highlight a small component of broader international trends. In order to
appreciate the reasons behind transformations in one single nation or colony,
these need to be decentred and contextualized in the framework of what was
happening in other parts of the world. This is because there are interdepend-
encies and rivalries between countries with respect to the new discoveries and
proposals which transformed the narrative of the past. It will be proposed
that, although the Western world maintained its protagonism in develop-
ments, other parts of the world—the colonized and those not included in the
empires—also participated in them, and events there also aVected European
scholars’ view of antiquity. At the same time, one should not take too
simplistic a view of the major economic and political fault lines which divided
the globe. The world was not simply split between, on the one hand, imperial
powers—Britain and France, then Germany, Italy, with the addition of the US
and Japan at the end of the century—and, on the other, non-imperial powers
in the Western world. Nor can one argue that there was a sharp dividing line
between colonizers and the colonized. DiVerences within each of these cat-
egories were wide ranging. For example, in the case of the imperial powers,
there was a great disparity. In Europe there were some countries which were
thriving empires for a while, while others aspired successfully—or not—to
become empires. Japan went from being prey to the Western gaze to become a
colonizer, and the US from being an independent outpost to become one of
the world powers. Frontiers between nations were in continuousXux, but
even in stable countries such as Britain or France, the rhetoric of imperial
triumphalism went hand in hand with rivalries, disappointments, and fears.
AWnal major aspect that distinguishes the history of archaeology presented
in this book from that written by other authors refers to a completely diVerent
sphere, that of the development of archaeological thought. The compelling
analysis of the advance of science presented by Thomas S. Kuhn in hisThe
Structure of ScientiWc Revolutions,Wrst published in 1962, led others to present
the history of ideas as a series of clear-cut paradigms sustained by scientiWc
communities, with the established group becoming, at some point in time,
substituted by another group backing an alternative paradigm. This way of
reasoning, whose success some have placed in the context of the time—the
student revolutions of the 1960s (Bourdieu 2004: 17)—was followed by many
in archaeology. In this book changes in the way archaeologists interpreted
archaeology will not be denied, but none of these transformations will be
described as a scientiWc revolution. On the contrary, it will be argued that new
paradigms—to use a concept popularized by Kuhn—such as culture history
in early twentieth-century archaeology can only be understood as the logical
continuation of previous developments (evolutionism in the case of culture
history). Moreover, it will be proposed that it does not seem accidental that, at
An Alternative Account 25