The apartheid of antiquity

Abstract

The term ‘antiquity’ can be used in different contexts to describe both the prehistoric past and the classical age of Graeco-Roman civilization in the western part of the Old World, a usage which glosses over the ways in which the experiential and discursive surrounds of these two pasts have been, and to some degree still are, radically different. This paper develops the notion of an ‘artefactual apartheid’ of the material remnants of the ancient past, beginning in the seventeenth century – a process grounded in the emergence of opposing methodological terrains as the appropriate means of studying different classes of ancient material culture. This shift is considered as profoundly intertwined with the politics of the colonial and postcolonial eras, and the roles archaeology has played within them.

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