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Article ID: CBB001213313

Introduction: The Archaeological Imagination (2012)

Warwick, Alexandra (Author)
Willis, Martin (Author)

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 5, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 1-5
Publication date: 2012
Language: English

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Introduction to a special section, “The Nineteenth Century Archaeological Imagination”

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Archaeology is the latest born of the sciences. It has but scarcely struggled into freedom, out of the swaddling clothes of dilettante speculations. It is still attracted by pretty things, rather than by real knowledge. It has to find shelter with the Fine Arts or with History, and not a single home has yet been provided for its real growth. (William Mathew Flinders Petrie, Methods and Aims in Archaeology vii) What can be called the archaeological imagination long precedes archaeology as a practice. Although histories of archaeology like to mark particular moments as the birth of the science, all acknowledge that those moments are preceded by the existence and even the practice of an archaeological imagination (Daniel). For example, many cite the temple of Larsa in what is now Iraq, which contains a stone inscription recording the work of the ruler Nabonidus (556-539 BC) who, curious about the ruin, caused it to be excavated and restored and attempted to establish something like a history of its construction and use (Schnapp 18). Despite the prior existence of what might be called an archaeological curiosity or wonder, the science of archaeology is deeply marked by the conditions of its emergence in the nineteenth century. As Julian Thomas has pointed out, the science is creatively shaped by its contemporary cultural and linguistic resources, and the nineteenth century presents a particularly dense set of such interactions (Thomas 153). What this reveals, as Flinders Petrie recognised in 1904 in the above epigraph, is that the archaeological imagination is not contained by its professionalization or its own institutions. And likewise, the archaeologist is not untouched by that which the profession often tries to resist: Howard Carter's reply in 1922 when he was asked what he could see through the tiny gap in the door of Tutankhamen's tomb was not convincing evidence of the funerary practices of the eighteenth dynasty but wonderful things (Silverberg 89). What is the archaeological imagination? As the writers of the six articles that follow reveal, there are numerous different kinds of imagining taking place in the widest of engagements with archaeology, and these are the product of varied imaginations. Certainly there is no clear division between the professional and rational on the one hand and the creative and imaginative on the other. Rather, explanation and interpretation are as often a part of imaginative responses to archaeology as is the wonder expressed by Carter or indeed by artists or writers of fiction and poetry. At the same time, various imaginative responses to archaeology (whether curatorial, literary, or visual) are employed to extend the explanatory, or rather are brought to bear when the empirical knowledge of scientific archaeology is felt to be unable to capture the entirety of the archaeological experience. In this way, different imaginations offer an argument about the limitations of certain kinds of rational explanation and in doing so lay claim to other truths of archaeological discovery

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Description Contents:

Includes Series Articles

Article Thomas, Sophie (2012) Displaying Egypt: Archaeology, Spectacle, and the Museum in the Early Nineteenth Century. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 6-22). unapi

Article Brusius, Mirjam (2012) Misfit Objects: Layard's Excavations in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Biblical Imagination in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 38-52). unapi

Article Zimmerman, Virginia (2012) “Time Seemed Fiction”---Archaeological Encounters in Victorian Poetry. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 70-82). unapi

Article Warwick, Alexandra (2012) The Dreams of Archaeology. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 83-97). unapi

Article Malley, Shawn (2012) Nineveh 1851: An Archaeography. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 23-37). unapi

Article Challis, Debbie (2012) Fashioning Archaeology into Art: Greek Sculpture, Dress Reform and Health in the 1880s. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 53-69). unapi

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