Archaeology could supply details unmentioned in written documents, but it did not produce historical sources that could compete with written evidence. Archaeology did not have any specific problems of its own; the relevant questions were supplied by history. In this way the romantic paradigm was fully subordinated to history.

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Artifacts from the tomb of the Bohemian king Premysl Otakar II in St. Vitus Cathedral (ca. 1370s)

(Hulton Getty)

However, this was also the period of important discoveries. For example, K.J. Biener von Bienerberg, a military engineer, excavated several urnfields in the vicinity of Hradec Králové from 1768 to 1776 and later published his results in three volumes. He unsuccessfully tried to distinguish Slav and Germanic pottery. A hoard of Celtic coins (some forty kilograms of gold) was found near Podmokly in 1771, but most of the metal was melted down to mint the coins of the owner of the estate. This find has aroused much interest in archaeology.

There were many excavations in the first half of the nineteenth century, some of them published. M. Kalina von Jäthenstein, to give just one example, published a book titled Pagan Sacrificial Places, Graves and Antiquities in Bohemia (in Czech) in 1836. It was a complete survey of Czech archaeological material, full of “unscientific,” romantic stuff, and assembled in cooperation with another “field archaeologist” named Václav Krolmus. The other excavations and publications of this period may be less impressive in their individuality, but they were many.

In a way, Josef Dobrovský, an extremely clever and able philologist and historian, was an exception in the romantic atmosphere of his time, for he tried to solve, on the basis of the archaeological record, the problem of whether the ancient Slavs incinerated their dead (Dobrovský 1786). In his case, finds were not used as mere illustrations, but the framework remained romantic.

Nationalism was not a great problem in the