Overview

Delves into two controversies from the French archaeological world to illuminate the tension between the discipline's scientific ambitions and its hunger for media attention. For well over a century, from Heinrich Schliemann's sensational discoveries at Troy in the 1880s, through the Tutankhamun excavations of the 1920s, to the recent LIDAR-aided uncovering of lost Maya cities, archaeology has made headlines. In this new history of archaeology and its archival traces, Daniel J. Sherman treats the friction between science and spectacle as constitutive of the field. By exploring two long-running controversies that roiled the French archaeological world and its wider public in the first third of the twentieth century, he gives the science/media relationship a unique place in the history of archaeology—and its present. The first controversy involves a dispute over the conduct of excavations at Carthage in Tunisia, then under French colonial rule. In the second, accusations of forgery clouded what seemed to be a stunning Neolithic find at a hamlet called Glozel, in the Auvergne region in central France. The affair divided the scholarly community and attracted enormous media attention across Europe and North America. Both controversies occurred at a transitional moment between what has been called the heroic age of archaeology, dominated by explorers and adventurers with little specialized training, and the beginnings of its professionalization. As Sherman shows, the two affairs put the methods, procedures, and networks of archaeology in the spotlight and profoundly shaped its history.

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9780226835372

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Reviews

“Sherman is one of a handful of people who work at the intersection of history and art history. He brings to his scholarship an exceptional depth of research and methodological sophistication, and now he has done it again. This time, his subject is archaeology in Jazz Age France, a critical moment when the field was making a concerted effort to professionalize itself, a process, as Sherman shows, that was aimed not just at disciplining practitioners but also at creating a self-legitimizing public image through visual devices of varied kinds: photographs, theatricals, and spectacular displays.” -- Philip Nord, author of “France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era”

Author Information

Daniel J. Sherman is the Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Art History and History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of, among other books, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France and French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–1975, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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