejugs . . . dun autre ge
(MO: 28).6 They had been sustained, Evans indicated, by, among other
things, the Biblical training of the northern nations and the abiding force
of the classical tradition (EQ: 909). There was a paradox, however, for the
past appeared to linger on, to extend to the moment of writing and even
beyond: we must still remember that the Sick Man is not dead, Evans
observed with reference to the Asiatic theory of European origins (EQ:
910), and Reinachs precise citations make it clear that the mirage oriental
had important followers even as his essay went to print (see also Myres,
1933: 285). It is as if the facts were already speaking but scholars were not
yet understanding, not obeying their call; or, as if the present had come but
scholars had not yet noticed, did not yet believe in its coming. And so, this
paradox of a different present that is not yet fully present (a present
before the present, as it were, a pre-figuration of the present) returns us to
the issue of consciousness and its limits. The key dimensions of the paradox
were indeed hidden from Reinach and Evans in the 1890s: they clearly
thought of themselves as being beyond the paradox (on the side of facts);
in reality, they epitomized it.7

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But the very last assertion needs to be methodically demonstrated. I shall

turn, therefore, to examples of what I have in mind by exoticism, first in
Reinachs, then in Evans essay. In the example that follows, the argument
concerns the origin of the sign of the swastika, but it is embedded in a larger
issue, the origins of bronze metallurgy. Reinach argued against, among
many others, the claims of Gabriel de Mortillet (senior to Reinach by a
generation) that the cradle of prehistoric metallurgy was the Far East. Here
is Mortillet (from 1883) on the matter, as quoted by Reinach (MO: 25):
Do nous est arrive la civilisation du bronze? Question importante que je
crois avoir rsolue. Le bronze nous est venu de lExtrme-Orient. Jtablis ce
fait de deux manires: par lexamen des rgions stannifres et par les
rapports que certains objets et certains emblmes de lge du bronze ont
avec des objets et des emblmes analogues de lInde et de la Chine.

One of these emblmes analogues was, for Mortillet, the swastika. He

considered it to be an essentially oriental religious symbol, which spread
from India to the rest of the world and assumed in the process the form of
the ordinary cross in all its variations. Its appearance in prehistoric Europe
confirmed not only that the civilization of bronze came from India but also
that the emblem of Christianity was ultimately derived from the ancient religions of India (MO: 26). Against Mortillets thse indienne, Reinach cited
the facts: the oldest known swastikas are those from the second city of Troy
and they date to the twentieth century BC, if not earlier. The sign is found
a little later in Cyprus, in the Aegean islands, and also in northern Italy,
the Danube valley, Thrace, Boeotia and Attica; it is absent from Egypt, the
Levant and Assyria. Moreover, its presence in India is late, dating to the
Christian era, and the same is true for China and Japan. In conclusion,
Mortillets argument was devoid of worth: cest dans le nord de la presqule
des Balkans, en Thrace et non en Inde, que ltude seule de la gographie
de ce signe symbolique conduit en placer le centre de diffusion (MO: 27).
Reinach devoted two pages to the issue of the swastika. Returning to the
larger issue of metallurgy, he speculated, after several more pages of intense
discussion, that the age of metals in Europe began about 4000 BC. In other
words, the first metallurgy of Europe ought to be contemporary with the
earliest bronzes of Asia and Egypt (MO: 34).
Before commenting on this, let me summarize two more examples. The
first of these concerns prehistoric vaulted tombs of the Mycenaean type.
Volume II of Eduard Meyers Geschichte des Alterthums was published in
1893, just in time for Reinach to read it and raise important objections.
Meyer had interpreted the presence of Mycenaean pottery in Sicily as a
sign of Phoenician maritime enterprise. He also observed that tombs of the
Mycenaean type existed not only in Greece but also in Sicily, Etruria and
Portugal, and that even the great vaulted tombs of Sardinia and the Balearic
Islands were reminiscent of the Mycenaean ones. He wondered, therefore,

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

whether the similarities seen in monuments so widely dispersed were due

to parallel (independent) developments or to contacts. If the latter is the
case, he concluded, the intermediaries could not be but the Phoenicians. In
response, Reinach objected that this was precisely the question and had to
be demonstrated rather than be affirmed as an inescapable conclusion
(MO: 52). Reinach then proceeded to identify a blind spot in Meyers
vision: comparable vaulted tombs were also known from Pantikapaion in
the Black Sea, where, however, they dated no earlier than 450 BC. Now,
Pantikapaion was a colony of Miletus, founded around 750 BC, and the
Milesians of that time could not have brought this type of tomb to the Black
Sea for, clearly, they did not have it. Should, therefore, one think again of
the Phoenicians? But even the phoenicomaniacs (les Phnicomanes)
recognized that the vaulted tomb was not a Phoenician motif:
Reste une seule solution, en accord avec le mot profond de Stephani, que la
clef de lnigme mycnienne doit tre cherche dans la Russie mridionale.
Nous devons admettre que la civilisation de Mycnes, en venant du Nord,
sjourna, longtemps avant lpoque des colonies milsiennes, sur les ctes de
la mer Noire et y laissa des types qui, grce un isolement relatif, purent sy
dvelopper et sy perptuer plus longtemps quailleurs. (MO: 523; for le
mot profond de Stephani, see below)

The argument about vaulted tombs was part of a considerably longer one,
in which Reinach undertook a passage de la defensive loffensive (MO:
44). The point was that the Pelasgians and the Hittites were folks of Occidental that is, European, as opposed to Asiatic origin, and that les
trusques, les Mycniens et les Asiatiques non smitiques forment un
groupe; la civilisation commune qui les charactrise se relie dautre part . . .
celles de la Hongrie et de lEurope du Nord (MO: 63). In fewer words
that meant the unit europenne primitive . . . de lpoque de la pierre
polie et du cuivre (MO: 55). The argument began with a discussion of the
heraldic composition on top of the Lion Gate of Mycenae. This was claimed
to be European and was also made the ancestor of comparable compositions in Asia Minor and further east. Heraldic scenes were European, not
Oriental, as some people still believe, Reinach asserted: the earliest known
examples belonged to the arts of the Mycenaeans and the Hittites, and both
of these ought to be considered European. Central European art had
already been heraldic in the La Tne period, and it remained heraldic
through the Roman conquest and up to the end of the Middle Ages. As for
the heraldic motifs of Assyrian art, those the Greeks took from the Orient
in the eighth century BC, Reinach was convinced that they too drivent,
en dernire analyse, dinfluences europennes qui staient exerces une
poque bien antrieure sur lart oriental (MO: 48).
Undset (the Danish archaeologist Ingvald Undset, a contemporary
of Reinach) was wrong, Reinach continued: the mysterious monument of

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Bologna, with its heraldically arranged animals around a column, did not
prove that the Phoenicians had penetrated the interior of Italy. Nor did the
spirals and figurative scenes carved on a few stelae from the same city and
from Pesaro, so strikingly Mycenaean in character, imply as again Undset
had argued a decade earlier Phoenician interventions (MO: 4950). After
all, Undset knew that comparable scenes existed in the rock art of Scandinavia, and had also noticed that spirals and other decoration were common
to objects from Mycenae, the Bronze Age civilization of Hungary, and the
civilization of the north: un paralllisme infiniment curieux, which the
Phoenicians could not be called upon to explain (MO: 501). There were
other curious parallels too: affinities obtained between the megalithic
monuments of western Europe and the Cyclopean constructions of Greece;
crude representations of female figurines engraved on megaliths and on the
walls of French funerary caves had exact equivalents in the pottery of Troy
and Cyprus, and, in a later period, also occurred in Bavaria, Prussia, Galicia
and Russia; horseshoe motifs appeared not only on Mycenaean pottery but
also on the megaliths of Brittany and Ireland; the same type of bronze
dagger was found in Cyprus,Troy, southern Italy,Albania, Hungary, Switzerland and the Gaul; a bronze axe in Hungarian style had been discovered in
Dodona in western Greece, while a Danubian type sword came from
Mycenae (MO: 545, 61); and several other analogies in artefacts came from
all across Europe.
Reinach credited other scholars, Quatrefages and Montelius among
them, for having already noted most of those analogies. What was,
however, the secret of the puzzle? Against the chance of Phoenician intermediaries, Reinach repeatedly invoked the absence of truly Oriental
objects, such as scarabs, cylinder seals or hieroglyphic inscriptions, from
European sites. On the other hand, several facts for instance, the earlier
age of the western megalithic monuments vis--vis their eastern counterparts accorded well with the hypothesis of a courant plasgique occidental (MO: 578). The Pelasgians, that is, must have been an aboriginal
European people. Some of them stayed in Italy, others pushed toward Asia
Minor. Ces derniers se civilisrent, sorientalisrent, et, un beau jour,
revinrent stablir en Ombrie au milieu de leurs frres arrirs, avec
lesquels ils se sentaient encore cependant des affinits dorigine (MO: 61).
And so, in its flow and counter-flow, the courant plasgique gave us the
Hittites (i.e. those Pelasgians who went farther, to Asia Minor) as well as
the Etruscans and kindred western Mediterraneans (i.e. those who
returned hither to Italy). In other words, what explained the analogies in
artefacts from across the Mediterranean was the communaut primitive
dune civilisation (MO: 53). From here, and in view of the existence of
comparable artefacts from further north, it was a short step to suggesting
that this civilization was connected with those of Hungary and northern
Europe, and claiming the unit europenne primitive . . . de lpoque de
la pierre polie et du cuivre (see above).8

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Where exactly is the exoticism in these (fragments of) arguments? Both

the arguments presented by Reinach as objectionable, those of Mortillet,
Meyer and Undset, as well as his own counter-arguments are intertwined
with evidence: specific archaeological facts are invoked in their support. Yet
Reinach and the other nineteenth century scholars do not do with the
archaeological facts at their disposal what we, 100 or so years later, would
do with those same facts. Their arguments take off in unexpected (for us)
directions, their logic bewilders us, and the claims emerging often sound
fantastic in our ears fantastic in the sense that their substance is overwhelming, far richer than the evidence in hand warrants. True, comparably
unwarranted claims have never disappeared from European prehistory;
when they arise today, however, they are easily recognized as such by
comparison with firmer, better grounded positions that constitute the core
of the modern discipline.
On a closer look, it becomes clear that the claims in Reinach are fantastic in several contiguous senses at once. First, the immense geographical and
temporal spread of the facts mobilized gives to the claims the quality of the
wondrous: no resemblance between two objects, however slight, and no
matter how far apart the objects, is allowed to be illusory, a play of mirrors.
Reinach sounds all too credulous to our ears when he finds culturally meaningful associations in artefacts from widely separated areas and periods, e.g.
from Troy and Ireland or from the Stone Age and the Middle Ages.9
Second, certain claims take the form of scenarios which beg the odds that
they might be true: it is an odd chance that there would have been Mycenaean ancestors around Pantikapaion in the Black Sea who undertook the
construction of vaulted tombs and who thereby initiated a tradition that lay
dormant until 1000 years later. Equally improbable is the hypothesis
according to which the Pelasgians of the legend migrated all across the
Mediterranean, first east, then back west to where they started. The same
also holds for the claim that the Mycenaean civilization came from the
north (Reinach here had endorsed the thesis of his coeval Christos
Tsountas, whose arguments on the northern origin of the Mycenaeans had
just appeared; see MO: 656 and Tsountas, 1891: 413). Or rather, to assent
to or dispute the plausibility of the last claim makes to us little sense, for
coming from somewhere is not the way we think a civilization is formed;
it is not a salient dimension of our notion of civilization.
Third (and already touched upon in the last remark), the claims often
incorporate notions with an empirical referent that is fused with a fictional
element. Such is the notion of a civilization (be it Mycenaean, Pelasgian or
other) as transcendent and, at the same time, inalienable substance, carried
in the human body. Such also is the notion of the swastika-having-a-centre
de diffusion, a place where (or, better, a people by whom) it was invented
and from where it spread to the rest of the world. Such too are the notions
of Europe and Asia, each of them underpinned by an enigmatic, everelusive essence:

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La civilisation mycnienne . . . est entirement europenne dorigine; elle
sest seulement orientalis, la surface, au contact des civilisations de la
Syrie et de lgypte. (MO: 40) . . . Une civilisation ne en Asie, proximit
de la Babylonie et de lgypte, ne doit pas se prsenter avec des charactres
de rudesse et doriginalit aussi frappant que celle des Plasges-Hthens.
(MO: 601)

Europe as well as Asia here emerge as birthmarks, and, as such, they are
ineffaceable, destined to accompany the one or the other civilization in
eternity. They remain indeed far more distinct in the bodies of those civilizations than any subsequent modifications brought about through contact;
the latter stay la surface, as also was the case, according to Reinach, of
the Pelasgians who became Hittites and, in spite of being Orientalized,
never lost their sense of being European.10
Fourth, certain claims consist entirely of layers of metaphorical
fabric with which the subject dresses the world; their chief source is
a subjects poetic imagination. The courant plasgique constitutes a
good example, as does the related notion of la marche dune civilisation
(MO: 55):
On se figure volontiers la marche dune civilisation sur le modle de celle
dune arme, qui, partie dun point de concentration, avec armes et bagages,
se dirige vers un autre point par une seule route ou par des routes
convergentes . . . Ce sont l des erreurs puriles. La marche dune civilisation
ressemble bien plutt celle de la mer envahissant une plage au moment du
flux: elle se produit par ondes successives, avec va-et-vient continuel qui
donne naissance dinnombrables courants.

Here poetic imagination appears in the guise of metaphors that purport to

reveal reality, to illuminate its inner workings, as it were, and no sooner
they do this than they evoke (inescapably) illusion, erreurs puriles.
Fifth, contiguous with the above is a stronger sense in which the late
nineteenth century arguments are fantasies. The intensity of many of the
arguments should suggest indeed that what is at stake does not pertain to
a remote, prehistoric and because of its remoteness now idle past, to a
past that no longer matters, but pertains instead to the here-and-now, to the
subject speaking today. Witness:
les figurines sardes ne sont, quoi que lon ait dit, ni phniciennes ni
gyptiennes; en un mot, les analogies entre Shardana et Mycniens sont de
celles quexplique la communaut primitive dune civilisation et qui
excluent, bien plutt que ne lautorisent, lhypothse de relations
commerciales . . . Lunit foncire de civilisation des peuples de la
Mditerranne, au xve sicle et plus tt encore, ne peut sexpliquer par une
influence quelconque de lOrient, parce que cette civilisation nest ni
babylonienne, ni gyptienne, ni syrienne. Elle sexplique simplement parce
que ces peuples taient apparents, quils avaient hrit dune civilisation
primitive commune, celle que nous connaissons surtout, en Orient, par les

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

dcouvertes de Troie, et que plusieurs dentre eux restrent en

communication, se transmettant de proche en proche, par un va-et-vient
constant dinfluences, quelques dveloppements de cette civilisation
primitive. (MO: 534)

The intensity of these lines the effect of long sentences with repeated
concatenations of emphatically negative and positive clauses suggests that
their substance concerns the identity of the present, rather than the identity
of prehistoric figurines and their long-dead makers. Here is another
example indicating that the subject is prepared to occupy precarious positions in defending a distant past, which, logically, should be a dispassionate
affair. Schliemanns discoveries at Mycenae had been met with suspicion in
the 1870s, and opinion wavered for years over the issue of Mycenaes
chronology and origin (cultural affiliation). Several scholars had
contended that the shaft graves and their contents could not be prehistoric (or pre-Homeric, as was the word of the day). In Ludolf Stephanis
mot profond (see above), many of the contents were the work of Gothic
hands (Gardner, 1880), and other scholars thought of them as medieval,
Celtic or even Byzantine. Such issues had been largely settled in favor of a
prehistoric date by the early 1880s. They did not, therefore, preoccupy
Reinach in 1893, except in a strange way: Stephani was right in a sense, he
suggested, for, to speak of the Mycenaean treasures as Celtic and even
Byzantine was to recognize that their art was connected to that of central
Europe, o lornement byzantin nest gure quune forme plus avance,
une forme post-romaine du style celtique (MO: 44). The Europeanness
of Europe in the prehistoric past was by no means a distant issue for the
present.
The subject, then, appears caught heart and soul in the midst of such
fantasies. They are not, that is, fantasies merely in the everyday sense of
scenarios containing imaginary elements or having a dubious correspondence with reality, but, more crucially, in the sense of a subjects dreams and
nightmares. A strong psychological relationship obtains between them and
the subject that weaves them.
Comparable in these respects is The Eastern Question in Anthropology. Evans began with an oblique reference to the radical break modern
anthropology had accomplished with its past Travellers have ceased to
seek for the Terrestrial Paradise then he went straight to the heart of
the matter (EQ: 906):
in a broader sense, the area in which lay the cradle of civilised mankind is
becoming generally recognised. The plateaux of Central Asia have receded
from view. Anthropological researchers may be said to have established the
fact that the White Race, in the widest acceptation of the term, including,
that is, the darker-complexioned section of the South and West, is the true
product of the region in which the earliest historic records find it
concentrated . . . The continent in which it rose . . . embraced, together with a

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Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

part of anterior Asia, the greater part of Europe, and the whole of Northern
Africa . . . To this great continent Dr. Brinton, who has so ably illustrated the
predominant part played by it in isolating the white from the African black
and the yellow races of mankind, has proposed to give the useful and
appropriate name Eurafrica. In Eurafrica, in the widest sense, we find the
birthplace of the highest civilisations that the world has yet produced, and
the mother country of its dominant peoples.

Eurafrica was indeed discovered in the 1890s by the Philadelphia

medical-doctor-turned-ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton (18371899),
or perhaps by Giuseppe Sergi (18411936), and was still visited in the early
decades of the twentieth century (DAgostino, 2002: 3245, 331). But who
remembers Eurafrica, this great continent, today? Does not its disappearance from our discipline most effectively demonstrate its status as a mirage?
Like Reinachs, Evans essay too abounds in such mirages and fictions.
The geographical compass of the claims again is of a wondrous scale: The
early gean culture rises in the midst of a vast province extending from
Switzerland and Northern Italy through the Danubian basin and the Balkan
peninsula, and continued through a large part of Anatolia, till it finally
reaches Cyprus (EQ: 91011). In the matter of the spiral motive an
ornament on which Evans dwelt at as great a length as Reinach did on the
swastika Crete may thus be said to be the missing link between prehistoric Ireland and Scandinavia and the Egypt of the Ancient Empire (EQ:
915). Meaningful similarities were sought across formidable distances, in
the minutiae of ornament from Mondsee and Cyprus, in primitive idols
of clay, marble, and other materials from the Aegean islands, the Alpine
pile settlements and the shores of Lake Ladoga, in spiral decoration from
Amorgos and New Grange (EQ: 91112). Once more too, the defense of a
Europe already European in prehistoric times led to claims the logic of
which bewilders us. For example, in a recent visit to Crete, Evans had found
a brief inscription in syllabic script which, he now announced, surpasses in
interest and importance all hitherto known objects of its class; for, not only
was the script early but it also supplied very close analogies to what may
be supposed to have been the pictorial prototypes of several of the Phoenician letters. In conclusion: The great step in the history of writing implied
by the evolution of symbols of phonetic value from primitive pictographs
is thus shown to have effected itself on European soil (EQ: 915).
The fantastic proportions of Europe are unmistakable in these claims
and throughout Evans text. It is the same with race. The attention
accorded to the latter seems in fact to have a libidinal dimension, as I will
explain. According to a recent theory advanced by Sergi, most modern
Europeans descended from an ancient stock of Eurafricans, whose
physical characteristics were best preserved among the later populations of
the Mediterranean. It was this Mediterranean Race, Sergi contended, that
had created the great civilizations of Greece and Rome (for the politics

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

surrounding the invention of the Mediterranean Race and its subsequent

fate see DAgostino, 2002). Evans endorsed the theory of that great ancient
stock, explaining, after Sergi, that its swarthy complexion and dark hair
bear no negroid affinities, and are not due to any intermixture on that side.
That made clear, Evans directly acknowledged the pleasurable consequences of this theory: those of us who may happen to combine a British
origin with a Mediterranean complexion may derive a certain ancestral
pride from remote consanguinity with Pharaoh (EQ: 907). Evans then
turned to archaeological evidence that would bear support to Sergis theory.
In 1892, excavations in the Barma Grande Cave on the Ligurian coast had
brought to light a number of human burials furnished with flint knives, bone
and shell ornaments but no pottery, polished stone implements or domesticates. Such burials ought to be pre-Neolithic in age, but this was unacceptable at the time.11 Archaeologists, Evans included, were prepossessed
by the . . . doctrine that the usage of burial was unknown to Palolithic
man. By 1896, however, Evans had changed his mind (a point to which I
will return), and he now focused on fresh data and critical observations
that made a Palaeolithic date for those burials appear inevitable. But the
main point of his argument lay elsewhere: the Barma Grande burials
provided evidence of the existence of a late Palolithic race with features
which, according to most competent osteological inquirers, reappear in the
Neolithic skeletons of the same Ligurian coast, and still remain characteristic of the historical Ligurian type. In other words, the Mediterranean
Race finds its first record in the West (EQ: 9089). Furthermore:
this evidence of at least partial continuity on the northern shores of the
Mediterranean suggests speculations of the deepest interest . . . In the
extraordinary manifestations of artistic genius to which, at widely remote
periods, and under the most diverse political conditions, the later populations
of Greece and Italy have given birth, may we not be allowed to trace the
re-emergence, as it were, after long underground meanderings, of streams
whose upper waters had seen the daylight of the earlier world? (EQ: 909)

The aquatic metaphor is worthy of comment. For the members of the

Anthropology Section in the 1890s, race was a versatile notion, sustained
in a network of emotions (the comfort, for instance, of belonging to the
civilized race, but also the specter of miscegenation). It had a physical
anthropological referent, of course (cranial type, skin complexion, hair
color, etc. they all were referable to race), yet, as in the case of Asia and
Europe which I discussed earlier, that referent was fused with an enigmatic, phantom-like core. And so, the notion would routinely expand and
encompass the entire moral and intellectual make-up of an individual or
collectivity, including their potential for cultural achievement. That was the
case even among physical anthropologists or doctors like Virchow, for
whom race remained to the end a slippery subject mostly a matter of

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precise measurements, but occasionally too a matter of ones mental worth

(Massin, 1996, e.g. 978). Race, moreover, was irreducible and obdurate,
almost indestructible. That is how it could, like a watercourse, emerge and
re-emerge after long underground meanderings and still be recognizable
as the selfsame race. Besides, the metaphor of the stream resonated with
the idea of blood and its flow from one generation to the next; applied to
an ancestral white race, it also suggested that that race had the positive
qualities one associates with a natural stream (purity, vigor, etc.).
All this is evident, yet it does not seem to exhaust the meaning of Evans
aquatic metaphor. I will suggest in fact that we will not approach that
meaning until we realize that there is something entirely arbitrary about
the imagery of the meandering underground streams arbitrary in the
sense of being independent of the logic that makes such streams an apt
metaphor for late nineteenth century race: the imagery itself, its very form,
is its meaning, and it is a pleasurable imagery. You will remember that
Reinach also resorted to aquatic metaphors in explaining la marche dune
civilisation. Reinachs metaphors were evocative of sexual pleasure: la mer
envahissant une plage / moment du flux / ondes successives / va-et-vient
continuel / innombrables courants. Sexual resonances are less audible in
streams and their long underground meanderings; still, I suggest, the
naturalistic metaphor and the imagery it evoked afforded an equally pleasurable illusion.

TIME EFFECTS
Nineteenth century Orientalism (protracted well into the twentieth
century) has been much more than a field of knowledge with a determinate
object: it shaped experiences and tastes, habits of thought and dispositions;
it formed subjects, it was a practice of self-definition that turned on dramatization of distance from the alien. Europe became European by Orientalizing the Near East, by turning differences from the latter into
Difference, by becoming what the Near East was not such has been the
going wisdom since Saids Orientalism appeared a quarter of a century ago
(1979). Le mirage oriental and The Eastern Question in Anthropology,
both devoted to the matter of Europe and its prehistoric origins, are
exemplary illustrations of that practice. Witness the theme that dominated
the last several pages of Evans essay:
Mycenan culture was permeated by Oriental elements, but never subdued
by them . . . We see the difference if we compare [the Aegean with] the
civilisation of the Hittites of Anatolia and Northern Syria . . . The native
elements were there cramped and trammelled from the beginning by the
Oriental contact. No real life and freedom of expression was ever reached;

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

the art is stiff, conventional, becoming more and more Asiatic, till finally
crushed out by the Assyrian conquest. It is the same with the Phnicians.
But in prehistoric Greece the indigenous element was able to hold its own,
and to recast what it took from others in an original mould. Throughout its
handiwork there breathes the European spirit of individuality and freedom.
Professor Petries discoveries at Tell-el-Amarna show the contact of this
gean element for a moment infusing naturalism and life into the
time-honoured conventionalities of Egypt itself. (EQ: 919)

For level-headed archaeologists a century later, this is fantasy at its purest.

It was enduring archaeological reality for Evans, however. A few years later,
while reporting on his discovery of inscribed clay tablets from the Room
of the Chariot Tablets in Knossos, he condensed this Orientalist fantasy to
a matter-of-fact statement. The tablets . . ., he wrote, present some distant
analogy to the Babylonian tablets, and the inscription is divided by horizontal lines. The letters themselves, however, are of a free, upright European
character (Evans, 1900: 92). The equivalent Orientalist fantasy at its
purest in Reinach is the scenario by which he sought to exorcise the specter
of the Phoenicians in Europe, his antidote to the Phoenician fantasy: le
courant plasgique occidental, lunit foncire and la communaut primitive of Europes prehistoric peoples.
How, then, does it happen that what was archaeological reality for
Reinach, Evans and their contemporaries a century or so ago is fantasy at
it purest for us in the present? In fact, a fantasy (mis)taken for reality is
precisely what we associate with the work of ideology; and throughout my
essay I have acknowledged that the late nineteenth century texts abound
in phantoms, figments, specters, mirages, dreams or nightmares all of which
belong to the realm of ideology. In this sense, then, the nineteenth century
archaeological texts are ideologemes. The question thus is, how does it
happen that what the nineteenth century archaeologists took as true, solid
arguments and claims founded on archaeological evidence, turn out in the
present to be blatant ideologemes?
In a crucial sense, this is a historical question: the degree to which we find
the nineteenth century texts alien to the modern disciplinary ethos exotic,
as I indicated in the beginning the ease with which we recognize them as
ideologemes, constitute a measure of the historical distance that separates
us from them. The significance of seeing the question this way resides in the
irony it foregrounds: Reinach, Evans, Mortillet and the others stand in direct
line of intellectual ascent from us. We are their disciplinary progeny, and yet
we appear to be a substantially different breed of scholars, a different sort
of subjects indeed, in so far as our scholarly selves are concerned.
I am tempted to think that we are different precisely because their
fantasy worked. It became, that is, our fantasy as well. The Phoenicians
were, in a sense, exorcised; we did become European. The merit of such an
answer would be that it acknowledges the presence of Reinach, Evans and

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Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

the other late nineteenth century scholars in our past. It predisposes us to

think of ourselves as disciplined subjects that have become disciplined as
an effect of the presence in our past of those scholars and their fantasies. It
requires that we account for difference, not (as Orientalist scholarship had
it) in essentialist terms, but as the effect of continuity, of repetition through
time a transformation brought about by the sheer increase of time depth
of our practice. Let me explain.
First of all, I am using the Phoenicians and Europe as metonyms, the
strength (metonymic value) of which derives from Reinachs and Evans
essays. As I indicated earlier, both Reinach and Evans placed the writing
of their essays in a turning point in time. Past scholarship, they claimed, had
accorded the Orient the place of pride in the matter of civilization and had
made the Phoenicians its missionaries. That view, however, had been entangled in a web of ancient prejudices. The present, on the other hand, granted
Europe the leading part in the origins of civilization; moreover, it did so on
the basis of facts. A metonymy was thereby established: the Orient and the
Phoenicians became associated with prejudice and with the past of archaeological scholarship, while Europe became associated with evidence,
rational thought, and the present.
As I also indicated, both Reinach and Evans defended their arguments
by frequent appeals to archaeological evidence (as had Mortillet, Undset
and the other archaeologists to whom Reinach and Evans took exception).
Both Reinach and Evans, that is, acted as if their convictions followed,
solidly and inescapably, from evidence. Belief follows evidence that is
how, they pretended, prehistoric archaeology worked. This is most clear in
cases where they showed themselves capable of changing their views as new
evidence became available, as Evans did on the date of the Barma Grande
Cave burials (for Reinach, see MO: 29). Both Reinach and Evans, in other
words, acted as if the detritus of prehistoric life could bear the weight of
todays questions. And that, I suggest, is the fantasy we inherited from them
and which became the ideology that sustains our practice today: we know
very well that belief does not follow evidence (not throughout, that is), and
yet in our everyday practice we act as if it did. We know very well that the
detritus of prehistoric life cannot bear the full weight of our questions, that
our persuasions about the prehistoric past are entwined with the thread of
arbitrariness, yet in practice we pretend that they are derived throughout
by rational procedures. We have learnt how to exorcise the Phoenicians
from our practice and how to become European.
It is a very special kind of subject that habitually requires evidential
proofs before they allow themselves to believe, one that refuses to know
where evidence is absent. Reinach, Evans and their nineteenth century
colleagues whom they criticized were not this disciplined kind of subject
yet. They lived, you remember, in a present before the present. They
invoked the authority of evidence with fervor, yet their obedience to it was

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

by no means unconditional, blind. Perhaps they were fascinated with the

mere existence of facts in prehistoric archaeology, that is, the possibility to
point to something as a fact, especially if it contradicted established wisdom.
Their allegiance to evidence did not, however, function as an inhibition, did
not prevent them from turning to the self as arbiter of the most important
matters in effect, from knowing even in the absence of evidence. The
facts know; still, the scholar inside me knows better! that seems to have
been their disposition.
In the succeeding century, prehistoric archaeology was progressively
instituted as a discipline and the prehistorian progressively became disciplined. This becoming disciplined, I submit, has entailed as a crucial
element living to the fullest the fantasy already entertained in the nineteenth century, that the prehistorians knowledge rises upon the bedrock of
evidence. The fantasy (we have in the present emancipated ourselves from
the tangle of prejudice, ides reues, etc.) was now rehearsed in one
instance after another and, through repetition, it hardened into a habit;
what was still conditional in the late nineteenth century became, with time
unquestionable, a pivotal element of the repertory of the prehistorians
dispositions. As the effect of the transformation, the facts of prehistory
today substitute for the prehistorians consciousness: we can no longer
believe when evidential proofs are absent, we can only know as much as
the facts know our obedience to them is blind. It is from within this
ideological fantasy that the knowledge claims and arguments of the predisciplined days of the nineteenth century appear to us odd, extravagant,
alien to the ethos of a modern discipline.12
We know very well . . . and yet . . .: we know, of course, that our obedience to evidence is not blind. Our disciplinary literature today abounds in
reflections and self-critical insights to the effect that our knowledge claims
about the prehistoric past are contingent on the present on history, on the
subject, on ideology, on values, on institutional structures and so on.
Moreover, we are quick to agree that the facts of the prehistoric record are
underdetermined, plastic and always already theory-laden. Interpretation, we have learned to repeat after Hodder (1999: 83), begins at the
trowels edge. Constructivist accounts of facticity (strong objectivity,
standpoint theory, hermeneutical approaches, dialogue with the data, and
the like; see Wylie, 2002) make much more sense to us than the premise
belief follows evidence. Elsewhere I have also argued in favour of archaeological knowledge that is timely rather then timeless (Fotiadis, 1994:
551).13 We know all this still, when it comes to doing archaeology (real
archaeology, that is, with fieldwork, analysis and publication of the results;
or attempting a synthesis of the sort Reinach and Evans undertook), we act
as if such reflections pertained to the discipline in an abstract way, but have
no relevance to the specific research we engage in at the moment (cf. Tilley,
1989: 278). In real archaeology, we are prepared to defend the pure

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24

factuality of every one of our claims to the very last, and we react nervously
at the suggestion that some of these claims, especially those that lend significance to our arguments, are held together in a web of ides reues.
We know, in other words, that our convictions about the prehistoric past
are part of the flow of history, and yet we will defend them as if they had
the permanency of bedrock. To put the matter one last time in terms of
consciousness and its beyond: the facts of prehistory are supposed to seize
our consciousness unnoticed by it, to penetrate and occupy it in its sleep,
as it were, while consciousness is taking a leave. The moment we suppose
otherwise, that our consciousness actively intervenes, the facts begin to look
tainted, and, if so, our practice will appear hollow, an unbearable selfdeception; it can no longer command our commitment. We cannot let go
of the fantasy without also letting our practice implode.
But it seems to me that, if we are reluctant to let go of the fantasy, this
is not out of fear that we will thus also let go of so good and noble a thing
as the pursuit of knowledge of the deepest human past. The real reason, I
suspect, is the very mode of our consciousness as historically shaped by the
process of Enlightenment (qua disciplinization). The fantasy envelops our
reality as its second nature, I indicated early on; it is an effect of times
arrow, I suggest here. We cannot reverse times arrow, revert to preenlightened modes of thinking, re-acquire the consciousness of those who
breathed before the process was set in motion. Privilege or predicament,
we cannot erase Enlightenment (discipline) from our unconscious and
cease to demand evidential proofs for our beliefs about prehistory. In fact,
living the fantasy to the fullest in practice and turning critical of it in reflection bears an uncanny resemblance to what being enlightened was once
thought to mean: argue as much as you want and about whatever you want
[in public], only obey [in private]!14

Acknowledgements
The first, short version of this article was read at the workshop Prhistoire et idologie, organized by Claudine Cohen at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris, in May 2002. I am indebted to Claudine Cohen, Alison Wylie and
Marianne Sommer, participants in the workshop, for encouraging me to carry on
with the original idea. My presence in Paris at the time, where a significant portion
of the article was written, was made possible by a temporary appointment at the
CNRS. For this I am especially indebted to Ren Treuil and Pascal Darcque. Sally
Humphreys also read the manuscript at a near-final stage and provided insights.
Finally, I am indebted to three anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments.

Notes
1 For another critique of this historicism and its stifling consequences on reading
texts from other eras, see Humphreys (2002: esp. 21924). For yet other
problems of the historicism I take exception to, see Tosh (2003).

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Factual claims in late nineteenth century prehistory

2 For Althusser, one had to be in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in

ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology
(Althusser, 1994: 131); the person in the street hardly stood such a chance.
Thirty-five years later the privilege of those in scientific knowledge has been
irrevocably abrogated.
3 iek (1989: 2849) acknowledges as his inspiration in this matter various
sources, from Pascals Meditations to Althusser and from Marx to Peter
Sloterdijk. The chief idea, then, that surfaces in my article has a long history;
there is nothing original in my text about it I only apply it to the specific issue
I outlined in the beginning. My understanding of representational vs.
performative idiom comes originally from Pickering (1995: esp. 59); see also
iek (1994: 7).
4 I have throughout preserved spelling, punctuation and italics as they appear in
the original publications.
5 Reinach and Evans were longtime friends, but between 1894 and 1897 their
friendship was encountering difficulties (Duchne, in press).
6 Reinach and Evans were far from exceptional in experiencing the present, the
late nineteenth century, as a turning point in time; folks in fields very distant
from theirs shared that experience (Daston, 2001: 21013).
7 My remarks here echo the analysis in iek (1989: 5962).
8 It is worth noting that the Pelasgians had appeared in the genealogy of the
Hungarians since 1825 (Szilgyi, 2001).
9 We should remember that comparing objects from widely separated areas and
eras and finding meaningful similarities among them was established practice
in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that is testimony to the power
of the (ethnological) evolutionism of the period (Lubbock, 1869).
10 For a contemporary, most explicit essentialist statement on this matter, see
Perrot and Chipiez (1894: 67).
11 For the conditions of the discovery of the Barma Grande burials, their
subsequent adventures and their chronology, see Formicola, Pettitt and Del
Lucchese (2004).
12 I do not intend this paragraph as an account of disciplinization and its effects
on the subject. Disciplines shape desires, construct fetishes round which
scholarly work can intensify, Humphreys (2002: 207) reminds us. My
argument here remains tangential to this observation and its consequences.
13 Drawing on Foucault, and on E. Brumfiels idea of archaeology as allegory
(1987), I argued that we need not be disturbed by the discovery that
archaeological knowledge is inescapably political, for, if that appears as a most
severe handicap, it also is a supreme virtue (Fotiadis, 1994: 5502; 2001).
14 Kant (1996 [1784]: 59, 63). As Foucault observed (1997: 307), it is the
unexpected swapping of places between public and private that gives Kants
maxim its pointedness. Suffice, then, that we think of the private as authority
interiorized, embodied in practices and institutions.

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Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

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MICHAEL FOTIADIS has taught at several universities in the USA and

now teaches in the Department of History and Archaeology, University
of Ioannina, Greece. A prehistorian by training, he also has a strong
interest and publications in theoretical questions arising from the
practice of archaeology in contemporary and nineteenthtwentieth
century contexts.
[email: mfotiadi@umich.edu]

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