than the Linnaean system for biology. He based it on his classification for fragmentary Neolithic ceramics, from which he could define territorial and chronological boundaries of groups as well as contacts and influences, a system more useful for diffusionists than for evolutionists. Between 1908 and 1916, Gorodcov published his analyses of pre-Scythian burial mounds—a quantum leap for prehistoric archaeology in russia, taking it from antiquarianism to twentieth-century science through his delineation of pit, catacomb, and timber graves and the Indo-European origins of their occupants.

In 1907, after his retirement from the army, Gorodcov began to teach archaeology at the Moscow Archaeological Institute. In 1908 he published the first part of his lectures as Prehistoric Archaeology, and in 1910 the second part, Everyday Archaeology, appeared. Both served as basic manuals and reference books for decades in russia. In 1919, Gorodcov became professor at Moscow University and in 1923 head of the Archaeological Department of the Russian Association of Scientific Research Institute of Social Sciences (RANIION).

An active school of archaeology formed around Gorodcov, and many Russian archaeologists of the second half of the twentieth century were taught and influenced by him. In 1933, some of his work on classification was translated into English and influenced the North American archaeologists Clyde Kluckhohn and irving rouse. He survived the Stalinist political upheavals of the early 1930s, and the radicalism of Marxist archaeology, and received an honorary doctoral degree in 1934.

Leo Klejn

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 261–262.

Graebner, Fritz

(1877–1934)

Fritz Graebner was born and studied history in Berlin, where by chance he became a research assistant in the Royal Museum of Ethnography in 1899. By the time he graduated from Berlin University a year later, Graebner had become fascinated by ethnographic problems and had begun working with the museum ethnographer Bernard Ankermann. In 1904, Graebner and Ankermann founded Kulturkreislehre (“study of culture circles,” or “cultural-historical ethnology”) within the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory. Stimulated by the work of anthropologist Leo Frobenius and the geographer friedrich ratzel, Graebner and Ankermann lectured on Kulturkreise (“culture circles”) and Kulturschichten (“culture strata”) in Oceania and Africa, rejecting the then-dominant biological-evolutionary concepts of ethnography.

In 1907, Graebner moved to Cologne to work at the new Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum where he was able to research the museum’s collections and continue his work on theoretical issues. The result of was his book Die Methode de Ethnologie [The Method of Ethnology] in which he argued for an epistemology of “culture-historical” research, emphasizing the importance of culture-historic connections for the interpretation of data and the understanding of development sequences. With the museum’s director, Willy Foy, Graebner founded the museum’s publication Ethnologica.

Graebner’s area of fieldwork was the South Pacific, and he published wide culture-historical-based work concerning that area. In 1914, while trying to leave Australia after a conference, he was arrested and interned for the duration of World War I.

After his return to Germany, he studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Bonn and became a professor there in 1921. He succeeded Foy at the museum in Cologne in 1925 and became a professor at the University of Cologne in 1926. Ill health caused his early retirement in 1928, and he moved back to Berlin. Graebner’s studies of Oceania are still relevant today, but his culture-historical theories, which greatly influenced researchers in Vienna, central Europe, and Scandinavia until the middle of the twentieth century, are today regarded as crudely reducing cultural variation to a few key geographic influences.

Tim Murray