This fascinating collection, beautifully produced, offers findings on the origins and evolution of antiquarianism—a deep interest in objects and records from the past—in many different societies. The authors stem from a number of regions, and the collective approach is decidedly interdisciplinary, featuring anthropologists and archeologists along with historians and art historians.
Besides empirical specifics (the list of case studies is too long to detail in a short review), the edition offers data and analysis about the various kinds of settings that have encouraged antiquarianism. An old proposition—that only the West and China generated cultural and institutional frameworks for serious antiquarianism—is significantly modified, though not entirely demolished. The book offers plausible accounts of serious antiquarian interest in the Abbasid caliphate, in early Mexico, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan, and possibly in India, as well as in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, centuries before anything like the West came into being.
A few...