and their institutions lacked, to put it mildly, coherence and policies. They had ludicrously tiny resources, and as a result theoretical models were not among their top priorities. Furthermore, at the time when French metropolitan archaeology was at last becoming established, modernity and grand explanatory paradigms were no longer in fashion. Besides, the individuality and proliferation of “post-modernist” ideas, which have continued to spring up ever since, were unable to gain widespread acceptance. French intellectuals grow up in a Cartesian deductive tradition, captured in the famous phrase cogito, ergo sum. In other words, their ability to think is their prime certainty. Their “reason” is not a faculty for epistemological questioning but a means of acquiring a direct grasp of the way things are. By following the logic of cogito, ergo sum, the intellectual can come to know and understand this reality purely through deduction.

Consequently, unlike their British or North American counterparts (who grow up in a system of empiricism), French researchers are not tempted to throw out the old paradigms and replace them with new ones that appear better suited to the problems of the moment. Instead, old and new concepts are combined as necessary into a general intellectual approach that cannot easily be labeled. This is why, for instance, structuralism in France has never been considered to be a theory or a school of thought, but simply a working method. Moreover, although nowadays young French archaeologists are familiar with epistemological concepts and ideas, they have difficulty in believing that there could be archaeological theories. The French indeed observe that archaeological data have never been used directly as the basis of a theory, when theory is defined as an explanatory system that works for data other than those used originally to generate the theory.

Archaeology, French Style

We have seen that, despite several crises of national legitimacy, French archaeology developed without the impetus of necessity. Local archaeology from the northern shores of the Mediterranean was never very interesting or contentious in France because of its inability to ever match up with the vision of excellence of Greco-Roman “civilization.” This notion of archaeology as distinct from any idea of civilization is extremely important for an understanding of the situation of archaeological research in a country where the intelligentsia has always held a dominant position.

Yet everything began well. The fifteen volumes of L’Antiquité expliquée en figures by the Benedictine scholar bernard de montfaucon (published 1719–1724), which brought to public notice the antiquities attributed to the Gauls, and the Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises by the comte de caylus (1752–1757), which emphasized the new notion of a typology, are evidence of the birth and growth of archaeological knowledge well able to take its place among the other humanities (Schnapp 1993). Admittedly, Montfaucon and Caylus were antiquaries, representatives of a style of archaeology that was mainly object-based and concerned only with monuments. But Caylus was not content merely with using antiquities for “illustrative” purposes. He wanted the study of antiquities to be one particular means of learning about the past, to interpret them using ethnographic comparisons, and to establish stylistic rules that would make it possible to assign a date and a place of origin to every object. Hence the care taken to collect the objects, describe them, and publish them formed the basis of a technical knowledge that, in the hands of men like Auguste Millin (1826) and later Solomon Reinach, was extremely important for French classical archaeology.

However, this prestigious tradition was eclipsed in the first half of the nineteenth century by the rise of German archaeology. In Germany, the Altertumswissenschaft revolution was under way, in which philology was given pride of place. It carried along with it German classical archaeology, which acquired a position in academe well before archaeology elsewhere in Europe was accorded similar status. Admittedly, the discoveries in France and the immense prestige of j.-f. champollion and, later, p. e. botta contributed to the creation of outstanding schools of Egyptology and Assyriology. But Orientalism