Germany's Ancient Pasts: Archaeology and Historical Interpretation since 1700 by Brent Maner (review)

Historians of the sciences that deal with culture have tended in recent decades to focus on their subjects' involvement with broad political phenomena, perhaps most notably with imperialism. In the case of Germany, more emphasis has been placed on radical nationalism and Nazism for an obvious reason: the pronouncements of National Socialist and other völkisch ideologues heavily featured what they portrayed as the conclusions of scientific research about Germanic cultural origins and Nordic racial superiority. According to Brent Maner, this emphasis has created the impression that nationalist inclinations dominated work in the fields of prehistoric and early historic archaeology in Germany up to the Nazi era, and also that those fields contributed substantially to constructing Nazi ideology.

In his careful and nuanced study, Maner counters this view by arguing that what he calls "domestic archaeology" (the archaeology of one's own district, region, or country) developed in Germany along a much wider range of trajectories than just the ones aligned with radical nationalism and political racism, thereby creating the plural "pasts" of the book's title. He does not deny that the radical right adopted ideas from domestic archaeology, that many archaeologists were nationalists, or that under the Nazis, archaeologists adapted themselves to the prevailing ideological line. He attempts to show, however, that radical nationalist archaeologists never constituted more than a subgroup of the field and that the presence of archaeological claims about the "Germanic" past in Nazi ideology was more the result of the co-optation of science by politics than of a conscious contribution by archaeologists.

Maner describes the eighteenth-century origins of German domestic archaeology as an effort to make sense of apparently ancient burial sites by placing them in the contexts provided by classical texts. Although the formation of German nationalism during the Wars of Liberation gave impetus to constructing a protohistoric Germanic past, this was less important in shaping domestic archaeology than the work of antiquarians attempting to interpret the burgeoning number of finds produced by the effects of economic change in the first half of the nineteenth century. Antiquarian archaeology was local and regional in orientation, not "German," as were the societies organized to support it. Increasing government involvement before 1871 arose from the desire to bolster loyalty to individual states, not to a German nation. Maner shows that these aspects of domestic archaeology—local and antiquarian—continued to exist through the twentieth century alongside archaeology consciously aimed at recovering the "German" past.

Germany's Ancient Pasts also describes the place of domestic archaeology in the process of constructing human and cultural sciences in the mid- and late nineteenth century. Research in physical anthropology and ethnology was particularly important to domestic archaeology because it could be applied to interpreting recent finds of skeletal remains and of ancient communities such as the Swiss lake villages. Scientific archaeology, as propounded by its most prominent advocate, the polymath Rudolf Virchow, strongly curbed tendencies to make broad generalizations concerning connections between archaeological finds and other, especially linguistic, evidence about ancient Germans. Virchow, the central figure in the Deutsche Anthropologische Gesellschaft, called for the careful, systematic collection and preservation of data and for its classification into categories that permitted reliable comparison. As in his other fields, he argued vigorously against theorizing before sufficient data were available. He particularly opposed attempts to link ancient human remains and artifacts to modern populations. This was precisely what radical nationalists wanted to do, and it was one of the reasons (apart from Virchow's activities as a left-liberal politician) that they attacked him. In his sympathetic treatment of Virchow, Maner offers a well-reasoned counterargument to recent attempts to portray Virchow's work as fundamentally racist. He also shows that Virchow's position maintained itself among many archaeologists throughout the twentieth century even when alternative approaches, many of them more consistent with radical nationalism, took center stage in the public eye.

Maner...