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From the collections of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums Head of a kouros seventh–sixth century BC, marble, Samos 1645 T, date of accession unknown Indigenous Archaeologies in Ottoman Greece yannis hamilakis In recent years the links between the emergence of professional archaeology and the discourses and practices of western modernity have been explored in a number of publications and debates.1 However interesting and fruitful this discussion may be, it is carried out within a framework that assumes both a linear, developmental, evolutionist narrative for the discipline and a singular notion of modernity and of archaeology. Conventional narratives assume that archaeology developed, initially in the west in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as part of the regime of modernity and out of earlier practices such as antiquarianism. But this is a problematic narrative that ignores nonelite, local, indigenous engagements with the material past, which predate the development of professionalized, official archaeology.2 In this essay I make a distinction between a modernist professional and institutionalized archaeology (which, much like modernity, can adopt diverse forms and expressions) and indigenous archaeologies: local, vernacular discourses and practices involving things from another time. These phenomena have been recorded in travel writings and folktales, and can also be seen in the practices of reworking the material past, such as those represented by spolia; we need not romanticize, idealize, or exoticize them to see that they constitute alternative engagements with materiality and temporality, which can teach us a great deal. My context is Ottoman Greece, primarily in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but with occasional references to earlier and later periods (fig. 23). Colonial Appropriation and Indigenous Resistance: A Clash of Archaeologies An appropriate starting point for this enquiry is the adventures of the Cam- bridge scholar, mineralogist, and antiquarian Edward Clarke, a determined and persistent collector of antiquities but also of natural specimens of all kinds. Hamilakis 50 fig. 23 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens, 1762, plate 1, view of the Acropolis with generic Ottoman riders in the foreground, providing a romanticized and Orientalized human landscape. fig. 24 The “Ceres of Eleusis,” upper part of a caryatid, Roman, c. 50 BC, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, acquired by Edward Clarke in 1801. Indigenous Archaeologies in Ottoman Greece 51 He belonged to a wave of traveler-antiquarians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who had developed a protoscientific, proto-“archaeological” attitude and gaze. In contrast to an earlier wave of travelers, who were guided primarily by a literary gaze and were interested mostly in architecture and in the landscape, the later group started paying more attention to objects and artifacts.3 This development was taking place in a wider international climate marked by the intensified appropriation and plundering of antiquities, an intensification characterized by nationalist competition (especially between the British and the French), at a time when Greece had become more accessible and more desirable to northern Europeans.4 At the same time, national imaginings and desires among Greek-speaking intellectuals and the emerging middle classes were becoming more widespread, largely based on the endorsement of the western ideals of Hellenism and the glorification of classical antiquity.5 Within this social and intellectual milieu, and guided not only by the colonial desire for the objects and artifacts of antiquity but also by a scientific belief in accuracy and detail, these later travelers came into contact, dialogue, and often conflict with local people, not only because they actively conducted excavations and thus employed local people as manual labor, but also because in attempting to forcefully appropriate antiquities they often encountered stiff local resistance, which took various forms.6 In a way, ancient sites and the places where antiquities were found became not only contact zones in the classic colonial sense, but also conflict zones.7 The conflict centered on antiquities, but was indicative of a broader clash of identities and cultures, a clash of colonization and resistance. Antiquarians and travelers recorded some of these clashes and the local reactions to their appropriation and pillaging, as well as local attitudes and practices involving antiquities.8 In this broader climate, Clarke, traveling in the eastern Mediterranean in the first years of the nineteenth century and collecting for Cambridge University, left a very detailed and highly interesting travelogue, open to various readings and interpretations. When, in 1801, he arrived in Eleusis, not far from Athens, the site associated with ancient religion and with the goddess Demeter, he could not hide his excitement. The place was littered with antiquities, but he was keen on one specific find, having read about it in earlier travelers’ accounts: a large marble upper torso of a female figure, known as the Ceres of Eleusis, but in fact a first-century BC statue of a caryatid, not a representation of the goddess (fig. 24).9 Nevertheless, he was not the only one interested in the statue. “We found it,” he later noted, “in the midst of a heap of dung, buried as high as the neck.” The inhabitants of the small village which is now situated among the Ruins of Eleusis still regarded this Statue with a high degree of superstitious veneration. They attribute to its presence the fertility of their land; and it was for this reason that they heaped around it the manure intended for their fields. They believed that the loss of it would be followed by no less than the failure of their annual harvests; and they pointed to the ears of bearded wheat among the sculptured ornaments upon the head of the figure, as a never-failing indication of the produce of the soil.10 Hamilakis 52 Clarke managed to secure a permit to remove the statue from the local Ottoman vaivode (governor) in exchange for a telescope. The main obstacle for him was not official intervention, but the resistance of local people, who in Clarke’s words were “respecting an idol which they all regarded as the protectress of their fields,” and before which they used to place a burning lamp during festival days, as they did with Christian icons. Local people refused to collaborate in its removal and believed that the arm of any person who dared to touch the figure or disturb its position would fall off. Interestingly, it was the local priest who intervened on Clarke’s behalf and secured the removal. He put on his canonical vestments, as for a ceremony of high mass, and descending into the hollow where the statue remained upright, after the rubbish around it had been taken away, gave the first blow with a pickaxe for the removal of the soil, that the people might be convinced no calamity would befall the labourers.11 Yet the ship that was carrying it to England sank. Eleusinians, Clarke notes, “predicted the wreck of the ship which should convey it; and it is a curious circumstance, that their augury was completely fulfilled.”12 Eleusinians, as later travelers recorded, lamented the loss of the statue for years to come and sure enough, several poor harvests followed.13 The statue was retrieved and ended up at Cambridge University, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, where it can be seen today. By 1813, only a few years after its removal, it had become the Ceres of Cambridge, at least for another British traveler, the politician John Cam Hobhouse.14 And the aftermath of this story is perhaps best evoked in the final paragraph of the relevant text from the website of the museum. Recognising the quality and importance of this statue, Clarke, decided to remove it. He winched the statue out of its dungy bed and shipped it to England. But it did not travel willingly. The ship carrying the caryatid, and other items collected by Clarke, sank off Beachy Head on the south coast of England.15 The story of the Ceres of Eleusis vividly illustrates a fundamental clash between two distinctive archaeological traditions, between the premodern, indigenous archaeology of the local people of Eleusis and the modernist western antiquarianism and archaeology represented by Clarke. I define archaeology here in a broad sense, as the discourses and practices involving material things of a past time. In that respect, the people of Eleusis were practicing their own archaeology: they had noticed the statue; they had exhibited it very close to its original context; they had created a discourse around it based on its sculptural details, such as the representations of ears of corn; and they venerated it and dedicated to it heaps of fertilizing dung, as the most appropriate substance for an entity that guaranteed the fertility of their fields. The modernist archaeology of Clarke Orientalized these people and their discourses and practices, confident of its superiority—ironically based on false knowledge about the statue. It stressed that such a work of art could not possibly Indigenous Archaeologies in Ottoman Greece 53 be left lying in dung, repeating a common trope among antiquarians since at least the eighteenth century in which the western European lover of art heroically rescued antiquities found among rubbish.16 It further advocated its removal to the more appropriate surroundings of Cambridge University, where it could be appreciated visually by English connoisseurs and used for artistic and archaeological instruction—and where it can be found today, placed high up, against the wall. The indigenous archaeology of the Eleusinians gave more attention to context than that of Clarke, and it also enabled a fully embodied, multisensory experience of the object that included olfactory contact with the heap of dung, which offended the nose of Clarke, just as it does the noses of the present-day curators of the Fitzwilliam Museum.

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