Beyond Hidden Hands: Scholars, Sailors, and Ottoman Communities in George Scharf

Presenters

Sebastian Marshall, University of Cambridge

Abstract

Among the many archaeological projects orchestrated by imperial powers in the nineteenth century, Charles Fellows’s expeditions to the Teke Peninsula (‘Ancient Lycia’) in southwestern Türkiye in the 1840s was seminal, as Holger Hoock notes, as the first preplanned collaboration between the Royal Navy, British Museum, and Foreign Office to remove ancient sculptures in a “military-style operation.” Little attention, however, has been paid to the archive of unpublished sketches produced by George Scharf, a young draughtsman who accompanied Fellows, which offers a rich resource for reviewing the balance of agency between Europeans and the peninsula’s Greek and Muslim inhabitants. To this end, this paper explores how Scharf recorded interactions between the diverse body of actors (often named) at the excavation, including British naval ratings, Italian cast-makers, Ottoman decision-makers, and communities of Oghuz Yörüks and Romani Çingân whose land was occupied by the British expedition.

In recent decades, historians of archaeology have explored how foreign archaeologists in the Mediterranean—buoyed by a sense of cultural superiority—left local knowledge and labor unacknowledged. Faced with suppression of local discourses pertaining to archaeological heritage in textual sources, Zeynep Celik examines photographs of Anatolian sites to “restore recognition to the multitude of faces and bodies routinely featured in the background of archaeological accounts.” But what about the period before photography’s popularization or the professionalization of archaeology? Far from depicting local inhabitants as staffage for ruin paintings, Scharf’s private sketchbooks prefigure and diverge from later ethnographic tropes, vividly juxtaposing activities of different groups in the Xanthus Valley. By comparing the contingencies and power imbalances represented in Scharf’s on-the-spot sketches with the expedition’s official published account, this paper foregrounds hierarchies of race and class that underpinned this early phase of archaeology in the picturesque Mediterranean landscape.