the discovery of and a cross-section through the Harappan defenses at Harappa; the identification of a Roman trading station at Arikamedu; and the establishment, on the basis of ceramic correlations with the dated ceramic sequence at Arikamedu, of a chronological sequence for southern Indian archaeology from the Neolithic stage upward. Among other issues, he emphasized the need for prehistoric and proto-historic studies, establishing a separate prehistory branch in the survey, and he underlined the importance of spreading archaeological studies beyond the confines of a government department to the portals of universities in India. Within the short span of time available to him for archaeological researches in the subcontinent, what he achieved and influenced must be considered remarkable.

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Sir Mortimer Wheeler

(Image Select)

Barry Cunliffe

See also

Indus Civilization; South Asia

References

A longer discussion of Wheeler’s life may be found in the Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 371–383, and in Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology by Jacquetta Hawkes (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).

Who Owns the Past?

It is a commonplace that archaeological knowledge is not and never has been produced in a cultural and political vacuum. Yet this fact was not formally recognized by archaeologists until the twentieth century. In the 1800s, when the fundamental structures of the discipline were created, the bulk of practitioners (and the general public, which avidly followed their work) firmly believed that archaeologists produced rational, objective, scientific knowledge about the past. Further, the search for knowledge about human history, at least as undertaken by archaeologists, was of sufficient cultural significance to be self-evidently worthwhile. A scientific archaeology was to provide an objective history of humanity, and this history (in the eyes of commentators such as Sir John Lubbock [lord avebury]) should become the foundation upon which rational societies of the future would be built.

This same search for universal edification (undertaken or controlled by Europeans or, later, North Americans) had been a major factor in fostering the work of collecting expeditions to italy, greece, and Asia Minor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which were followed by major expeditions in Egypt and the Middle East. In an important sense the pasts of countries that lay outside the borders of metropolitan Europe were considered to be resources that could be articulated by archaeologists and antiquarians in the search for an understanding of human (read European) history. Thus the great excavations in mesopotamia, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece that began in the nineteenth century and continue to this day were initially launched to explore the roots of Judeo-Christian civilization and to bring back to London, Paris, Berlin, or New York the material representations of that great journey toward civilization.

It is also no coincidence that these explorations outside Europe (especially in Africa, the Americas, and Australia) fulfilled two roles at the same time—providing a reconnaissance of contemporary human diversity and fostering a consideration of the relationship between the histories of such places or people and the history of Europe. The museums of “man” or “natural history” that sprang up all over the western