closely interrelated and coeval with one another. On the basis of this methodology he claimed that it was possible to identify major prehistoric racial groups, such as the Aryans and the Slavs, and trace their relationships through time. The work of others, such as the early archaeology of vere gordon childe, although of a very different political persuasion, was embedded in similar concepts and methodology, as exemplified in Childe’s book The Aryans (1926). The conflation of race, language, and culture in the study of archaeological remains can be confirmed by a glance though the volumes of any early archaeological journals. For more recent historiographical overviews see Colin Renfrew’s Archaeology and Language (1987), K. Sklenár’s Archaeology in Central Europe (1983), and Siân Jones’s Archaeology of Ethnicity (1997).

The Politics of Race

Racial typologies and classifications remained all-pervasive throughout the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century, penetrating many aspects of social life and informing ideological and political debates. The idea that the physiological characteristics of particular races determined cultural and intellectual ability, allied with evolutionary theories, provided a convenient way to justify relationships of power in the context of slavery and colonialism. For instance, applied to colonial America or Africa, such approaches placed the indigenous inhabitants lower down on the evolutionary ladder and members of European “civilization” at the top. Archaeologists maintained this idealized evolutionary racial hierarchy by going to great lengths to attribute “sophisticated” sites and assemblages to migrating races of European or Near Eastern origin (despite evidence to the contrary) rather than to the supposedly backward non-European races. For classic examples see Peter Garlake’s Great Zimbabwe (1973) and R. Silverberg’s Mound Builders of Ancient America (1968). Recent historiographical studies highlighting the politics of racial theory and the role of archaeology more generally include Bruce Trigger’s A History of Archaeological Thought (1989) and “Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian” (American Antiquity 45, 1980), Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1980), and K. Sklenár’s Archaeology in Central Europe (1983); further case studies are provided by contributions to a number of books in the One World Archaeology Series (Routledge), in particular Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity (S.J. Shennan, ed. [1989]) and Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power (G. C. Bond and A. Gilliam, eds. [1994]).

The concept of race played an equally important role in European politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nations were conceived of in racial terms, and states justified their actions toward one another and their own populations on the basis of racial theory. Once again archaeology’s role in legitimizing and informing contemporary political thought concerned historical relations between races, in particular the evolution of European civilization. Archaeological evidence was employed in the competition between nation states as to whose racial pedigree was superior and which nations had played a decisive role in the development of European civilization. The most notorious case in this regard is the way in which the Nazi regime used the work of archaeologists, including Kossinna, to support its misplaced claims about the superiority of the Germanic race, contributing to the ideological apparatus that supported the destruction of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. Other European nations also employed archaeological evidence in support of racial theories that would be used to legitimate their relationships with others. The English, for instance, used archaeological evidence to emphasize their Roman and Anglo-Saxon heritage and to justify their superiority over the Welsh, the Scottish, and particularly the Irish, all of whom were considered to be racially inferior. For an overview of the German case see Bettina Arnold’s “The Past as Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi Germany” (Antiquity 64, 1990); for an analysis of the English case see Richard Hingley’s Roman Officers and English Gentlemen (2000).

Culture-History and Typology

The political importance of race in contemporary society goes some way toward explaining