Excavating the Nation: European Popular Nationalism and the Excavations of Delphi and Knossos, 1890–1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Greek archaeology at the turn of the twentieth century existed at the intersection of a modern positivistic practice of scientific study and a longer-standing European fascination with the ancient world. As the continent’s masses increasingly engaged with popular fin-de-siècle nationalisms, they also sought knowledge of the cultured refinement historically associated with the ancient world through empirically supported studies of the ancient past’s material remnants. This paper assesses the extent to which popular national identities conditioned European public perceptions of Greek archaeology in the decades the leading up to the First World War (1890–1914). Examining news-media coverage of the French excavation of Delphi and the British excavation of Knossos from nationally-prominent publications, this article identifies the influence which paradigms of national identity exerted over public perceptions of Europe’s ancient past. Concluding that these two excavations were exalted as evidential of national genius, this also posits that the particular finds associated with these sites were strongly coloured by the lens of national identity in popular periodical publications. Diffuse understandings of national heritage stretching back to the distant reaches of Europe’s ancient past thereby influenced popular perceptions of Greek archaeology as a discipline inherently linked to turn-of-the-century nationalist projects, with the archaeologist being increasingly relied upon to empirically entrench and legitimize the modern nation-state in a civilizational pedigree, coinciding with the national institutionalization of archaeological study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".