and the Greek jewelry found in them also became popular. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the French emigré Paul Dubruxe, a low-ranking official, began excavating the Crimean city of Kerch, and in the second decade, the governor of Kerch, Stempkovsky, a retired colonel, encouraged serious archaeological work there.

The second result of the romantic movement and the wave of patriotic feeling in Russia was the birth of interest in Slavic and Russian antiquities. This interest was stimulated by the publication of the “History of Russian State” by the well-known writer and official state historiographer Nikolay Karamzin. According to Karamzin, Russian autocracy was the result of the long development of the Russian peoples’ national peculiarities. Russia’s grand and attractive beginnings were obvious in the study of its monarchy, written language, and orthodoxy.

The Polish enthusiast Zorian Dolega-Chodakowsky (pseudonym of Adam Czarnocky), who was fighting for recognition of the great Slavic past, was the first to show a substantially different interest in antiquities. He argued that written history was distorted by clerical chronologists for the sake of the church and monarchic power and that only folklore and material monuments revealed the truth about the past. He was interested in paleoethnography and, more particularly, in the pagan and premonarchic Slavic past.

In 1822, at the site of the medieval principality of Ryazan, which had been destroyed by the Mongol ruler Batu Khan in the thirteenth century a.d., a hoard of ancient Russian ornaments was found by chance. This find caught the imagination of the Russian people and increased their interest in Slavic-Russian antiquities. During the government of the comparably liberal Czar Alexander I, the enthusiasm for Slavic-Russian antiquities was still not very different from an interest in classical archaeology, and the Slavic past was adjusted to fit the classical model. However when Czar Nicholas I suppressed the Decembrist rebellion in 1825 to become “the gendarme of Europe,” so-called Kvass Patriotism (something like jingoism) prevailed in Russia. The czarist administration began to promote Russian traditions and values as an antidote for the European spirit of free-thinking, a defensive idea that was expressed by the minister of enlightenment, Count Sergey Uvarov, as autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality. Thus, the disciplines of classical and medieval archaeology, which in the rest of Europe were formed at different times, stimulated by different interests, and developed by different groups of scholars, were in Russia born simultaneously; governed by the same interests, both applied aesthetic and political; and conducted by the same scholars.

The young Count alexey uvarov, a son of the notable minister formerly mentioned, was fascinated by archaeology and studied at St. Petersburg, Heidelberg, and Berlin Universities. At the last, he was taught by Eduard Gerhard, the founder of the deutsches archäologisches institut (German Archaeological Institute), who transferred Winkelmann’s ideas on style in the analysis of classical sculpture to the analysis of classical vase painting. Between 1851 and 1854, the young count and the archaeologist and orientalist Savelyev excavated 7,759 barrows. The results were published thirty years later.

At the same time that excavations were beginning, there was an upheaval in the aristocratic-bureaucratic Russian Archaeological-Numismatic Society in Saint Petersburg. The leadership of the society, created some years earlier, was seized by patriotic members who collected folktales and also fabricated “folk” frauds with a monarchic ideology. These members not only changed the direction of the society’s activities, they also renamed the group the Russian Archaeological Society and began publishing in Russian instead of in French.

Prehistoric archaeology was not very popular at the time. In the journals of the 1820s and 1830s, occasional notes about European discoveries of “pre-flood” people appeared. In 1826, however, censorship instructions declared, “Every harmful theory, such as for instance, on the prehistoric bestial state of man as if natural… is not to be allowed to [be] printed,” and nothing of that kind appeared in print in the 1840s and early 1850s.