white Europeans were usually followed by creoles—although there were
alternatives—and then by other peoples who were graded depending on
their perceived location in the evolutionary scale. A similar ranking has
been observed in French Indochina (Van 2003). Archaeologists coming
from imperial powers usually felt superior to the local archaeologists even
in independent countries such as Brazil and Argentina (but the opposite was
also the case).
With respect to the role of the state, the creation of discourses about the
past was helpful to the colonial powers because it erased any other alternative
vision that was too diVerent from the Western narration and legitimized
the colonial present with its narrative of progress. The Western nature of
the discourse about the primitive past explains why beyond America, those
dealing with prehistoric antiquities were for the most part members of the
Western powers—which Japan would join from the 1870s. The discovery of
archaeological remains served to legitimate further colonial imposition. In
general terms it was argued that because the European powers had succeeded
in reaching the pinnacle of cultural advancement it was their mission to help
the other peoples of the world to beneWt from Western civilization.
The usefulness of the discourse about the past for colonial governments
materialized in the integration of prehistoric studies within state-organized
expeditions and within newly created institutions. The latter were not gener-
ally the same institutions mentioned in previous chapters. They diVered from
them in two main aspects. On the one hand, they were not devoted to
philology and the history of art and religion, but to anthropology and the
natural sciences. One of the reasons for the connection between prehistoric
archaeology and anthropology and the natural sciences partly derived from
the borrowing of techniques from the latter (for others see Chapter 13). Yet, in
addition to this, in the colonies, as opposed to Europe, the division between
philological and natural archaeology, to follow Schnapp’s terminology
(Schnapp 1991), came together with a perceived racial detachment between
scholars and their object of study. In the colonies the archaeological endeav-
our was not only an issue of class (the archaeologist belonging to the moneyed
strata of society) but also of ethnic origin and race. Institutionally this meant
that the archaeology of the uncivilized was tied to anthropology. This process
also occurred in Europe to some extent (Chapter 13), but, in the search for the
national roots into the past, the subordination of prehistoric archaeology to
anthropology was academically contested and eventually broken in some
countries from the early twentieth century. In the colonies, however, the
assumed unchanging nature of savages fused anthropology and archaeology
together to a much more permanent degree than in Europe—to the extent
that it is still present today.
310 Colonial Archaeology