Abstract
Taking as its starting point a collection of (auto)biographical narratives on the academic careers of Dutch prehistorians Van Stein Callenfels, Van Heekeren and Van der Hoop, this paper discusses the phenomenon of the ‘colonial archaeologist as hero’ from both a historical and a theoretical (post-colonial) perspective. We thus reconsider those colonial archaeologists who, according to traditional histories of archaeology, ‘discovered’ the prehistoric past of Indonesia during the 1920s and 1930s. We do this in order to gain a better understanding of the colonial dimension of research into the prehistory of the Dutch East Indies and the way it continues to affect the archaeology of post-colonial Indonesia. We focus on the dynamic social and cultural contexts within which the archaeological research was developed and conclude that the creation of knowledge of the prehistoric past included various forms of indigenous involvement.