easier, for scholars knew the rules of the game from the start, and institu-
tionalization, legislation and the outlawing of the export of antiquities
assisted them in organizing a body of experts who contributed to the con-
struction of an alternative national history to that produced by others. The
Wnal part of the world in which to discuss the issue of resistance is that of most
of sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of the colony at the southern tip of
the continent) and parts of Australia, not because there was much of it but, in
fact, because there was none. This occurred mainly in territories in which no
state political organization had existed, or in which it had been much less
pronounced, before the arrival of the Europeans. There, imperial archaeolo-
gists did not encounter any opposition to their particular narration, for the
local understanding of time was far removed from that developed in Europe.
A closing comment needs to be made. Hegemony and resistance are useful
tools in examining imperial situations, but to some extent are also slippery
words. The concept of resistance can be used, in fact, to refer to tensions
among colonial archaeologists: between those living in the colonies and those
in the metropolis. One could also see as resistance the involvement in the
study of the past of a few local scholars. Their eVorts were ambivalent. Local
archaeologists became complicit in the discourse authorized by the imperial
authorities, but, by getting involved, they challenged the rules of the game, for
their supposed inferiority made them inadequate interlocutors in the nego-
tiations about past-building.
TOWARDS TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARCHAEOLOGYMany of the developments that took place in the 1800s had an enormous
impact thereafter, to the extent that some are very much present in archae-
ology today. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as had been the case
in the previous hundred-odd years, archaeology’s role in constructing the
essential historical roots of the nation continued to attract the attention of
politicians. The political map of Europe, subject to so many changes during
the nineteenth century—legitimized, at least in part, through recourse to the
past—was only temporarily frozen in the decades following the end of the
First World War. More importantly, archaeological monuments and objects
continued being used as mnemonics—elements to assist historical memory—
of imagined remembrances and shared group experience. A nation with a past
had necessarily a future. Recurrent sets of archaeological objects and features
were organized in terms of ‘cultures’, which were then seen as proof of the
racial and linguistic make-up of the nation. The political importance of
Conclusion 407