Framing the "Ethnoarchaeological" Other: The Direct Historical Approach in Victorian Bible Customs Books

Summary

One of the most popular genres of late-Victorian literature was the Bible Customs book. Often written by missionaries who had lived in Palestine for years, these books were intended to help illuminate the Bible based on observations of the flora, fauna, topography, and especially of the people living in the land in the 19th century. Organized according to subject or by Biblical verse, these books presupposed a connection between the people of Biblical times and 19th-century Palestine. In these books, a form of "ethnographic analogy" was used to better understand Biblical passages and reconstruct the ancient cultural practices of the region. This paper explores the ways that analogies derived from (amateur) ethnographic observation helped missionaries interpret a Biblical past. Whereas most Near Eastern ethnoarchaeologists were inspired by Jesse Fewkes’s direct historical approach in the Americas, the widespread popularity of these Biblical studies (some of which were amongst the best-selling books of the 19th century) suggests that they may also have been influential antecedents for the analogical reasoning now used in archaeology. We compare the use of analogy in this Victorian literature with a sample of contemporary ethnoarchaeological approaches.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage