communication about its existence to the wider academic community in
Europe (Ayarzaguena Sanz 2002). Research on human antiquity would then
be continued mainly in Western Europe during the following decades.
INSTITUTIONALIZING THE NATIONAL HERITAGEInstitutionalization is a wide concept, which includes institutions for both those
earning a living from archaeology and those who do not. In the latter category
the institutions par excellence are the learned society and the academy, both of
which had existed for more than a century—or two—by the period under
discussion in this chapter. Institutions for professional archaeologists today
can be divided into four categories: museums, universities, heritage oYces,
and commercial archaeology units. Discarding the last one because of its very
recent appearance in the history of the discipline, jobs whose title explicitly
mentioned either antiquities or archaeology were created from the start of the
nineteenth century. From the handful of jobs so described before 1820 (which
included, for example, the German Georg Zoe ̈ga, and the Italian, Carlo Fea, as
Commissioner of Antiquities, mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3), a small but
signiWcant number of newly created posts were added in this period. Yet, as the
discussion in previous sections shows, there were many others working in
cognate disciplines who also dealt with archaeological material. This issue will
be analysed in more detail in Chapter 13. Most institutions mentioned in this
section will explicitly focus on antiquity or archaeology.
Starting with positions created for what we would deWne nowadays as
heritage management, after the early appointment of Carlo Fea cited above,
it would be the French government that pioneered the creation of a post of a
Wrst civil servant explicitly dealing with archaeology. The new position was
that of General Inspector of Antiquities, created in 1830 andWlled in 1834 by
Prosper Me ́rime ́e (1803–70). His oYce’s aim was to control the increasing
activity related to antiquities and excavations. In accordance with the mood
of the time, a systematic cataloguing of artistic monuments was announced.
A questionnaire was distributed throughout France. The diYculties that
ensued showed the huge problems faced by any of these novel initiatives: to
start with only a few city councils bothered to respond to the questionnaire.
Moreover it soon became obvious that the oYce was not properly resourced
for the magnitude of the work to be done and the specialists sent to check the
information were rapidly overwhelmed by the task. In 1837 a Commission of
Historical Monuments was set up to implement legislation and prevent
the destruction of historical and archaeological monuments (Choay 2001;
Liberal Revolutions (c. 1820–1860) 357