to the country’s antiquities. Some of these initiatives were in response to European educational thinking (Barril 1993, 44); others, to specific subjects, such as the study of the situation in the colonies or the defense of royal rights against the papacy (Mora 1991, 31).

The most prominent institutions were the private Sociedades de Amigos del País (Societies of Friends of the Country) and, among the public ones, the Real Academia de la Historia (Royal Academy of History, founded in 1738) the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, 1752), the Librería Publica (Public Library, 1716, the forerunner of la Biblioteca Nacional [National Library], which was founded in the nineteenth century), and the Gabinete de Historia Natural (Cabinet of Natural History, 1773), whose collections constitute the original nucleus of the present Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Museo Etnológico y Museo de America (National Museums of Archaeology, Ethnology, and the Americas).

The documentation and material preservation of archaeological monuments and finds were one of this period’s great advances (Barril 1993, 45). Archaeological excavations were carried out to enlarge collections and to identify those ancient cities (Munda, Numantia, Segobriga, Saguntum) that had once contributed to the glory of the nation. In a sense, the appreciation of these ruins more for their aesthetic and picturesque than for their historical value prevented studies as broad as those that Charles III, as king of Naples, had sponsored at pompeii, herculaneum, and Stabia (Fernandez 1988, 384; Mora 1991, 32).

Beginnings of Scientific Archaeology

In the nineteenth century, archaeological research was carried out against a social background of civil and colonial wars and sharp conflict over the organization of the state. And it was carried out not by public sponsors, but by private initiatives. These initiatives, in the political and intellectual context of the times, were increasingly centered on local and national concerns. At the same time, isolation was broken by reading, contact with foreign researchers (Gran-Aymerich and Gran-Aymerich 1991), participation in international congresses (Ayarzaguena l99l, 69), and universal expositions (Barril 1993, 50). Basic to this broadening of outlook was the establishment of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza by Francisco Giner de los Rios in 1876 (Moure 1993, 206–207), which had the patriotic goal of understanding and renewing Spain. Against Catholic conservatism, it represented a secular and innovative attitude and sought to renew Spanish secondary and university education by encouraging studies abroad and receptivity to French, British, and German pedagogical approaches (Jutglar 1971, 148–153).

Scholarly and scientific societies (numismatic, archaeological, and so on) began to be established early in the nineteenth century, and their publications, generally local, played a fundamental role in the popular and scientific spread of culture and education. Some demanded the protection and recovery of ancient monuments (Salvatierra l990, 22); others participated in debates on evolution and prehistoric archaeology, topics censored until the Revolutionary Sexennium, a revolutionary period between 1868 and 1874 (Ayarzaguena 1991, 69). These initiatives, and those of booksellers, maintained the interest in knowledge of the past. The state sought to centralize that interest through institutions that would define a historic heritage common to the whole national territory: royal academies, museums, and (after 1900) universities, whose activities had hitherto been unimportant in the development of archaeology in Spain (Cortadella I Morral 1991, 161; Pasamar and Peiró 1991, 73).

The cabinets and royal academies were converted into public museums with ever more specialized collections. As a result of their participation in the juntas cientifico-artisticas (“scientific- artistic councils”) and the comisiones de monumentos provinciales y central (“provincial and central monuments commissions”) established to recover ecclesiastical properties after the disentailments decreed between 1835 and 1843 (Barril 1993, 47), the royal academies widened their work of protecting and collecting the cultural heritage. The Academy of History likewise devoted its efforts to the promotion of archaeological