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The roots of modern scientific archaeology are in Europe, where, from the 1650s to the 1850s, all manner of men (yes, it was mostly men for a long time) sought to find and bring home antiquities and curios of the ancient world. This checkered crew included genuine naturalists, such as Danish prehistorian Ole Wurm, legions of vaguely interested wealthy British bachelors, and Giovanni Belzoni, the Italian-born charlatan, circus strongman, and explorer of the Egyptian pyramids.

Wurm (1588–1654) was a Danish professor of medicine with an interest in, well, everything. Paying students to collect objects and curios any time they traveled abroad, Wurm assembled an impressive collection of artifacts, skeletons, fossils, rocks, ancient statuary, artifacts, and other bric-a-brac. Working under the impression that the world was just a few thousand years old, Wurm organized the objects in his museum not according to age (as we would today), but by how much they resembled one another. This was a start at systematically organizing the many new objects being discovered by explorers, but it was different from today’s archaeology because it lacked an understanding of the actual age of the Earth and humanity.

By the time he was 25, Belzoni (1778–1823) had fled from a monastic school in Rome and started a 12-year career as a strongman in an English circus. Traveling to Egypt in 1815, he quickly began an extraordinary new career as an “Antiquarian.” Within a few years he had sent many ancient Egyptian relics back to London’s British Museum, including multi-ton stone statues. In 1818 he used what some called his engineering genius to locate a passage into the Great Pyramid at Gizeh; although he found that it had already been looted, his dramatically publicized adventures were enough to excite the public with tales of treasure-hunting and relics from past ages. Though he wasn’t a professional scholar, Belzoni is credited with encouraging the public to take an interest in the ancient world.

Like colonialist ethnography, antiquarian archaeology had some distinctive characteristics:

 A focus on large, visible archaeology: In particular, large ruins — such as the walled city of Troy, the pyramids of Egypt, or the Parthenon — that were relatively easy to find and analyze. (This propensity for size also led to a focus on the royal families of the ancient world because they were associated with these large monuments, whereas common people were buried elsewhere and essentially ignored by archaeologists until the 1960s.)

 A focus on the Western world: Early archaeologists largely believed that the West was at the pinnacle of evolution, and all other societies were either going to become Western or become extinct.

 A focus on monetary value: Many sought antiquities not for their value as knowledge but as items that could be sold.

 A concept of shallow time: Until the 1860s, many believed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old and that most explanations of the ancient world were in the Christian Bible.

Although archaeology began without distinctively scientific goals, by the early 1900s people knew that the Earth was very ancient and that evolution had shaped humanity as early as millions of years ago, and archaeologists had begun to make very careful records of what they found. You can check out more about modern archaeological methods in Chapter 3. For the moment, you just need to know that although the study began in antiquarianism, it developed into a modern science that has revealed a great deal about the human past.