arts and commerce, with branches in every province in Spain. In 1752, a
society of sciences with some interest in history, the Hollandsche Maatschap-
pij der Wetenschappen, was created in Holland.
The surge in societies would have early oVshoots in the colonies. In the
Spanish Empire the Societies for the Friends of the Country created branches
in many of the main cities of the Latin American provinces (Habana, Lima,
San Jose ́in Costa Rica, Chile, etc.) from the last decades of the century (see
below). In the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the Bataviaasch Genootschap
van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences)
originated in 1778, and in the British colony of India the Asiatic Society
was founded in 1784 to foster ‘inquiry into the history and antiquities, the
arts, sciences and literature of Asia’. From 1788 the society published an
annual journal,Asiatick Researches(Chakrabarti 1988: 15; Singh 2004: 8).
This journal and other publications became key elements, together with other
imperial institutions such as the colleges created in India and England to train
colonial subjects, in shaping and disseminating the increasingly established
knowledge created in pre-imperial India, and had an inXuence back in the
metropolis (Ballantyne 2002: 32). In the journal, to begin with, historical
writings were primarily based on information provided by texts and not
much of what we could connect with archaeology was to be found. Interest
in inscriptions, coins and sculptures, however, increased from 1830 (Chakra-
barti 1988: 21, 32–9) (Chapter 8).
Antiquities in the American coloniesIn contrast to the lack of attention paid to the monuments found in the
Asian colonies, the monumental past left behind by the major civilizations in
Mesoamerica and the Andean areas 9 provided a prestigious base from which
some local scholars started to build the historical account of pre-contact
America, a period about which the written sources provided little or no infor-
mation. Parallel to the excavations of Roman sites in Rome, Pompeii and
Herculaneum, as well as in other sites throughout the territory of the old
Roman Empire and beyond it, in the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and
Peru, and in the Captain Generalship of Guatemala, several sites were dug during
the eighteenth century, the most renowned being that of Palenque in Mexico.
Known since 1734, preliminary studies were undertaken in the mid 1780s, and
these were followed by another one commissioned by the Spanish king in 1787.
9 In the rest of America, with the exception of a few excavations, such as those undertaken by
the then governor of Virginia, Thomas JeVerson, at the end of the century (Wallace 2000), pre-
contact remains were generally considered unimportant.
Antiquities and Political Prestige 55