Archaeology

Abstract

… Swift hands, on strings nigh overhead, Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss: It stirred me as I stood, in Caesar’s house, Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led, And blended pulsing life with lives long done, Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one. The reconstructive potential of archaeology and its capacity to bridge the present and the past appealed to Hardy, who had grown up close by what was once the Roman capital of the southwest, Durnovaria. In Dorset, as in towns and cities around the world, archaeological discoveries began to assume new importance in the late Victorian era as archaeology developed as a discipline of its own. Lecturing on “The Development of Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century’ in February 1900, Reverend Professor Mahaffy, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire and Provost of Trinity College Dublin, remarked that “in no science had success been more marked than in archaeology’. Transcending the domain of the amateur antiquary, archaeology had become what the archaeologist and ethnologist Sir Daniel Wilson termed in 1851 “an indispensable link in the circle of the sciences’. In light of its broad appeal to enthusiasts, thinkers, and artists alike, archaeology became one of the most popular topics in the periodical press during the 1870s, leading to the launch in 1880 of the Antiquary: A Magazine devoted to the Study of the Past.