01 fotiadis 2006 factual claims in late xix european prehistory

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

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

5

Factual claims in late nineteenth centuryEuropean prehistory and the descent of amodern discipline’s ideology

MICHAEL FOTIADIS

Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina, Greece

ABSTRACTExtravagant, fantastic claims about the past are not unique to the latenineteenth century in European prehistory, yet those from that periodsound especially curious to twenty-first century archaeological earsand invite reflection: their authors are our direct disciplinary ancestors,yet, when we find fantastic what they took to be sound knowledge, weappear to be of a radically different breed of scholars/subjects. In thisarticle, I explore the nature of the difference, and do so while attempt-ing to ‘re-member’ the presence in our disciplinary past of those ances-tors. At issue is not the nineteenth century ideological context thatmade their fantastic claims appear like solid knowledge to them butthe disciplinary ideology that sustains the practice of prehistoricarchaeology today, and from the standpoint of which the nineteenthcentury factual claims are curious. This ideology, I argue, descends fromthe very nineteenth century scholarship that it now finds replete withfantasies. Demonstration of this requires that I leave aside the familiartechniques of today’s historicism and treat the difference in terms ofcontinuity and transformation of the subject.

6 Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

KEY WORDSdisciplinary history ● disciplinary ideology ● disciplinization ● historicism ● orientalism ● transformation of consciousness

■ IDEOLOGICAL DISTANCE AND EXOTICISM, ITSSYMPTOM

This is an article about disciplinary history: I read late nineteenth centuryessays on the prehistory of Europe and I puzzle about the nature of thedistance my discipline, prehistoric archaeology, has since traversed andabout the attending transformation of the prehistorian’s consciousness.When we, archaeologists, read nineteenth century essays today (a rareoccasion, since such essays are only of historical interest to us), we usuallyoverlook the exoticism in their fabric, the fact that the arguments andknowledge claims of which they consist sound odd, extravagant, indeedfantastic, to modern disciplinary ears. We are in the habit, it seems, ofpretending that we are already acquainted with that exoticism and, at thesame 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 nine-teenth century (though the matter hardly ends here, and more will be saidbelow). I take exception to this pattern in the present essay. I wish toacknowledge the exotic element in the fabric of the late nineteenth centuryessays, to locate it with precision, and attend to it as a puzzle; one that arisesin the act of our reading those essays. I treat, that is, the exoticism suchessays hold for us as a symptom – and symptoms excite curiosity, provokestrings of questions. At the same time, I try to bring my understanding ofthe field of ideology to bear on that symptom. This turn to ideology wasinitially provoked by the nineteenth century essays themselves – roughly:such essays were meant in their time as scientific accounts, yet they strikeus as ideologemes, that is, constructs laden with (overdetermined by)ideology. I ask, however, not so much what in the content of the essays isideological and to which ideology it belongs (though I can hardly avoid thisissue), but a different question: what is, in terms of disciplinary ideology, thedistance that separates us, contemporary practitioners of prehistoricarchaeology, from our late nineteenth century forefathers – the distancethat makes their science of European prehistory sound to our ears exotic?

Concrete examples of that exotic science and my comments on them arereserved for the second, main part of the essay. Here, I must clarify my mainquestion and circumscribe the scope of the argument that follows. What doI have in mind by ‘distance in terms of disciplinary ideology’? My argumentwill not be that the late nineteenth century knowledge claims were perfectly

7Fotiadis 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 toosimply, a symptom of our estrangement from that context – of the fact thatwe, of the present, have laid aside the nineteenth century ideological preju-dices and are therefore able to assess those ‘knowledge claims’ for whatthey really were, ideology-laden constructs, alien to the ethos of ourdiscipline. Such an argument would correspond to an empiricist (residuallyat least) species of historicism – ‘place the knowledge quests of another erain their ideological context, and their greatest mysteries shall be transparentto you!’ Despite countless merits, that species of historicism, so firmly estab-lished today in the historiography of the disciplines, appears to meincapable of ever admitting the past in the genealogy of the present, ofinterrogating itself about how that past became the present. It remains stub-bornly indifferent to the bearing of past events and circumstances onpresent understandings of those events and circumstances. Its lasting effectis an irreparable rupture between the ‘other era’ and today, between thepast of a field of practices and its current configuration. Such a rupture isespecially awkward in cases where demonstrable continuity obtainsbetween the other era and today, as is patently the case with the field ofprehistoric archaeology between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries.

And that is not all. ‘You see’, also says this kind of historicism, ‘the pastis not, after all, as curious, as exotic as you thought. Those are only firstimpressions. They are justifiable, of course, in light of your innocence, yournaïveté when you are a newcomer in the matter and you have not yetacquainted yourself with the context of the other era’. The exoticism of thepast 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 stageof our inquiries. It is accorded the status of a temporary illusion, one thatmust be overcome in the progress of the inquiries; else, if it survives to theend, it turns into a liability, a weakness the scholar ought to be ashamed of(persisting naïveté). No wonder contemporary archaeologists reading thetexts of their nineteenth century predecessors are reluctant to acknowledgetheir exoticism.1

My own stance is the opposite: exoticism of the sort I identified is asymptom of historical distance, not naïve ignorance. The late nineteenthcentury claims about the prehistory of Europe were, I accept, perfectlyrational and ordinary (not at all exotic) in the ideological context of theirtime. But no amount of contextualizing, of examining them together withtheir context, will ease their curiousness in the context of today. Further-more, the distance that separates us from our nineteenth century disciplin-ary forefathers and makes their science of prehistory sound curious to ourears is not, I submit, simply a matter of us having liberated our thought from


the ideological obsessions that burdened theirs. By ‘distance’ indeed I amthinking not so much of plain difference as of ‘road traveled’ – the effectof 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 wasalready taking shape in the nineteenth century (it is present in the essays Iexamine) and which today envelops our reality as its second nature andsustains 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 thebearing of past events and circumstances on the present, and circumventthe problem of the ‘irreparable rupture’ I noted above.

‘The fantasy that sustains our practice’: this, then, is in shorthand thenotion 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 oftheir partiality, circularity, incoherence (contradictions) or lack of corre-spondence with their purported referent. This presupposes a great deal, forexample subjects and consciousness, but makes no mention of class orsectional interests, which an ideology is supposed to serve but for which myargument has no place at this stage. To bracket a complex of beliefs asideology is to target those beliefs for critique, to suggest that they are flawedin some ways; an act of symbolic violence, therefore, as Bourdieu had it(Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1994), provoking, exposing the critic to counter-violence (Bourdieu, 1991: 153). But to bracket a complex of beliefs asideology also is to recognize their generative power, accord them specialimportance: such beliefs are foundational in some ways – ‘they sustainpractice’, in the terminology I have adopted. To my mind, that is, ideologycannot be treated strictly as a liability, an obstacle we must overcome beforeproceeding with the business of true knowledge, a mere negativity. It shouldequally be thought of as a positive force, as the element (the ‘dream’,‘fantasy’, or ‘vision’) that empowers practice, the constitutive condition ofpractice.

A more perplexed issue that bears on my argument is whether agentsever become aware of the fact that they are ‘in ideology’ and adopt therebya 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 crucialextent on whether one thinks about ideology in a ‘representational’ or in a‘performative’ idiom. Most of the time discussions adhere to the ‘represen-tational’ idiom: ideology is taken to be a dimension, a problem indeed, ofour representations of social reality – descriptions, knowledge claims, deep-seated beliefs, etc. And so, ‘false consciousness’, ‘misrecognition’, ‘distortion’,


‘self-deception’ and the like are not simply notions we associate with thework 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 longas we stay with the representational idiom, the issue, whether or not agentsare ever capable of putting down their ideological spectacles, seems to meintractable (as does the related issue, whether agents truly believe in theideology they preach). I abide by the representational idiom for the longestpart of this article. When I say, for instance, that the nineteenth centuryessays ‘strike us as ideologemes’ (see above), quite clearly I am thinking ofthe essays as representations – and I do not usually worry whether theirauthors were themselves deceived by, or had misgivings about, what theywrote; I take their claims at face value.

In the last part of the article, however, I try to abandon the representa-tional idiom. Inspired by Slavoj Žižek (1989, 2002 [1991]), I adopt the stancethat the work of ideology manifests itself not as a divergence betweenreality and our representations of it, in our systematic misrecognition of theworkings of the social universe, but in our performance, in the very unfold-ing of our action: we perform upon our world as if that world were madein a certain way, even though it does not escape us (we realize upon everyreflection) that the world is not made in that way. It is our doing, not ourthinking, which submits to, organizes itself in response to a fantasy. Or –and here I am only slightly paraphrasing Žižek (1989: 32; for variations, seeŽižek, 2002: 241–5) – we know that, in our practice, we are guided by anillusion, but still, we keep on practicing. It follows from this that, were weto step outside that illusion (were we, so to speak, to let go of the ideo-logical veil that disguises and blurs the true fabric of reality), the effectwould not be to see reality ‘as it really is’; rather, practice – the whole ofour practice – would become disoriented and would call its right to existinto question. Only by overlooking the fantastic nature of the reality uponwhich 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 doingit’, 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 thatMarx’s phrase no longer applies to the world today: we live, in a sense, ina ‘post-ideological’ era, in which the ideological text is not meant to betaken seriously, not even by its authors, and people are not fooled intobelieving ideologemes (Žižek, 1989: 28–33). Does this mean that people(scholars included) were more naïve, more prone to ideological deceptionin the nineteenth century, in Marx’s time? Perhaps – in a complex way:Žižek’s justification for the inversion foregrounds subjectivity, or at leastconsciousness, and invites reflection on the likelihood that these haveundergone a reconfiguration since the nineteenth century. Where scholarsare concerned, such reconfiguration may be related to the process of


disciplinization, the development of the particular form of discipline wepractice today in scholarly fields such as prehistoric archaeology. I willargue, in fact, in the end not only that this is the case, but also that disci-plinization and the cultivation of the ideological fantasy that sustains ourpractice 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 argu-ments and knowledge claims with examples from two works, ‘Le mirageoriental’ by Salomon Reinach (1893) and ‘The “Eastern Question” inAnthropology’ by Arthur Evans (1896). These essays are exceptionally richin claims and arguments that I find exotic, and that is the chief reason formy choice. It should be clear all along that my subject is not the personal-ities of Reinach and Evans (and I attempt no comparisons between themor their essays), but rather impersonal agencies, the ideas, fantasies, figures,fears, etc., active in their minds. These ideas were widely shared, as is plainfrom the essays themselves, where many other scholarly voices beside thoseof Reinach and Evans are heard. I attend to those voices as well, and onoccasion I note yet others, when they resonate with the arguments andclaims I examine.

‘Le mirage oriental’ (MO) appeared as a two-part article in L’Anthro-pologie 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 theMusée 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-halfthe length of Reinach’s essay. It was delivered as the President’s address atthe Anthropology Section of the British Association for the Advancementof Science in its 1896 meeting. Knossos and the ‘Palace of Minos’, you willremember, lay still in the future, but Evans had already visited Crete(Brown, 1993: 37–74) and had been preoccupied with the study of its picto-graphic and linear scripts (Evans, 1894, 1897).

Both essays acquired significant reputation and were widely cited. Inretrospect they were also credited with having played a decisive role inreshaping fundamental premises about the prehistoric past of Europe(Myres, 1933: 283–4). Their subject matter was identical. It was the issue ofEuropean prehistoric origins, or more precisely, the legacy of Europe’sprehistoric debt to Asia. The present, the 1890s, was a turning point, a timeof radical break with the past – that is how both Reinach and Evanspresented the matter to their colleagues: there had been a time, a long period


lasting ‘till within quite recent years’, when ‘the glamour of the Orientpervaded all inquiries as to the genesis of European civilisation’ (EQ: 909).4

From knowledge of agriculture to mythology, from monumental architec-ture and bronze metallurgy to the superior Indo-European languages andthe art of writing, the foundations of Europe were thought to be the workof colonists and intermediaries whose origin or homeland was Asia. Butdiscoveries made in recent years showed that such views were ill-founded.Scholarly opinion was at last swinging. The moment had come for Europe’sprehistoric 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 theperiod between 1880 and 1890: ‘c’est alors . . . que s’est dessinée, timidementd’abord, puis avec une assurance de mieux en mieux justifiée par les faits, lareaction contre le “mirage oriental”, la revendication des droits de l’Europecontre les prétentions de l’Asie’ (MO: 3); a ‘reaction’, therefore, justified by‘facts’. Evans also spoke of ‘a natural reaction’, brought about by ‘morerecent investigations’. As a result, ‘[t]he primitive “Aryan” can be no longerinvoked as a kind of patriarchal missionary of Central Asian culture’ (EQ:909); furthermore: ‘The days are past when it could be seriously maintainedthat the Phœnician merchant landed on the coast of Cornwall, or built thedolmens of the North and West’. And, commenting on Reinach’s essay ofthree years earlier, Evans noted a degree of exaggeration, but he alsoremarked: ‘For many ancient prejudices as to the early relations of East andWest [this essay] is the trumpet sound before the walls of Jericho’ (EQ: 910).5

‘Recent investigations’ and ‘facts’, then, as opposed to ‘ancient preju-dices’ and a ‘mirage’, not simply ‘Europe’ pushing ‘Asia’ off the cradle ofcivilization. The present indeed was different from the past – so much sothat the established views now appeared to be ‘prejugés . . . d’un autre âge’(MO: 28).6 They had been sustained, Evans indicated, by, among otherthings, ‘the Biblical training of the northern nations’ and ‘the abiding forceof the classical tradition’ (EQ: 909). There was a paradox, however, for thepast appeared to linger on, to extend to the moment of writing and evenbeyond: ‘we must still remember that the “Sick Man” is not dead’, Evansobserved 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 notyet understanding, not obeying their call; or, as if the present had come butscholars had not yet noticed, did not yet believe in its coming. And so, thisparadox of a ‘different’ present that is not yet fully present (a ‘presentbefore the present’, as it were, a pre-figuration of the present) returns us tothe issue of consciousness and its limits. The key dimensions of the paradoxwere indeed hidden from Reinach and Evans in the 1890s: they clearlythought of themselves as being beyond the paradox (on the side of ‘facts’);in reality, they epitomized it.7


But the very last assertion needs to be methodically demonstrated. I shallturn, therefore, to examples of what I have in mind by ‘exoticism’, first inReinach’s, then in Evans’ essay. In the example that follows, the argumentconcerns the origin of the sign of the swastika, but it is embedded in a largerissue, the origins of bronze metallurgy. Reinach argued against, amongmany others, the claims of Gabriel de Mortillet (senior to Reinach by ageneration) that the cradle of prehistoric metallurgy was the Far East. Hereis Mortillet (from 1883) on the matter, as quoted by Reinach (MO: 25):

D’où nous est arrivée la civilisation du bronze? Question importante que jecrois avoir résolue. Le bronze nous est venu de l’Extrême-Orient. J’établis cefait de deux manières: par l’examen des régions stannifères et par lesrapports que certains objets et certains emblêmes de l’âge du bronze ontavec des objets et des emblêmes analogues de l’Inde et de la Chine.

One of these ‘emblêmes analogues’ was, for Mortillet, the swastika. Heconsidered it to be an essentially oriental religious symbol, which spreadfrom India to the rest of the world and assumed in the process the form ofthe ordinary cross in all its variations. Its appearance in prehistoric Europeconfirmed not only that the civilization of bronze came from India but alsothat the emblem of Christianity was ultimately derived from the ancient reli-gions of India (MO: 26). Against Mortillet’s ‘thèse indienne’, Reinach citedthe facts: the oldest known swastikas are those from the second city of Troyand they date to the twentieth century BC, if not earlier. The sign is founda 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, theLevant and Assyria. Moreover, its presence in India is late, dating to theChristian 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’îledes Balkans, en Thrace et non en Inde, que l’étude seule de la géographiede 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 thelarger issue of metallurgy, he speculated, after several more pages of intensediscussion, that the age of metals in Europe began about 4000 BC. In otherwords, the first metallurgy of Europe ought to be contemporary with theearliest bronzes of Asia and Egypt (MO: 34).

Before commenting on this, let me summarize two more examples. Thefirst of these concerns prehistoric vaulted tombs of the Mycenaean type.Volume II of Eduard Meyer’s Geschichte des Alterthums was published in1893, just in time for Reinach to read it and raise important objections.Meyer had interpreted the presence of Mycenaean pottery in Sicily as asign of Phoenician maritime enterprise. He also observed that tombs of theMycenaean type existed not only in Greece but also in Sicily, Etruria andPortugal, and that even the great vaulted tombs of Sardinia and the BalearicIslands were reminiscent of the Mycenaean ones. He wondered, therefore,


whether the similarities seen in monuments so widely dispersed were dueto parallel (independent) developments or to contacts. If the latter is thecase, he concluded, the intermediaries could not be but the Phoenicians. Inresponse, Reinach objected that this was precisely the question and had tobe demonstrated rather than be affirmed as an inescapable conclusion(MO: 52). Reinach then proceeded to identify a blind spot in Meyer’svision: comparable vaulted tombs were also known from Pantikapaion inthe Black Sea, where, however, they dated no earlier than 450 BC. Now,Pantikapaion was a colony of Miletus, founded around 750 BC, and theMilesians of that time could not have brought this type of tomb to the BlackSea for, clearly, they did not have it. Should, therefore, one think again ofthe 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 laclef 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 dela mer Noire et y laissa des types qui, grâce à un isolement relatif, purent s’ydévelopper et s’y perpétuer plus longtemps qu’ailleurs. (MO: 52–3; for ‘lemot 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 Occi-dental – that is, European, as opposed to Asiatic – origin, and that ‘lesÉtrusques, les Mycéniens et les Asiatiques non sémitiques forment ungroupe; 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 wordsthat meant the ‘unité européenne primitive . . . de l’époque de la pierrepolie et du cuivre’ (MO: 55). The argument began with a discussion of theheraldic composition on top of the Lion Gate of Mycenae. This was claimedto be European and was also made the ancestor of comparable composi-tions in Asia Minor and further east. Heraldic scenes were European, notOriental, as some people still believe, Reinach asserted: the earliest knownexamples belonged to the arts of the Mycenaeans and the Hittites, and bothof these ought to be considered European. Central European art hadalready been heraldic in the La Tène period, and it remained heraldicthrough the Roman conquest and up to the end of the Middle Ages. As forthe heraldic motifs of Assyrian art, those the Greeks took from the Orientin the eighth century BC, Reinach was convinced that they too ‘dérivent,en dernière analyse, d’influences européennes qui s’étaient exercées à uneépoque 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


Bologna, with its heraldically arranged animals around a column, did notprove that the Phoenicians had penetrated the interior of Italy. Nor did thespirals and figurative scenes carved on a few stelae from the same city andfrom Pesaro, so strikingly Mycenaean in character, imply – as again Undsethad argued a decade earlier – Phoenician interventions (MO: 49–50). Afterall, Undset knew that comparable scenes existed in the rock art of Scandi-navia, and had also noticed that spirals and other decoration were commonto objects from Mycenae, the Bronze Age civilization of Hungary, and thecivilization of the north: ‘un parallélisme infiniment curieux’, which thePhoenicians could not be called upon to explain (MO: 50–1). There wereother curious parallels too: affinities obtained between the megalithicmonuments of western Europe and the Cyclopean constructions of Greece;crude representations of female figurines engraved on megaliths and on thewalls of French funerary caves had exact equivalents in the pottery of Troyand Cyprus, and, in a later period, also occurred in Bavaria, Prussia, Galiciaand Russia; horseshoe motifs appeared not only on Mycenaean pottery butalso on the megaliths of Brittany and Ireland; the same type of bronzedagger was found in Cyprus,Troy, southern Italy,Albania, Hungary, Switzer-land and the Gaul; a bronze axe in Hungarian style had been discovered inDodona in western Greece, while a Danubian type sword came fromMycenae (MO: 54–5, 61); and several other analogies in artefacts came fromall across Europe.

Reinach credited other scholars, Quatrefages and Montelius amongthem, for having already noted most of those analogies. What was,however, the secret of the puzzle? Against the chance of Phoenician inter-mediaries, Reinach repeatedly invoked the absence of truly Orientalobjects, such as scarabs, cylinder seals or hieroglyphic inscriptions, fromEuropean sites. On the other hand, several facts – for instance, the earlierage of the western megalithic monuments vis-à-vis their eastern counter-parts – accorded well with the hypothesis of a ‘courant pélasgique occi-dental’ (MO: 57–8). The Pelasgians, that is, must have been an aboriginalEuropean people. Some of them stayed in Italy, others pushed toward AsiaMinor. ‘Ces derniers se civilisèrent, s’orientalisèrent, et, un beau jour,revinrent s’établir en Ombrie au milieu de leurs frères arriérés, aveclesquels ils se sentaient encore cependant des affinités d’origine’ (MO: 61).And so, in its flow and counter-flow, the ‘courant pélasgique’ gave us theHittites (i.e. those Pelasgians who went farther, to Asia Minor) as well asthe Etruscans and kindred western Mediterraneans (i.e. those whoreturned hither to Italy). In other words, what explained the analogies inartefacts from across the Mediterranean was the ‘communauté primitived’une civilisation’ (MO: 53). From here, and in view of the existence ofcomparable artefacts from further north, it was a short step to suggestingthat this civilization was connected with those of Hungary and northernEurope, and claiming the ‘unité européenne primitive . . . de l’époque dela pierre polie et du cuivre’ (see above).8


Where exactly is the exoticism in these (fragments of) arguments? Boththe arguments presented by Reinach as objectionable, those of Mortillet,Meyer and Undset, as well as his own counter-arguments are intertwinedwith evidence: specific archaeological facts are invoked in their support. YetReinach and the other nineteenth century scholars do not do with thearchaeological facts at their disposal what we, 100 or so years later, woulddo with those same facts. Their arguments take off in unexpected (for us)directions, their logic bewilders us, and the claims emerging often soundfantastic in our ears – ‘fantastic’ in the sense that their substance is over-whelming, far richer than the evidence in hand warrants. True, comparablyunwarranted claims have never disappeared from European prehistory;when they arise today, however, they are easily recognized as such bycomparison with firmer, better grounded positions that constitute the coreof the modern discipline.

On a closer look, it becomes clear that the claims in Reinach are fantas-tic in several contiguous senses at once. First, the immense geographical andtemporal spread of the facts mobilized gives to the claims the quality of thewondrous: no resemblance between two objects, however slight, and nomatter 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 mean-ingful 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 thatthey might be true: it is an odd chance that there would have been Myce-naean ancestors around Pantikapaion in the Black Sea who undertook theconstruction of vaulted tombs and who thereby initiated a tradition that laydormant until 1000 years later. Equally improbable is the hypothesisaccording to which the Pelasgians of the legend migrated all across theMediterranean, first east, then back west to where they started. The samealso holds for the claim that the Mycenaean civilization ‘came from thenorth’ (Reinach here had endorsed the thesis of his coeval ChristosTsountas, whose arguments on the northern origin of the Mycenaeans hadjust appeared; see MO: 65–6 and Tsountas, 1891: 41–3). Or rather, to assentto 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 oftenincorporate notions with an empirical referent that is fused with a fictionalelement. Such is the notion of a civilization (be it Mycenaean, Pelasgian orother) as transcendent and, at the same time, inalienable substance, carriedin the human body. Such also is the notion of the swastika-having-a-‘centrede diffusion’, a place where (or, better, a people by whom) it was inventedand from where it spread to the rest of the world. Such too are the notionsof ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’, each of them underpinned by an enigmatic, ever-elusive essence:


La civilisation mycénienne . . . est entièrement européenne d’origine; elles’est seulement orientalisé, à la surface, au contact des civilisations de laSyrie et de l’Égypte. (MO: 40) . . . Une civilisation née en Asie, à proximitéde la Babylonie et de l’Égypte, ne doit pas se présenter avec des charactèresde 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 areineffaceable, destined to accompany the one or the other civilization ineternity. They remain indeed far more distinct in the bodies of those civil-izations than any subsequent modifications brought about through contact;the latter stay ‘à la surface’, as also was the case, according to Reinach, ofthe 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 celled’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 routesconvergentes . . . Ce sont là des erreurs puériles. La marche d’une civilisationressemble bien plutôt à celle de la mer envahissant une plage au moment duflux: elle se produit par ondes successives, avec va-et-vient continuel quidonne naissance à d’innombrables courants.

Here poetic imagination appears in the guise of metaphors that purport toreveal reality, to illuminate its ‘inner workings’, as it were, and no soonerthey do this than they evoke (inescapably) illusion, ‘erreurs puériles’.

Fifth, contiguous with the above is a stronger sense in which the latenineteenth century arguments are fantasies. The intensity of many of thearguments should suggest indeed that what is at stake does not pertain toa remote, prehistoric and – because of its remoteness – now idle past, to apast that no longer matters, but pertains instead to the here-and-now, to thesubject speaking today. Witness:

les figurines sardes ne sont, quoi que l’on ait dit, ni phéniciennes niégyptiennes; en un mot, les analogies entre Shardana et Mycéniens sont decelles qu’explique la communauté primitive d’une civilisation et quiexcluent, bien plutôt que ne l’autorisent, l’hypothèse de relationscommerciales . . . L’unité foncière de civilisation des peuples de laMéditerrannée, au xve siècle et plus tôt encore, ne peut s’expliquer par uneinfluence quelconque de l’Orient, parce que cette civilisation n’est nibabylonienne, ni égyptienne, ni syrienne. Elle s’explique simplement parceque ces peuples étaient apparentés, qu’ils avaient hérité d’une civilisationprimitive commune, celle que nous connaissons surtout, en Orient, par les


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

The intensity of these lines – the effect of long sentences with repeatedconcatenations of emphatically negative and positive clauses – suggests thattheir substance concerns the identity of the present, rather than the identityof prehistoric figurines and their long-dead makers. Here is anotherexample indicating that the subject is prepared to occupy precarious posi-tions in defending a distant past, which, logically, should be a dispassionateaffair. Schliemann’s discoveries at Mycenae had been met with suspicion inthe 1870s, and opinion wavered for years over the issue of Mycenae’schronology and ‘origin’ (cultural affiliation). Several scholars hadcontended that the ‘shaft graves’ and their contents could not be pre-historic (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 Gothichands (Gardner, 1880), and other scholars thought of them as medieval,Celtic or even Byzantine. Such issues had been largely settled in favor of aprehistoric date by the early 1880s. They did not, therefore, preoccupyReinach in 1893, except in a strange way: Stephani was right in a sense, hesuggested, for, to speak of the Mycenaean treasures as Celtic and evenByzantine was to recognize that their art was connected to that of centralEurope, ‘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 thepresent.

The subject, then, appears caught heart and soul in the midst of suchfantasies. They are not, that is, fantasies merely in the everyday sense ofscenarios containing imaginary elements or having a dubious correspon-dence with reality, but, more crucially, in the sense of a subject’s dreams andnightmares. A strong psychological relationship obtains between them andthe subject that weaves them.

Comparable in these respects is ‘“The Eastern Question” in Anthropol-ogy’. Evans began with an oblique reference to the radical break modernanthropology had accomplished with its past – ‘Travellers have ceased toseek for the “Terrestrial Paradise”’ – then he went straight to the heart ofthe matter (EQ: 906):

in a broader sense, the area in which lay the cradle of civilised mankind isbecoming generally recognised. The plateaux of Central Asia have recededfrom view. Anthropological researchers may be said to have established thefact 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 trueproduct of the region in which the earliest historic records find itconcentrated . . . The continent in which it rose . . . embraced, together with a


part of anterior Asia, the greater part of Europe, and the whole of NorthernAfrica . . . To this great continent Dr. Brinton, who has so ably illustrated thepredominant part played by it in isolating the white from the African blackand the yellow races of mankind, has proposed to give the useful andappropriate name ‘Eurafrica.’ In ‘Eurafrica,’ in the widest sense, we find thebirthplace of the highest civilisations that the world has yet produced, andthe mother country of its dominant peoples.

‘Eurafrica’ was indeed ‘discovered’ in the 1890s by the Philadelphiamedical-doctor-turned-ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837–1899),or perhaps by Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936), and was still ‘visited’ in the earlydecades of the twentieth century (D’Agostino, 2002: 324–5, 331). But whoremembers ‘Eurafrica’, this ‘great continent’, today? Does not its disappear-ance 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: ‘Theearly “Ægean” culture rises in the midst of a vast province extending fromSwitzerland and Northern Italy through the Danubian basin and the Balkanpeninsula, and continued through a large part of Anatolia, till it finallyreaches Cyprus’ (EQ: 910–11). ‘In the matter of the spiral motive’ – anornament on which Evans dwelt at as great a length as Reinach did on theswastika – ‘Crete may thus be said to be the missing link between prehis-toric Ireland and Scandinavia and the Egypt of the Ancient Empire’ (EQ:915). Meaningful similarities were sought across formidable distances, inthe ‘minutiae of ornament’ from Mondsee and Cyprus, in ‘primitive “idols”of clay, marble, and other materials’ from the Aegean islands, the Alpinepile settlements and the shores of Lake Ladoga, in spiral decoration fromAmorgos and New Grange (EQ: 911–12). Once more too, the defense of aEurope already ‘European’ in prehistoric times led to claims the logic ofwhich bewilders us. For example, in a recent visit to Crete, Evans had founda brief inscription in syllabic script which, he now announced, ‘surpasses ininterest and importance all hitherto known objects of its class’; for, not onlywas the script ‘early’ but it also supplied ‘very close analogies to what maybe supposed to have been the pictorial prototypes of several of the Phoenic-ian letters’. In conclusion: ‘The great step in the history of writing impliedby the evolution of symbols of phonetic value from primitive pictographsis thus shown to have effected itself on European soil’ (EQ: 915).

The fantastic proportions of ‘Europe’ are unmistakable in these claimsand throughout Evans’ text. It is the same with ‘race’. The attentionaccorded to the latter seems in fact to have a libidinal dimension, as I willexplain. According to a recent theory advanced by Sergi, most modernEuropeans descended from an ancient stock of ‘Eurafricans’, whosephysical characteristics were best preserved among the later populations ofthe Mediterranean. It was this ‘Mediterranean Race’, Sergi contended, thathad created the great civilizations of Greece and Rome (for the politics


surrounding the invention of the ‘Mediterranean Race’ and its subsequentfate see D’Agostino, 2002). Evans endorsed the theory of that great ancientstock, 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 conse-quences of this theory: ‘those of us who may happen to combine a Britishorigin with a Mediterranean complexion may derive a certain ancestralpride from remote consanguinity with Pharaoh’ (EQ: 907). Evans thenturned to archaeological evidence that would bear support to Sergi’s theory.In 1892, excavations in the Barma Grande Cave on the Ligurian coast hadbrought to light a number of human burials furnished with flint knives, boneand shell ornaments but no pottery, polished stone implements or domes-ticates. Such burials ought to be pre-Neolithic in age, but this was unac-ceptable at the time.11 Archaeologists, Evans included, were ‘prepossessedby the . . . doctrine that the usage of burial was unknown to Palæolithicman’. By 1896, however, Evans had changed his mind (a point to which Iwill return), and he now focused on ‘fresh data’ and ‘critical observations’that made a Palaeolithic date for those burials appear inevitable. But themain point of his argument lay elsewhere: the Barma Grande burialsprovided ‘evidence of the existence of a late Palæolithic race’ with featureswhich, according to ‘most competent osteological inquirers, reappear in theNeolithic skeletons of the same Ligurian coast, and still remain character-istic of the historical Ligurian type. In other words, the “MediterraneanRace” finds its first record in the West’ (EQ: 908–9). Furthermore:

this evidence of at least partial continuity on the northern shores of theMediterranean suggests speculations of the deepest interest . . . In theextraordinary manifestations of artistic genius to which, at widely remoteperiods, and under the most diverse political conditions, the later populationsof Greece and Italy have given birth, may we not be allowed to trace the re-emergence, as it were, after long underground meanderings, of streamswhose upper waters had seen the daylight of the earlier world? (EQ: 909)

The aquatic metaphor is worthy of comment. For the members of theAnthropology Section in the 1890s, ‘race’ was a versatile notion, sustainedin a network of emotions (the comfort, for instance, of belonging to ‘thecivilized race’, but also the specter of ‘miscegenation’). It had a physicalanthropological referent, of course (cranial type, skin complexion, haircolor, 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 enig-matic, phantom-like core. And so, the notion would routinely expand andencompass the entire moral and intellectual make-up of an individual orcollectivity, including their potential for cultural achievement. That was thecase even among physical anthropologists or doctors like Virchow, forwhom ‘race’ remained to the end a slippery subject – mostly a matter of


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 andre-emerge ‘after long underground meanderings’ and still be recognizableas the selfsame race. Besides, the metaphor of the stream resonated withthe idea of blood and its ‘flow’ from one generation to the next; applied toan ancestral ‘white race’, it also suggested that that race had the positivequalities 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 aboutthe imagery of the meandering underground streams – arbitrary in thesense of being independent of the logic that makes such streams an aptmetaphor for late nineteenth century ‘race’: the imagery itself, its very form,is its ‘meaning’, and it is a pleasurable imagery. You will remember thatReinach also resorted to aquatic metaphors in explaining ‘la marche d’unecivilisation’. Reinach’s metaphors were evocative of sexual pleasure: ‘la merenvahissant une plage / moment du flux / ondes successives / va-et-vientcontinuel / innombrables courants’. Sexual resonances are less audible in‘streams’ and their ‘long underground meanderings’; still, I suggest, thenaturalistic metaphor and the imagery it evoked afforded an equally plea-surable illusion.

■ TIME EFFECTS

Nineteenth century Orientalism (protracted well into the twentiethcentury) has been much more than a field of knowledge with a determinateobject: it shaped experiences and tastes, habits of thought and dispositions;it formed subjects, it was a practice of self-definition that turned on drama-tization of distance from the alien. Europe became ‘European’ by ‘Orien-talizing’ the Near East, by turning differences from the latter intoDifference, by becoming what the Near East was not – such has been thegoing 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’, areexemplary illustrations of that practice. Witness the theme that dominatedthe last several pages of Evans’ essay:

Mycenæan culture was permeated by Oriental elements, but never subduedby them . . . We see the difference if we compare [the Aegean with] thecivilisation of the Hittites of Anatolia and Northern Syria . . . The nativeelements were there cramped and trammelled from the beginning by theOriental contact. No real life and freedom of expression was ever reached;


the art is stiff, conventional, becoming more and more Asiatic, till finallycrushed 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 itshandiwork there breathes the European spirit of individuality and freedom.Professor Petrie’s discoveries at Tell-el-Amarna show the contact of thisÆgean 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 ‘Roomof the Chariot Tablets’ in Knossos, he condensed this Orientalist fantasy toa matter-of-fact statement. ‘The tablets . . .’, he wrote, ‘present some distantanalogy to the Babylonian tablets, and the inscription is divided by hori-zontal lines. The letters themselves, however, are of a free, upright Europeancharacter’ (Evans, 1900: 92). The equivalent Orientalist ‘fantasy at itspurest’ in Reinach is the scenario by which he sought to exorcise the specterof the Phoenicians in Europe, his antidote to the Phoenician fantasy: ‘lecourant pélasgique occidental’, ‘l’unité foncière’ and ‘la communauté prim-itive’ of Europe’s prehistoric peoples.

How, then, does it happen that what was archaeological reality forReinach, Evans and their contemporaries a century or so ago is ‘fantasy atit purest’ for us in the present? In fact, a fantasy (mis)taken for reality isprecisely what we associate with the work of ideology; and throughout myessay I have acknowledged that the late nineteenth century texts aboundin phantoms, figments, specters, mirages, dreams or nightmares – all of whichbelong to the realm of ideology. In this sense, then, the nineteenth centuryarchaeological texts are ideologemes. The question thus is, how does ithappen that what the nineteenth century archaeologists took as true, solidarguments and claims founded on archaeological evidence, turn out in thepresent to be blatant ideologemes?

In a crucial sense, this is a historical question: the degree to which we findthe nineteenth century texts alien to the modern disciplinary ethos – ‘exotic’,as I indicated in the beginning – the ease with which we recognize them asideologemes, constitute a measure of the historical distance that separatesus from them. The significance of seeing the question this way resides in theirony it foregrounds: Reinach, Evans, Mortillet and the others stand in directline of intellectual ascent from us. We are their disciplinary progeny, and yetwe appear to be a substantially different breed of scholars, a different sortof subjects indeed, in so far as our scholarly selves are concerned.

I am tempted to think that we are different precisely because theirfantasy ‘worked’. It became, that is, our fantasy as well. ‘The Phoenicians’were, in a sense, exorcised; we did become ‘European’. The merit of such ananswer would be that it acknowledges the presence of Reinach, Evans and


the other late nineteenth century scholars in our past. It predisposes us tothink of ourselves as disciplined subjects that have become disciplined asan effect of the presence in our past of those scholars and their fantasies. Itrequires that we account for difference, not (as Orientalist scholarship hadit) in essentialist terms, but as the effect of continuity, of repetition throughtime – a transformation brought about by the sheer increase of time depthof our practice. Let me explain.

First of all, I am using ‘the Phoenicians’ and ‘Europe’ as metonyms, thestrength (metonymic value) of which derives from Reinach’s and Evans’essays. As I indicated earlier, both Reinach and Evans placed the writingof their essays in a turning point in time. Past scholarship, they claimed, hadaccorded the Orient the place of pride in the matter of civilization and hadmade the Phoenicians its missionaries. That view, however, had been entan-gled in a web of ancient prejudices. The present, on the other hand, grantedEurope the leading part in the origins of civilization; moreover, it did so onthe basis of facts. A metonymy was thereby established: the Orient and thePhoenicians became associated with prejudice and with the past of archae-ological scholarship, while Europe became associated with evidence,rational thought, and the present.

As I also indicated, both Reinach and Evans defended their argumentsby frequent appeals to archaeological evidence (as had Mortillet, Undsetand 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 ishow, they pretended, prehistoric archaeology worked. This is most clear incases where they showed themselves capable of changing their views as newevidence became available, as Evans did on the date of the Barma GrandeCave burials (for Reinach, see MO: 29). Both Reinach and Evans, in otherwords, acted as if the detritus of prehistoric life could bear the weight oftoday’s questions. And that, I suggest, is the fantasy we inherited from themand which became the ideology that sustains our practice today: we knowvery well that belief does not follow evidence (not throughout, that is), andyet in our everyday practice we act as if it did. We know very well that thedetritus of prehistoric life cannot bear the full weight of our questions, thatour persuasions about the prehistoric past are entwined with the thread ofarbitrariness, yet in practice we pretend that they are derived throughoutby 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 evidentialproofs before they allow themselves to believe, one that ‘refuses to know’where evidence is absent. Reinach, Evans and their nineteenth centurycolleagues whom they criticized were not this disciplined kind of subjectyet. They lived, you remember, in a ‘present before the present’. Theyinvoked the authority of evidence with fervor, yet their obedience to it was


by no means unconditional, ‘blind’. Perhaps they were fascinated with themere existence of facts in prehistoric archaeology, that is, the possibility topoint to something as a fact, especially if it contradicted established wisdom.Their allegiance to evidence did not, however, function as an inhibition, didnot prevent them from turning to the self as arbiter of the most importantmatters – in effect, from ‘knowing’ even in the absence of evidence. ‘Thefacts “know”; still, the scholar inside me knows better!’ – that seems to havebeen their disposition.

In the succeeding century, prehistoric archaeology was progressivelyinstituted as a discipline and the prehistorian progressively became disci-plined. This ‘becoming disciplined’, I submit, has entailed as a crucialelement living to the fullest the fantasy already entertained in the nine-teenth century, that the prehistorian’s knowledge rises upon the bedrock ofevidence. The fantasy (‘we have in the present emancipated ourselves fromthe tangle of prejudice, idées reçues’, etc.) was now rehearsed in oneinstance after another and, through repetition, it hardened into a habit;what was still conditional in the late nineteenth century became, with timeunquestionable, a pivotal element of the repertory of the prehistorian’sdispositions. As the effect of the transformation, the facts of prehistorytoday substitute for the prehistorian’s consciousness: we can no longerbelieve when evidential proofs are absent, we can only know as much asthe facts ‘know’ – our obedience to them is ‘blind’. It is from within thisideological fantasy that the knowledge claims and arguments of the pre-disciplined 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 obedi-ence to evidence is not ‘blind’. Our disciplinary literature today abounds inreflections and self-critical insights to the effect that our knowledge claimsabout the prehistoric past are contingent on the present – on history, on thesubject, 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’. Interpret-ation, we have learned to repeat after Hodder (1999: 83), begins ‘at thetrowel’s edge’. Constructivist accounts of facticity (‘strong’ objectivity,standpoint theory, hermeneutical approaches, ‘dialogue’ with the data, andthe like; see Wylie, 2002) make much more sense to us than the premise‘belief follows evidence’. Elsewhere I have also argued in favour of archae-ological 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 actas if such reflections pertained to the discipline in an abstract way, but haveno 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


factuality of every one of our claims to the very last, and we react nervouslyat the suggestion that some of these claims, especially those that lend signifi-cance to our arguments, are held together in a web of idées reçues.

We know, in other words, that our convictions about the prehistoric pastare part of the flow of history, and yet we will defend them as if they hadthe permanency of bedrock. To put the matter one last time in terms ofconsciousness and its beyond: the facts of prehistory are supposed to seizeour consciousness ‘unnoticed’ by it, to penetrate and occupy it ‘in its sleep’,as it were, while consciousness is ‘taking a leave’. The moment we supposeotherwise, that our consciousness actively intervenes, the facts begin to looktainted, and, if so, our practice will appear hollow, an unbearable self-deception; it can no longer command our commitment. We cannot let goof the fantasy without also letting our practice implode.

But it seems to me that, if we are reluctant to let go of the fantasy, thisis not out of fear that we will thus also let go of so good and noble a thingas the pursuit of knowledge of the deepest human past. The real reason, Isuspect, is the very mode of our consciousness as historically shaped by theprocess of Enlightenment (qua disciplinization). The fantasy envelops ourreality as its second nature, I indicated early on; it is an effect of time’sarrow, I suggest here. We cannot reverse time’s arrow, revert to pre-enlightened modes of thinking, re-acquire the consciousness of those whobreathed before the process was set in motion. Privilege or predicament,we cannot erase Enlightenment (discipline) from our unconscious andcease 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 re-flection bears an uncanny resemblance to what ‘being enlightened’ was oncethought 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 idéolo-gie’, organized by Claudine Cohen at the École des Hautes Études en SciencesSociales, Paris, in May 2002. I am indebted to Claudine Cohen, Alison Wylie andMarianne Sommer, participants in the workshop, for encouraging me to carry onwith the original idea. My presence in Paris at the time, where a significant portionof the article was written, was made possible by a temporary appointment at theCNRS. For this I am especially indebted to René Treuil and Pascal Darcque. SallyHumphreys 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 readingtexts from other eras, see Humphreys (2002: esp. 219–24). For yet otherproblems of the historicism I take exception to, see Tosh (2003).


2 For Althusser, one had to be ‘in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am inideology (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 beenirrevocably abrogated.

3 Žižek (1989: 28–49) acknowledges as his inspiration in this matter varioussources, from Pascal’s Meditations to Althusser and from Marx to PeterSloterdijk. 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 issueI outlined in the beginning. My understanding of ‘representational’ vs.‘performative’ idiom comes originally from Pickering (1995: esp. 5–9); see alsoŽižek (1994: 7).

4 I have throughout preserved spelling, punctuation and italics as they appear inthe original publications.

5 Reinach and Evans were longtime friends, but between 1894 and 1897 theirfriendship was encountering difficulties (Duchêne, in press).

6 Reinach and Evans were far from exceptional in experiencing the present, thelate nineteenth century, as a turning point in time; folks in fields very distantfrom 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 practicein the second half of the nineteenth century, and that is testimony to the powerof the (ethnological) evolutionism of the period (Lubbock, 1869).

10 For a contemporary, most explicit essentialist statement on this matter, seePerrot and Chipiez (1894: 6–7).

11 For the conditions of the discovery of the Barma Grande burials, theirsubsequent adventures and their chronology, see Formicola, Pettitt and DelLucchese (2004).

12 I do not intend this paragraph as an account of disciplinization and its effectson the subject. ‘Disciplines shape desires, construct fetishes round whichscholarly work can intensify’, Humphreys (2002: 207) reminds us. Myargument 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 thatarchaeological knowledge is inescapably political, for, if that appears as a mostsevere 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 theunexpected swapping of places between ‘public’ and ‘private’ that gives Kant’smaxim its pointedness. Suffice, then, that we think of the ‘private’ as ‘authorityinteriorized’, ‘embodied’ in practices and institutions.

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MICHAEL FOTIADIS has taught at several universities in the USA andnow teaches in the Department of History and Archaeology, Universityof Ioannina, Greece. A prehistorian by training, he also has a stronginterest and publications in theoretical questions arising from thepractice of archaeology in contemporary and nineteenth–twentiethcentury contexts.[email: [email protected]]

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