geology and anthropology, and they mainly focused their studies in the
prehistoric period. The need for training to qualify as a professional, however,
would radically change the meaning of archaeology from the late nineteenth
century.
The multivocality of the meaning of archaeology in the present as well as in
the past makes the attempt to write a history of archaeology a challenge. There
are many possible histories of archaeology, as many as understandings of what
archaeology is. In this book the widest possible meaning has been chosen. In
fact, included in this volume are many individuals who dealt with ancient
objects but never deWned themselves as archaeologists and perhaps not even
as antiquarians. If they—and the institutions that they were associated with—
have been incorporated into the account it is because nowadays all of them
would most probably deWne themselves—or be identiWed by others—as either
professional or amateur archaeologists. 2 Consciously, therefore, this history is
a teleological account of a discipline that emerged in the nineteenth century
and fully matured in the following century, or it fully developed professionally
between the two world wars, and especially after the Second World War.
Maturity does not mean coherence, for, as explained above, even today
archaeology does not have a single meaning. There are, and there were,
alternative understandings of what archaeology is and was, as well as complex
and multi-layered identities of the actors who practised and practise it.
It could be argued that the body of archaeologists who form the basis of
this volume were an imagined community of scholars, a group of individuals
who perhaps never saw each other or knew each other but imagined them-
selves as having common interests and were ready to behave fraternally to
other members of the community. It started as a very amorphous community
that gradually became moreWnite in its boundaries and whose members, over
time, felt increasingly legitimated by the professionalization of their pursuit.
It was a community which had elastic boundaries with other, similarly
perceived, scholarly communities (cf. Anderson 1991: 6–7). The elaboration
of its own realms of memory (cf. Nora 1996–8), as Nathalie Richard (2001)
puts it, further promoted an awareness of its existence as a group: the
handbook—or, in the nineteenth century, the catalogue—their own history
as a group, a set of anecdotes and a group of scholars with whom one could
identify, were all nineteenth-century creations.
2 Until theWnal years before the First World War there was no sharp contrast between
professional and amateur archaeologists. In 1996 Marchand complained about what she called
the ‘manichean dichotomy between ‘‘politicized’’ pseudo-scholarship and ‘‘disinterested’’ pure
scholarship’, which, she argued, ‘has obstructed our understanding of their dialectical interde-
pendency’ (Marchand 1996a: 155). In this book, the term amateur has been used instead of
avocational, to avoid the modern connotations of the latter concept, of recent creation.
An Alternative Account 3