previous decades in a wide area including South Africa, Namibia, Botswana,
and Zimbabwe (Mitchell 2001). In addition to objects related to the Stone Age,
African treasures mainly plundered in the context of conquest also arrived in
European institutions. Thus, valuables from conquered monarchs were seized
and sent to the metropolis. This is how treasures from Segou, Amadou Tall,
and Babema Traore ́reached Paris in the latter years of the nineteenth century.
Some collections formed by individuals with both ethnographic and archaeo-
logical interests resulted from object-collection missions, such as the Gautier
and Chudeau mission of 1904–5 by E ́mile Fe ́lix Gautier (or Gauthier, 1864–
1940) and Raymond Chudeau, in Western Sudan, and those of Leo Frobenius
(1873–1938) both before and after the turn of the century (Sibide ́1996: 79).
Archaeological material formed only a minor part of what was being sent to
the metropolis. The bulk of the collections were of ethnographic objects that
had been bought or pillaged from natives (Coombes 1994). In Europe some of
the archaeological objects were displayed in permanent and also in temporary
exhibitions. Some of the latter were then transformed into permanent mu-
seums, like the Belgian Central African Geological Exhibition of 1897, which
became the Museum Tervuren in Brussels. Archaeological objects were also
shown in the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 in London and were included
in a thematic display entitled ‘The Life of Primitive Man with Particular Re-
ference to the Stone-Age Peoples Pre-Historic and Contemporary’ (Coombes
1994: 204–5). Africa was represented as a continent saved from its own past
through colonialism, its heritage being displayed in the form of war trophies
(ibid. ch. 9).
The forbidden Great Civilizations: Great Zimbabwe, Benin, and Ife 7A number of sites found mainly in South and East Africa did not seem to
conform to the image of timeless primitive and underdeveloped Africa. The
power of the model, of the black as inferior and degenerated, however,
prevented those who studied and interpreted them from concluding that
their remains were evidence of past black Great Civilizations. Instead, it was
7 Sites like the sacred city of Aksum in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) were also described by Europeans
from theWfteenth century (Phillipson 2002: 28–30). In 1893 the Italian bibliographer Giuseppe
Fumagalli already included a section about archaeology in hisBibliograWa Etiopica(Milan),
sponsored by two prominent Italian geographical societies: the SocietaGeograWca Italiana and the SocietaCommerciale Africana (Lockot 1998). There is a need, therefore, for an analysis of
the way in which the diVerent explorers interpreted the Christian ruins and the extent to which
late nineteenth-century British, Italian and German imperialism aVected the way in which the
antiquities were described. Some sources for such an analysis are Bates (1979); Bent (1896);
Manley & Re ́e (2001: 30, 33); and Zietelmann (2006).
Archaeology of the Primitive 305