invoked against standardization, innovation, and/or usurpation. As a coun-
ter to French interference, one’s own nation was emphasized and the na-
tional past was invariably invoked as proof of its existence. In this process
archaeology was not yet valued as the main device for exposing the historical
roots of the nation, for in many cases antecedents were still either sought in
recent history or with a biblical, mythical past invoked for the most ancient
origins, or textual evidence was used for later periods. As a way of empha-
sizing diVerences from the invading French, the ethnic and linguistic com-
ponents of a nation and the depth of their roots began to be stressed, a
development which bore fruit later in the century and helped institutionalize
the nations’ own past.
The ferment in this period between the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries had important consequences for the political map of the Western
world, Europe and the Americas, in the 1820s. As will be seen in Chapter 4,
the Greek revolt of 1821 was one of the few which resulted in the formation
of a new nation-state in Europe in the post-Napoleonic era. Most of the
revolts of the early 1820s, 1830s, and 1848, which aVected many European
countries, were defeated by the conservative coalitions formed by Russia,
Prussia, and Austria, later joined by Britain and France, to repress the legacy
of the French Revolution. The situation was very diVerent on the other
side of the Atlantic. The revolutions in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies
in the Americas resulted in the independence of most of them. As in Greece,
the past was used in these independence movements, although most of them
referred only to the centuries after European colonization. Only in Mexico
and Peru were the pre-Columbian monuments integrated into the separatist
discourse.
The French Revolution signiWed the universal recognition of both individ-
ual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the framework of a new
political entity, the nation. For early nationalism, therefore, the nation was a
concept linked to popular freedom and sovereignty. It was, as Hobsbawm
explains, ‘the body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them a
state which was their political expression’ (Hobsbawm 1990: 18–19). Scholars
have called civic or political nationalism that of the French Revolution. In
civic nationalism individuals were considered political animals whose self-
fulWlment was to be a citizen of a free republic, attaining glory by serving it
and being ready to lose their lives for their patria, their fatherland. Initially,
therefore, elements such as ethnicity, race, and language, which later formed
an essential element of nationalism, and, as we will see in Chapter 12,
archaeology, became involved in the search for, were not essential compon-
ents of the nation. In their place, during that initial period, the key concept
associated with the idea of the nation was civilization.
66 Early Archaeology of Great Civilizations