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Archaeologists and Autobiography: (Self-)Fashioning in the Public

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Archaeologists and Autobiography: (Self-)Fashioning in the Public Archaeologists and autobiography: (self-)fashioning in the public autobiographical writings of Austen Henry Layard (1817 - 1894), William Flinders Petrie (1853 - 1942), and Mortimer Wheeler (1890 - 1976) Name: Robin Hoeks Master Thesis, Research Master Historical Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen First assessor: Dr Nathalie de Haan Second assessor: Prof Jan Hein Furnée Word count: 33.8701 1 The word count includes footnotes, but excludes in-text quotes from source-material. 1 Images, clockwise: 1. William Flinders Petrie in front of a rock-carved tomb which he used as living space during excavations in Egypt. 2. Austen Henry Layard ‘in Albanian dress’. 3. Mortimer Wheeler excavating a mosaic in Verulamium 2 Table of contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5 Chapter 1 — autobiographical theory ...................................................................................... 10 Autobiography — the question of definition ....................................................................... 10 Autobiography — the question of history ........................................................................... 13 Autobiography — critical approaches ................................................................................. 16 Agency, ‘I’’s, selves, identity and the public....................................................................... 19 A methodology..................................................................................................................... 24 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 26 Chapter 2 — public expectations of the practice of archaeology and ‘an archaeologist’ ........ 27 The practice of archaeology ................................................................................................. 29 ‘The archaeologist’: personal characteristics ....................................................................... 33 ‘The archaeologist’: personal and discursive background ................................................... 41 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 44 Chapter 3 — The lives and public persona of Austen Henry Layard (1817 - 1894), William Flinders Petrie (1853 - 1942), and Mortimer Wheeler (1890 - 1976) ..................................... 46 Austen Henry Layard: ‘discoverer of Nineveh’................................................................... 47 The myth of ‘Layard of Nineveh’ ........................................................................................ 50 William Flinders Petrie: archaeological explorer of Egypt ................................................. 51 Petrie, eugenics, and exhibitions .......................................................................................... 53 Mortimer Wheeler: public archaeologist ............................................................................. 56 ‘Naughty Morty’ .................................................................................................................. 58 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 60 Chapter 4 — The ideological ‘I’’s and the autobiographies of Layard, Petrie, and Wheeler . 61 Layard’s Autobiography and letters from his childhood to his appointment as H.M. ambassador at Madrid ......................................................................................................... 61 Petrie’s Seventy years in archaeology ................................................................................. 63 Wheeler’s Still digging: interleaves from an antiquary’s notebook .................................... 64 The public expectations of the practice of archaeology and the autobiographies ............... 65 Public expectations of the archaeologist and the autobiographies....................................... 70 Elements outside the framework .......................................................................................... 77 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 82 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 85 3 Sources ..................................................................................................................................... 90 Works cited .............................................................................................................................. 92 Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................. 100 Appendices ............................................................................................................................. 101 Appendix A: ‘Statesmen No. 30: Caricature of the Rt Hon Austen Henry Layard’, Vanity Fair (28 August 1869). ...................................................................................................... 101 Appendix B: tables of content Autobiography vols. I and II. ............................................ 102 Appendix C: table of contents Seventy Years .................................................................... 104 Appendix D: table of contents Still digging ....................................................................... 105 Appendix E: Frontispiece Autobiography, vol. I. .............................................................. 106 4 Introduction ‘You want to be a good archaeologist, you've got to get out of the library!’ ‘[A]utobiography is not merely something we read in a book; rather, as a discourse of identity, delivered bit by bit in the stories we tell about ourselves day in and day out, autobiography structures our living.’2 At first sight, the two quotes above seem to be unrelated. In some sense, even, they could not be further apart from each other. The first is spoken by the protagonist of the latest (2008) episode of an international movie franchise centring around a person who, together with other popular focussing on archaeology, undoubtedly inspired many to take up archaeology: Harrison Ford as professor Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones, Jr. The second quote, contrarily, is a passage from the first chapter of literary historian Paul Eakin’s Living autobiographically, a work dealing with the role of identity within autobiographical narratives. Both quotes, however, point at two central pillars of the research presented in this thesis. Central to it is the question: how can differences between the public persona and the images of the practice of (popular) archaeology Austen Henry Layard (1817 - 1894), William Flinders Petrie (1853 - 1942), and Mortimer Wheeler (1890 - 1976) fashioned in their autobiographies, be explained?3 Firstly, public images of the practice of archaeology and of archaeologists in general during the period of ca. 1850 - 1950, and of Layard, Petrie, and Wheeler specifically, are key to this study. Such public images take a textual form as narrative structures, motifs, and topoi. Further, they exist independently of ‘what really happened’, as this was usually not known to the recipients of the text (the readers of the autobiography). The second pillar is made up of how autobiography in general, and written autobiographies in particular, structure not only how we construct our own identity for ourselves, but also, especially in the case of a public figure, for a larger public. As will be shown in the first chapter on a theoretical level, both pillars are tied together in a reciprocal relationship, the one continuously influencing the other and vice-versa. 2 Paul J. Eakin, Living autobiographically: how we create identity in narrative (Ithaca and London, 2008), 4. 3 The term self-fashioning was coined by the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt in the context of the Renaissance and was, for example expanded to the nineteenth-century intellectual world by Jo Tollebeeck. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980); Jo Tollebeeck, Fredericq & zonen: een antropologie van de moderne geschiedwetenschap (Amsterdam, 2008), 40. 5 These two pillars also connect this historical research with the present time. The concept of identity has gained in importance during the last decades, both within and beyond the academic world. Outside of academia (and all too often inside of it as well) an ‘identity’ is usually seen as something which is uniform, static, and of which one possesses but one. The following chapters, however, not only show on a theoretical level that anyone possesses a variety of ever-changing identities, but they also point out how the three examined archaeologists actively adapted the identity they showcased in their autobiographies to cater to the expectations of their audience. Furthermore, scholars, especially but not exclusively those from the humanities, are currently increasingly pushed to highlight the contemporary relevance and ‘usefulness’ of their research, besides the more traditional roles they play in larger societal debates.4 The analysis of the strategies three public archaeologists employed in their autobiographies to reach a large audience can therefore be informative to current
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