Empire by Excavation: The Vilnius Archeological Congress of 1893

The Archaeological Congresses sponsored by the Moscow Archaeological Society, held every three years from 1869, were the most consistently attended scientific meetings in Imperial Russia. From the political perspective of the tsarist state, these congresses were an ideal forum to showcase the empire, and Tsar Alexander III insisted that the 9th Congress be held in Vilnius in 1893, and the 10th in Riga in 1896 as a means of further incorporating the Pribaltika, or Baltic littoral into the empire. The years spent preparing for these congresses were fraught by contestation over who should be invited, what should be included, where excursions would take the attendees, and what local museums would
have on display. Much of the congress itself focused on the role of Grand Duke Gediminas, the Lithuanian founder of Vilnius, and Lithuania’s relationship to Muscovy in the Middle ages.

In this presentation, I seek to analyze the Congress in order to historicize the ways in which archaeology was deployed as a strategy of both imperialism and nationalism in the late 19th century. My paper responds to the convention’s theme of “Scaling” because it links the space of the Pribaltika with the temporal history claimed by both nationalists and imperialists. Moreover, I emphasize that this can hardly be essentialized as an ethnic battle between Germans and Russians, as members of both camps crossed ethnic boundaries. The scale here is archaeological, because the two shared a past made evident through the excavations. But what to display where, and whose reading of
the digs to privilege?