Antiquarians, Aesthetes, and Archivists Become Archeologists

Abstract

The first chapter introduces the noble antiquarian elites and discusses their influences on the tsars who made the decisions about how to evaluate the material remnants of the past for political purposes. Many stumbled along the path from transforming an artifact into a symbol of identity, and in this sometimes circuitous venture they were producing a fundamentally new kind of science of society. First, they had to collect and index discoveries, and the notion of Russia as a multi-ethnic empire provided the conceptual foundation. If the Scythian gold discovered along the Black Sea littoral, produced by craftsman from the Greek trading colonies that dated back to antiquity, captured the greatest attention, it also sparked debates about aesthetics and identity. At first blush it might appear that archeology was launched in Russia by a group of emigres excavating non-Slavic sites, but that would give greater credence to geography than to epistemology in the evolution of archeology.