Digging, collecting, knowledge - archaeology in its beginnings

Even before the institutional establishment of archaeological disciplines and museum presentations in the modern sense, material relics of the past were unearthed from the ground both accidentally and deliberately. As material manifestations of past eras, they have found their way into aristocratic as well as bourgeois collections and cabinets of art and rarities, have been recontextualised and interpreted in contemporary terms.

The interdisciplinary dissertation project aims to use textual, pictorial and material sources to explore processes of negotiation, transformation and circulation of knowledge in relation to archaeological finds using theoretical and methodological approaches from material culture studies and recent sociology of knowledge, thereby shedding light on the roots of archaeological science in the pre-modern era.