and resulted in his appointment to the influential Emperor’s Archaeological Commission, whose three members were in charge of all archaeological activity in russia.

In 1888 Kondakov became professor of art history at Petersburg University and principal curator of medieval antiquities at the Imperial Hermitage Museum. In 1889 he became an academician (member of an imperial academy of eminent academics). He published six volumes of Russian Antiquities in Monuments of Art and a work on Russian archaeology, Russian Hoards, in 1898. In the latter Kondakov researched burial mounds, hoards, and other finds “in all aspects of their style, typical form of subjects, (and) its historical changes,” using the iconographic typology developed in his thesis and transforming it into an archaeological typology. Kondakov continued to travel extensively and to publish his research on Byzantine art, which he described as the result of three different cultural and aesthetic traditions and influences—Hellenism, Greek–Egyptian–Near Eastern Orientalism, and the nomads from the steppes of the Black and Caspian Seas, Central Asia, and Southern Siberia.

At the end of the nineteenth century Russian prehistoric archaeology came of age. In 1899 aleksander spitsyn’s The Settling of Ancient Russian Tribes According to Archaeological Data and gorodcov’s “Russian Prehistoric Ceramics” were published, the latter becoming the basis of all typological work by Russian archaeologists. Kondakov returned to the analysis of Byzantine art, writing Iconography of Our Lady, Connections of Greek and Russian Icon-Painting with Italian Painting of the Early Renaissance in 1911 and the two-volume Iconography of Our Lady in 1914–1915.

Kondakov’s work, which redefined Russia and Russian culture as an expression of the Orthodox East as distinct from the cultural traditions of the West, also argued for Byzantium as the prototype for the contemporary Tzarist Russian empire. Both had unified Europe and Asia, and both justified Orthodoxy and autocracy. However this meant that liberal intellectuals and revolutionaries identified Byzantine influence with the maintenance of the monarchy and the social and political order. Kondakov was socially and politically conservative despite his background; closely connected with the church, he was readily admitted to the palace of Tsar Nicholas II as the court’s expert on icon-painting.

Kondakov was 73 when the Russian Revolution began. During the Civil War (1918–1920) he lived in Odessa in territory occupied mainly by anticommunist White Russians and by supporting troops of the European powers. When they lost he went into exile in Istanbul, Sofia, and finally in Prague in Czechoslovakia in 1921, where his pupils organized what became the Kondakov Institute after his death in 1925. The institute became important for the study of czech Byzantine art and Slav philology and history, moving to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, after the German invasion, where it was destroyed in 1944 during a German air raid. Kondakov’s numerous pupils have occupied leading positions within Soviet academe. He is now recognized as the founder of Russian archaeology.

Leo Klejn

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 165–174.

Korea

Archaeological research on Korean Peninsula has about 100 years of history, which can be roughly divided into two halves. During the first half, Japanese scholars had exclusive access to, and control of, archaeological research and interpretation in the few years before the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 and during their colonial rule of the peninsula from 1910 to 1945. The second half started with the defeat of japan at the end of World War II and the division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South Korea in 1945. Archaeological developments in the divided Korea have taken place with very little interaction between the two Koreas.

Archaeological Research before 1945

Before the modern discipline of archaeology was introduced to Korea, a number of Korean writers provided their own interpretations of archaeological sites and artifacts such as dolmens,