Inventing the Ancients

This course brings together the history of collecting and archaeology with biography. By examining the fascinating, entertaining, and often improbable lives of individuals who helped shape modern archaeology and the public museum, it explores the blurred boundaries between professionalism and amateurism, as well as between the fictive and the authentic. Students will read biographies of Hans Sloane, Giovanni Belzoni, Heinrich Schliemann, Luigi and Alessandro Palma di Cesnola, Constantine Simonides, among others, and will engage with themes such as biographical writing; collecting in the age of Enlightenment and empire; the museumization of the past; the reinvention of the ancient Mediterranean; the dream of the East; forgery and the illusion of authenticity; and archaeology, race, and nationalism.