of a nation became a political tool. The arrangement of data of the national
history into a coherent account was deemed essential for the explanation of its
present identity and of its likely future. Archaeologists, and others from
cognate disciplines, such as history, philology, anthropology, geography, and
the history of art, endeavoured to interpret the data available to them. They
aimed to assemble a framework in which the nation was made intelligible,
helping to further disseminate the national idea in the population’s imagin-
ation. The public outcome of archaeologists’ work, museum displays and
academic publications, mediated the past, present, and future. They produced
authorized versions of the past, which in time crystallized as public memory.
This was helped by the popularization of these sanctioned renditions through
the modern arts (mainly paintings but also sculpture), school books and
newspapers.
The value of archaeologists’ interpretations for the construction of the
nation led to the institutionalization of archaeology. The connection that
the social theorist, Michel Foucault (1972 (2002); 1980b), makes between
power, knowledge, and truth is relevant here. Archaeologists helped the state
with their understanding of the past. This convinced some of those in power
of the usefulness of funding archaeologists’ work, both on a permanent and
on a short-term basis. Regarding the latter the state sponsored expeditions
and provided encouragement to privately commissioned individuals who
explored ancient sites. They were supported through the state purchase of
the antiquities gathered by them and also through their selection for honours
and medals. On a permanent basis the state nursed archaeology mainly
through the creation of museums, universities and oYces for heritage admin-
istration. Once institutionalized, archaeology enforced a control of the inter-
pretation of the past by establishing its own rules. Hence a ‘discipline’ (cf.
Lenoir 1997) was established, and this led to a regulation of what constituted
legitimate knowledge. In the process of selecting collections to be exhibited,
and writing handbooks, museum curators, as well as university professors
and heritage oYcers, determined criteria of signiWcance and moulded the
historical imagination.
The suggestion that archaeologists were inspired by nationalism, and
indeed that they took an active part in its success as a political ideology,
does not negate the existence of competing views about the essential aspects
of the national past. One could say that there were—and are—as many
nations as individuals, for each of them drew a diVerent picture of it. During
the nineteenth century, as well as today, there was a pool of elements from
which each person selected a few in order to characterize their own nation.
The perception of the nation (and of its past) was aVected by factors such as
political allegiance to either conservative or progressive ideology, sympathy
400 Conclusion