How to organize oneself within history: Pehr Tham and his relation to antiquity at the end of the 18th century

E-ISSN： 1745-1744|76|291|141-150

ISSN： 0003-598x

Source： Antiquity, Vol.76, Iss.291, 2002-03, pp. : 141-150

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Abstract

Recently a doctoral dissertation was submitted to the Department of Archaeology at IJppsala [Jniversity. The author, Michel Notelid, presented and defended a text, called Den omvanda diskursen (The Second Glance: A study of transitions in the history of archaeological discipline). This work (Notelid 2000; 2001) represents quite a new way of looking at the discipline’s past, with the serious ambition to understand the romantic approach to prehistory in its own right, and not primarily as a fumbling, imaginative and pre-scientific start of a new discipline. The archaeological community was puzzled by this work, and very few scholars were able to read and appreciate this distinctive and unexpected perspective. There were obstacles, and possibly the most difficult one was the very language used. This language was in itself a sort of romantic reconstruction, which did not clearly indicate the difference between the plain text and passages of citations.