Although the Scythians are not my research interest, my PhD is in Art
History (what is an "art historical" type?) even though I regard myself as
an archaeologist (in the US, there are few departments of archaeology, so
if you want to pursue old world archaeology, one often ends up in art
history, classics, biblical studes, etc), so I read the review with great
interest based on MEH's warning that art historical types might be upset.
The only upsetting thing is that their aren't more reviews like this that
take Art History and traditional archaeology to task for the endless
production of catalogs that discuss objects as if they just sprouted out of
the earth like weeds.
It's regretable that archaeologists continue to distinguish archaeology
from just acquiring objects by stating it's the emphasis on contextual
relationships that the archaeologist is interested in. Yet, when the stuff
is finally published, the significance of context is totally ignored.
For a similar view, see my "Review of Alfred Bernhard-Walcher, Günther
Dembski, Kurt Gschwantler, and Vassos Karageorghis, edited by Wilfried
Seipel, 1999, Die Sammlung zyprischer Antiken im Kunsthistorischen
Museum/The Collection of Cypriote Antiquities in the Kunsthistorisches
Museum." in Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 323
(2001) Pp. 97-98.
In my conclusion, I state the following:
In his essay on the history of the Vienna collection, Berhard-Walcher
astutely notes that the archaeological activities of diplomats in 19th c.
Cyprus resembled a competition. Although competition still stimulates the
activities of modern archaeologists, the current goal is often prestige in
the form of finding and excavating the most impressive site or being
awarded a large or influential grant. It would be desirable to see future
prestige vested in competition to produce the most thorough site reports,
better means of preserving and conserving monuments for future scholarship,
and in eliciting meaning from the study of contextual relationships. This
last is perhaps the most important as it is the documentation of context
that separates the professional archaeologist from the collector. One is
left to hope that powerful institutions such as the A.G. Leventis
foundation that funded this particular work might more usefully use turn
their influence and prestige toward funding the conservation of
one-of-a-kind architectural monuments that are suffering from exposure and
the comprehensive documentation of archaeological excavations. In this way,
the east Mediterranean archaeology of the 21st century might result in an
appreciation borne of understanding rather than of acquisition.
Cheers, Louise Hitchcock
Louise A. Hitchcock, Ph.D.
Research Associate,
The Cotsen Instititute of Archaeology at UCLA
http://www.ioa.ucla.edu/hitchcock.htm
http://www.ioa.ucla.edu/backdirt/Fallwinter00/cypriot.html
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