ABSTRACT
In previous chapters I have been seeking to demonstrate that archaeology took shape within the conceptual framework of Western modernity, and that distinctively modern ways of thinking are still fundamental to the discipline and its practices. However, we should not imagine that this has been a one-way process, in which archaeological thought has simply come to embrace the main currents of modern philosophy. On the contrary, archaeology occupies a significant place in the modern imagination because it has provided a series of extremely potent metaphors that have been employed in a very diverse range of contexts. Archaeology is widely understood as being concerned with the recovery of knowledge about the past, by uncovering and revealing structures and artefacts that have been hidden for centuries. As such, it evokes notions of the repressed, the lost and the forgotten, and of the drama of discovery, which are often spatialised in terms of the relationship between depth and surface. While I have argued that the emergence of archaeology depended on ideas of historical time, nature, method and sociality that came into being from the Renaissance onwards, in this chapter I will suggest that the more specific transformation of antiquarianism into archaeology was bound up with significant changes in the character of modern thought at the end of the eighteenth century. Broadly speaking, this was the period in which a view of the world as composed of isolated entities (which were best understood through classification) began to be compromised by the notion that hidden structures underlay perceptible reality. My suggestion will be that archaeology itself has continued to embody a conflict between the search for hidden depths and the urge to classify objects and deny the existence of the insensible. Addressing these themes will require some recapitulation of ideas that have already been discussed in this book. Hopefully it will be clear that the intention is to open up some quite different implications of this material.
