Factual claims in late nineteenth century European prehistory and the descent of a modern discipline’s ideology

Abstract

Extravagant, fantastic claims about the past are not unique to the late nineteenth century in European prehistory, yet those from that period sound especially curious to twenty-first century archaeological ears and invite reflection: their authors are our direct disciplinary ancestors, yet, when we find fantastic what they took to be sound knowledge, we appear to be of a radically different breed of scholars/subjects. In this article, I explore the nature of the difference, and do so while attempting to ‘re-member’ the presence in our disciplinary past of those ancestors. At issue is not the nineteenth century ideological context that made their fantastic claims appear like solid knowledge to them but the disciplinary ideology that sustains the practice of prehistoric archaeology today, and from the standpoint of which the nineteenth century factual claims are curious. This ideology, I argue, descends from the very nineteenth century scholarship that it now finds replete with fantasies. Demonstration of this requires that I leave aside the familiar techniques of today’s historicism and treat the difference in terms of continuity and transformation of the subject.