A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts Stephen L. Dyson In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON Copyright © 2006 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Linotype Fairfi eld by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dyson, Stephen L. In pursuit of ancient pasts : a history of classical archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries / Stephen L. Dyson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11097-5 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-300-11097-9 (alk. paper) 1. Archaeology—History—19th century. 2. Archaeology—History—20th century. 3. Classical antiquities. 4. Archaeology and history—Mediterranean Region. 5. Mediterranean Region—Antiquities. I. Title. CC100.D97 2006 930.1—dc22 2006017553 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Abigail Daniel Jacob Jonathan Peter Simona Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Chapter 1. The Protohistory of Classical Archaeology 1 Chapter 2. The Foundations of Classical Archaeology 20 Chapter 3. The Opening of Greece 65 Chapter 4. Nationalism and National Traditions Before the Great War 86 Chapter 5. The Emergence of the Great Museums in Europe and America 133 Chapter 6. Political Ideology and Colonial Opportunism During the Interwar Period 172 Chapter 7. After World War II: Capitalism, Corporatism, and Marxism 214 Afterword 249 Notes 255 Bibliography 279 Index 305 Preface This is a book about classical archaeology in the past two centuries. It explores the changes in the modern age to a fi eld of study that by then was already old. This was the period in which an avocational interest became an academic discipline. But classical archaeology had many other faces during this period. The expansion of the educated middle class created new rosters of amateurs who identifi ed with the Greek and Roman past. These amateurs formed the legions of new tourists who replaced the Grand Tour aristocrats at Rome and Pompeii. Histories and myths associated with ancient Greece and Rome became caught up with national histories in an imperialist age. A French emperor sponsored the excavation of the hill fort where Julius Caesar defeated the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix. An Italian dictator demanded that archaeologists clear the fora of the Caesars to provide an appropriate backdrop to his military parades. A history of classical archaeology during the past two hundred years, then, must be a history of professionalization and the advancement of knowledge, but it must also be a cultural, social, and even political history. Much has been written about the history of classical archaeology from the Renaissance to the early years of the nineteenth century. These were the centuries when classical antiquity was rediscovered, when the arts developed in close connection with classical models, when the collecting of ancient sculpture, coins, and other antiquities was central to humanists. Education still included the classics, and most cultivated people had more than a passing knowledge of Greek and Roman authors. The antiquarians who dominated archaeological study in the seven teenth and early eighteenth centuries laid foundations on which we still build today through their methodical marshaling of information in a number of archaeological fi elds. Many who once mocked those dusty pedants and their quaint ways have developed an admiration for these scholars’ persistent hard work and their impressive accumulation of knowledge. In the eighteenth century archaeology moved in many directions. xi xii PREFACE The discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii made more immediate the Roman past. The French turned to Rome as they shaped their evolving ideologies of the prerevolutionary, revolutionary, and Napoleonic eras. The youth of the ruling class of that emerging power England experi- enced ancient Rome fi rst through the classical curricula of Oxford and Cambridge and then on the Grand Tour. The collecting mania associated with the Grand Tour helped create the international antiquities market and laid the foundations of many great collections north of the Alps. A neoclassical revival in the arts spread throughout Europe, and the fi rst small expeditions were dispatched to Greece to study classical art at what the classical humanist Johann Winckelmann proclaimed was its source. After the defeat of Napoleon the history of classical archaeology seemed to grow progressively duller, as the study attracted the interest only of specialists. The ephemeral brilliance of Napoleon was replaced by a succession of pedantic German professors, and the decadent young aristocrats of the Grand Tour by earnest tourists, Baedekers in hand, who invaded every gallery determined to study every statue. Neoclassi- cal art, considered cutting edge in the eighteenth century, moved to an increasingly marginalized backwater in the nineteenth, represented by Henry James’s “white marmorean fl ock” of American women sculptors carving marble nymphs in Rome. Even the archaeological adventurers like the Englishman Charles Newton, who fi lled the museums of Europe with original Greek art, have attracted relatively little attention. While it is true that the classical has not dominated the cultural world in the past two centuries in the way it did the previous three, it was hardly a minor presence. Greece and Rome remained central not only to elite but also to middle-class education in Europe and America during the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. The nineteenth- century phenomenon of middle-class American women gazing appre- ciatively at the Apollo Belvedere while their husbands commissioned Greek Revival houses shows the hold the classical aesthetic still had on educated society. If its characteristic archaeological manifestation in the mid-eighteenth century was a British Grand Tourist visiting the Vatican galleries, in the late twentieth century it was Archaeology magazine in the dentist’s offi ce. Writing the more recent history of classical archaeology is a com- plicated task. During this period classical archaeology became a profes- PREFACE xiii sional discipline with more than its share of the institutions devoted to its study, and disciplinary and institutional development from profes- sorships in Berlin to museums in Munich to research and study centers in Athens and Rome have to be considered. So do the major research projects, especially that late-nineteenth-century archaeological innova- tion, the “big dig.” But there is danger in an institutional approach to the history of classical archaeology, where an emphasis on the professional may lead to little more than a parade of dead academics, dusty excavations, and silent libraries. Certainly, university seminars, scholarly libraries, research institutes, and well-organized and well-funded excavations laid the foundations of a modern, professional, classical archaeology. But these instruments of disciplinary professionalism developed at a very uneven pace. The Germans led the way, and, ironically, it was in the raw land of America that German classical scholarship probably had its great- est formative infl uence. Many of the founding generation of American classicists had studied in Germany. The French always looked skepti- cally on things German, although they paid more attention to German scholarly accomplishments in the 1870s after the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The British universities retained a solid classical curriculum into which archaeology penetrated only marginally up until World War I. In the British Museum they had access to the best collec- tion of original Greek sculpture in the world, but the museum classical archaeologists were few in number and amateur in education. In Rome, the capital of a newly united Italy, classical archaeology did not enter the university as a formal fi eld of study until the last years of the nineteenth century, although after that German scholarship had a dominant—some would have said too dominant—position there. To focus simply on professional classical archaeology and archaeologists in the nineteenth century would be too limiting. Field archaeology had originated with the amateur antiquaries, and for much of Europe the antiquary remained the principal source of archaeological research well into the twentieth century. These parochial savants, with their dusty collections of antiquities and querulous meetings, where they argued over the location of some Roman town mentioned by Tacitus, became an ob- ject of fun and even of derision. However, many were deeply learned and knew much of the world outside their local areas; they played a vital role xiv PREFACE in recording information on sites that have now been destroyed and in saving antiquities that would almost certainly have been lost. Important fi elds of archaeological study like Roman Britain remained until the 1960s largely the domain of the amateur. It is one

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