led?...Thecuriositythat is gratiWed with inquiring into the laws implanted in
organised beings, or into the general phenomena which characterise the material
world at large, admits of, and is usually attended by, gratiWcation as permanent as it is
unmixed; every step is attended with unalloyed pleasure, every new acquisition leads
and stimulates to further discovery.
(RaZes in Finlayson 1826: xxiv–xxv).Using rhetoric inherited from the Enlightenment, this pursuit was vindicated
as a civic duty for the community. This obligation, however, could only be
accomplished through sacriWce. ‘To form a general and tolerably accurate
account of this country and its inhabitants’, commented William Marsden in
1811, ‘is a work attended with great and peculiar diYculties. The necessary
information is not to be procured from the people themselves, whose know-
ledge and inquiries are to the last degree conWned’ (Marsden 1811: iv). As the
last sentence makes clear, for Marsden, as well as for the others, the only valid
discourse was that formed in the Western world. The information gathered by
the explorers, philologists and other early writers would be the basis for the
imposition of a cultural hegemony based on Western ideals of authenticity.
Throughout the nineteenth century the understanding of the nature of the
colonial territory changed, a transformation that left behind a world ‘far more
hybrid, and with far less clearly deWned ethnic, national and religious borders’
(Dalrymple 2002: xl). This transformation entailed a deWnite emphasis on
history and antiquities. From being considered a conglomerate of nations,
each of the colonies came to be imagined, from the mid nineteenth century
onwards, as a single entity, each with its own make-up and character. As single
entities the colonies were conferred with names that Europeans thought
appropriate for them, as late as 1810 in the case of Indochina, and the
documentation of their cartography made them recognizable on maps, visible
and coherent. Importantly for the understanding of the development of
archaeology, the very idea of the colony as an entity made inevitable the
elaboration of a past for it. In the process of identity-production the con-
struction of historical narratives for each of the colonies was deemed essential.
There was no single approach for this. Discourses on the past were formed on
the basis of philology, religion, and documents as well as antiquities. Only
well into the twentieth century would each of theseWelds establish clearer
demarcations. Before that scholars usually participated in debates ranging
across all of these areas of scholarly knowledge. In the study of the most
remote past, as will be seen in Chapter 10, anthropologists and natural
scientists would also have a say. Most of the archaeological research that
became professionalized prior to the First World War was linked to the
study of monuments, coins and inscriptions.
240 Colonial Archaeology