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however, has been paid to the archive of unpublished sketches produced by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.
AIA-5F