had a long tradition of scholarship which had developed centuries before the
arrival of the Europeans, but their conventions were of a very diVerent nature
to those developed from the Renaissance. This was the case of China and
Japan. Resistance in each case took very diVerent paths. In China there was a
reluctance, throughout the nineteenth century, to accept the new scholarly
rules coming from Europe—only after the First World War would the situ-
ation change. In Japan a very diVerent reaction took place. Japanese politi-
cians decided to mimic their European counterparts and become an imperial
empire. The analysis of the actions undertaken by individuals, which pro-
duced these divergent paths, is beyond the remit of this book. However,
information published regarding archaeologists in China and Japan shows
that their archaeological practice assisted government policies, not because
they blindly followed oYcial orders, but because they themselves had personal
reasons to do so. This helps to explain some of the speciWc aspects of the
development of archaeology in each country. For example, someone like the
Japanese abbot-to-be, Kozui Otani, would not have engaged in the search for
Buddhist antiquities had it not been because of hisWght to stop the decline of
this religion in Japan. Also, the approach to archaeology by the Chinese
geologist, Ding Wenjian, would have been diVerent if he had not received
a classical Chinese education in Confucian ethics, followed by a university
degree in geology in Britain. They played a part in the creation of a national
history, but they did so generating transcultural forms, a hybrid archaeology
between their tradition and that of the West.
Resistance followed a diVerent pattern in other parts of the world. In
addition to China and Japan, many more areas can become the focus of our
attention. TheWrst of them is Latin America, an independent, but besieged
world, which had been opened to European inXuence during the early
modern era, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. There, the process
of Westernization had produced its own local elites before the nineteenth
century. From early on these local elites had been keen to create their own
accounts of the history of the land they had come to inhabit. SigniWcantly,
a higher percentage of miscegenation, of racially mixed population, usually
belonging to the well-oVclasses in areas such as Latin America, had been
reXected in the early appearance of feelings of pride towards the archaeology
of the pre-colonial period. This also happened among native elites educated
under Western standards coming from other parts of the colonized and
independent world beyond Europe, such as Indonesia, Egypt, and the Otto-
man Empire. However, the quest for Golden Ages in the native past had a
major obstacle to overcome: the power of racism, an ideology that grew in
strength throughout the century and that stubbornly claimed the superiority
of the white race. Resistance in parts of the world such as Greece and Italy was
406 Conclusion