Abstract
Contrary to other forms of heritage (i.e., art collections), archaeology is based on allegedly objective data and is, therefore, particularly suitable to support ideological narratives on the past. Its scientific nature, combined with the proximity between its subject, material findings, and the cultural heritage of certain groups, entails that its history is key to understanding the interactions between science and its public. From an historical analysis that highlights the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, participation and narration of heritage, we can move on to reconstruct a critical approach to museums, collections, and cultural heritage in the society of the present and the future and re-imagine the role of history of science in this complex process.
1 Specimens Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: A Look at Museums and the Role of the History of Archaeology
Since the last decades of the 20th century, the studies on the material and visual aspects of science have grown significantly. As a consequence of the material and visual turn in history of science, the number of scholars interested in collections and museums has grown too. In museums and collections, objects are contextualized as scientific evidence in a larger framework.1 They can be considered both as epistemic source of scientific knowledge and as historical and cultural sources that can illuminate a variety of aspects in history of science (gender, practices, individual agency, object agency, psychological approaches and so on). Because of this, recent development in fields such as museum studies, art, archaeology, and mobility studies to cite only a few, are becoming increasingly important for historians of science. This process combines with the ongoing debate on the definition of museums themselves.
A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.2
In August 2022, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) approved the above-cited definition of a museum, eliciting widespread enthusiasm among scholars. Although the necessity of a modern definition had been stressed as early as the 1990s, attaining an agreed-upon definition was far from easy. A fundamental passage was the 2019 proposal, right before the pandemic outbreak.3 The current definition is largely based on that proposal and the ensuing debate. However, the 2019 proposal was much more articulated and problematic than the approved one. It read:
Museums are democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.
Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.4
This formulation unleashed vibrant protests. Some considered it a limitation, some, by contrast, too broad. But the strongest criticisms were that it was too politically loaded. Somewhat surprisingly, the opponents’ leader of the 2019 proposal did not come from authoritarian countries. On the contrary, the president of ICOM-France, Juliette Raoul-Duval, moved on the offensive against what she considered a “politicization” of the museum spaces.5 According to Raoul-Duval, the proposal was an unacceptable “ideological manifesto.”6
However, the history of museums and collections shows that it is impossible to view them as neutral spaces. Contrary to Augé and Bauman’s non-places,7 in which no social, commercial, or interpersonal relationships are displayed, museums weave relations by virtue of the objects and material they store.8 By weaving relations and telling stories, museums act as political spaces.9 Moreover, the relations and stories exhibited in the museum’s halls unfold themselves in the present space and in time, making the museal action particularly meaningful. In the 2019 document, this diachronic aspect was clearly present in that it proposed a “critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures.” This aspect disappeared from the final definition, though.
Another aspect of the original document has not made it to the 2022 definition: the polyphony of voices. Raoul-Duval rejects the word “polyphonic” as an “inappropriate and caricatural” term and asks herself: “who doesn’t do it? and even, who doesn’t try to excel in it?.”10 To be sure, Raoul-Duval’s interpretation of the term seems to rest on a misunderstanding. She claims that it leads to “diversify the range of what we offer and seek attractiveness.” However, the term has another nuance in cultural studies, providing a precise programmatic value. The term “polyphonic” alludes to Michail Bachtin11 and the capacity of a (not exclusively literary) narrative to include many voices in order to construct a dialogue between different standpoints. Consequently, museums without a narrative are a mere utopia (if not a dystopia insofar as it entails that curators relinquish any responsibility for the result). A museum or collection, or even a single object, recognized as heritage by a small community or social group, tells multiple stories.12 Therefore, the only way to reach a critical approach to museums is to adopt a dialogical dimension in which several narrative and interpretative planes interact. In other words, it is not a matter of “diversifying the offer” but problematizing it. But problematization entails a political action, a stance, possibly an open one.
Leaving aside conceptual issues, the sticking point of the 2019 definition, as said, was its political flavor. This critique profoundly affected the proposal approved by ICOM last August. In the new definition, any reference to the democratic mission of museums and their contribution to the dissemination of a critical approach to the material culture of the past (and the present) have been removed. The mission is no longer ethically characterized, and the role of museums is thereby marginalized because it voided of (openly political) values such as “social justice, global equality, and planetary wellbeing.” Those ethical aspirations which were surely ambitious but arguably necessary in a world dominated by pandemics, climate change, economic crises, populism, authoritarianism, and war have thus been erased.
It would be worthwhile to ask which pedagogical role museums would like to play, as there is no politically neutral pedagogy.13 Likewise, museums’ messages have never been neutral. Historians, and historians of science particularly, know very well that they are the result of the history and society they are embedded in. Neutrality and positivistic scientism are here just political statements: museums do not represent facts, but narratives.14 This might be true to the extent that narratives are seldom elaborated by curators who share with the objects the same background.15 The very disposition and organization of the spaces is an act of discipline of bodies and thus a political action.16
However, the stance taken by ICOM is full of consequences for the way in which the next generations of curators, educators, and visitors will approach museums. As a global organization, ICOM has authority and holds weight, far beyond ICOM and its members. The role of research in the history of scientific collections has, therefore, a key role to play in monitoring the function of museums and in keeping the focus on the power they have in our society. At the same time, scientific research must maintain critical attention on the project of democratization of museums and collections, which a political body of global influence like ICOM seems to have forgotten. Research must fill the gaps and bring a critical contribution to the debate on museums, collections, and, more generally, the material and immaterial culture. In other words, it must assume the task to remember to curators that there is no such thing as a neutral museum as they are institutions that create narratives, that is, interpretation of reality. This is even truer in museums that store, exhibit, and communicate scientific collections, which quite obviously allude to a natural reality and the place of humankind in history.
Scientific collections, being naturalistic, archaeological, anthropological, and so on, are an instrument, an object, and an actor of narratives. Moreover, the objects’ selection and organization reveal a political heritage, that is, their being representative of a certain reality. These points have been precisely made by Strasser already ten years ago:
These collections can be considered to have been representations of nature, like paintings, because they reflected an intentional perspective, embodied in a limited selection of natural objects. Furthermore, they were groupings of things made by collectors, not as found in nature. A collector isolated a thing in nature (say, a bird), stripped it of its relations to its surroundings (the forest), left behind most of its properties (such as being alive), and turned it into a specimen embedded in a new system of relations with other specimens in a collection. Birds could be found in trees, but in collections, there were only specimens.17
This process of selection and organization stems from the history of collections. It’s a history that must be studied and criticized not to fall prey to stereotypes and elitarian ideologies. Moreover, museal narratives hold power to define and disseminate personal and collective identities, to interpret reality and the role of individuals and societies. From a great power—to organize and communicate objects (specimens)—it derives a great responsibility, first of all, the choice of narratives and the problems to provide to the public’s reflection. But, as said, the ICOM definition does not formulate any assumption of an ethic of global responsibility on the part of museums. It rather leaves to the goodwill of individuals, who must “operate and communicate ethically” and “professionally.” That this is sufficient to foster a critical approach to the problems of contemporary society is very dubious. Analogously, it is doubtful that it is “ethically necessary” to think about the history and cultural bias plaguing collections and undermining the role of museal institutions in the present and future.
The history of science offers a novel perspective on the role cultural heritage plays in the public discourse on the construction of reality and identity and, more generally on the history of archaeology. The reason is that, at least since the end of 19th century, archaeology aims at reconstructing cultural heritage from a scientific viewpoint. In the last 150-odds years, archaeologists have increasingly adopted scientific methodologies, tools, and concepts typically used in physical, natural, and biomedical sciences. Examples are numerous: one only needs to think of the stratigraphic method derived from geology, the typological-comparative approach of botanics, or the usage of chemistry to analyze human remains. More recently, the scientific weaponry of archaeology has been enriched by the application of genetics, the use of big data and machine learning techniques. Alternatively, as the essays in this volume clearly prove, the history of archaeology, archaeological collections, and their popularization is an exciting and helpful springboard for critical reflections. On the one hand, the history of the archaeological heritage highlights the complex relationships between politics and material culture, on the other, it offers an entry point in the process of construction of narratives of collective identity through scientific practices. It also allows us to reflect on narratives, methods, and stereotypes that in the past were sounding boards and instruments of propaganda for regimes and nationalistic policies. Assuming the viewpoint of the history of science and its relations with material and visual cultures—the central topic of this special issue—the history of archaeology becomes a privileged observatory to investigate the interplay between experts and society, scientific institutions, and the public.
2 Archaeological Objectivity from the 1870s to Present Times
The criticism of the ethic-political responsibility that museums assume seems to reconnect to the old claim of objectivity and impartiality underlying many 19th-century scientific collections (including archaeological ones). In a classical study, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison18 demonstrated that seeking objectivity grounds the institutionalization process in both natural and human sciences. The material visualization of the scientific proof, stored in museums and exhibited to the public, was a turning point in the legitimization of all disciplines, archaeology among them. Since its institutionalization in the 19th century, archaeology has appealed to the objectivity of the material datum to support its political and social legitimacy (Coltofean, Pizzato, this volume). Historically, the first attempt to transform prehistoric archaeology into an independent field of inquiry by Thomsen and De Mortillet simultaneously positioned archaeology closer to sciences, such as geology and comparative anatomy. More interestingly, they inaugurated a tendency, still alive,19 to consider museum collections as repositories of scientific evidences.20
As pointed out by Kasper Risbjerg Eskildse, using the history of archaeology as a kind of litmus paper, “also reveals the arbitrarinesss of the boundaries between the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities.”21 As it will became clearer upon reading the articles that follow, history of archaeology is a sort of “in-between field” which represents an interesting branch both of history of science and history of human sciences.22 Moreover, archaeology, defined as a “science of old things” has a long traditions in considering material aspects in the constructions of knowledge as well as in its circulation and reception by the general public. Clearly, these are also topics of interest for historians of science. A very recent example of the benefits of a dialogue between archaeology and history of science is the article by Anne Teather, which interpret archaeology as a “narrative science.” The author states that “the primary goals of archaeology is to construct narratives of past human societies through the material evidence of their activities”23 and, consequently, it represents a useful resource also for history of science.
However, past collections did not only contain material objects. Archaeological museums use, then and now, paper and visual supports. These supports are not a dispensable element of collections. On the contrary, they are crucial to grasp the meaning of the objects. In other words: they are a fundamental instrument for communicating the scientific content of the exhibition. Informational supports enable the visitor to retrace the analytic process of the scientific datum pursued by scientists and curators. More importantly, they contextualize and testify to the claims of the collection. They are a part of the organization of the museum. Their usage (or lack thereof) is a clear methodological and museological choice. During the 19th century, they enabled the visitors to compare the remnants and spot analogies.24 Today, museums use reconstruction not only to make a “scientific reality” vivid but also to enhance the public’s emotional engagement (see, e.g., Hochadel, this volume).
In the history of archaeological collections, one can find countless anthropological reconstructions. The use of the latest technology is not a novelty. Although today museums use augmented reality, in the late 19th century, they used photography, a device widely regarded as an epistemically neutral vector to the scientific datum. For a while, photography and archaeological drawing coexisted as practices of co-construction of knowledge for experts and amateurs alike. More importantly, they also became instruments for creating consensus not only about the new archaeological science (Coltofean, Mallart, Pizzato this volume) but also about new social groups and emerging political ideologies (Troilo this volume).
Heritage—as well as science25—is a political resource.26 By touching upon different aspects, the articles in this special issue show that the practices of disseminating archaeological knowledge did not merely aim at consolidating a consensus about the discipline. They also supported several different social and political agendas. All significant 19th-century archaeological collections contributed to some agenda. Examples are the 1876 exposition of Hungarian remnants at the CIAAP (International Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology and Anthropology) (see Coltofean this volume) and the photographic display “Iconografic Repertoire of Spain” at the International Exhibition of Barcelona (Mallart this volume). However, as Oliver Hochadel demonstrates in his article, the political usage of the past is still a common practice.
In the long run, traditional media such as the press (see Coltofean, Troilo, Hochadel this volume) and the journals of cultural associations (see Pizzato this issue) are crucial in the process of politicization of the archaeological discourse. For example, during the 1976 exhibition at the Hungarian National Museum (Budapest), the press took the pain to “explain how prehistory developed as a field of study and the struggles it had faced for gaining acknowledgment in various countries.” It described “[…] prehistory as having a rapid and amazing evolution in a short period of time” and “highlighted the importance of congresses in this process” as they “enabled knowledge sharing” (Coltofean, this issue). Besides dissemination and legitimation of the new science, the visits to archaeological sites and international exhibitions contributed to fostering nationalistic aspirations:
It is certain, however, that after the congress, Hungary is not an unknown land anymore for prehistorians. The world knows that in the field of this science we also worked sedulously and that in its advancement the Hungarian also holds an important role.27
Visual collections were also functional for national propaganda. A case in point is the Iconografic Repertoire of Spain which “was expected to foster a new reading of Spain’s art history and heritage and to form the basis of a grand exhibition of the country’s past” (Mallart, this issue). Unlike the national press, however, sometimes the organizers of the collections carried out local and personal agendas. Thus, the IRS offers a privileged insight into the interplay of culture and politics in early-twentieth-century Catalonia. As demonstrated by Mallart, “the Repertoire attempted to reimagine Spain’s artistic traditions just as the Lliga Regionalista, Josep Puig i Cadafalch’s political party, hoped to regenerate and transform the Spanish State. It offered an alternative reading of the canon of Spanish art by placing the centre of its development in the periphery, in an arch formed by Andalusia and the Mediterranean coast” (Mallart, this volume).
The political agency of the findings stands out even more explicitly if we look at fascist Italy’s colonial politics, where the monumentalization of antiquity was instrumental in legitimizing the anthropological revolution desired by Mussolini. “The spectacle of the ruins” benefits from the new technological discoveries to the extent that “knowledge, technique, control over nature and management of the material forms of the past were instrumental to promoting the centrality and the cultural superiority of those behind the camera” (Troilo, this issue). At the same time, however, Roman antiquities in Libya acted as a necessary element of the Regime’s “power structure.”
As we have seen, the objectivity of the archaeological findings lends itself to supporting different agendas in different socio-political contexts. In the nation-building period, for example, the narratives supported by the archaeological evidence are of a different political flavor. They can illuminate the role of science as a sounding board for the aspiration for national unity by supporting national claims (Coltofean, Pizzato). However, a careful analysis of the historical sources highlights how collections could even lead to narratives that ended up being politically heterodox for national storytelling. For instance, Mallart shows us how the archaeological repertoire built in Catalunya was meant to support local demands, sometimes critical of the Central government. Pizzato shows, instead, that participation in scientific research and dissemination was used by specific social groups (i.e., mountaineers belonging to the urban elite) to legitimize themselves as political actors.
In the colonial context, the public use of materiality allows shedding new light on the relations between colonized and colonizers. However, it also highlights the role of a discipline in establishing power relations. Furthermore, it tells us how technology can become an instrument of cultural hegemony.28 In this volume, Troilo argues that the combination of photography, widely used as a documentation tool in archeology29 and the airplane, a symbol of modernity, became functional to support the fascist colonial ideology. As she writes: “the use of aerial photography, an avant-garde technique that well reflected the intimate relationship between history, technology, and power.” Aerial photography was, therefore, a documentation tool and supported the Regime’s propaganda via the spectacularization of the archaeological remains of the colonies. From a History of Science perspective, we can say that these photographs became boundary objects30 whose function, once reported by the Regime’s press, contributed to its political project. Far from representing objective data, it ended up supporting an imaginary of the past, a politically-driven narrative.
3 (Scientific) Heritage Often Mobilized People
Although in the last forty years, there has been a growth of interest in philosophical questions in archeology,31 these questions have seldom been analyzed from a historical or sociological perspective. In particular, the history of science has struggled to find a place in this conversation. It should be remembered that until the institutionalization of the discipline, which took place with the theory of the “three-age system,” the 19th-century archaeologists oscillated between “the practice of the natural sciences as codified by philosophers” and the concept of “positive science.”32 It was the adoption of the “method of natural science” to sustain the initial stages of the discipline.33 The faith in the scientific method, comparative and typological analysis, in stratigraphy as a method for determining the ages was later replaced by other practices derived from the chemical, physical, or natural sciences: radiocarbon dating, DNA and isotopic analysis, and so on. Despite the early adoption of scientific methods, only recently, the history of archaeology seems to have reached an epistemological consciousness.34 However, it now appears to be a consolidated point, which suggests the opportunity for a dialogue between the history of science and archeology.35
On the other hand, if one looks at the history of science, the material and visual history has become central in today’s research (see, e.g., the works of Peter Galison, Lorraine Daston, and Bruno Latour, to cite just a few authors). This is accompanied by reflection on the construction, management, and social role of scientific heritage in the past, present, and near future. In this sense, particular attention must be paid to museology as a tool for producing and circulating ideas, narratives, images, concepts, and scientific practices. As a discipline linking historical-artistic and scientific aspects, archaeology is particularly suitable to highlight the evolution of heritage management and communication practices. As scientific tools, archaeological images, objects, and visual representations embody, translate and circulate science. Moreover, they enhance the relationship between science, society, and heritage from an innovative point of view.
The contributions in this volume combine the reflection on the public of science, the historical construction of the national heritage, and the practices of collection, cataloging, documentation, and dissemination of scientific “data” with the material and visual archaeological heritage. They approach the classic themes of the history of archeology, in particular the relationship between archeology and politics, from an unprecedented point of view. This point of view consists of the study of the interaction between experts and the public of science. The goal is to show that these interactions are helpful in unearthing the multiple political uses of the findings and their representations in different temporal and spatial contexts.
Although the first three contributions develop against the background of the nation-building process, they pursue different perspectives. Coltofean’s contribution shows, on the one hand, the role of the press in the discipline construction in relation to the affirmation of national communities and, on the other, the agency of scientists and laymen in the formation of the national archaeological heritage. She also points out the role of gender in the process of inclusion and exclusion in the archaeological communities of practices. Mallart’s contribution offers a peripheral look with respect to nation-building, which shows how the documentation and celebration of national heritage also provided the opportunity to propose alternative political narratives to the national governments. Finally, Pizzato’s contribution takes a bottom-up perspective with respect to the construction of the archaeological, and cultural heritage and focuses on the dynamics of transdisciplinary exchange and the role of other disciplines (geology and natural science) in the construction of prehistoric knowledge in Italy. Simona Troilo’s contribution, as mentioned, addresses the issue of the circulation of archaeological knowledge from the point of view of cultural studies, offering useful reflections to integrate a view that focuses on specific scientific issues into a broader horizon.
Oliver Hochadel’s reflection on the “missing sculpture” of the Burgos Museum of Evolution raises other questions on the transfer of information between experts and the general public. These questions are central in the contemporary debate on scientific communication both in museums and in the various media: How do museum curators, scientists, and artists/designers deal with the inevitable uncertainty of reconstructing aspects less known in science? And how do these three different actors interact in workshops and museums? Who is the ultimate authority in deciding specific questions? And finally, how does the public perceive these visually powerful reconstructions?
Naturally, the approach to case studies of the history of disciplines represents a way to highlight not only the agency, strategies, and agendas of historically actors but also the socio-political and scientific constraints in the past and the present, the possible solutions to communication and interpretation problems, and the relationships between experts and non-experts. On the other hand, the use of case studies can also highlight virtuous dynamics of collaboration in the process of co-construction and circulation of scientific knowledge, as appears in the case of the role of mountaineers-archaeologists in post-unification Italy (see Pizzato in this volume).
To conclude, I would like to mention one of the greatest historians of cultural heritage who supports the impossibility of political neutrality of museums and collections. In a recent article, Laurajane Smith writes: “heritage sites and places are often mobilized to represent a group’s identity and sense of place and belonging.”36 In this sense, the history of archeology represents a privileged observation point on science’s emotional role in the mobilization of social groups, communities, and the general public. This volume collects this perspective in many ways. The contributions collected here look beyond the museum collections in the strict sense and investigate the role of archaeological findings as vehicles of narratives for a broad audience. In addition, they look at public participation in the construction of scientific heritage. It follows that the practices of documenting, reconstructing, and circulating materials (in physical form or through visual reproduction) play a crucial role in the construction of scientific theories, data, and narratives.
The articles in this issue highlight the historical importance of material and visual culture in science communication and the role that objectivity can play in the invention of political and social realities. The general framework is the relationship between science and society. Contrary to other forms of heritage (i.e., art collections), archaeology is based on material, allegedly objective, data and is, therefore, very effective in supporting ideological narratives on the past. Its scientific nature, combined with the proximity between its subject, material findings, and the cultural heritage of certain groups, entails that its history is key to understanding the interactions between science and its public. From this historical analysis, which highlights the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, participation and narration of heritage, we can move on to reconstruct a critical approach to museums, collections, and cultural heritage in the society of the present and the future.
Jim Bennett, “Museums and the History of Science: Practitioner’s Postscript,” Isis 96 no. 4 (2005): 602–608.
See ICOM. International Council of Museums, “Icom Approves a New Museum Definition” (August 24, 2022),
See Elizabeth Weiser, “The Definition Debate: From Paradigm Shift to Bend in the Road,” ICOFOM Study Series 48, no. 2 (2020): 247–263; Brenda Salguero, “Defining the Museum: Struggling with a New Identity,” Curator. The Museum Journal 63 (2020): 591–596.
“Museum Definition,” quoted in Weiser, “The Definition Debate: From Paradigm Shift to Bend in the Road,” 251.
Juliette Raoul-Duval, “Introduction and Context,” in What Definition Do Museums Need? Proceedings of the ICOM Committees Day (Paris: ICOM, 2020), 25–29.
Vincent Noce, “What Exactly is a Museum? ICOM Comes to Blows over New Definition,” The Art Newspaper (August 19, 2019),
Marc Augé, “No-lugares y espacio público—Non-places and Public Space,” Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme 231 (2001), 6–15; Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2008); Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
See also Maximiliano Korstanje, “Philosophical Problems in the Theory of Non-place,” International Journal of Qualitative Research in Services 2, no. 2 (2015): 85–95.
Fredrik Portin and Klas Grinell “The Diplomatic Museum: A Latourian Perspective on the Civic Role of Museums,” Curator. The Museum Journal 64, no. 4 (2021), 675–691.
Juliette Raoul-Duval, “Introduction and Context,” in What Definition Do Museums Need? Proceedings of the ICOM Committees Day (Paris: ICOM, 2020), 27.
Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 2002).
See e.g. Stephanie Anderson, “Unsettling National Narratives and Multiplying Voices: The Art Museum as Renewed Space for Social Advocacy and Decolonization—a Canadian Case Study,” Museum Management and Curatorship 35, no. 5 (2020): 488–531; Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips, eds., Museum Transformations: Decolonization and Democratization (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020); Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press, 2012); Bryony Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonizing Engagement (London: Routledge, 2015). Ruth Page and Thomas Bronwen, eds., New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Roberta Piazza, ed., Discourses of Identity in Liminal Places and Spaces (London: Routledge, 2019); Claire Wintle, “Decolonizing the Smithsonian: Museums as Microcosms of Political Encounter,” The American Historical Review 121, no. 5 (2016): 1492–1520.
Martha Nussbaum is a leading figure in the pedagogical debate worldwide. In her view, schools should develop students’ capacity to see the world from the viewpoint of other people to produce citizens for a healthy democracy, particularly for marginalized categories of people. Nussbaum argues that education needs to be value-oriented. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Jack Ashby, “The Hidden Biases that Shape Natural History Museums,” Smithsonian Magazine (December 20, 2017),
Helen Coxall, “ ‘Whose Story Is It Anyway?’ Language and Museums,” Journal of Museum Ethnography 12 (2020): 87–100; Amy Hollander “Museums & Truth. The Truth Is, There Is More than One Truth!” Museum Next (December 16, 2019),
Tony Bennet, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). See also Dvora Yanow, “Space Stories: Studying Museum Buildings as Organizational Spaces while Reflecting on Interpretive Methods and their Narration,” Journal of Management Inquiry 7, no. 3 (1998): 215–239.
Bruno Strasser, “Collecting Nature: Practices, Styles, and Narratives,” Osiris 27, no. 1 (2012): 319.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (1992): 81–128; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Response: Objectivity and its Critics,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 4 (2008): 666–677; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021 [1st ed. 2007]).
See e.g. Lynne P. Sullivan and Terry S. Childs, Curating Archaeological Collections: From the Filed to the Repository (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2003). It has been also noticed that: “Technically, at least, archaeologists do not actually study the past. Instead they study evidence of all kinds which has survived from the past into the present, or from the present which may be more broadly applicable, in order to make inferences about the past.” Alex Barker, “Curating Archaeological Artifacts,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009), 1371.
Nathalie Richard, “Archeology, Biology, Anthropology: Human Evolution According to Gabriel de Mortillet and John Lubbock (France, England c. 1860–1870),” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 34, no. 1/2 (2012): 9–31; Kasper Risbjerg Eskildse, “The Language of Objects: Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s Science of the Past,” Isis 103, no. 1 (2012): 24–53.
Kasper Risbjerg Eskildse, “The Language of Objects: Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s Science of the Past,” 26. On this topic see also Matthew Norton Wise, “On the Relation of Physical Sciences to History in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, ed. Loren Graham et al. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 3–34; Peter Hanns Reill, “Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm von Humboldt,” History and Theory 33 (1994): 345–366; Irmline Veit-Brause, “Scientists and the Cultural Politics of Academic Disciplines in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany: Emil DuBois-Reymond and the Controversy over the Role of the Cultural Sciences,” History of the Human Sciences 14, no. 4 (2001): 31–56; and Denise Phillips, “Epistemological Distinctions and Cultural Politics: Educational Reform and the Naturwissenschaft/Geisteswissenschaft Distinction in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Historical Perspectives on Erkla¨ renand Verstehen, ed. Uljana Feest (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 15–35.
A discussion on why archaeology should matter for history of science can be also found in William Carruthers and Stéphane Van Damme, “Disassembling Archeology, Reassembling the Modern World,” History of Science 55, no. 3 (2017): 255–272.
Anne Teather, “Stored and Storied Time in Archaeology,” in Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800, ed. Mary S. Morgan, Kim M. Hajek, and Dominic J. Berry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 122–139.
See e.g. Elisabetta Cova, “Negotiating the Past in the Present: Italian Prehistory, Civic Museums, and Curatorial Practice in Emilia-Romagna, Italy,” European Journal of Archaeology 13, no. 3 (2010): 285–312.
See e. g. Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Omodeo, “For Gramsci: Hegemony in the History and Philosophy of Science,” in Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World. Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science, ed. Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Omodeo (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 1–18.
Laurajane Smith, “Heritage, the Power of the Past, and the Politics of (Mis)Recognition,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 52, no. 4 (2022): 623–642,
Quoted in Coltofean, this issue.
On this topic see e.g. Lino Campubrí, “Engineering as Cultural Hegemony: What a Gramscian Interpretation of Fracoism Tells Us about Gramsci,” in Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World. Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science, ed. Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Omodeo (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 258–273.
Christina Riggs, “Archaelogy and Photography,” in The Handbook of Photography Studies, ed. Gil Pasternak (Oxnon-New York: Routledge, 2020), 187–205.
The idea of boundary objects was first introduced by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer in 1989: Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387–420.
See e.g. Merrilee H. Salmon, Philosophy and Archaeology (New York: Academic Press, 1982); Alison Wylie, Thinking from Things (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Timothy Murray, From Antiquarian to Archaeologist: The History and Philosophy of Archaeology (Barnsley: Pen &Sword, 2014).
See Marko M. Marila, “Slow Science for Fast Archaeology,” Current Swedish Archaeology 27, no. 1 (2019): 93–114.
See also Anne Teather, “Stored and Storied Time in Archaeology,” cit. at 128; see also Pizzato, this volume.
See e.g. Margarita Díaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth Century Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Anne O’Connor, Finding Time for the Old Stone Age: A History of Palaeolithic Archaeology and Quaternary Geology in Britain, 1860–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Peter Rowley-Conwy, From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and Its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
See e.g. Timothy Murray, From Antiquarian to Archaeologist: The History and Philosophy of Archaeology (Barnsley: Pen &Sword, 2014). See also Tim Murray and Matthew Spriggs, “The Historiography of Archaeology: Exploring Theory, Contingency and Rationality,” World Archaeology 49, no. 2 (2017): 151–157.
Smith, “Heritage, the Power of the Past, and the Politics of (Mis)Recognition,” 1.