only the wealthy could aVord the purchase of Great Civilization antiquities.
The aim of colonial collections was to demonstrate the other side of the
discourse about the genesis of the Western civilization: not its glorious
origin in the classical period, but rather its amazing degree of development
in comparison with other distinctly less advanced peoples in the world. This
they did in the context of their nation-state: British explorers and antiquar-
ians showed how the British had made much more progress than the peoples
in India, Australia, or any other of the British colonies, as did the French,
Dutch, and Russians regarding their own colonies. Also, white Argentinians
showed how advanced they were in relation to the natives in the areas being
conquered in the second half of the nineteenth century within the frontiers
of their nation, an attitude expressed by other antiquarians of prehistoric
remains elsewhere in America. Enquiries into the archaeology of the unciv-
ilized, therefore, strode along national lines and dealt with the antiquities of
a territory controlled by (or in the process of being controlled by) the
archaeologists’ nation-state. This fostered the creation of networks of know-
ledge in each of the nations and/or colonies which were not forcefully
imposed but developed through various strategies. These included the
membership of societies and attendance of their meetings, the representation
of one’s own country in international conferences, the common understand-
ing produced in expressing ideas in the same language, the rivalry and
honour obtained in publishing in a particular set of national journals,
and the citation of one another’s works. Collectors earned respect and
social recognition from their peers through the publicity given to their
endeavours in learned societies and publications as well as by the sending
of collections—often as gifts—to the major museums in the metropolis.
Coming back home (male) colonizers also brought collections and displayed
them as symbols, as Lahiri (2000: 688) puts it, of their colony-returned
gentleman identity.
As explained earlier in the book, there were a few native archaeologists in
some colonies, such as those of South and Southeast Asia. However, they
rarely engaged with the archaeology of the primitive. Generally, they would
only do so after the First World War and especially after independence from
colonial rule. To a certain extent in the countries where internal colonialism
and miscegenation had taken place the picture becomes more complicated.
The reductionist duality of colonial versus indigenous so often used because
of its deceiving clarity is an oversimpliWcation which easily disintegrates on
closer analysis. Starting with the white race situated at the pinnacle, there was
also a grading depending on the scholars’ place of provenance in Europe and
their religion. In turn, natives were located in a hierarchical scale in which
distinctions were made between diVerent peoples. Thus, in Latin America,
Archaeology of the Primitive 309