Colonialism and the Archaeology of the Primitive

Westerners encountered a wide variety of societies in their colonial expansion. Politically these were categorized from the most complex—the state societies in regions of Asia and North Africa—to those perceived as formed by savages and primitives, with the simplest types of political organization. Their entrenched belief in a philosophy of progression took Western scholars to assume an uneventful and unchanged past for these societies. It was commonly argued that savages did not have a history. Hence, they were considered as living fossils, as ‘survivals’ from earlier stages of culture long passed in Europe. In stark contrast to the awe that the ancient Great Civilizations had inspired in imperial Europe, the antiquities of primitive societies evoked a distinctly lesser regard. Instead of appropriating them as part of their own past, Western scholars remained unreceptive: no genetic links were created with the archaeology of the ‘uncivilized’, rather, they were considered to be a distorted image of the remote European—and, from the end of the century, also Japanese—past. This position was not completely new, for primitives had been regarded as a source of information with which to understand the prehistoric past in Europe since the eighteenth century, although at that time this was made within the biblical framework (Sweet 2004: 149–51). This chapter will aim, first, to explore how, during the nineteenth century, the archaeology of the primitive was used in the formation of the colonial discourse. Secondly, the following pages will also assess the interpretations Westerners provided to explain the presence of monumental antiquities in areas considered primitive and, therefore, without a distinguished past. It is important to note that the encounter with primitive societies not only took place within newly established colonies, but also within the frontiers of century-long political formations. This chapter, therefore, regards colonization as operating at two different levels. First, colonialism in the classical sense—based on territories appropriated by a foreign power in a different part of the world. Secondly, internal colonialism, a concept which in this book is employed to define the physical occupation by white settlers of territories usually inhabited by non-state societies, both within already defined boundaries of the state or in adjacent lands.