Queries for discussion
- In broader terms, this week's main objective is to situate the emergence of the discipline of archaeology within the context of European modernism and the (utopian) project of modernity. But what is modernity after all? This is the modernity that Jurgen Habermas referred as "an incomplete project", the modernity that is believed to have completely transformed our modes of thinking, living and being (really?), the modernity whose collapse has been celebrated by the postmodernity of the last three decades. How did the arrival of modernism affect our everyday lives, how did it affect the way we think about the past? In what ways do we experience the modernist origins of archaeology among other disciplines?
- James Ussher (1581–1656), the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625–1656, calculated in his delightful Chronology of the World that the world was created by God during the nightfall before October 23, 4004 BC. His work is more precisely known with the title Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti (Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world), which was apparently quite a feat of scholarship and accurate science !. But he was not alone among his contemporaries in this interest in calculating the age of the earth through Biblical texts. This reminds me the famous Early Mesopotamian text known as the "Sumerian Kings List" which has a similar precision-obsessed approach to history of mankind and establishing a particular narrative of it. I don't know were I am going with this, but these imaginations of the ancient past in the past has engaged with history in serious ways, and I was wondering if we could discuss Julian Thomas's dismissal of such efforts not classifying as "the construction of the systematic knowledge of the past"(p. 4).
Some interesting individuals of the 1880-1920's, of the first "scientific" and "systematic" attempts in the field of archaeology:
Additional bibliography/further reading for the curious and the ambitious
- Tilley, Christopher; 1990. "On modernity and archaeological discourse," Archaeology After Structuralism: Post-Structuralism and the Practice of archaeology. Ian Bapty and Tim Yates (eds.). London & New York : Routledge, 127-152.
- Habermas, Jurgen; 1998 (1983 really). "Modernity--an Incomplete Project." The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Hal Foster (ed.). New York: The New Press, 1-17.