Crystallization of Archaeology during the Epoch of the Great Reforms, 1855–1881

In 1855, Czar Nicholas I, unable to bear Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, died. The defeat was partly the consequence of a delay in the reformation of the country’s archaic social order, a point the new czar, Alexander II, understood. He began the necessary all-embracing reforms, such as the abolition of the serfdom and changes to laws, and one of his first reforms concerned archaeology. In February 1859, the Archaeological Commission (AC) was created by the Ministry of the Court as the central state office to control archaeological excavations, the collection of data on antiquities, the stimulation of their studies, and expert knowledge of them. All archaeological finds from state and municipal land, i.e., not in private ownership, came under the authority of the AC. The Hermitage was also under the Ministry of Court, so the AC was closely connected to it and the most valuable finds went to the Hermitage. The AC published annual reports of its studies and activities, which listed all archaeological finds and their fates.

In 1864, in addition to the archaeological institutions in Saint Petersburg, two were created in Moscow—the Moscow Archaeological Society (MAO) and the Society of Amateurs of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography (OLEAE). The founder of MAO was Count Alexey Uvarov, now thirty-seven years old and an archaeologist. Beginning in 1869, MAO organized the all-Russian archaeological congresses, held every three (later four) years, each in a different town. Ivan Zabelin, a venerable Moscow archaeologist, was for many years invited to work in Saint Petersburg in the AC. Zabelin had no university education, in fact no education at all, and he obtained his great knowledge from practice. He was the real head of the Historical Museum founded by Uvarov in Moscow.

Uvarov’s and Zabelin’s methodological articles reveal their interest in Slavic archaeology, mainly with the ethnic identification of monuments and the widely understood byt (everyday life and equipment) of ancient peoples, i.e., their cultures. The two men did not separate archaeological sources of information into a special branch, instead considering it side by side with ethnographic evidence from the field, museum observations, and written sources. They included all of these sources of information into the study of archaeology. They separated the discipline of archaeology not by specific sources but according to two criteria: practically, as a period not enlightened, or poorly enlightened, by chronicles, and theoretically, not by events but byt (culture). Archaeology for them, from the beginning, was something like paleoethnography.

In 1874, when the participants in the Third (Kievan) Archaeological Congress went to see the Sophian Cathedral, its dean, according to the historian Kostomarov, asked them, “Haven’t you come in order to search for arguments in favor of the origin of man from the ape?” Count Uvarov, leading the archaeologists, reassured the archpriest, “We do not march into such a distance.”

However, some Paleolithic discoveries were made in Russia, especially in the late 1870s and early 1880s. These included the excavations of kostenki near Voronezh on the Don River by Polyakov, the exploration of Crimean caves by Merezhkovsky, and even the discovery of a Paleolithic site in Karacharovo, on Uvarov’s own land. The main explorers of these sites were naturalists, not humanists. In Uvarov’s book Archaeology: The Stone Age (1881), there is no long chronology, and Darwin is not mentioned. Uvarov really did not march “into such a distance.”

Separation of Archaeology into a Special Discipline, 1881–1917

Liberalization ended when Czar Alexander II was assassinated by a terrorist in 1881. The majority of the archaeologists were on the side of the counterrevolution, and there were many aristocrats and priests in archaeology. Countess Praskovia Uvarova, who replaced her husband as the head of MAO after his death, once said that archaeology is knowledge for the rich.

In 1889, as part of a general centralization, the AC received the monopoly on issuing permits for excavations. Count Bobrinsky, a well-known Saint Petersburg archaeologist and the head of the AC, began to issue permits with great fervor. Uvarova and her colleagues at MAO protested, initiating a long quarrel between Saint Petersburg and Moscow archaeologists.