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A review by tessisreading2
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk
4.0
This is a very readable book, essentially a chronicle of the work of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century foreign (mostly western) archaeologists looting Silk Road sites in what is now Xinjiang province. Hopkirk excels at drawing pencil sketches of the archaeologists, their sidekicks, the world around them, the techniques they used, etc., and he does a good job of conveying the pulse-pounding adventure of riding into the Taklamakan desert with a couple of trusted servants (none of whom speak the native language), some camels loaded with an undefined amount of water, and a lot of acquisitive hope. It's a fun read.
That said, it's very much a period of its time; while Hopkirk pays vague lip service to the idea that maybe it's not the greatest thing for western archaeologists to come and strip a country of its native heritage and cart it off to foreign museums, his bigger issue seems to be that the British Museum just shoved all of its Central Asian artifacts into a basement instead of giving them the Elgin Marbles treatment. He acknowledges, for example, that everything the Germans got was destroyed during WWII, but basically argues that maybe local Muslims would also have destroyed the artifacts so really it could have been worse. I get that he was writing in 1980 but the conversation around this kind of thing has advanced significantly beyond 1980, so it's just something to be aware of. There are also some odd notes of classism (after a lengthy discussion of the feuding between a bunch of German archaeologists because the senior archaeologist thought the junior archaeologists were making a mess of their excavations, in a later chapter when an English archaeologist complains about the state of a German site he suggests on no evidence that the site might have been excavated by the German archaeologists' handyman operating solo). The overall feel is very "yay imperialism, colonial adventurers riding forth" - the book ends with Hopkirk bemoaning the arrival of the first busload of British tourists to the area, thereby destroying the glamor of the Silk Road, which I guess is kind of a look?
That said, it's very much a period of its time; while Hopkirk pays vague lip service to the idea that maybe it's not the greatest thing for western archaeologists to come and strip a country of its native heritage and cart it off to foreign museums, his bigger issue seems to be that the British Museum just shoved all of its Central Asian artifacts into a basement instead of giving them the Elgin Marbles treatment. He acknowledges, for example, that everything the Germans got was destroyed during WWII, but basically argues that maybe local Muslims would also have destroyed the artifacts so really it could have been worse. I get that he was writing in 1980 but the conversation around this kind of thing has advanced significantly beyond 1980, so it's just something to be aware of. There are also some odd notes of classism (after a lengthy discussion of the feuding between a bunch of German archaeologists because the senior archaeologist thought the junior archaeologists were making a mess of their excavations, in a later chapter when an English archaeologist complains about the state of a German site he suggests on no evidence that the site might have been excavated by the German archaeologists' handyman operating solo). The overall feel is very "yay imperialism, colonial adventurers riding forth" - the book ends with Hopkirk bemoaning the arrival of the first busload of British tourists to the area, thereby destroying the glamor of the Silk Road, which I guess is kind of a look?