ARI Working Paper Series

This paper is a study of the history of colonial archaeology in French Indochina. The formal study of archaeology began in December 1898 when the Governor-General, Paul Doumer, established the Mission Archéologique d’Indochine in Sàigòn, which was later reconstituted to form the École Française d’Extrême-Orient.

In 1901, the first Bulletin de l’ École Française d’Extrême-Orient appeared, in which colonial archaeological work was predominantly published.  This paper discusses colonial archaeology as it appears in this and other publications.  Following recent work on empires and information it pays special attention to the ecumenical context in which knowledge about the prehistory of Vietnam was produced.  First, the production of this knowledge was geographically dispersed, emerging from a number of sites, including: the colony, the metropole, and other European and colonial centers outside the French empire. This was a consequence of the circulation of texts owing to ‘print capitalism’ and the intellectual sociability of colonial scholars.  Second, this knowledge was produced in a range of disciplinary contexts, including: archaeology, ethnology, geology and philology.

Third, knowledge of prehistory did not remain the sole preserve of colonial scholars but entered into circulation and was contested in the public sphere through the indigenous press.  It is argued that it is in this ecumenical context that the dominant theories of colonial archaeology such as cultural diffusion were worked out.  This is significant because in the post-independence period creative appropriations of colonial archaeological scholarship, at once critical and appreciative, were to provide evidence for the founding myth of the Vietnamese nation.