from Lyon and played a leading role among the scholars who contributed to the origins of archaeology, and he was the first to use the term in the preface to his collection of inscriptions, the Miscellanae eruditae antiquitatis, published in the late eighteenth century. He believed that classical philology alone was not enough to develop the historical sciences; it was imperative to go back to other sources, too, such as inscriptions and incised monuments. Antique remains were books “whose stone and marble pages were written with hammer and chisel.” Systematic use of inscriptions and ceaseless comparison of texts and observable data on site were the rules of Spon’s critical method. He applied his method, not only as he studied the antiquities of Lyon, but also during his travels in italy, Dalmatia, greece, and turkey (1674–1675). Spon’s great originality was to have discovered and shown that “the soil is a history book.”

In the eighteenth century, the vogue for antiquities spread in France at an incredible rate, reflecting the mood of the times. The philosophy of the Enlightenment was guided by two dominant ideas, nature and reason, and it was admitted once and for all that both were the prerogative of antiquity. There was, therefore, a return to the antique and its aesthetic and moral values. This enthusiasm was only in part the result of the movement of ideas, for travel to Italy, and then to Greece and Asia Minor, became a mark of social distinction among the European elites. Simultaneously, travel writing bloomed: engravings, descriptions, and commentaries on monuments appeared in lavish publications, such as Le voyage pittoresque de Naples et de Sicile by the Abbé of Saint-Non (1781–1786) and Le voyage pittoresque en Grece by the ambassador Choiseul Gouffier (1782); the latter corresponded with the French consul in Athens, Louis Fauvel, who was commissioned to collect antiques for Gouffier, becoming one of the foremost connoisseurs of the sites in Athens. Another work that was very popular was by the Abbé Barthelmy, Le voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece, even though it described a fictional journey and was a literary version of Greece.

The whole approach to ancient history underwent a radical change in the eighteenth century. Interest in antiquities became less theoretical, and philology became less popular, especially in France, even though the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres was still sending out expeditions to bring back medals and manuscripts. The study of material remains began to be taken into proper account, linked as it was with the interest of the Encyclopédie (the movement within the Enlightenment to record and know everything possible) in materials, tools, and techniques.

bernard de montfaucon (1655–1741) exemplified the transition between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. He was a Benedictine monk and a philologist, a scholar of the written word but fascinated, too, by visual images, and he published the first collections of antiquities in an attempt to illustrate historical monuments as faithfully as possible. A generation later, the comte de caylus, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Pestels de Lévis de Tubières-Grimoard (1692–1765), broke with the philological tradition and inaugurated a new era in archaeology. He gave priority to studying and examining objects, even those used in daily life, and his method must be considered progress, archaeologically speaking, compared to the seventeenth century approach, which was concerned, above all, with coins and inscriptions. In an encyclopedic vision of culture, he wrote Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises (1752–1758). He was the first to classify these antiquities and to draw up a typology that would bring out geographical and historical distinctions.

In the eighteenth century, there were the spectacular but unscientific excavations of cities buried by Vesuvius (herculaneum and pompeii), excavations supported by the Bonapartes of Naples, and also a systematic search for Greek antiquities in southern Italy and Sicily. French architects contributed significantly to the knowledge of monuments and sites. Soufflot surveyed and drew the ruins of Paestum around 1750, and Hittorff later demonstrated the polychromy of Greek architecture by studying the temples in Sicily. David Le Roy brought back from his travels to Greece drawings that were more picturesque than scientifically exact (they