only outside Mesoamerica and the Andean area were prehistoric remains
taken into consideration.
Hegemony implies consent. Archaeologists from the non-colonized world
generally accepted ideas coming from their colleagues in the imperial powers
as enlightened and authorized. The most inXuential imperial power for most
of the nineteenth century seems to have been France, probably because of the
state investment in archaeology. Archaeologists from independent countries
beyond Europe who decided to publish in one of the imperial languages
usually chose French. France was also the country where they went to study,
the exception to this being Chinese and Japanese individuals who went to
Britain mainly from the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It was
taken for granted that the discourses about the past devised by the imperial
powers were fully legitimated—although, as will be seen below, this did not
prevent the existence of alternatives. It will be argued here that the belief in the
validity of the accounts developed by the archaeologists of European imperial
powers was related to their superiority in terms of numbers of archaeologists,
funding, and the means to promote individuals and their ideas. Despite the
relatively small magnitude of the professional body when compared with its
size a century later, the number of academics from the Powers and the
funding they had access to (in Europe and also, from the last decades of the
nineteenth century, in the US and Japan) was much greater than those from
elsewhere. It is also important to understand the internal functioning of these
communities to grasp the extent of their academic might. The academic body
of each of the powers behaved in some ways like communities of interest. In
the centres of imperial power daily practices such as letters, conversations,
encounters, conferences, committees, institutions, and so on acted as the
media through which essential information was transmitted and key alliances
were formed. These groups were able to deWne who was important in theWeld.
They could have been fundamental in inXuencing the acceptance or rejection
of new ideas in theWeld and the general strategy for future research. The
publications produced in the imperial centres had a much wider distribution
than those printed elsewhere. The academic production carried out in the
centres, therefore, had a much higher potential for having an impact on other
archaeologists elsewhere. Archaeologists living in the European powers acted
as the transmitters and, on most occasions, as those who sanctioned as
satisfactory hypotheses produced elsewhere. To be successfully accepted in
the academic arena, original ideas need a large educated audience of a type
only available in the prosperous societies of the imperial powers.
Consent did not mean complete compliance. The non-colonized world did
not remain passive in the face of attempts by the Powers to appropriate and
create particular discourses about its past. A similar situation occurred in
Latin America, China, and Japan 203