Excavating Empire

Abstract

This book tells the story of imperial Russia’s archeologists, the pioneering generations of men and women who took their trowels to the burial tumuli, Russia’s kurgans, and went digging to unearth a tangible, identifiable past. Determined to establish professional standards, they were producing a new kind of knowledge, one with the potential to furnish insights necessary for an objective evaluation of their collective past. If they came up short on their ideals of objectivity, they succeeded admirably in inserting their activities into all the key issues that Russians were grappling with throughout their long nineteenth century. Archeology became a science of society that lay beneath the topsoil and in forgotten ruins, accessible to all those who craved knowing more about the long-ago. But these objects were themselves fated to the personalities who excavated and interpreted them. Viewing the digging sites from these disparate gazes, this book puts the archeologists themselves front and center, watching as they quibbled among themselves and with their Western counterparts. These would-be social scientists came from all social backgrounds, beginning with the noble elites who collected antiquities for their artistic values, with little thought to historical contextualization. Additionally, women, school teachers, and even political exiles all made momentous contributions. Whether reconstructing a woolly mammoth from bones washed up in a Siberian riverbed, or arguing for icons as evidence of social not just theological change, Russia’s multi-ethnic archeologists excavated objects equally capable of producing a national as well as an imperial identity. Everything old became new again.