In the case of South and Southeast Asia, the discovery of forgotten civil-
izations gave dignity to the colonies, a dignity that other parts of the world
inhabited by non-state societies lacked. The diVerences were not clear-cut,
however, especially in the study of prehistoric remains. As will be seen in
Chapter 10, for the archaeology of the pre-literary periods similarities can be
traced between the Asian colonies and those of Africa, Australia, and parts of
America. Literacy—and therefore civilization—had reached the area with the
migration of a new people, the superior Aryans, who came from the north,
introducing Sanskrit, an old Indo-European language,Wrst to India and then
to Indochina and Indonesia. After some debate, Western scholars identiWed a
homeland in Europe itself (Mallory 1989). Local populations, therefore, were
seen as takers, and the ancestors of the colonizers as the civilization-bearers.
Aryan presence signalled the appearance of superior forms of architecture and
art that represented a golden age. From this beginning, decadence had ensued.
In the case of Indochina and Indonesia, the disappearance of Sanskrit in-
scriptions was coupled with the civilizations’ subsequent decline on the ladder
of progress. In India, more modern Hindu and Buddhist artistic traditions
were also seen as a relapse from earlier, more pure forms. Degeneration was
understood in racial/language terms. The evidence from inscriptions, for
example, revealed that in addition to those in Sanskrit there were others
written in other languages, showing that local populations had kept their
racial identity and continued to speak their own tongues. These had evolved
into the nineteenth-century native vernaculars which, with the exception of
those of northern India, did not belong to the Indo-European language
family. Given the equation accepted by most between language and race, the
failure of the Asian civilizations to continue in the line of progress marked by
the Western world was explained as a result of racial inferiority. The cultural
and racial distance of the colonies from the metropolis was metaphorically
displayed by the location chosen for the storage and exhibition of collected
antiquities, particularly visible in relation to museums. Because they did not
completely conform to the classical model, nor to ideals of Aryanness as
represented in Greek art, the antiquities of South and Southeast Asia were
usually sent to institutions such as the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, the
Muse ́e Indochinois in Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
It was only from the 1870s that the British Museum developed a positive
interest in Indian antiquities, and in the early twentieth century that Indo-
chinois ancient works of art went to the Louvre after a typhoon destroyed the
museum in Hanoi (Willis 1997; Wright 1996: 128).
The importance conferred on the historical narrative for the legitimization
of colonial rule meant that antiquities were not put to one side in the
development of the administrative machine in the colonies. From being the
South and South East Asia 241