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The notion of ‘classical archaeology’ is of relatively recent origins in the vocabulary of the humanities. Its common usage dates to the second half of the nineteenth century, when archaeology, a newly formed university discipline, sought its place within the broader intellectual framework of the sciences of antiquity, the Altertumswissenschaft of German scholarship. For knowledge of antiquity to be scientific, it had to encompass all the creations of human genius. Thus, just as philology had emancipated itself from theology, so was archaeology to free itself from philology in order to constitute, together with the latter and with ancient history, the third pillar of Altertumswissenschaft. This disciplinary triangle effectively constitutes the foundations of the modern conception of the classical past—that is, the past of the Greco-Roman world.
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1. The Definition Of Classical Archaeology
Such a definition of classicism is quite evidently arbitrary. It rests on a very specific and thoroughly European experience of antiquity, in which Greco-Roman literature and its concepts are overwhelmingly privileged. In specifying the chronological and geographical boundaries of the classical world, nineteenth century historians and archaeologists have confirmed a spatio–temporal distinction already initiated during antiquity, and notably in the Alexandrian golden age of the third and second centuries BC. Following this definition, the classical world effectively begins with the dispersal of the Greeks in the Mediterranean during the eighth century BC, and ends with the fall of the occidental Roman empire in 476 AD. In terms of its geographical extension, the classical world reaches as far as the farthest expansion of the Roman empire, at the end of the first century AD.
As can be seen, this mode of historical representation clearly focuses on the Mediterranean as the zone of contact between Europe, Africa and Asia. But where does this Mediterranean space actually ends? Is it somewhere in the vast European plains? On the shores of the Black Sea? At the foot of the mountain ranges bordering Anatolia or Africa? According to their readings of both the classical sources and the surrounding landscapes, experts have drawn different boundaries to the classical world. Given this diversity of opinions, German archaeologists have proposed the notion of Randkulturen to designate all those civilizations known to have been in contact with the classical world without fully merging with it: Scythians, Parthians, Germans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and many others.
Chronology is not much better established. When the Archaic epoch was first identified, archaeologists knew nothing of the Minoan world and the palace civilizations of Greek antiquity, civilizations which later on would end being called preclassical. At the other end of the scale, the date commonly chosen to signal the conclusion of Greco-Roman history—the fall of the occidental Roman empire in 476 AD— proves to be equally problematic: it takes no account of the persistence of the oriental Roman empire until the fall of Constantinopolis in 1453.
2. The History Of Classical Archaeology
With its uncertain chronological and geographical boundaries (a problem admittedly shared with protohistory), classical archaeology stands somewhat apart from other, more global, strands of archaeology. It is both the oldest among these archaeologies, and the one most influenced by tradition: the ancient Greek word archaiologia retains within it all its meaning as a discourse on antiquity. It was, after all, in fifth century Greece that the historical genre first appeared, the reasoned discourse on the past to which the Greeks gave the name of historia (enquiry). And since Varron in the first century BC, the title of antiquary has been given to the man who seeks to interpret and classify ancient objects or monuments. In Greece as well as Rome, these antiquaries contributed to elucidate the past; they assembled series of objects and monuments, collected inscriptions, and then put them in order and sought to understand them.
In this respect, the collapse of the Occidental Roman Empire was not without consequence, for with it a whole social class of knowledge producers and users came to disappear. Secular men of letters were gradually replaced by clerics, whose function was to educate the masses and the elite in the Christian faith. To be sure, there were among these clerics some antiquarians who undertook to collect and investigate the monuments of antiquity. But one has to wait until the end of the Middle Ages to find an antiquarian movement comparable to that of Greco-Roman times.
It was in Renaissance Italy that a new passion for antiquity emanated which was also a means for reinventing the contemporary world. Collections of Greek and Roman manuscripts arose passions, ancient coins were coveted, monuments begun to be excavated for the sculptures and architectural remains they may have contained. The past that was sought after and revived was that of Greece and Rome, if only because a reference to this world was seen as a means to do away with a present seen as barbarous, illiterate and indeed ‘gothic.’
For Renaissance scholars, antiquity was quintessentially Greco-Roman: the literary works, sculptures and architecture of these periods were seen as unsurpassable productions, to be studied and emulated by the best contemporary artists. This classical focus dominated scholarly and artistic production until the end of the eighteenth century, and it explains that ‘barbarian’ antiquities received only marginal interest. The Renaissance has thus contributed to conflating the knowledge of the past with the investigation and understanding of the Greco-Roman heritage—the part of universal culture believed to be ‘classic’ by virtue of being the veritable pedestal of humanist scholarship. There were some scholars who manifested considerable interest for the oriental world, Egypt or even Mesopotamia, and others, particularly in Scandinavia, Britain and Germany, who paid attention to local antiquities, but the model for the organization of knowledge derived directly from the prestigious Greco-Roman tradition.
Renaissance scholars and their Enlightenment successors assembled together coins, inscriptions, sculptures, and sometimes even ceramics or other objects of daily life. These collections were displayed in ‘cabinets of curiosity’ and eventually came to adorn the first public museums, such as the Venetian collections and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (from 1683). However, since no careful observations were made regarding the place of discovery and the mode of manufacture of these collected works and monuments, it was only with the greatest difficulty that scholars were able to classify them in terms of their dates and provenance. In fact, it was only the antiquarians of the eighteenth century who were first able to lay the grounds of a critical analysis of archaeological monuments.
These advances occurred at different paces, and they were due both to discoveries in the field and to new attitudes towards finds and their study. In this respect, the fortuitous discovery of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum at the beginning of the eighteenth century did much to awaken the interest of the elite in the Greco-Roman world. What was being unearthed there by the excavating teams of the King of Naples were no longer usual ruins, but entire cities, covered by volcanic eruptions and thus miraculously preserved from the ravages of destruction. Closely guarded by the Neapolitan government, the exploration of Pompeii gave rise to an unprecedented craze for the painting, architecture and implements of daily life of the time. Given the context of their discoveries, these items could also for the first time be attributed a secure chronological position. Naples thus played the role of an antiquarian capital, and gradually came to compete with Rome in the esteem of travelers and connoisseurs.
Without interpretation, however, discovery is nothing. In the second part of the eighteenth century, two men revolutionized the understanding of antiquity. The first of these was Johannes Winckelmann (1717– 68), a German scholar from a small Prussian town who achieved tremendous influence with his work. His History of Art in Antiquity, published in Leipzig in 1764, offered to amateurs of Greco-Roman art the first ever systematic and chronological treatise on the subject. Aided by a thorough familiarity with textual sources, Winckelmann depicted and commented on antique objects scattered throughout European collections. Drawing on his personal study of the most important Roman collections, he could propose to his readers a remarkable history of plastic forms in antiquity. The style of this work, the quality of its descriptions, and the philosophical spirit which animated it, all explain its unprecedented success: with it, the occident could at last discover the sources of Renaissance art in the classical world. Winckelmann, otherwise an enemy of the aristocracy and determined critic of the ancient regime, received his highest acclaim from the courts of kings and princes, among those who sought antiquity for the aesthetic pleasure it procured them.
One of the most notable aristocrats in the court of France, the Comte de Caylus (1692–1765), was instrumental in drawing the attention of his contemporaries to another aspect of the study of the past. For Caylus, what justified the quest for antiquity is not the aesthetic, but the technical achievements of the past. He therefore developed an approach to the study of past techniques in which can be recognized our current concerns with artifact morphology and archaeometry. Each in his way, Winckelmann for the appreciation of art and Caylus for the understanding of techniques, laid down the bases for a history of the oeuvres of antiquity, a research programme developed and followed throughout the nineteenth century.
3. The Rules Of Classical Archaeology
The exploration of antiquity thus gradually transformed itself into a new discipline of archaeology. Under this framework, nineteenth century scientists elaborated and imposed new rules for the extraction, analysis and publication of evidence from the past. Archaeology distanced itself from collections and from the social milieu of collecting, and advocated instead the necessity of observing finds in the field, and of recognizing them as coherent wholes open to rigorous analysis. While the antiquarian channeled his passion for the past to the collection of objects, the archaeologist aimed to valorise these objects and monuments in the context of their discovery. This approach found its most systematic expression in Germany with the research programme of E. Gerhard (1795–1867), who effectively fought for an autonomous archaeology, free from collectors, philologists and artists. Archaeologists must take the place of connoisseurs with their various intermediaries, and themselves seek for the evidence on the ground.
They must also distance themselves from philologists, and challenge the primacy of written over nonwritten sources. Finally, they must take leave of aesthetic considerations, and study ancient productions in all their material and technical dimensions. Building on advances in historical studies, this positivist program also drew on developments in geology and natural history to forge for itself its specific scientific instruments.
Three complementary pillars came then to form then backbone of archaeology. One, stratigraphy, consists of observing the conditions of deposition of objects and monuments in the ground. The second, typology, seeks to identity in the objects themselves some evidence regarding the time and place of their manufacture. The third, technology, deals with the modes of production, the raw materials, the procedures of fabrication. It was in fact only by the end of the nineteenth century, when these three strands were mastered and marshaled together, that archaeology became a fully-fledged discipline able to undertake the reliable and methodical investigation of the past. The body of doctrines and institutions which accompanied this development contributed to giving archaeology, and specifically to classical archaeology, its distinctive identity. In this respect E. Gerhard created a novel kind of institution which prefigures in many ways those of today: the Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica, established in 1829 in Rome through the activities of aristocrats and scholars from across Europe, took it as its aim to collect, excavate and publish as thoroughly as possible all the antiquities of the Mediterranean world.
By drawing archaeologists to the field, by elaborating a modern strategy of publication based on detailed sections and descriptions, the Instituto virtually launched the new discipline that was embodied in this dedicated research institution located in Rome, one of the capitals of the classical world.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the exploration of the Greco-Roman world had been a matter of individual enterprise with occasional royal support. From then on, archaeology would become what the discoverer of Greek Asia Minor T. Wiegand (1864–1936) has called a Grosswissenschaft, a statesponsored science. The leading European powers established then various institutes or schools in Rome and Athens, and these encouraged archaeological expeditions throughout the main urban sites of the Mediterranean. The enormous success encountered by the private initiatives of the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90) at Mycenae and Troy fueled a veritable scramble for new excavating territories among the countries of Europe and even America. This competition contributed notably to the growth of collections in the main European and American museums. The rise of such museums as the British Museum, the Louvre, the Berlin museums and even the Metropolitan Museum in New York, all catering for an ever-increasing public, corresponded with the ascendancy of a classical archaeology closely entwined with the economic developments of capitalism and colonialism. The conquest of the past was effectively an instrument of foreign policy in the hands of all main powers, beginning with the core area of the Greco-Roman world and reaching towards the Orient, Africa, and the globe as whole.
Archaeological schools, museums and, of course, universities were all part of this expansion, from which they have benefited. Whereas in the mid nineteenth century only Germany was endowed with a network of university Chairs in classical archaeology, by 1914 all European nations as well as the United States had established university curricula in classical archaeology. This three-pronged movement, involving the development of museum collections, the systematic excavation of sites, and the setting of an academic theoretical and educational framework, effectively gave to classical archaeology its modern appearance.
4. The Paths Of Classical Archaeology
Set out during the second half of the nineteenth century, this disciplinary model witnessed during the first half of the twentieth century a considerable expansion and consolidation in both qualitative and quantitative terms. Alongside a marked increase in the number of excavations carried out, the main archaeological institutions followed the German model by systematically publishing catalogues of finds and collections according to specific descriptive protocols. This increased and refined considerably the existing knowledge on artistic and artisanal productions: sculptures, architecture, ceramics were all researched, and so were numismatics and glyptics. Thus classical archaeology forged itself a vast corpus of systematic reference, bearing equally on chronology, typology and technology.
Some criticisms and contradictions emerged, however, during the second half of the twentieth century. The implicit supremacy of Greco-Roman culture came under challenge; the comparative study of cultures raised questions over the Hellenocentrism characteristic of most Classical archaeologists, while advances in the study of mentalities promoted a critique of Eurocentrism. The Greek and Roman worlds are now understood as melting-pots rather than hochkulturen. Under the influence of economic history, scholarly interest has shifted from a history of art in the narrow sense towards a wider history of productions. The better chronological grasp allowed by typological studies has served to advance studies on colonization, on long distance contacts and trade. Studies of the relations between centre and periphery, between Greeks, Roman and ‘barbarians’ have benefited from developments in the field of protohistory. It may indeed be said that the research program of classical archaeology has undergone a wide-reaching redefinition during the 1960s.
No longer considered as the elder of the sciences of antiquity, it is now one discipline among others, sharing resources and addressing issues similar to other strands of archaeology. In this context, such topics as the history of the landscape, or that of the movements of populations and the exchanges of goods and ideas, all open up new perspectives which contribute to extricate classical archaeology from its somewhat marginal position.
At the same time, advances in the iconography and the sociology of representations make it possible to cast a new light and reach a more satisfying understanding of otherwise well-known bodies of evidence. Thus, building on the strength of its centuries-long traditions as a science dedicated to Ancient art, Classical archaeology is developing now into to a human science in the full sense of the term.
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- Bordein A, Holscher T, Zanker P (eds.) 2000 Klassiche Archaeologie, eine Einfuhrung. Dieter Reimer Verlag, Berlin, Germany
- Elsner J A 1955 Art and the Roman Viewer, the Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
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