Unearthing Atlantis and performing the past: Ancient things, alternative histories and the present past in the Baroque world

Abstract

This article discusses fabrications and alternative histories, and their relationship with antiquarian and early archaeological practice, in the Baroque world through the case of an alabaster urn reportedly found in the garden of a Swedish royal castle in 1685. The urn, decorated with a strange inscription, is used to address broader issues of how the past was conceived in the Baroque world, and how the relationship between the past and present was manipulated through antiquarian research. Certain characteristics of the urn and its cultural life have led modern scholarship to dismiss the artefact as 'unauthentic' and hence uninteresting, whereas this article seeks to reconsider the nature and meanings of fabricating the past in the 17th century. It will be argued that the past was not fixed in the Baroque world, but various material and magical practices enabled altering the past. It is against that background, and within the Baroque relational understanding of reality, that the 17th-century interest in and manipulations of the urn must be understood.

Northern Archaeology and Cosmology

“…Indeed, ghosts comprise a prime example of the 'mystical' dimensions of non-linear time and temporality and illustrate the manner in which the past can be considered to be actively present in the present. By the same token, in early modern Scandinavia the ancient Germanic runic letters were thought to have a mystical connection to the ancient worlds (Karlsson 2009: 71-72), and early modern antiquarian pursuits in general carried mystic and esoteric ambitions (Curran 2007;Curran et al 2009;Stolzenberg 2013;Herva and Nordin 2015).…”

“…Everything in the world was thought to be interconnected, with meaningful links between myths and pasts. Thus, for instance, the ancient town of Uppsala in Sweden was linked to Atlantis and Troy (Eriksson 2002;Herva and Nordin 2015). Alternative-historical explorations focusing on the connections and conjunctions of the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea worlds did not die out after the early modern period, however, but have continued to modern times.…”

Alternative Pasts and Colonial Engagements in the North: The Materiality and Meanings of the Pajala ‘Runestone’ (Vinsavaara Stone), Northern Sweden

“…In this intellectual setting, the mysterious inscription was likely the main element that invested the Vinsavaara stone with a sense of a living past in the present (cf. Herva & Nordin 2015, 130), but dolostone as a material would have amplified, even if subconsciously, the association of the stone with ancient civilizations in scholarly imagination (Fig. 4).…”

Vagueness and Archaeological Interpretation: A Sensuous Approach to Archaeological Knowledge Formation through Finds Analysis

“…Many have implicitly or explicitly referred to abduction when discussing IBE as a model of hypothesis formation and/or selection (Plog 1974, Kelley and Hanen 1988, Hanen and Kelley 1989, Routledge 1995, Fogelin 2007, Chadha 2010, Bogaard 2015, Dallas 2016. Some accounts make use of the term in reference to Alfred Gell's (1998) 'abduction of agency' (Alberti 2001, Shapland 2010, Herva and Nordin 2015.…”