Sensations: French Archaeology between Science and Spectacle, 1890–1940

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: From the Archaeological Archive 1. “For Carthage”: Scientific Networks and the Glare of Publicity Prologue: The Field and the Network Serious Men (and Their Archives) “To Save Carthage”: Networks, Authority, Publicity Enter the Americans Heritage and/as Science 2. The News from Glozel: Scholars, Media, and the Making of a Scandal The Glozel Archive: Exit the State Exchanging News Blame the Media Fake News/News of Fakes Affairs to Remember Coda 3. Bodies and Minds: The Work of Archaeology The Archaeologist’s Police File Bodies at/of Work Looking Like an Archaeologist 4. Reality Effects: Staging Archaeology Performing Carthage Glozel and the Performative 5. Picturing Things: Archaeology and the Imagined Past What Are These Objects? Who Were These People? Imagining the Glozelians Epilogue After Bizerte: 1926–1933–1962 “Glozel For Ever”: 1968–1974–2021 Objects, Knowledge, and the Archive: 2022– Notes Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“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.” “As a discipline grounded in fieldwork, archaeology involves both the social and natural sciences. But this position is the product of a long history that only came to fruition in the twentieth century. The originality of Sherman’s book lies in its ability to shed new light on this history: he brings a global and critical lens to bear upon excavation practices, their neocolonial context, archaeology’s complex relationship with the media, and the decisive role that amateur archaeologists have played in the discipline. In considering two seemingly dissimilar objects—the founding of French mandate-era Tunisian archeology and the most infamous controversy of the 1920s, the Glozel affair—Sherman brilliantly illuminates an emerging field’s sometimes farcical vicissitudes in the face of the public’s expectations. His deft and assured mastery of profoundly diverse and often comical sources exposes archaeology’s deep connections with what Guy Debord called ‘the society of the spectacle.’” “In Sensations, Sherman lays out the ways in which media, journalism, and publishing played a central and complex role in the legitimation of colonial archaeology and its claims to scientific expertise. Moving between the ruins of Carthage in Tunis to the hamlet of Glozel in France, the scientific, the sensational, and the scandalous are brought into focus as an archaeological nucleus of the fame of discovery, racialism, and imperial power. A superbly written and erudite book that exposes the historical bond between archaeology and the press, Sensations lays out the links between science, spectacle, and empire that continue to support archaeology’s sensationalizing claims today.” “Only a scholar of Sherman’s breadth, depth, and experience could produce such an innovative and interdisciplinary study. Sensations shows us how archaeology positioned itself between science and spectacle. Using case studies from France and French-occupied Tunisia, Sherman explores the extent of archaeology’s implication in colonial structures and discourse, from the 1880s to the 1920s and beyond. Dependent on media attention, yet ambitious for academic recognition, archaeology captured the public imagination even (or especially) when it struggled to interpret the distant past it had uncovered. This deeply researched and closely argued book traces an important new history of archaeology by connecting it to transnational histories of science, media, sexuality, and visual culture.”