Archaeology against the State: Roots of Internationalism (1995)

From World Heritage Sites to World Systems, global perspectives have come to play a dominant role in archaeology. The proliferation of variously ‘world’ entitled journals and the publication of the many volumes that are the proceedings of the 1986 World Archaeological Congress (One World Archaeology) attest to the prominence of the idea of a world archaeology/prehistory. There is a tendency to place the birth of this highly influential concept some time in the 1960s, the decade of emotive satellite imagery of the planet and McLuhan’s ‘global village’. Capturing the public spirit, ‘world’ projects featured in United Nations/UNESCO and environmental initiatives of the 1980s. Interrelating the global and local, the very big and small, by transcending or bringing pressure to bear upon the ‘middle’—the nation—‘One World’ is a compelling and apt contemporary ideology. It has come to supersede ‘united nations’, whatever the basis of their unity, inasmuch as it suggests the possibility of a world without borders. This chapter explores the roots of this recent archaeological internationalism, postulating that its origins, at least in part, lie in late/ post-Second World War reactions to nationalist archaeologies of the 1930s. Marking a watershed for the discipline, this reorientation was largely determined by the question of the role of the state and encouraged by the promise of objective archaeological science. The ‘state’ issue, much to the fore in the 1930s and 1940s, is still of relevance. It reflects, for example, upon recent declarations of politically motivated archaeologies and the awareness of practice in relation to local/indigenous, national, and international concerns. ‘The world’ and its many pasts is a (too) vast arena. This study is concerned only with the formulation of an international perspective in British archaeology. Narrowing the focus even further, it specifically considers the ‘announcement’ of this concept within a conference held in London in the late war years by Grahame Clark and his subsequent fostering of a global archaeological programme in the decades preceding the publication of World Prehistory in 1961. Finally, comparison is made between Clark’s ‘project’ and the avowedly political agenda of latter-day (One) World Archaeology.