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Factual claims in late nineteenth century European prehistory and the descent of a modern discipline’s ideology Michael Fotiadis Journal of Social Archaeology 2006; 6; 5 DOI: 10.1177/1469605306060559 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jsa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/1/5

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Journal of Social Archaeology

ARTICLE

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com) ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 6(1): 5–27 DOI: 10.1177/1469605306060559

Factual claims in late nineteenth century European prehistory and the descent of a modern discipline’s 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 today’s historicism and treat the difference in terms of continuity and transformation of the subject.

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Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

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 prehistorian’s 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 naïveté 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 naïveté). 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 naïve 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


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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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‘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 Žižek (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 Žižek (1989: 32; for variations, see Žižek, 2002: 241–5) – 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 Žižek 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 Žižek offered for this inversion was that Marx’s 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 (Žižek, 1989: 28–33). Does this mean that people (scholars included) were more naïve, more prone to ideological deception in the nineteenth century, in Marx’s time? Perhaps – in a complex way: Žižek’s 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 L’Anthropologie 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 Musée des Antiquitées nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Duchêne, 1996: xxxvi). The essay was reprinted again in 1896 (Duchêne, in press). ‘The “Eastern Question” in Anthropology’ (EQ) is approximately one-half the length of Reinach’s essay. It was delivered as the President’s 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: 37–74) 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: 283–4). Their subject matter was identical. It was the issue of European prehistoric origins, or more precisely, the legacy of Europe’s 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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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 Europe’s 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: ‘c’est alors . . . que s’est dessinée, timidement d’abord, puis avec une assurance de mieux en mieux justifiée par les faits, la reaction contre le “mirage oriental”, la revendication des droits de l’Europe contre les prétentions de l’Asie’ (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 Phœnician merchant landed on the coast of Cornwall, or built the dolmens of the North and West’. And, commenting on Reinach’s 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 ‘prejugés . . . d’un autre âge’ (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 Reinach’s 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 Reinach’s, 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): D’où nous est arrivée la civilisation du bronze? Question importante que je crois avoir résolue. Le bronze nous est venu de l’Extrême-Orient. J’établis ce fait de deux manières: par l’examen des régions stannifères et par les rapports que certains objets et certains emblêmes de l’âge du bronze ont avec des objets et des emblêmes analogues de l’Inde et de la Chine.

One of these ‘emblêmes 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 Mortillet’s ‘thèse 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, Mortillet’s argument was devoid of worth: ‘c’est dans le nord de la presqu’île des Balkans, en Thrace et non en Inde, que l’étude seule de la géographie de ce signe symbolique conduit à 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 Meyer’s 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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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 Meyer’s 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 Phénicomanes’) 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 l’énigme mycénienne doit être cherchée dans la Russie méridionale. Nous devons admettre que la civilisation de Mycènes, en venant du Nord, séjourna, longtemps avant l’époque des colonies milésiennes, sur les côtes de la mer Noire et y laissa des types qui, grâce à un isolement relatif, purent s’y développer et s’y perpétuer plus longtemps qu’ailleurs. (MO: 52–3; 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 à l’offensive’ (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 Étrusques, les Mycéniens et les Asiatiques non sémitiques forment un groupe; la civilisation commune qui les charactérise se relie d’autre part . . . à celles de la Hongrie et de l’Europe du Nord’ (MO: 63). In fewer words that meant the ‘unité européenne primitive . . . de l’époque 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 Tène 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 ‘dérivent, en dernière analyse, d’influences européennes qui s’étaient exercées à une époque bien antérieure sur l’art 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: 49–50). 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 parallélisme infiniment curieux’, which the Phoenicians could not be called upon to explain (MO: 50–1). 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: 54–5, 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-à-vis their eastern counterparts – accorded well with the hypothesis of a ‘courant pélasgique occidental’ (MO: 57–8). 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 civilisèrent, s’orientalisèrent, et, un beau jour, revinrent s’établir en Ombrie au milieu de leurs frères arriérés, avec lesquels ils se sentaient encore cependant des affinités d’origine’ (MO: 61). And so, in its flow and counter-flow, the ‘courant pélasgique’ 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 ‘communauté primitive d’une 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 ‘unité européenne primitive . . . de l’époque 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: 65–6 and Tsountas, 1891: 41–3). 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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Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1) La civilisation mycénienne . . . est entièrement européenne d’origine; elle s’est seulement orientalisé, à la surface, au contact des civilisations de la Syrie et de l’Égypte. (MO: 40) . . . Une civilisation née en Asie, à proximité de la Babylonie et de l’Égypte, ne doit pas se présenter avec des charactères de rudesse et d’originalité aussi frappant que celle des Pélasges-Héthéens. (MO: 60–1)

‘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 ‘à 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 subject’s poetic imagination. The ‘courant pélasgique’ constitutes a good example, as does the related notion of ‘la marche d’une civilisation’ (MO: 55): On se figure volontiers la marche d’une civilisation sur le modèle de celle d’une armée, qui, partie d’un point de concentration, avec armes et bagages, se dirige vers un autre point par une seule route ou par des routes convergentes . . . Ce sont là des erreurs puériles. La marche d’une civilisation ressemble bien plutôt à 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 à d’innombrables 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 puériles’. 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 l’on ait dit, ni phéniciennes ni égyptiennes; en un mot, les analogies entre Shardana et Mycéniens sont de celles qu’explique la communauté primitive d’une civilisation et qui excluent, bien plutôt que ne l’autorisent, l’hypothèse de relations commerciales . . . L’unité foncière de civilisation des peuples de la Méditerrannée, au xve siècle et plus tôt encore, ne peut s’expliquer par une influence quelconque de l’Orient, parce que cette civilisation n’est ni babylonienne, ni égyptienne, ni syrienne. Elle s’explique simplement parce que ces peuples étaient apparentés, qu’ils avaient hérité d’une civilisation primitive commune, celle que nous connaissons surtout, en Orient, par les


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découvertes de Troie, et que plusieurs d’entre eux restèrent en communication, se transmettant de proche en proche, par un va-et-vient constant d’influences, quelques développements de cette civilisation primitive. (MO: 53–4)

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. Schliemann’s discoveries at Mycenae had been met with suspicion in the 1870s, and opinion wavered for years over the issue of Mycenae’s 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 Stephani’s ‘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, ‘où l’ornement byzantin n’est guère qu’une forme plus avancée, 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 subject’s 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 (1837–1899), or perhaps by Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936), and was still ‘visited’ in the early decades of the twentieth century (D’Agostino, 2002: 324–5, 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 Reinach’s, Evans’ essay too abounds in such mirages and fictions. The geographical compass of the claims again is of a wondrous scale: ‘The early “Ægean” 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: 910–11). ‘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: 911–12). 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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surrounding the invention of the ‘Mediterranean Race’ and its subsequent fate see D’Agostino, 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 Sergi’s 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 Palæolithic 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 Palæolithic 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: 908–9). 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 one’s mental worth (Massin, 1996, e.g. 97–8). ‘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 d’une civilisation’. Reinach’s 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 Said’s 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: Mycenæan 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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the art is stiff, conventional, becoming more and more Asiatic, till finally crushed out by the Assyrian conquest. It is the same with the Phœnicians. 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 Petrie’s discoveries at Tell-el-Amarna show the contact of this Ægean 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 pélasgique occidental’, ‘l’unité foncière’ and ‘la communauté primitive’ of Europe’s 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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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 Reinach’s 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 today’s 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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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 prehistorian’s knowledge rises upon the bedrock of evidence. The fantasy (‘we have in the present emancipated ourselves from the tangle of prejudice, idées reçues’, 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 prehistorian’s dispositions. As the effect of the transformation, the facts of prehistory today substitute for the prehistorian’s 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 trowel’s 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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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 idées reçues. 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 time’s arrow, I suggest here. We cannot reverse time’s 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 ‘Préhistoire et idéologie’, organized by Claudine Cohen at the École des Hautes Études 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 René 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. 219–24). For yet other problems of the historicism I take exception to, see Tosh (2003).


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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 Žižek (1989: 28–49) acknowledges as his inspiration in this matter various sources, from Pascal’s 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. 5–9); see also Žižek (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 (Duchêne, 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: 210–13). 7 My remarks here echo the analysis in Žižek (1989: 59–62). 8 It is worth noting that the Pelasgians had appeared in the genealogy of the Hungarians since 1825 (Szilágyi, 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: 6–7). 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. Brumfiel’s 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: 550–2; 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 Kant’s maxim its pointedness. Suffice, then, that we think of the ‘private’ as ‘authority interiorized’, ‘embodied’ in practices and institutions.

References Althusser, L. (1994) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Notes towards an Investigation’, in S. Žižek (ed.) Mapping Ideology, pp. 100–40. New York: Verso.


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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 nineteenth–twentieth century contexts. [email: [email protected]]


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