religion, Christianity (i.e., no Jewish or indeed Muslim archaeologists were
involved in its archaeology at this time), and many were drawn to theWeld by
devotion. Some even lived in missions and religious communities. The
centrality of the biblical account was shared in Egypt, Turkey, and Mesopo-
tamia with other issues, but it was important in the work of archaeologists
such as the Swiss, Edouard Naville, the Englishman, Flinders Petrie, and the
Frenchman, Ernest Renan, among others.
In their search for ancient civilizations the scholars from the imperial
powers reached every corner of the world and explored not only relatively
well-known lands such as Mexico and Peru, but also territories closed to the
Europeans for centuries in the Far East, the areas covered in Chapter 7. The
most interesting distinction between both areas is the perspective from which
their antiquities were approached: the existence of texts in the Far East made
the hunt for documents one of the main objectives of research. The religious
debate also inXuenced the way in which Chinese and Japanese antiquities
were considered, for their analysis became connected to comparative studies
of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity. The antiquities found
in Latin America, however, were not complemented by documents that
philologists could read. This led their study to be shared by anthropologists.
Both areas, the Far East and Latin America, also diVered in the traditions of
local research, much closer to the European model in Latin America, for
obvious reasons (it was colonized by the Iberian countries from 1492) than in
China and Japan, which had been almost completely closed to Europeans in
the early modern period. This explains why the number of local experts in the
Latin American countries was much higher than in the Asian countries, a
contrast that shows similar results in terms of the local institutions created at
the time.
The role of archaeology during colonial occupation is looked at in Part III
of the book with respect to the cases of monumental archaeology in South
and Southeast Asia (Chapter 8), the Russian Empire and French North Africa
(Chapter 9). The archaeology of the ‘primitive’ 6 in colonial lands is assessed in
Chapter 10. Chapter 8 compares British India with French Indochina, Dutch
Indonesia, and independent Siam (today’s Thailand). The very diVerent
stories of each of the regions show the wide diversity in the ways antiquities
may be used in a colonial context. In all areas there would be expeditions,
societies, museums, and legislation, but the rate at which they appeared and
the speciWc forms they took varied from one place to another. A point all
shared was the interest in ancient religions—Wrst in Hinduism and then in
6 In this volume concepts such as ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, and ‘barbarian’ are used as they would
have been employed in the nineteenth century and usually written without inverted commas.
An Alternative Account 17