2.4: 'Collecting Old Things' is not Archaeology


One sometimes meets the opinion  (including from some unreflexive UK archaeologists) that collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record and archaeology have in some way 'common aims'. This basically means that the people espousing this view consider that the aim of both is nothing more than 'collecting and contemplating (interesting) old things'. Archaeology is (should be) more than mere antiquitism. The objects do not form the object of study in themselves, that is a separate field of study altogether - material culture studies.

Artefact collections are also not a good way to curate archaeological material. For the scientific community, then, a non-profit, self-perpetuating museum is considered the safest depository for archaeological collections. With the passage of time, important artefacts in personal collections may lose their importance. When they are traded and sold without supporting documentation, they become nothing more than curios or relics, because important information about them (such as the part of the archaeological record from which each object came), is often lost. When this happens to an artefact, it loses most of its ability to be archaeological evidence. Private archaeological collections are also at risk from various factors such as fire, theft, disposal by a disgruntled or uninformed spouse, or by the collector's heirs who are unaware of the scientific importance of the specimens.

An analogy might be between stamp collecting - a loose collection of coloured pieces of paper nicely arranged on a page may be 'informative', may give various types of pleasure (aesthetic, trophy/bragging rights), but is a far different thing than the study of postal history through those stamps (in context on a cover and associated with other phenomena such as postmarks, senders address etc)

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Likewise rows and rows of captured and killed butterflies labelled with place and date of capture may provide information of a kind (wing pattern/colour variation, shrinking habitats and range), but it is not ecology.

Collecting vintage costume Barbie dolls, or 'vintage' horse brasses, are not ethnology.



Tamara Kroftova comments:
"The idea that one can find reflected in much insular archaeological discussion of artefact hunting that making collections of archaeological items is some form of "citizen archaeology" is simply a naive and unreflexive denial of what the discipline archaeology is all about that has its roots in colonial exploitation of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries".

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