antiquities, therefore, assisted in the creation of a past for many colonies that
explained their historical shortcomings and the right of the Powers to dom-
inate them.
The object of study in colonial archaeology increasingly broadened
throughout the nineteenth century to include vestiges from societies per-
ceived as inferior and primitive. The widening of scholars’ interests to non-
monumental remains led to the expansion of archaeology to areas of the
world not previously considered. This does not mean that non-state societies,
both those of the past and the present, were seen in a more positive light. The
belief in progression meant that these communities were deemed of a lesser
rank, at the bottom of humanness. Primitives’ ignorance and their lack of
civilization, in sum, their detachment from progress, rationalized the colonial
venture as justiWable. The issue of racism also became key in the examination
of the data, to the extent that when monuments were found in areas where the
local population was thought too low in the hierarchy of races to have
produced them, white authorship was proposed. For the description and
interpretation of theWndings the sequence created for the European prehis-
toric material served as a standard to follow, but this was not a one-way
process: the European classiWcations had been formed partly on the basis of
the information sent by explorers in their reports about living ‘primitives’.
For the success and development of archaeology beyond the Western world
scholars’ active involvement had a crucial role to play. Nationalism’s interest
in archaeology would not have spread around the globe without the curiosity
of learned individuals from the imperial powers. As in the case of Europe,
America, and some of the other early modern colonies, in almost every other
area of the world individuals’ interest towards antiquities came before insti-
tutionalization. Scattered throughout the continents archaeologists and ex-
plorers built discourses about the past of increasingly remote places, creating
a global picture that vindicated the world they were living in. They voluntarily
collaborated in the construction of a past that helped to legitimize imperial-
ism and colonialism. Their sense of duty was one of the key motivations
explaining their actions. Firstly, they felt it was their responsibility to under-
take a task that, in their opinion, locals were unable to do. In fact, in the case
of areas which had not been colonized before the nineteenth century, they
were right, for the rules archaeologists followed in the elaboration of dis-
course of the past were very speciWcally Western, completely alien to local
wisdom. Secondly, those dealing with antiquities felt the urge to explain why
the imperial countries—i.e. the white populations living in them—were
superior to the peoples living in the colonies. Some were moved by a quest
for prestige, achievable through their eVorts to uncover the good, the rational
and the truthful. Others tried to uncover their own colonial identity through
Conclusion 403