Consequently That Now in Our Possession Was Sold: The Sale of the de Mortillet Collection

The processes through which ethnographic and archaeological material has entered Western museums are an important element in the history of anthropology (Hinsley 1992a; Schmidt and McIntosh 1996). In an interesting study Nicholas Thomas has employed ethnographic theories of exchange to look at the collection of aboriginal artifacts by travelers and missionaries in the South Pacific during the colonial period (Thomas 1991:125–184). Thomas draws on the terminology developed by Arjun Appadurai, who argues that commodities should be thought of as "things in a certain situation" rather than some particular type of thing. For Appadurai all objects are capable of becoming commodities (Appadurai 1986:13). Appadurai defines three elements of what he calls the commodity situation of an artifact:

• • The commodity phase is the time in which the object becomes a commodity, when its exchangeability for some other thing becomes its socially relevant feature.

• • The commodity candidacy is the standards and criteria that define the exchangeability of things in any particular historical context. The commodity candidacy of an object is closely related to standards of value on both ends of the exchange.

• • The commodity context refers to "the social arenas, within or between cultural units, that help link the commodity candidacy of things to the commodity phase of its career." (Appadurai 1986:15)

This paper extends Thomas's project by applying Appadurai's method to the study of the exchange of archaeological artifacts between Western institutions. The exchange examined is the sale of the collection of prehistoric European artifacts belonging to Gabriel de Mortillet by de Mortillet to the newly formed Harvard Peabody Museum in 1868. This analysis demonstrates the centrality of the scientific framework derived from European comparative zoology in the early stages of North American prehistoric archaeology.

The Social Life of Archaeological Objects

Archaeological objects have complex social histories. The life of the object can be separated into two phases. In the first phase the object is valued for its functionality, whether symbolic, practical, or—as is more often the case—a mixture of both. In its second phase, after recovery by archaeologists, the object is still valued for its functionality but its function is no longer symbolic or practical. The function of the object in its second phase is dependent on its authenticity and its ability to serve as evidence or a witness of the past. For archaeologists the authenticity of an object is closely linked to secure knowledge of the context in which it was discovered. Dividing the two major phases of an archaeological object's social life is an inert phase during which it is buried and has no social value.

In the second phase of an archaeological object's life it does not necessarily enter a commodity phase. In fact most archaeologists question the morality of the exchange of archaeological objects.¹ Legal frameworks now exist for controlling such exchanges. One of the main objections to the modern antiquities trade is that it is exploitative because it is largely the acquisition by private citizens in wealthy countries of the patrimony of poor countries. This problem is linked with the means available for recovering archaeological objects, such as bulldozers and dynamite, which can rapidly exhaust nonrenewable cultural resources. The current pattern of exploitative exchange of archaeological objects has a long history, the most famous example being the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum. In contemporary debate on the exchange of archaeological objects this practice is often presented as lying outside scientific norms. As this study will show, from a historica perspective the exchange of archaeological material has often taken place within a scientific framework. What is perhaps most problematic is not the exchange of objects per se but rather the exploitative fashion in which this is done in many parts of the contemporary world as well as the means used for collecting these objects, which destroys contextual information. The destructive capacity of people excavating objects in the late nineteenth century pales in comparison to contemporary methods. Perhaps more importantly, the number of potential purchasers of objects has grown exponentially, changing the...