The History of Archaeology, Part 2

Better known to the general public, partly because of Irving Stone, and partly because of rudiments of his own sense of PT Barnum, is Heinrich Schliemann, a German whose insatiable search for the Troy of the Odyssey and the Iliad led him to Turkey to the site of Hisarlik. Schliemann spent four years in the early 1870s digging through nine levels of occupation at Hisarlik, interestingly enough excavating right through the classic period Hellenic occupation without recognizing it in the process.

Other early scientists who excavated for answers to questions, not necessarily gold artifacts, included Paul Emile Botta, an Italian who excavated the Palace of Sargon II of Assyria in the 1840s, under the mistaken impression that he had found the biblical site of Nineveh.

A few years later, Austen Henry Layard, an Englishman fired up by Botta's research, went searching and actually did find Nineveh. Christian J. Thomsen and Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae, succeeding curators of the National Museum of Denmark argued against the prevailing theory that in prehistoric times, iron tools were for poor people and bronze for rich, and in the 1840s looked for and provided the evidence for the Three Age System (Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages) throughout Europe.

The modern science of archaeology still grapples with three issues believed by European antiquarians in the century after the Enlightenment. First, they firmly believed that all white, propertied men were equal--but nobody else. Secondly, they believed European scientific society was the pinnacle of human endeavor, and that any society not there yet was inferior in some way. Thirdly, due to their efforts, much of the artifacts they found are in European museums, far from their countries of origin. It is only relatively recently that archaeology has begun to let go of these tenets, and, to some extent, returned to the original notions of equality of the Enlightenment itself.