Field Notes Seminar

Witness to a Greater Germanic Past? The SS-Ahnenerbe and the Archaeological Research Sites of Dolni Věstonice and Solone Dr Martijn Eickhoff (Radboud University Nijmegen) Discussant: Dr Helen Roche (University of Cambridge) Abstract In my presentation I focus on two archaeological excavations carried out by Dutch prehistorians Assien Bohmers and Frans C. Bursch during the Second World War in the villages of Dolni Věstonice (Unterwisternitz) and Solone (Soljonoje). These excavations were contracted by the SS-Ahnenerbe—an SS research unit—and are therefore examined not only in conjunction with the history of East Central Europe and the history of archaeology, but al­so on the micro-level, where institutional, organizational and biographical aspects are in­corporated alongside cultural and social backgrounds. The inspiration here is the post-colonial approach, in which scientific expeditions carried out outside Europe are understood as a process in which each party influences the other. It thereby becomes clear how during the Second World War, the SS-Ahnenerbe tried to portray the two research sites as materi­al witnesses to a Nordic- (Indo-) Germanic past. In the scenario, Unterwisternitz was a sym­bol of 'origin' and Solone symbolized 'propagation'. At the same time, the Czechoslovak­ian and Ukrainian interpretations (and significance) of the research sites were to be oblite­rated. This leads to the conclusion that the SS-Ahnenerbe was indeed a highly active National Socialist scientific organization and that they developed a new militant and “Greater Germanic” scientific style and a new practice which at the time was directly connected to the terrorist interventions of the Na­tional Socialists. The avant-garde nature of the SS organization did, however, also contri­bute to the fact that their activities had little “effect” outside their own SS circle. The two excavations—including the fact that SS archaeologists had ever been involved on-site—were as a result soon forgotten after 1945.

Disciplinary Formation, Imperialist Gender, Nationalist Class: Egyptian Archaeology under British Military Occupation (1882-1956) Prof Stephen Quirke (ULC) Discussant: Mimi Winick (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) Abstract In his 1996 History of Archaeological Thought, Bruce Trigger described archaeology across Africa as neo-colonial. Two decades later, in the political economy of knowledge, de-colonisation remains one paradigm shift that never materialised – nowhere more visibly than in the study of other places/times. With a smaller scale of population, narrowly bounded disciplines offer opportunities to analyse this continuity, and to identify the trump cards of domination. In Egyptology established practitioners such as the philologist Georges Posener have voiced concern over self-isolation; in its current practice, the sub-discipline seems torn between the First World technocracy of archaeological fieldwork, and an anti-theoretical positivism in research into ancient written sources. From the history of nineteenth and twentieth century archaeology, two particular liberation motifs or genres might be re-interpreted as implicit strategies of domination: praise of women archaeologists, in a first wave feminist style; and praise of Egyptian Egyptologists, in nationalist historiography. Is it possible to develop a self-critique in either area, against normative self-images of heroism? Is a war of position possible against the hegemonic structures of both science and its civil society?

Dr Christina Riggs (University of East Anglia) Discussant: Dr Chris Wingfield (University of Cambridge) Abstract Considerations of aesthetics have played a part in studying and interpreting the ancient past since Winckelmann and Hegel, although many 20th and 21st century archaeologists may reject 'aesthetics' as a useful or productive category. In this paper - developed for the Durham-based AHRC Research Network on Ethics and Aesthetics in Archaeology - I use the ancient Egyptian mummy to argue for an ancient aesthetic that we can reconstruct through, for instance, considerations of materiality, and I contrast that to modern encounters with the Egyptian mummy, which employ a very different, and very persuasive, aesthetic based on anatomical and forensic science. What implications might this contrast have for archaeological and museological interpretations of the ancient Egyptian funerary sphere, including debates around the ethics of curating and researching human remains?

Dr Alice Stevenson (UCL) Abstract The latter part of the Victorian era and early Edwardian period witnessed a change in the pace and nature of museum collecting of Egyptian culture. Crucially, this was the time when both archaeology as a discipline and museum curatorship as a profession became established, their relationship up until the 1920s being symbiotic. By examining case studies from a few of the hundreds of the world’s museums that received such material of the export and reception of assemblages from British excavations in Egypt this paper seeks to tease apart these relationships and explore how the idea of archaeological context was constructed in the intersections between fieldwork and museum practice.

Dr Richard Staley (University of Cambridge) Discussant: Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)

Skull Triangles: Flinders Petrie, Craniometry and Race Dr Debbie Challis (University College London) Discussant: Dr Kate Nichols (CRASSH, University of Cambridge) Abstract My paper takes as its starting point a ‘Diagram of Climate and Race’ published by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in the anthropological journal Man in 1902. I will consider Petrie’s assumptions around race and skull dimensions inherent in the diagram and how this relates to his work at this time. Petrie collected skulls for what became the National Eugenics Laboratory at UCL and I will concentrate on the use by ‘computers’ at UCL of skulls from the predynastic site of Naqada, Petrie’s first large collection for Karl Pearson.

Narrating the Fall of Empires in Weimar and National Socialist Racial Ideology Dr Helen Roche (University of Cambridge) Discussant: Dr Joachim Whaley (University of Cambridge) Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, the idea that the destinies of races, nations and empires were universal and biologically determined (wherever and whenever in human history they existed) was the preserve of a minority of racial theorists and academics. However, within a few decades, such ideas came to dominate National-Socialist thought, and were propagated in ideological and educational material throughout the Third Reich. Using a variety of examples drawn from these racial interpretations of history, concerning both the ancient and the modern world, Roche argues that this inculcation of a particular racial historical framework follows very closely the model of ‘schematic narrative templates’ devised by the sociologist James Wertsch. Wertsch’s work has shown that a crucial element in the formation of collective identity is provided by forcing historical occurrences to fit into a consistent, immutable narrative framework, which can be used both to justify and to legitimise the actions of the nation or ruling power in question. This paper explores the development of this phenomenon, and analyses the ways in which schematic narrative templates of race came to dominate German intellectual and historical thought during the 1930s and 1940s.

People and Places Reading Group: Experts, Politicians, Labs and Media in Late Twentieth-Century Palaeoanthropological Knowledge Production Miquel Carandell Baruzzi (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Abstract Our Michaelmas reading group develops from Miquel’s interest in the ‘Orce man’ controversy that arose over a cranial fragment discovered in 1982 in Orce, Granada that initially appeared to be from a hominid but was later attributed to a donkey’s remains. In this session, Miquel will trace how paleoanthropological knowledge is “constructed” by different actors (academic experts, politicians, journalists) in excavation sites, laboratories, conferences and the modern media. Seeking a better understanding of the strategies used by scientists in this process, we will discuss how it is possible to analyse and begin to frame the construction of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline at the end of the twentieth century.

Of Cats, Cathedrals and Crusaders: Rethinking Approaches to 'Heritage' through Representations of Restoration in Cyprus Dr Astrid Swenson (Brunel University, London) Discussant: Professor David Abulafia (University of Cambridge) Abstract The paper examines the history of the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the Crusades during the modern colonisation of the Mediterranean. More particularly, it will closely examine the photographs and drawings of Cyprus made and collected by the French medievalist Camille Enlart in 1899 on a government sponsored research mission. These visual archives can be used to rewrite the history of heritage in Europe from the margins by reinserting a perspective that is both imperial and transnational, and that connects the history of art and archaeology with that of the history of medicine. But these images are also useful in transcending a focus on national and imperial rivalries by reflecting about how to connect the public uses of heritage sites, with more intimate, embodied, sensory, personal appropriations

Sadiah Qureshi (University of Birmingham) Discussant: Sujit Sivasundaram (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge) Abstract Paying to see living foreign peoples perform was enormously popular ‎in the nineteenth century. ‎Throughout the 1800s, for a shilling or more, the ‎public flocked to see everyone from Africans to ‎Aztecs in European metropolitan centres. Foreign peoples would perform songs, dances and ‎ceremonies designed to showcase both their ethnic ‘singularity’ and lives abroad. Initially, such ‎shows usually consisted of a single individual or small group imported in relatively haphazard ‎circumstances. By the late nineteenth century, particularly under the aegis of world fairs, entire ‎‎‘villages’ of foreigners from around the world were being exhibited together. ‎ Across the century, the shows provided a form of popular entertainment combined with ‎intercultural encounter and scientific enquiry. For instance, the shows were routinely marketed as opportunities to meet and greet ethnic groups which were unknown in Europe. Canny ‎impresarios sought to maximise their profits by associating their shows with ongoing military, ‎political and missionary activity in the colonies. The shows were also routinely promoted as useful ‎for anyone with an interest in race and the new disciplines of ethnology and anthropology. Thus, ‎displayed peoples became specimens that were crucial to nineteenth-century debates on race. ‎This paper will consider the importance of displayed people for broader histories of race, science ‎and empire. In particular it will argue that the shows were crucial opportunities for intercultural encounter. Moreover, they were sites for the making of scientific knowledge because they allowed the lay and the learned to create and participate in ongoing debates on the nature of human variation. In doing so, the paper will also ‎consider opportunities for future histories of science and empire.‎

Charlotte Roberts (Clare College and Faculty of English, University of Cambridge) Discussant: Dr. Melissa Calaresu (Early Modern History, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge) Abstract The eighteenth-century ‘discovery’ of the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii revolutionised the way in which individuals thought about their relationship with the ancient world. The accounts of British visitors written between the start of the official excavations in 1738 and the end of the century reflect a new historical sensibility, one predicated upon the extraordinary proximity between present and past that these sites seemed to ensure. This new way of looking at the ancient world challenged many of the established models of classical engagement that dominated European and especially British culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Herculaneum and Pompeii offered the possibility of an encounter with the ancient world that might not only rival Rome but compensate for some of the shortcomings and disappointments experienced by visitors to that ancient city. This communal, cultural response to the ruins of these cities does not mean, however, that the eighteenth-century influence of Herculaneum and Pompeii was purely decorative, nostalgic or sentimental. Particular voices emerge strongly from the mass of writings inspired by these sites, and the particular closeness between present and past associated with the excavations allows several individuals to shape and develop unique political and intellectual arguments. In this paper I will outline some of the main ideas and images that are characteristic of the eighteenth-century response to the excavation of Herculaneum and Pompeii, but I will also examine the way in which these broad ideas were echoed, altered or appropriated by individual thinkers, such as J.J. Winckelmann and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who used them to articulate innovative and expansive points of view. I hope that this discussion will provide an opportunity to reflect on the diversity of the eighteenth-century reception of the ancient world; the scope and influence of early archaeology on disciplines other than antiquarianism, and the relationship between cultural and intellectual history in our own understandings of the past.

Chris Manias (University of Manchester). Discussant: Professor Peter Mandler (Prof. of Modern Cultural History, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge) Abstract The discovery of Palaeolithic art in western, southern and central Europe in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was one of the most striking developments within the new and publicly prominent scholarly field of human prehistory, with implications which cut across the archaeological, anthropological and cultural sciences, and into wider popular discourse. At La Madeleine, Les Eyzies, Altamira, Dolní Věstonice, and a host of other sites, rock-paintings, carved bones and antlers, and statuettes were discovered depicting long-extinct animals, abstract designs and a few rare human figures. More than anything else, the art of the Upper Palaeolithic seemed to offer an insight into the mysterious world of the Ice Age, and potentially the origins and earliest development of human culture. Yet within this interest, individuals from a range of fields – including anthropologists, archaeologists, neurologists, art historians, literary figures, and public intellectuals – were split and divided over what these objects showed. Were these the first glimmerings of religious or ceremonial activity? The products of a pristine and natural form of human nature, which modernity was in danger of effacing? The sudden fully-formed flowering of “Neanthropic Man”? Manifestations of the simultaneously savage and child-like earliest condition of the human race? Or simply crude modern fakes within a field persistently dogged by frauds and forgeries? Examining the answers given to these questions as Palaeolithic art sparked excitement and debate across Europe and North America, this paper will examine not only the public and scholarly construction of European prehistory in the early-twentieth century, but also wider international debates on the development of human nature and culture.

Mirjam Brusius (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) Discussant: Dr Christina Riggs (University of East Anglia) Abstract What happens to archaeological objects between their excavation and their incorporation in museum collections? Focussing on 19th century excavations in ancient Mesopotamia, this talk will investigate the relationship between Antique objects found at the excavation site and attempts to shift and incorporate them into European canonical traditions at the major museums in London, Paris and Berlin. Even though archaeology has often been motivated by political interests, its historiography has hitherto failed to help us understand how European canons and values are the result of a complex transfer in which objects and cultures move from one canonical space to another. The talk will pay attention to the time and space where the objects seemed to have "no status" and their meaning was still dynamic and negotiable. It will show that this status even persisted once the object arrived in the museums. Here, the main story took often place in the storage area, in attics and basements rather than the exhibition hall.

Field Notes: Histories of Archaeology and Anthropology

Chris Evans (Cambridge Archaeological Unit, University of Cambridge) Discussant: Prof Simon Schaffer (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge) Abstract This paper will generally explore the influence of military procedures and personal experience thereof in 19th and early 20th century British archaeological fieldwork. Aside from tracing this as a practical legacy (survey techniques, the grid and organisation of labour, etc.), it will consider its impact upon notions of ‘disciplining the past’ (e.g. Wheeler) and, particularly, how Pitt Rivers’ constitution of proof arose from his army background (ordnance adjudication and legal prosecution).

Oliver Hochadel (Institució Milà i Fontanals, CSIC, Barcelona, Spain) Discussant: Robert Foley (Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution, University of Cambridge) Abstract In 1994 a Spanish research team found in the Sierra de Atapuerca in Northern Spain hominid fossils that turned out to be more than 780.000 years old, making them the oldest in Europe. Three years later the researchers named a new species: Homo antecessor. In 2002 Spanish historian Fernando García de Cortázar chose for his Historia de España the subtitle De Atapuerca al euro. How is it possible that within less than ten years Atapuerca turned from a practically unknown archeological site to the (however imaginary) starting point of Spanish history? I will argue that this did not happen “by itself”. The sheer age of the fossils was not enough. The numerous and intense efforts of the researchers themselves to popularize their findings were crucial. These efforts were taken up by the Spanish media as well as by museums and political actors and strongly enhanced. Numerous studies have shown how closely nation building goes hand in hand with research into human prehistory. Yet they mostly focus on the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The example of Atapuerca will show that the strong link between hominid fossils and national identity still exists in the 21st century. The paper will also try to show that there are different ways of appropriating prehistoric human remains. One may distinguish the concept of “biological continuity” in which the fossils represent some kind of ancestor from the concept of “scientific nationalism”. The latter consists in the pride in the scholarly achievement and international recognition of “our own” scientists. In Atapuerca – UNESCO- world heritage site since the year 2000 – we may even discern a third concept: the marketing of origins in order to lure tourists to the site: nationalism enterprised-up.

Kate Nichols (Bible and Antiquity in 19th Culture Postdoc Research Fellow, CRASSH, University of Cambridge) Discussant: Brian Murray (Bible and Antiquity in 19th Culture Postdoc Research Fellow, CRASSH, University of Cambridge)

Efram Sera-Shriar (York University, Canada) Discussant: Prof Peter Mandler (Department of History, University of Cambridge).

Allison Ksiazkiewicz (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge) This seminar will discuss three articles that deal with the role of antiquity in late-Enlightenment Britain. Using Edward Daniel Clarke’s (1769–1822) travels through Greece and Levant as a case study, the first article considers the meaning of Classical antiquity for an emerging British empire. The second article addresses antiquarianism and its importance in cultivating national identity in Britain. This argument develops through a detailed history of the Society of Antiquaries and its role as a public institution. The final article examines notions of private and public life in eighteenth-century historiography.

Matthew Eddy (Department of Philosophy, Durham University) Discussant: Jim Secord (Department of History ans Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)