Archaeology and Cultural Policy in Ottoman Tunisia Part II: Muhammad Khaznadar (1871–99)

This article is the second part of a study focusing on Muhammad Khaznadar’s role in the history of archaeology in nineteenth-century Tunisia. Whereas part I traced the meteoric rise of Muhammad Khaznadar as a Tunisian cultural figure, the second part of this inquiry examines Khaznadar’s fall from power and the end of his monopoly over the country’s antiquities. Following the dismissal of his father, Mustafa Khaznadar, as grand vizier in 1873, Muhammad’s artifacts were seized by the bey. The Khaznadar collection then attracted the attention of the new grand vizier, Khayr al-Din (1873–78). Influenced by the activities of Muhammad Khaznadar, Khayr al-Din sought to create a national museum of antiquities. However, this project came to an end with Khayr al-Din’s dismissal and the subsequent arrival of French colonizers, who established the Bardo Museum (then called the Alaoui Museum) in 1888. The historical narrative written by the French colonial authority erased the memory of prominent Tunisian archaeologists and collectors who had been active in the preceding decades. This article seeks to highlight the important contributions of local Tunisians to the development of archaeological research and policies surrounding Tunisian cultural heritage in the nineteenth century.

«Soviet scholars were on duty»: studying and teaching of the archaeology and the history of primitive society in the Belarusian State University during the war and post-war period

The article deals with the little-known pages of the history of archaeology and education. It reveals the main aspects of the teaching of archaeology and other disciplines of the relevant profile at the Belarusian State University in the period from 1940s to the beginning of 1950s. Lectures were conducted by full-time staff members of the Belarusian State University. Moscow scholars as well as fellow workers of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR were also invited for teaching. Scientific activity in the field of archaeology and closely-related disciplines was constrained by personnel problems and restricted material resources. University intellectuals carried did their best to restore the Museum of history and archaeology, however, due to the lack of exhibition space, the renewed exposition had not been opened.

Cultivating trust, producing knowledge: The management of archaeological labour and the making of a discipline

Like any science, archaeology relies on trust between actors involved in the production of knowledge. In the early history of archaeology, this epistemic trust was complicated by histories of Orientalism in the Middle East and colonialism more broadly. The racial and power dynamics underpinning 19th- and early 20th-century archaeology precluded the possibility of interpersonal moral trust between foreign archaeologists and locally hired labourers. In light of this, archaeologists created systems of reward, punishment, and surveillance to ensure the honest behaviour of site workers. They thus invented a set of structural conditions that produced sufficient epistemic trust for archaeological research to proceed—a system that continues to shape archaeology to the present day.

Compressed Air Technology in Swedish Archaeology: An Example of the Social Construction of Technology in Practice

In this paper the authors problematize the relation between technological and social aspects of archaeological fieldwork through a historical case study of the introduction and use of compressed air technology in archaeology. They do this by incorporating aspects of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor Network Theory (ANT) into the history of archaeology. Apart from archive material, fieldwork reports and interviews with colleagues have been the primary sources. The study shows how technology is negotiated and renegotiated, and how the technical and the social form each other. Finally, the authors draw attention to issues of technological development in the present.

Early History of Archaeology Graphs

The earliest archaeological spindle graph was published in 1883 by natural historian and avocational archaeologist Charles C. Abbott. Evidence that he obtained the idea from paleontology, which first published spindle graphs in the 1830s and 1840s, is circumstantial at best, and differences in graph styles weigh against such borrowing. Several spindle graphs published in the 1890s and early 1900s by archaeologist William Henry Holmes either depict his views on inevitable progressive evolution—a theory rapidly falling from anthropological favor—or were so speculative as to likely have had little influence on the discipline. During the first couple decades of the twentieth century, physicist/geographer/anthropologist Franz Boas (often referred to as the father of anthropology) published numerous line graphs of quantitative data. He influenced archaeologists Leslie Spier and Manual Gamio who used line graphs to display temporally varying frequencies of artifacts. About the same time, the wife and husband team of Madeleine Kidder and Alfred V. Kidder published several line graphs of relative frequencies of pottery types against stratigraphic provenience, seemingly largely as a result of Madeleine’s influence because Alfred never again published such a graph and instead favored phyletic seriation graphs of a type reminiscent of Sir William Flinders Petrie’s sequence dating graphs from the turn of the century.

".. .wiser than he himself at the time knew" - The Histories of Archaeology and the Whig Problem

The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in the history of archaeology, an interest which, unfortunately, has not always included theoretical and methodological issues. In this paper, therefore, the author focuses upon one vital problem in the historiography of archaeology the problem of anachronistic reasoning. One example put forward concerns how one textbook in the history of archaeology treats the question of how the existence of thunderbolts was explained by an early scholar, the Dane Ole Worm. As a general conclusion it is claimed that different forms of the history of archaeology need different foundations with respect to the question of how to assess the past from the vantage point of the present.