The reader who knows even the elements of the Aryan problem ofWfty years ago will
understand how quickly it became a controlling factor in my dream. To the idea that
the progressive shrinkage of an inland sea indicated a progressive desiccation that
forced destructive radial migrations was added the thought that migrations similarly
forced might have brought to Europe the Aryan peoples, the Aryan culture, and Aryan
languages.
(Pumpelly 1908: xxv).The expedition worked in Anau and then moved on to Merv, in the latter site
hoping toWnd the oldest prehistoric strata.
As in the case of biblical archaeology (Chapter 6), Byzantine and Islamic
archaeology became engaged with religious debates. The civilizing mission of
Russia among the non-Christians had become one of the main tenets of
Russian imperialism from the sixteenth century. Ivan IV had banned the
building of new mosques after the conquest of Kazan in 1552 and started a
policy of religious conversion, which, however, produced very poor results. In
the eighteenth century Catherine the Great’s reputed ‘Greek project’ aimed
at the renewal of a Byzantine Empire under Russian control by the expulsion
of the Ottomans from Europe. It was considered that the predominant faith
of Russia was rooted in the Byzantine experience. In terms of contemporary
politics, only through conversion into the Orthodox Christian religion could
the colonized be considered as Russians. In the nineteenth century the
southward expansion resulted in the inclusion of numerous non-Christian
societies, many of Muslim faith, within the Russian Empire. Islam became the
second major religion, predominant in areas such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,
Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan. There was a renewed attempt of conversion, a
policy that had among its stronger supporters the prominent Orientalist
Vasilii Grigoriev (1816–81) (Pugachenkova & Rtveladze 1987: 322). In the
Caucasus conversion was justiWed as the ‘restoration’ of the Orthodoxy of the
Byzantine Empire. Yet, in the midst of growing nationalism, from the 1860s
the increasing importance of racial and ethnic classiWcations in the Russian
Empire broke the link between Orthodoxy and Russianness. The model of
Russian identity became constructed in opposition to the ‘Other’, the ‘alien’
population. Even if converted, a new Orthodox could not be considered a
Russian. Russia was changing from a religion-based state to a nation deWned
on the basis of ethnic identity. This transformation was matched by the
increasing presence of imperial ethnographers in the Caucasus and elsewhere,
who aimed to map the ethnic composition of the Russian Empire (Brower
1997; Jersild 1997; 2002; Werth 2002).
The importance conferred on religion in nineteenth-century Russian
nationalism and colonialism was reXected in a relative greater attention
260 Colonial Archaeology