Archaeologists in Print examines British archaeology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on how archaeologists communicated with the public. The book encompasses an impressive amount of research. Amara Thornton's familiarity with the archives and with the characters who populate them is made clear on every page. Nevertheless, her attention to detail—often at the expense of analysis—can detract from some of her stated aims. Although Thornton seeks to include women and to consider the colonial context of the period, her engagement with both subjects remains limited.
The opening chapters quickly establish the book's central thesis: early British archaeologists depicted themselves as adventurers, emphasizing the romance of their field. Moving through the archives, Thornton documents the construction of the archaeologist as a daring traveler with expert knowledge who could pass easily between cultures. Moreover, she shows that this figure was—it might go without saying—emphatically male. The chapters that follow trace the archaeological persona through various print media, demonstrating both the consistency with which archaeologist-authors built the image and its tenacity in the public imagination. The treatment is exhaustive, including meticulous details about manuscripts, authors, presses, meetings between and letters exchanged by authors and presses, book prices, lecture tours, travel itineraries, and more. Marshalling all of this data has clear value for preserving the history of the field, but Thornton's care for the evidence sometimes exceeds her effort at analysis. Most processing is left to the reader, and she provides few signposts to signal the relevance of the data to the overarching argument. Some small changes, such as including conclusions for each chapter, would have done much to unite the narrative.
This imbalance between collection and analysis creates particular problems in the chapter on women in the field. Thornton demonstrates women archaeologists’ considerable contributions, and she should be commended for giving these often-overlooked figures the voices they deserve. She does not, however, explore how their involvement affected (or was affected by) the archaeological persona that is the focus of the book. The archives indicate that female archaeologists communicated their work primarily to audiences of other women, but any identity they created for themselves is left implicit. In a setting where archaeology was coded unambiguously as male, what did it mean to be a woman archaeologist? Did women's self-presentation vary from that of their male colleagues? Did they see themselves as passing between spheres of male and female in much the same way that male archaeologists passed between British and foreign? Answers to these questions are left in the hands of the reader.
Thornton's treatment of her subject's colonial context is even sparser. She implies, but never specifies, another aspect of the archaeological persona: the archaeologist was not simply male, but British, and he moved through cultures subjugated by British colonization. The archives occasionally motion toward the racialized foundations of the field—for example, in Flinders Petrie emphasizing his knowledge of Egypt but denying that he had become in any way like the modern Egyptians, or in Mary Brodrick's excitement upon seeing British troops pushing south into Sudan—but the book's rare attempts to investigate that reality are unsuccessful. Thornton faces the subject most directly when contending that archaeologists’ feelings of being out of place both at home and in the field complicate their role as colonizers. She leaves her precise meaning unclear. Certainly, any such feelings did not disrupt the power imbalances at the core of colonialism. The related anecdotes also fail to develop the argument. For example, the memoir of Annie Quibell, wife of the British director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, includes a scene in which she inadvertently offended the (unnamed) daughter of a local notable. Thornton contextualizes the story through Quibell's discomfort at being an outsider, claiming that the scene adds nuance to standard ideas of British colonialism. Nevertheless, colonizers often feel uncomfortable around those they have colonized. The book's final chapter, on archaeological fiction, makes this point clearly. Focusing on three genres—romance, horror/fantasy, and crime—Thornton shows how novels written by and about archaeologists carried the archaeological persona into twentieth-century pop culture. Colonial tensions are evident throughout, most often in the form of locals who capture or otherwise threaten violence against the British protagonists, a recurring trope that goes unexplored here.
That the book falls short of some of its goals does not erase its contributions. The attention to detail probably will overwhelm students and all but the most devoted general readers, but professionals will find much of value in its pages. Above all, Thornton demonstrates the potential of archival research to illuminate archaeology's development as a discipline, describing how some of its earliest practitioners—women among them—shaped the field's reception and relevance. Her research invites exploration into other geographic areas and/or periods of archaeological work and indicates the potential of projects attuned to the intersections of gender and colonialism within that history. Perhaps most importantly, Thornton's book should prompt modern archaeologists to consider the narratives we construct around our own work and to question who benefits (or suffers) from our chosen stories.
