Archaeology and ancient history have been bound together in a tight, complex, and not overly satisfactory relationship since the Renaissance. The archaeologist depends on the ancient historian to provide chronological order and historical context to his/her material. The ancient historian relies on the archaeologist to enhance our sense of the physical world of antiquity and expand the corpus of material, preferably with written components that will deepen our understanding of the past.
By the end of the Renaissance the monasteries and libraries had been combed and the bulk of the Greek and Roman manuscripts recovered and published. Classical scholars and especially historians began to realize that it was only through the investigation of the material world that their corpus of information would be significantly expanded. The ancient historians established a tripartite mission for the archaeologist that continues to operate down to the present day. Classical archaeologists were to produce inscriptions that would expand the body of written materials available for study. They were to expand the topographical information provided by the ancient geographers and help create fuller and more accurate maps of the ancient world and better plans and reconstructions of the major sites. Finally they were to enrich the body of material culture from architecture through sculpture to minor arts like vases and bronzes that would not only inspire contemporary artists but also inform the cultural historian.
Archaeology took another turn in the seventeen and eighteenth centuries with the rise of the antiquarian. They often lacked the broad vision of the humanist, but had a more factual and scientific approach to the study of the past. Sometimes dismissed as overly concerned with minutiae, the antiquarians did lay the foundations for more rigorous scholarship in such combined historical and archaeological fields as numismatics. They also represented a greater geographical range in their interests in antiquity. The humanists centered their activities in Italy. Antiquarians were located
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
Throughout Europe, and they played an important role in integrating prehistory, classical and national history in countries like France, Germany, and England.
The goals of ancient history changed during the nineteenth century, and with that the relationship to archaeology. The ancient historians were pioneers in the new critical history that rigorously analyzed sources and attempted to separate fact and fiction in the study of Greek and Roman texts. As the nineteenth century progressed, the study of history in general became more empirical, and with those developments ancient historians faced new dilemmas. Their own research had challenged the historical validity of many of the canonical writers such as Homer and Livy. However, an ancient historian could not compensate for the limitations of the major works by emulating contemporary historians like the German Leopold Ranke and expanding the body of information on antiquity through archival research. Greek and Roman archives, if they ever existed, had long since been destroyed. As the historical discipline demanded an ever more precise reconstruction of the past, the ancient historians could not deliver. The only significant expansion of information had to come from archaeology.
Epigraphy came in the nineteenth century to form an important link between archaeology and ancient history. Scholars like Bartolomeo Borghesi, August Boeckh and Theodor Mommsen realized the importance of the historical evidence contained in inscriptions, and set out developing a scientific system for their collection, analysis, and publication. Since many of the Latin inscriptions first studied in Italy and Western Europe were already in collections or publicly accessible, the role of the archaeologist was initially limited. Different was the Hellenic world of Greece and Asia Minor, where systematic investigations only began in the nineteenth century. The archaeological pioneers there had the three-fold task of finding and charting sites, relating them to ancient geography, and recording and publishing the large number of Greek language inscriptions they found.
Hellenic archaeology in the early nineteenth century was largely shaped by the work of the great topographers like the Englishman William Leake. They described the remains at often little-known sites, attempted to ascertain their ancient identity, and published the texts of inscriptions that they had discovered during in their explorations. They were generally well-read classicists, intrepid explorers, and skilled observers. Their agenda was shaped to a great degree by the surviving ancient geographical writers, such as Strabo, who lived in the Augustan period, and the Greek Pausanias of the second century AD. Far less studied in the schools and universities than the histories of Herodotus or Thucydides, those ancient geographical guidebooks became the key links between the worlds of the historian and the archaeologist.
The scholarly agenda did not change markedly when the archaeologist turned from geographical investigation and epigraphical collection to actual excavation. The Germans set the pattern when they started excavations at Olympia in 1875. It was a site of great historical and cultural importance to Greek civilization, undisturbed by post-classical development. Pausanias provided a detailed description of Olympia in the second century ad that shaped and guided the archaeological program. The stress was on the uncovering and reconstruction of the great public monuments. The
Excavations produced inscriptions for the epigrapher, architecture and sculpture for the art historian, and some visual “realia” for the text-based ancient historian. Other major digs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at places like Delos, Delphi, Corinth, Ephesos, Miletos, and Samothrace followed a similar course. In spite of many exciting finds and new insights into the classical past provided by these excavations, the ancient historical hierarchy still remained in place, one based on the ongoing premise that the discipline should first focus on political history, with cultural, social, and economic history following behind. First the canonical ancient texts must be mastered, then the inscriptions and secondary texts, and finally the physical remains.
Archaeology did become central to ancient historical studies for those time periods and geographical areas, where the information provided by the textual sources was limited or the validity of canonical texts had been seriously challenged. Archaeology was called upon here to validate Homer’s description of the Trojan War or Livy’s account of early Rome, since the veracity of those authors had been challenged by the “higher critical” methodologies of the philologists and ancient historians. Schliemann excavated at Hissarlik to find Homer’s Troy, while Giacomo Boni discovered Romulus’s Rome in the Forum.
World History
