Paper short abstract:

Conventional histories of the professionalization of Archaeology in Britain have ignored the major contribution of late Victorian scholars and the enduring influence and colonial context of their practice and ideas about progress, science, class, race, modernity and rational recreation.

Paper long abstract:

The professionalization of Archaeology in Britain is widely accepted by historians of the subject to have taken place between the wars, as a dynamic generation of new archaeologists, the 'golden generation' or 'heroic band', including O.G.S. Crawford, Vere Gordon Childe, Mortimer Wheeler, Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott modernised and professionalised a hitherto amateur pursuit to create an exciting new 'age of excavation'. This paper questions the extent to which this picture is a deliberate and misleading construct created by the group themselves. This manipulation has obscured the vital groundwork done by individuals in the previous generation, notably Sir John L. Myres, Sir William Flinders Petrie, Sir Frederic Kenyon, Sir Charles Peers and Harold Peake, who began the process of separating archaeology from anthropology, folk-lore, history and heraldic studies and turning it into a progressive and independent 'science'. Working within established societies, these individuals sponsored the new progressive archaeologists and manoeuvred them into positions of authority from which they were able to generated change, albeit not without challenge from older, influential amateurs. Many of the features we associate with 'professional' archaeology came from this earlier generation and reflected Victorian ideas about progress, science, class, race, modernity and rational recreation. They were, furthermore, developed not in Britain but within a colonial context, in Britain's imperial 'possessions', where archaeology and heritage were used as elements of colonial government and in the promotion of 'authentic' cultural identities. Professionalising archaeology in Britain involved rendering 'colonial' practices fit for purpose 'at home'.