Jean Leclant

Bio: Jean Leclant is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 36 citations.

Sacralising the Past

Abstract: The paper discusses the religious undertones classical Greek heritage is vested with in Greece. Drawing on the argument that nationalism and religion need to be seen as similar cultural systems, we show that classical antiquities have become powerful emotive icons for performances of national memory in the process ot imagining the topos of the Hellenic nation. This process is open to all social actors and not simply to State bureaucrats and intellectuals. We offer an explanation of this phenomenon by examining the position of antiquity in the construction of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation, as well as the ways by which Orthodoxy and classical antiquity became enmeshed in the formation of Hellenic national identity.We finally explore some of the implications that this phenomenon has for archaeology as a discipline and as social practice.

An archaeology of lunacy: Managing madness in early nineteenth-century asylums

Abstract: This book examines the historic lunatic asylum from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing methods drawn from archaeology, social geography, and history, to create a holistic view of the built heritage of the asylum as a distinctive building type. This study combines critical analysis of the architecture, material remains, and historical documentary sources for lunatic asylums in England and Ireland.

La mise en scène du patrimoine : évolution des politiques de mise en valeur du patrimoine en Charente-Maritime, 1830-1976

Abstract: La notion de monument historique – distincte de la notion de patrimoine – apparait durant la Revolution francaise. La protection du patrimoine, dont les origines proviennent d’une reponse directe a la situation de crise revolutionnaire, s’organise lentement mais avec des principes forts pendant le XIXeme siecle : un support associatif local tres actif, une administration en gestation et un cadre theorique et legal en point de mire (la premiere loi de protection des monuments historiques etant votee en 1887). La recherche historique a toujours accorde une place importante au patrimoine, en particulier par le biais de l’histoire de l’art. En privilegiant l’entree politique, un grand nombre d’historiens se sont penches sur l’evolution des differentes branches du service des monuments historiques. D’autres ont effectue un remarquable travail epistemologique redefinissant le concept de patrimoine, a l’oree de ses multiples ramifications, tout en repondant a cette pluralite en proposant une analyse pluridisciplinaire de la question. Notre etude s’inscrit dans ce constat d’un besoin de reintegrer la question patrimoniale a une analyse globalisante integrant les objets, les discours et les acteurs en reifiant les objets patrimoniaux du discours qui les produit a travers le temps. L’objectif de cette etude est de comprendre comment le patrimoine, dans sa diversite, va etre mis en valeur par les acteurs sociaux grâce a une analyse du discours qui le sous-tend. Nous suggerons que le patrimoine n’est pas plus intrumentalise que les autres fabrications humaines. Le patrimoine est cree par des discours qui, a leur tour, creent de l’espace public. Donc le patrimoine est la rencontre de l’homme et de son environnement : thematique notamment developpee par les specialistes de l’environnement.

Waking the Gods: Archaeology and State Power in Porfirian Mexico

Abstract: During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government of Mexico made concerted attempts to define, control, and manage a national archaeological patrimony. While these efforts had precedents dating back to the colonial period, the administration of Porfirio Diaz cemented connections between archaeology and state power. Core principles and administrative structures established during the Porfiriato withstood the Revolution of 1910, and continued to shape uses of the material past during the post-Revolutionary era. However, Porfirian efforts to assert control over pre-Hispanic sites and artifacts also met with resistance from a variety of foreign and domestic sources. My dissertation examines interactions between federal bureaucrats, site caretakers, professors of the National Museum, local community members, regional officials, scholars, explorers, and travelers to examine how state power was enacted - and how it faltered - on the ground. Much scholarship on the history of Mexican archaeology focuses on changing intellectual approaches to the Mesoamerican past, or the symbolic and rhetorical uses of pre-Hispanic imagery. In contrast, I emphasize the administrative and legal practices by which the Porfirian regime asserted its authority over physical sites and artifacts. In particular, I look closely at the workings of the Inspeccion y Conservacion de Monumentos Arqueologicos (Inspectorate of Archaeological Monuments), an agency founded in 1885 to monitor the uses of pre-Hispanic sites and serve as a general clearinghouse for archaeological affairs. Under the direction of Leopoldo Batres, the Inspeccion played an active role in enforcing the prerogatives and property claims of the federal government. I argue that while the reach and influence of the federal archaeological bureaucracy increased considerably over the course of the Porfiriato, its authority remained fraught and contingent in application. Again and again, individuals and communities resisted or subverted the programs of the archaeological bureaucracy, forcing federal administrators to negotiate rather than command. Through detailed descriptions of specific incidents, I analyze competing uses of the pre-Hispanic material past in order to trace out some of the complexities of Mexican state formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ancestral Archives: Explorations in the History of Archaeology

Abstract: Historiographic revelations Back from his famous visit to Boucher de Perthes in the spring of 1859, John Evans hastened to invite some antiquarians friends in London to examine his finds. The flint implements he had collected with Joseph Prestwich in the undisturbed gravel beds of the Somme valley were indeed. or so ho believed, altogether new in appearance and totally unlike anything known in this country [Evans 1869: 93-4): But while I was waiting in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries, expecting some friends to come out of the meeting room, I looked at a case in one of the windows seats, and was ahsolutely horror-struck to see in it three or four implements precisely resembling those found at Abbeville and Amiens. I enquirer1 where they came kom, but nobody knew, as they were not labelled. On reference, however, it turned out that they had been deposited in the museum of the Society for sixty years, and that an account of them had been published in Archaeologia …