province of private individuals and learned societies in the early decades of
the nineteenth century, in later years the study of the past and the preserva-
tion of the most important remains became increasingly the responsibility of
the state. The state fulWlled its obligation through institutions where profes-
sionals were paid to undertake their research. Interestingly, the tardiness
observed for the involvement of the British state in the informal colonies
was not apparent in the case of the formal colonies. Investing in the archae-
ology of a country where the export of antiquities was forbidden did not seem
to hold much sense for fund administrators; however, funding archaeology in
a colony such as India did. The development of the institutions dealing with
archaeology was one of the methods used by the administrative machine to
organize the surveillance of the colonial subject. In India, Viceroy Curzon
(r. 1899–1905) would say that it was the colonizers’ duty ‘to dig and discover,
to classify, reproduce and describe, to copy and decipher, and to cherish and
conserve’ (in Anderson 1991: 179). The state’s increasing acceptance of the
prestige of ancient monuments, and the growing subsidies that their study
received from the 1860s, has been linked to the rise of true modern coloni-
alism. Thus, Benedict Anderson argues, perhaps not wholly convincingly, that
funding for archaeology was part of a conservative programme in which
money was diverted from investment in school education for natives, which
was considered as potentially dangerous. The racial separation of the builders
of the monuments, seen as being of Indian extraction, from the natives, also
helped to justify the European presence, for it demonstrated that civilization
had only been possible under the rule of foreign invaders. Finally, pro-
grammes of restoration and conservation of monuments vindicated the
beneWts of having the state as the guardian of the historical heritage. They
were no longer religious monuments, stupas, and monasteries, but symbols of
a secular colonial state (ibid. 181–2).
For the creation of institutions in South and Southeast Asia two key
periods can be distinguished. TheWrst saw the revival of the Archaeological
Survey of India in 1871 (it had been previously created as a one-man oYce
with Cunningham as archaeological surveyor in 1861, but then abolished in
1866), and the Museum of Jakarta (conceived in 1862, opened in 1868). The
second wave of institutionalization occurred in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
At this time the foreign school was exported to the Far East; a type of
institution that had been developed a few decades earlier exclusively for
countries where the Western ancient Great Civilizations had evolved—Italy,
Greece and Egypt. The initiative came from France, the last major colonial
power to arrive in the area, with the establishment of what would initially be
called the Mission Arche ́ologique in 1898 and soon after the E ́cole Franc ̧aise
d’Extreˆme-Orient in 1898. This would be emulated in following years by the
242 Colonial Archaeology