meeting—the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Parallel to this process both
Russia and the United States expanded beyond their former borders, enlar-
ging them several-fold. Some of this growth was the result of warfare with
adjacent states (half of the territory of Mexico—Texas, New Mexico, and
California—was lost to the United States in 1848). In most of Africa, Austra-
lia, the PaciWc, North Asia, and Western North America, antiquarians were
not able to deal with ancient monuments for there were none (or they were a
rarity and were considered foreign to local cultures). As a result, the study of
the non-state 1 societies and their predecessors was mainly left in the hands of
anthropologists (Chapter 10). The exceptions to this were South and Central
Asia and North Africa, areas that will be explored in this and the following
chapter. In them, colonialists found civilized peoples who had for centuries
possessed state or quasi-state systems of government and legislative codes.
Science was not detached from contemporaneous political events. As the
political theorist Frantz Fanon once said, ‘science depoliticized, science in the
service of man is often non-existent in the colonies’ (Fanon 1989: 140). Like
other human sciences such as geography, anthropology, and history, archae-
ology became a tool of imperialism. 2 By forming part of the control mech-
anisms exercised by the creation of the census, the map, and the museum
(Anderson 1991: 164), archaeology fulWlled a part in the state’s strategy of
surveillance and observation that gave the imperial powers a perspective on
the dominated. It helped to rationalize the ‘Other’, to conWrm the superiority
of these powers through demonstrating that the backwardness the Europeans
encountered outside their native countries was rootedWrmly in the past. In
the colonies, the creation of a Western-shaped knowledge of the past of the
subjugated populations assisted administrators in making them comprehen-
sible, and therefore susceptible to regulation and assimilation into the colo-
nial ethos. However, ancient monuments also helped to elevate the state as the
keeper of local tradition. Archaeology thus acted as an instrument of power,
legitimizing the hegemony of the imperial centres over subaltern countries. It
is the purpose of the following pages to scrutinize how South and Southeast
Asian antiquities were perceived and integrated into the colonial discourse.
The main concern will be to understand the production of knowledge in the
Weld of archaeology within the framework of the imperial project.
1 In this volume the use of non-state societies has been preferred over other terms such as
non-Western, traditional, native, non-industrialized societies.
2 The link between science and political events is a growingWeld of research (MacLeod 2001).
There are many studies on this, of which those mentioned here are just examples: for geography
see Smith and Godlewska (1994), for anthropology see Asad (1973); Thomas (1994) and for
history see Bergeret al. (1999b); and Zimmer (2003b).
210 Colonial Archaeology