A Foreign School of Archaeology and the Politics of Archaeological Practice

Abstract

This paper considers the politics of archaeological practice of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), a major institutional force that has shaped the discipline of Classical archaeologythrough its educational programs and its sponsorship of archaeological excavations. The current attitudes of ASCSA towards archaeology reflect a long-standing commitment to the tenets of western Hellenism and to the nationalist discourse of the modern Greek state. Here the focus is on events surrounding an archaeological expedition dispatched in 1922 by ASCSA and Harvard University to investigate the ancient Greek city of Colophon in Anatolia. I argue that such critical histories of archaeological practice are useful in that they can clarify the past sociopolitical conditions in which current archaeological policies took shape and, in so doing, may challenge the assumption that these are the most appropriate avenues for an institution like ASCSA to follow in the future.