ABSTRACT
‘Archaeology is a subject’, proclaimed a women’s magazine in the mid-1890s, ‘peculiarly adapted to all cyclists’. This pronouncement signals archaeology’s disciplinary identity as so well established that it could confidently be popularized as a hobby. In asking how archaeology was treated in newspapers and periodicals for different readerships, this chapter examines the relationship between Victorian popular culture and the development of disciplines; how evidence from the Victorian popular press fits with existing accounts of the development and separation of archaeology as a discipline. Expectations of what target readers should be taught reveal how archaeology as a discipline was promulgated. Even as archaeology was demarcated from kindred disciplines, however, its precise definition varied: in particular, antiquarians and archaeologists often appeared interchangeable. Modern histories of archaeology often condemn Schliemann as embodying the ‘romanticism of the antiquarian era’ or as an ‘archaeological anachronism’ using ‘crude and destructive’ methods, but others praise his pioneering of ‘basic archaeological methods’ to ‘uncover a rich preclassical culture’.
