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27 Perhaps the most intriguing and consequential case of “invented traditions” in European history involved a sweeping “colonization” of modern consciousness by the ancient GrecoRoman world. This process was launched several centuries ago, and its evolving manifestations have been a pervasive feature of European cultures ever since. The passages cited above are illustrative of this curious cultural conquest of the present by the past, although hundreds of other examples easily could have been substituted to make the point. More important in the present context, however, is to examine the nature of, and reasons for, the historical development of this referential and reverential engagement with the ancient “classical” world and, especially, to reveal its connection to the intimate and problematic relationship between ancient and modern colonialisms that I posited in chapter 1. 2 ARCHAEOLOGIES OF COLONIALISM All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean. DR. JOHNSON, IN BOSWELL 1887, VOL. 3:36.456 All civilized nations, in all that concerns the activity of the intellect, are colonies of Hellas. J. A. SYMONDS 1880:401 The continent of Europe has been our modern Hellas. . . . And surely we may without self-flattery claim that in the high civilization which Europe has inherited and passed on to her kindred across the oceans, is a Hellenism which the barbarian rejects but still longs to understand and assimilate. G. MURRAY 1953:52–53 Although the racial ancestry of the English was Nordic, their cultural ancestry is predominantly Mediterranean. D. S. FOX 1978:2 28 • A R C H A E O L O G I E S O F C O L O N I A L I S M RECURSIVE COLONIALISMS, ANCIENT AND MODERN This issue is of particular concern in dealing with the colonial encounter in the ancient western Mediterranean. That is because this encounter constitutes the seminal episode in the colonial process through which the indigenous peoples of the territories that would eventually spawn the dominant colonial powers of the modern world—France, England, Spain, Portugal, Germany—first became entangled with the Greco-Roman world that later would come to play such an obsessional role in the collective ancestral imagination of these imperial nations. Hence, it is a moment of pregnant significance for modern discourses of imperialism and anti-imperialism. The urgency of a critical archaeological reanalysis of this encounter is clear, as are the desirability and difficulty of situating that analysis from a position that attempts to unsettle the encounter from its discursively embedded context. This modern infatuation with ancient Greece and Rome stems from a particular moment in European history, the so-called Renaissance of the fifteenth century, when a new myth of European cultural ancestry was constructed. Not coincidentally, this was a period that also witnessed the first phase of modern European colonization beyond the Mediterranean.1 In this chapter, I first examine the ways in which the development and embellishment of this ancestral myth was linked both to the construction of a field of “cultural capital” (in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu2 ) marshaled in processes of class differentiation within European societies and to the production of an imperialist discourse providing an ideological engine (or at least a rationalization) for European colonialism abroad. I then show how both of these closely interrelated features have subtly conditioned and constrained the interpretive perspectives of archaeologists engaged in the study of ancient Mediterranean colonialism and explain why it is so critical to reflexively challenge our intellectual habitus, to the extent that this is possible. This discussion serves as the foundation for presenting, in chapter 3, an approach to the colonial encounter that points the way toward circumventing some of these vexing problems. The Renaissance was not so much a “rebirth” as an invention, a self-conscious attempt to link the present directly to a long dead and poorly understood period of the past by negating a millennium of intervening history and a wide variety of other cultural influences. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has noted, “we need not take the naïve history of the West at face value: Greece did not beget Europe. Rather, Europe claimed Greece.”3 The movement began in Italy, and, not surprisingly, it was actually ancient Rome, rather than Greece, that provided the initial ancestral “golden age” and Roman culture that was the first focus of adulation and emulation. The alluring imperial legacy of Rome, with its widespread traces...

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