Peter N. Miller is a professor and dean at Brad Graduate Center, New York. His field is the history of historical research, as opposed to historiography or philosophy of history; he is less interested in the forms history takes or in the subject matter, as in the questions historians ask. This is directly related to historians understanding that certain kinds of artifacts speak to certain kinds of inquiries—and not others. Miller's research work has been spurred by a long-running engagement with early modern European antiquarianism and its continuing impact on how historians work.

Miller recant work is a study of Peiresc’s relations with the merchants of Marseille, which is directly related to questions of the Mediterranean and to the historiography of commerce as an intellectual practice and was published in 2015 by Harvard University Press. His current project is an essay-like traversal of the history of the idea of material culture, of using objects as historical evidence, from Peiresc up to the beginning of the twentieth century.  It will be published by Cornell University Press in 2017.

Archaeology: A Mediterranean Inquiry

Archaeology is a practice that is both in and of the Mediterranean. That another way of saying “antiquarian” might be “Mediterranean archaeologist” points towards an important long-term continuity. From Poggio to Peiresc and on to Winckelmann, antiquarianism was driven by the encounter with Mediterranean antiquity. The development of archaeology as a discipline is described, in the best accounts, in terms of its emergence out of antiquarianism. One could also describe it in terms of the separation of aesthetic intentionality from historical functionality. But still another way to make sense of the rise of archaeology is to think in terms of north v. south. The articulation of a stone-bronze-iron age sequence not only brought prehistory into archaeology, changing it forever, it was also a kind of revenge of the north against the south. Modern archaeology has reclaimed the south, but retained many of the northern prejudices—like the rejection of texts—which have continued to obscure the relationship between archaeology and antiquarianism to this present day.