University of Barcelona was an exception (Pasamar and Peiró 1991, 75).

Research became institutionalized at the national, regional, and local levels and, for a brief time, abroad. The Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (Board for the Expansion of Study and Scientific Research, 1907) had among its missions the establishment of scientific exchanges abroad. It created the Escuela Española de Historia y Arqueología en Roma (Spanish School in Rome for History and Archaeology, 1910), which did not outlast World War I, and sections on Spanish archaeology both within the Centro de Estudios Históricos (Center for Historical Studies, 1910) and the Comisión de Investigaciones Paleontológicas y Prehistoricas (Commission for Paleontological and Prehistoric Research, 1912). The commission had prestigious members (the marquis of Cerralbo, the count of la Vega del Sella, Juan Cabre, Eduardo Hernandez Pacheco, Hugo Obermaier Grad, Paul Wernert) and collaborators (Pere Bosch Gimpera, Hubert Schmidt, henri breuil) and carried out a vast program of systematic research and publication. Its foundation was encouraged by research in the region of Cantabria financed by Prince Albert I of Monaco.

The Servei d’Investigacions Arqueologiques (Archaeological Investigation Service, 1915) of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Institute for Catalan Studies, 1907) was established as part of the program of cultural modernization advocated by the Catalan bourgeoisie first through the Mancomunitat and later through the Generalitat (Cebria, Muro, and Riu 1991, 83; Dupre and Rafels 1991, 175). As in the case of analogous services established by provinces (Valencia and Sevilla) and cities (such as Madrid), the service represented the culmination of a process started the century before by local scholars and naturalists.

French research in Spain also became institutionalized. On Pierre Paris’s initiative, the Escuela Francesa de Arte y Arqueología (French School of Art and Archaeology), or Casa de Velazquez, was established in Madrid in 1928 (Gran-Aymerich and Gran-Aymerich 1991, 117). In turn, German archaeology’s great influence in Spain arose as the result of training that important Spanish archaeologists received in Germany and of work in Spain by scholars such as Georg and Vera Leisner on megaliths; Adolph Schulten on proto-history; Hans Zeiss on funerary archaeology of the Visigothic period; and Helmut Schlunk, who later became the first director of the Madrid branch of the deutsches archäologisches institut (German Archaeological Institute), on late Roman and early medieval art and archaeology (Grunhagen 1979; Marcos 1993, 80).

As this period closed, only prehistory had succeeded in freeing itself from a philological and art-history perspective (Arce 1991, 209; Pasamar and Peiró 1991, 75; Rosello-Bordoy 1986, 8–9), which it had managed to do because of its empirical orientation and the national and international importance of discoveries in the Cantabrian region—altamira by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola in 1879—and the southeastern part of the peninsula—Los Millares, El Argar, and Villaricos by Louis Siret (Moure 1993, 207–210). In general, field archaeology did not involve stratigraphic controls or a detailed register of data, but enough evidence was available to permit Bosch Gimpera to create the first great federalist synthesis of pre- and proto-history, Etnología de la Península Iberica, in 1932 (Ruiz Rodriguez 1993, 308; Ruiz Zapatero 1993b, 47–48).

Meanwhile, classical and medieval archaeologists were concerned not so much with research as with the restoration of cities, ecclesiastical buildings, and large Islamic architectural complexes (Salvatierra 1990, 40–49). All of this initial structuring of Spanish archaeology was truncated by the Civil War of 1936–1939.

Institutionalization of the 1950s and 1960s

The Franco regime suppressed centers of debate and institutions of regional self-government but maintained other organizations (the network of provincial museums, universities) once their memberships had been purged. Academic institutions were particularly affected; for example, Pere Bosch Gimpera and Jose Miguel de Barandiaran were exiled, and Leopoldo Torres Balbas was compelled to retire. In other instances, such as Martin Almagro Basch’s