Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands by J. Laurence Hare (review)

In 2003, the so-called Nydam Boat traveled from its permanent home at the Landesmuseum at Gottorf castle in Schleswig to be put on display at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. The celebrated Viking age vessel remained on loan until early 2004 and was then returned to Schleswig. This peaceful exchange between two museums and between archaeologists of bordering nations can be seen as a symbolic conclusion to a lengthy tug-of-war over ownership. As J. Laurence Hare shows in his monograph Excavating Nations, the Nydam Boat, excavated in 1863, can be counted among “relics of acrimony” (p. 181) tussled over in the shifting German-Danish borderlands. The contested fault line between Denmark and Germany in Schleswig, as Hare convincingly argues, turns out to be a particularly suggestive contributor to the history of archaeology.

Excavating Nations is a fascinating and deeply relevant study of how political climates, ideological movements, and historical claims affected the archaeological discipline from its inception. Meticulously researched, it makes use of published and unpublished texts, newspapers, field reports, private correspondences, and museum exhibitions. The crux of the study is not a theoretical parsing, but a presentation of historical and archival research; accordingly, theoretical references (Bourdieu, Trigger, Anderson, Smith, Hobsbawm, crane, and others) are used sparingly. Hare’s prose is clear and eloquent, and his findings are highly valuable for anyone interested in material culture and historical analysis of the past in Germany and Denmark.

One of Hare’s main goals is to demonstrate how both archaeological fieldwork practices and theoretical assumptions were vulnerable to and sometimes contingent on ideological and political circumstances. He gives a careful and well-argued assessment of the various key agents that brought fundamental changes to archaeology as a discipline from the 1830s through the 1950s. He shows how the borderlands between northern Germany and southern Denmark provide a plethora of material to examine tensions between the formation of a science of the past and emerging national ideologies. The region has yielded some exceptionally treasured national icons: this is where the Golden Horns were found, where the medieval walls of Danevirke were located, and where the lost and legendary town of Haithabu (known to the Danes as Hedeby) was buried.

Both Germany and Ddenmark were sensitive to the symbolic potential of prehistoric artifacts or places; each nation was eager to shape narratives about the ancient remains to fit larger concerns in the respective homelands. At the same time, archaeology was evolving as a discipline, eager to form its own narratives built on science. As Hare describes it, each generation of Danish and German archaeologists had to balance pressing nation-building demands with the discipline’s own commitment to transnational academic exchange. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the developing archaeological field also had to find its purchase vis-à-vis the so-called Nordic Renaissance, where a fusion of Nordic and Christian themes were highly favored and where aesthetic imaginings in literature (like Adam Oehlenschläger and N. F. S. Grundtvig) or visual art (like Caspar David Friedrich) were the order of the day. The past took hold of the nations’ imaginations. At the same time, the field of archaeology increasingly aimed to divorce itself from mythical or imaginative understandings of the past. Archaeologists wanted to focus on more tangible material to support scientific claims.

The growth of national or regional museums around the 1830s, particularly the ones in Kiel and Copenhagen, makes evident the burgeoning interest in antiquities. The move from private collections (what Hare calls the “subjective I”) to national institutions (“the collective we”) became emblematic of this shift. Yet we cannot fully know the history of the discipline, Hare argues, by looking exclusively at the history of institutions. Scholarly collaboration and museum practices do not follow a single trajectory, but must be understood as a combination of provincial, national, scientific, and individual factors. As Hare points out, personal contacts between individual archaeologists...