in the 1930s (Femia 1981: ch. 2), deals with the means by which domination is
achieved through consent rather than naked force, by making people believe
that the ruling class’s interests are for the common beneWt. Thus, imperial
archaeology will be considered here as a hegemonic narrative created by
archaeologists coming from the imperial powers that excluded other accounts
about the past. It was hegemonic because it was broadly accepted by colon-
izers and colonized, because it was taken for granted that it would produce the
only authorized discourses about the past. The concept of hegemony is
usually linked to that of the subaltern, meaning ‘of inferior rank’. This concept
addresses theXuidity with which colonial ideology operates. Most notably in
this context, in this book it will be argued that the ruling class in a colony may
also be considered as subaltern. Settlers are part of the ruling class in the
colony, but at the same time are usually considered as inferior by the me-
tropolis ruling classes. It will be proposed that this ambivalence has important
implications that need further study.
Imperial discourse is about power and how it works. It is from their
vantage point that archaeologists produce a narrative of power which is
based on the authority of the observer and consigns the non-European to a
secondary status, a narrative that takes as a basis the concept of the ‘Other’ as
inferior, subordinate and dependent. This is not a narrative divorced from
everyday practice. In this sense, the way in which colonial discourse permeates
all cultural activities and inXuences archaeology can be described rhizomi-
cally, i.e. like a root system that spreads across the ground. Some authors
prefer the metaphor of a spider’s web. The terms rhizome and web aim to
convey the way in which colonial discourse imposes its hegemony dynamic-
ally, following the diverse and even contradictory pathways proposed by the
diVerent actors. Connections, internalizations, understandings are some of
the processes by which cultural hegemony operates. The way in which colo-
nial discourse is imposed is not through a monolithic, violent force following
a master plan. It is much more subtle and diverse. Bourdieu’s concept of
symbolic violence is also pertinent. For Bourdieu, symbolic violence is ‘a
gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the
most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and
cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling’
(Bourdieu 2001: 1–2).
Colonial archaeology was a practice linked to one of the most powerful
strategies of imperial dominance, that of surveillance or observation (cf.
Foucault 1977). It is from the position as observer that archaeologists help
to objectify the ‘Other’ through the analysis of the past. Connected to this
some authors have used the concept of alterity to indicate the ‘Other’, an
abstraction formed as an opposite to that of the Western image of itself. Far
8 Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century