Early History of Archaeology Flashcards
Great Serpent Mound, Ohio. White colonisers refused to believe native americans had built this as this didn’t fit in with the image they had of the “savages” who preceded them. This undermined their superiority. Many scholars now believe that members of the Fort Ancient culture built it about 1070 CE.
Great Zimbabwe. White colonists refused to believe Black Africans, who they viewed as inferior, could have built the city. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe during the country’s Late Iron Age. Construction on the monument by ancestors of the Shona people began in the 11th century and continued until the 15th century - at its peak, could have housed up to 18,000 people.
Thucydides was an Athenian historian, political philosopher and general, 460 BC - 395 BC. Used the word archaiologia to indicate very distant history of Greece, which could not be directly observed by the writer. Wrote about the purification of Delos.
Plato was a philosopher and mathematician in Classical Greece (4th c.BC), and the founder of the Academy in Athens. Used the work archaiologia to indicate genealogies of heroes (e.g.) Achilles) and men.
Digging for Saints Relics (11c. Illuminated MS). Artefacts found in medieval times were known as “saints relics” and were thought to be divine, rather than items from the past.
Ceraunia or Thunderstones. These stone palaeolithic axes and arrow heads were thought to be the work of god or elves.
Nabonidus, King of Babylon (556-539 BC)(below) excavated the Temple of Ebbar, Larsa, Mesopotamia, dedicated to the god Shamash in order to restore it. This was one of the first instances of excavation and analysing objects, but was done for religious reasons, and not just for the sake of research.
Purification of Delos, Greece. Thucydides recounts that the Athenians in 426 BC decided to “purify” the island of Delos by removing all the tombs of people who had died on the island. He remarks that more than half of the tombs appeared to belong to the Carians (a population from a region in SW Turkey judging from the way they were buried and from the burial gifts that accompanied them. Thucydides concludes that this is evidence for suggesting that the Carians inhabited the Greek islands before the Greeks.
Corinthian Vases, from Greece. Romans were great collectors of these. They were being produced before 1000 BC.
Shows the medieval Paradigm and lack of consciousness that the past was different by depicting the Argonauts in medieval armour.
Numismatics: In the renaissance, Roman coins started being used as historical documents
Ciriaco D’Ancona (1391-1454). An Italian Anquarius who worked on the Parthenon. Ciriaco was dubbed ʻthe first archaeologistʼ by Bruce Trigger in his History of Archaeological Thought.
Italian Antiquarius Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)and his topographical work on Rome.
Italian Antiquarius Pirro Ligorio (1510-1583) and topographical work on Rome.
John Leland (1503-1552). Claimed that ʻin 1533 Leland was made Kingʼs antiquary, office in which he had neither predecessor nor successorʼ. The only evidence for this is a pamphlet addressed to King Henry VIII, in which Leland himself signed as ʻJoannes Leylandus antiquariusʼ. What is certain is that he travelled widely in England and Wales, and published in 1546 the preface of his planned book De Anquitates Britanniae. Much of his archaeological/antiquarian work published after his death.
William Camden (1551-1623). Wrote his volume Britannia in 1586. Focused on the topography of England and reamins found around Stonehenge. Founded the London Society of Antiquaries and the Archaeology chair at Oxford. Presented evidence of indigenous coinage in pre-Roman Britain.
John Aubrey (1621-97). The first to link stonehenge to druids. Wrote his Monumenta Britannica in 1675. Drew Avebury and Stonehenge and applied systematic classification taken from the study of ancient writing (palaeography) to study styles of buildings and objects to date them.
William Stuckeley (1687-1765) - Responsible for the association of Stonehenge and Druids. Part of 18th century enlightenment. Religion affected his views. Thought druids were descendants of Phoenicians, who were predeccessors of Christians. Dated barrows due to the Roman Roads running through them, and his daughter dated the White Horse due to stylistic similarity to pre-Roman coins.
The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means.The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s. Took in many famous archaeological sites.
