Under the influence of the German art historian Winckelmann, classical antiquities were considered everywhere, including in Russia, as the greatest monuments of art and as an ideal. This sentimental attitude was an important part of antiquarianism, and it was alive and well in Russia until the beginning of the Soviet era, for example, in Zhebelev’s Introduction to Archaeology, published in 1923. The final demise of these values was recognized in Marr’s statement: “Down with Venus of Milos, long live the hoe!”

Romantic Ethnography

The romantic movement gave birth to a widespread interest in local medieval monuments all over Europe, and Russian romanticism was especially patriotic because it developed as a result of the war against Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. In the early nineteenth century, this interest was best expressed by Chodakovsky’s program of scholarly travels. He was as carried away by hill forts, as was william stukeley by megaliths in England—and like Stukeley, Chodakovsky suspected that his hill forts were sacred places. Passek had the same passion for barrows, but both men were interested in the ethnography of these monuments.

Passek’s investigations of barrows occurred during the middle of the nineteenth century and were inspired by the grand excavations of barrows by Uvarov and Savelyev. Uvarov published the results of these excavations in 1871 and described the barrows as belonging to the Merya (a Finnish people), although later it became clear that they were, in fact, ancient Slavic monuments. This episode shows that leading Russian archaeologists still did not have means to properly identify ancient peoples with the peoples of today and thus identified them ethnically. It also shows that at least some Russian scholars had no nationalist subplot they were trying to justify via archaeology and that they did not try to widen the ancient territories of the Russian people to this end. Their national self-esteem was not dependent on the past.

Archaeology was considered to be the simple expansion of ethnography into the distant past. The same scholars undertook both the archaeological and the ethnographic exploration of a region. The principle that every people had distinct peculiarities of culture and distinct material or types of things seemed quite natural and was the view that the German archaeologist rudolf virchow and other German scholars of his circle took.

The best example of this point of view can be found in an 1899 article by Spitsyn, “The Distribution of Ancient Russian Tribes According to Archaeological Data,” in which he established that the territory of Russian “tribes” (as they were called in the chronicles Polyane, Drevlyane, and Vyatichi) reflected the area of their temple ring types, i.e., each “tribe” had its own type of ring. Spitsyn’s work resembles that of the twentieth-century German archaeologist gustav kossinna in his article “On the Decorated Iron Lanceheads as Attribute of Ancient Germans” (1905). However free Spitsyn was of Kossinna’s nationalist and racist overtones, he could still get carried away by the possibilities of migrations. The notion of archaeological culture also originated in Russia at this time and has been used widely since 1901.

Migrations were only one part of Kossinna’s overall concerns and not really central to them. For central Europe, where the Germans lived, Kossinna preferred to argue for local and continuous development so that, in fact, the central part of his argument was autochthonism. This concept was more widely held in Russia than migrationism. Within the framework of the “byt-descriptive” (everyday-life-descriptive) approach developed by Zabelin and Samokvasov, there was also an argument for a very long and continuous development of the Russian state and culture from the same territories as Kievan Rus, which must have originated from the Scythians (“the noble ancestors”). Despite the cold reception this hypothesis received and numerous critiques, it remained tenacious and was revitalized again and again. In the middle of the twentieth century (from the 1930s to the 1970s), Boris Grekov and Boris Rybakov built a scheme for Russian state development that was still longer than that of Zabelin and Samokvasov, as they included not only Scythians but also Tripolye agriculturists, from the Eneolithic period. There are many weak points in this concept,