Power and the Past: European Empires and Archaeology in the Balkans, 1860s–1941

This project compares the archaeological research that scholars from Austria(-Hungary), Italy, France, and Germany conducted in the Balkan countries of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, and Kosovo between the 1860s and 1941.

During this period, the researchers' countries/empires were interested in the Balkans for various, and respectively specific, political, geostrategic, economic, financial, imperial, and colonial reasons.

The project combines this transnational and global history with the history of archaeology in the Balkans as an often-neglected region and the so-called ""European Orient"".

Principal research questions are (1) how archaeological interest in the Balkans emerged and developed in the four countries/empires, (2) how that archaeological interest was influenced by the respective government’s interests and policies in the region, and (3) how archaeologists viewed, and cooperated with, local researchers and inhabitants.

The project will be hosted by the Institute of Culture Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and, through a secondment, the Department of Archaeology of the University of Ljubljana.

Sources are archaeological publications as well as archival materials of individual researchers and scientific and governmental institutions. Their interpretation will be supported by visualisations of the analysed research in maps.

Findings are disseminated through, among other things, an international conference and a student workshop as well as, to non-academic audiences, a public exhibition.

As a result, the project will contribute, among other things, to developing the history of archaeology into an autonomous, interdisciplinary, reflexive field, and to heightening the public's awareness that archaeology does not operate in a vacuum, but is always conditioned by its historical context, and that archaeological finds cannot be made without the knowledge and support of local inhabitants and cooperation partners.