Abstract

In the course of the long nineteenth century, European excavators ransacked archaeological sites from Rome to Chinese Turkestan, hauling home treasures of untold number and value. Their doings, however, soon led to the rise of monument protection services and laws against the exportation of antiquities. Today’s largely sessile form of archaeological practice and our non-aestheticizing, historicist attitude toward classical artefacts is the unintended consequence of earlier attempts to plunder them.

Suzanne L. Marchand is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton University Press, 2003) and German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which was awarded the George L. Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association.