operated in which ‘the Aryans, it seems, on the basis of their tombs, are
the richest, the most powerful, and those who must have been the leaders
of the Berber tribes of Roknia’ (Bourguignat 1868 in Coye 1993: 112). It
was thought that the Aryans—the same Aryans that in the web of imperial
discourse scientists had ‘discovered’ in India only a few decades earlier (Chapter
8)—had arrived in Algeria from Europe through Italy, Sicily and the
Iberian Peninsula, and had brought megalithic ritual to the Berbers. Some
authors have seen this racial link between Europeans and North Africans at
the base of the practice of borrowing typological schemes developed in
Europe to describe North African archaeological objects, such as lithic industries
(Coye 1993: 115–21). Yet, it should be pointed out that this practice occurred
elsewhere even where no racial connection was assumed (Chapter 10). Still, in
North Africa the practice was rationalized in a diVerent way than in other parts
of the world. In Noe ̈l Coye’s opinion, this allowed that prehistoric remains
served to reinforce further the message that the Europeans—especially in
this case the French and to a certain extent the Spaniards (Ferna ́ndez Martı ́nez
2001: 177)—were only re-gaining what had once been theirs.
After the 1870s, interest in the classical past remained predominant, with
less consideration given to other periods. In contrast with research on the
classical period, that on the prehistoric past remained secondary. Physical
anthropology became one of the main areas of research in tune with devel-
opments in Europe. This would also be the case in the Canary Islands, whose
archaeology also attracted some of the main players in North African prehis-
tory at this time. Although the islands had belonged to the kingdoms of Spain
since 1342, the Spanish right to them was questioned by France at the
Congress of Berlin. Around the same time French archaeologists emphasized
the connections between the archaeology of the islands and that of North
Africa. Thus, in 1874 Louis Leon Ce ́sar Faidherbe (1818–89), a French army
oYcer with much experience in North Africa, claimed the discoveries of
remains associated with Berber populations in North Africa, such as the
supposed inscriptions of El Jular from the island of El Hierro, were the result
of immigration from North Africa (Farrujia 2005: 54). For his part Rene ́
Verneau (1852–1938), a leading French physical anthropologist, rejecting his
own earlier hypothesis of the multiple racial origin of the natives of each of
the Canary islands, argued in 1886 that their earliest colonization had been
undertaken by a Cro-Magnon race that had originated in the Perigord region
in France and had arrived through North Africa (ibid. 70). In contrast with
this view, German scholars had proposed other hypotheses that pointed,
perhaps not surprisingly, to an early colonization connected with Germany.
Thus, Franz von Lo ̈her (1818–92), the director of the Imperial Archive in
Bavaria, published a series of articles in 1876 in which he attributed the
272 Colonial Archaeology