ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Metaphor and Method in Colonial Archaeology

• In Event: Histories of Archaeology 2

English Abstract

Metaphors of readability have been central to scholarly descriptions of the world since late antiquity: the book of nature, the archives of earth history, the genetic code. My paper examines the media history of this metaphor in twentieth-century archaeology. In the interwar period, before the ‘archaeological record’ became a common concept, British archaeologists Tessa Verney Wheeler and Mortimer Wheeler transformed excavation reports from descriptive documentation into prescriptive method, turning the soil itself into a historical text to be read, interpreted, and annotated. Shifting perspective from conceptual history to media history, my paper shows how the Wheelers’ excavations turned the metaphor of the readability of the world into a set of media practices that came to define modern archaeology.
Central to establishing this method was its pedagogical implementation, led primarily by Tessa Verney Wheeler. Through intensive training at excavation sites in 1930s England, she taught students the Wheelers’ system of three-dimensional recording. The Wheelers’ excavation sites disseminated their method of excavation and notation, establishing it as archaeology’s standard form of knowledge production. By analysing field practices, training regimes, and imperial politics of knowledge, my paper reveals how this method brought Mortimer Wheeler to India in 1943 as director of the Archaeological Survey of India, regardless of his lack of expertise in Indian history and archaeology. There, he established dedicated training excavations and published methodological papers that codified the approach, later feeding into his definitive 1954 textbook ‘Archaeology from the Earth’. My paper thus complicates histories of both British and Indian archaeology, showing that ‘modern archaeology’ was not simply an imperial export from metropole to periphery but emerged as a set of practices shaped and reshaped as they moved along colonial infrastructures.

Author

• Felix Lüttge, German Historical Institute London