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El poder del pasado

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El poder del pasado

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  • The power of the pas... ... (Area)

    The exhibition, organised by the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid and Acción Cultural Española, presents the history and development of Spanish archaeology through 150 pieces in order to show how Spain’s material past has been constructed. The works have been lent by 68 collaborating institutions and are all icons of the past which convey an overall, up-to-date and critical vision of archaeology in Spain. The show furthermore coincides with the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Museo Arqueológico Nacional (MAN) and the network of Spanish archaeology museums. Archaeology has three main objectives: firstly, to discover and preserve the material remains from the past; secondly, to represent the historical past of each current society; and thirdly, to transmit that knowledge to all of society. In other words, it has preservation, historical and cultural functions. All three must be well integrated.   MORE INFO

  • Antiquarism. the ori... ... (Area)

    Antiquarianism, from antiquarius (pertaining to ancient times), was the movement to recover and study the material remains of the past by collecting and interpreting objects, especially inscriptions and coins, and exploring ancient monuments. It began in the 15th century with the Renaissance and peaked during the 18th century.   MORE INFO

  • Pioneer archaelogy i... ... (Area)

    The creation of the National Archaeological Museum and the museum network in 1867 marked the first institutionalisation of Spanish archaeology. The archaeological excavation methodology was not very refined, and the antiquarian tradition, which prioritised the value of the objects themselves, was the most used one. The fieldwork focused mainly on prehistoric sites and Roman cities. Prehistory and the Roman era headed the interests of the new discipline.   MORE INFO

  • The first settlers (Area)

    According to classical sources, the Celts and Iberians were the first settlers with a known name. The Celts came from central Europe, they were recognised by their cremation cemeteries and iron weapons, and they spread to central, western and northern Spain.  The Iberians occupied the east and south of the Iberian Peninsula. The presence of East Mediterranean people in Spain is testified in the written Greek and Roman sources. The Phoenicians reached the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula and established contact with the mythical kingdom of Tartessos, or Tarshish. In classical archaeology, the dominant paradigm was the "cultural-historical" archaeology, where a lot of the archaeology carried out was a peculiar version of the History of Ancient Art.   MORE INFO

  • Medievalism (Area)

    The 19th century tradition in Spanish medieval archaeology was based on compiling and studying medieval materials in part (rarely in full) but it never became a true archaeology, at least in the modern sense of the discipline, beyond scattered actions, which were very often by chance and hardly with specific objectives. In a certain way, the initial training process of that archaeology was thwarted.   MORE INFO

  • First archaeology pu... ... (Area)

    The first monographs or summaries of Spanish archaeology include well-published extraordinary works such as Origen, Naturaleza y Antigüedad del Hombre (Origin, Nature and Age of Man) by Juan Vilanova (1878) and Las primeras Edades del Metal (The first Metal Ages) by Luis Siret (1889). Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola (1831-1888), who discovered the Altamira cave paintings in Cantabria, published in 1880 a leaflet with the results of his excavations, proposing a Palaeolithic chronology for the paintings. He was the first to consider the existence of Palaeolithic cave art and had the intelligence to defend that chronology with modern reasoning.   MORE INFO

  • Consolidation of arc... ... (Area)

    In those 50 years, Spanish archaeology became more institutionalised at universities, with new professorships and the creation of other institutions such as the Junta Superior de Excavaciones y Antigüedades (Higher Council for Excavations and Antiques). The excavation methodology and the documentation improved. The number of excavations with good stratigraphic records increased. The focus on the context experienced strong growth and, at the end of the period, there were projects which dealt with historical problems.   MORE INFO

  • (Area)

    The change in classical archaeology between 1940 and 1960 focused on architecture, sculpture, mosaics and minor arts and left the most abundant material in excavations outside: Roman pottery. The true specialisation in Roman pottery would be developed by the next generation of specialists. The same could be said for the study of less common materials which illustrate certain aspects of daily life in Roman Hispania such as toys and medical instruments.   MORE INFO

  • Contemporary archaeo... ... (Area)

    The current archaeology in Spain is structured into four sectors or agents: the universities and the CSIC (Higher Council for Scientific Research), the museums, the archaeology companies, and the administration, mainly the regional ones. Archaeological research has become a task for groups and teams, with large nationwide projects, which extend to archaeological missions abroad. Archaeological specialities by chrono-cultural period have been consolidated, as can be seen by the specialist publications and the scientific congresses and meetings.   MORE INFO

  • (Area)

    Palaeolithic archaeology has experienced enormous development in recent decades. Transdisciplinarity, i.e. various disciplines which jointly study the same problem from different perspectives, has paved the way for studying the first human presence in Spain. The archaeology of the Iberian, Celtic, Mediterranean colonisations and the Classical world have considerably expanded the records and knowledge of the past.   MORE INFO

  • Medieval contemporar... ... (Area)

    Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, medieval archaeology in the modern sense was configured that led to the questioning of the traditional approaches and a theoretical innovation. There are three large research areas: the studies on ceramics, on castles and fortresses, and those related to the irrigation systems The archaeology of religion and ritual and the archaeology of identities, especially of interest in Al-Andalus, are promising for the future.   MORE INFO

  • Indigenous canary ar... ... (Area)

    The archaeology of the indigenous Canary Islanders has experienced major advances in the last few decades. The first settlement, around the middle of the 1st millennium BC, still requires much more research.Subsequent developments have provided a unique opportunity to analyse the internal evolution, contact and cultural interaction processes since each island is a different world.   MORE INFO

  • Archaeology is publi... ... (Area)

    Carrying out archaeology is publishing. First and foremost, the objective of all archaeology is to produce historical knowledge. Publications are the most enduring contributions that can be made to the discipline and to society since they specify the historical knowledge acquired and restore the data of the excavated sites. The electronic publications and the institutional repositories are streamlining and disseminating the research faster than ever before.   MORE INFO

  • Celebrating 150 year... ... (Area)

    Celebrating the past is understanding the present and preparing for the future. Archaeology is a fascinating discipline with very powerful scientific methods and it gives us the enormous power to make us question ourselves about the essence of what makes us human. It is the only discipline that can create infinite views of each corner of the large chain of human cultures and generations which take us back to distant times. Archaeology enables us to advance towards the future but also towards the past because it makes us think, change and expand our interpretation of what has been written in history. We perform archaeology on the archaeology of previous generations to see how archaeological knowledge has taken place and think about the historical conditions in which they were generated.   MORE INFO

  • Credits exhibition (Area)

    Organized by: Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) Museo Arqueológico Nacional (MAN)   Curatorship: Gonzalo Ruiz Zapatero   MORE INFO

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