2 - Modernity and archaeology

Summary

Archaeology as a modern institution

It has already been recognised that the discipline of archaeology is, by its origin and nature, a fundamentally modern institution. A systematic manipulation of the past, involving kinds of excavations, appears to have taken place in some ancient states (e.g. Trigger 1989, 27–31; Schnapp 1996). The use of the past in the form of the mobilisation of ancestoral images and the place-related memory of past human acts began much earlier (e.g. Bradley 2002). However, the disciplinisation of archaeology, or the beginning of ‘scientific archaeology’ as Bruce Trigger puts it (1989, Chapter 3), i.e., the articulation of the subject matter, objectives, and methods with which the discursive boundary between what is and is not archaeology can be drawn, took place, as a process rather than as an event, in the formative phase of ‘modernity’ (Trigger 1989, 73–86).

The concept ‘modernity’ is defined in various ways and manners. Here, I wish to refer to Malcolm Waters's characterisation as a balanced, and appropriately concrete, definition. According to Waters, modernity is a ‘socio-cultural configuration’ characterised by the following (Waters 1999, xii–xiii):

1. production systems are industrial,

2. an increasing proportion of interpersonal practices are self-interested, rational and calculating,

3. physical and social objects, including human labour, are defined as commodities, and regarded as exchangeable,

4. control of the state is specified by social role rather than by personal characteristics and is subject to periodic constituency legitimation,

5. individuals have citizenship rights that they can claim against the state,

6. the primary site of legitimacy and responsibility is the individual person,

7. […]