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During the 1880s he began to read archaeological literature and to attend meetings of the Berlin Anthropological Society, founded by rudolf virchow and Adolf Bastan in 1869. Virchow was the head of German prehistoric archaeology for over thirty years and argued that the laws of culture might mirror those of biology. Kossinna developed the idea of identifying ancient peoples such as Slavs and Germans from their contemporary descendants, transferring ideas of biological transmission into ideas about the transmission of cultural traditions, succession, and continuity. In 1895 Kossinna gave the paper “The Prehistoric Spreading of Germans in Germany” at the annual meeting of the Anthropological Society, arguing that material culture (burials and artifacts) was a more precise indicator of the boundaries of early Germany than literary sources, and that prehistoric German territory could be determined by excavating prehistoric cultures.

Virchow died in 1904 and Kossinna succeeded him to the chair of prehistory at Berlin University. In 1905 he published “Ornamental Iron Spear-Heads as an Indication of Eastern Germans,” in which he asserted the identification of cultures by one category of artifact and one identifying attribute—seeing national particularities in every detailed manifestation of national culture. Kossinna resented any criticism of his simplistic ideas, and surrounded himself with acolytes, whom he sought to place in key positions within German archaeology. In 1911 Kossinna’s methodological work The Origins of the Germans and the Method of “Residence Archaeology” not only took his critics to task but also spelled out his “ethnographic prehistory” or “archaeology of spreading,” an autochthonistic thesis that supported the primacy of continuity, of an age-long habitation of the same territory of Germans by Germans.

These arguments were further developed in the book German Prehistory, An Extraordinarily National Science, published that same year. Kossinna insisted that despite the opinions of classical writers, early Germans and their ancestors (Fore-Indo-Germans) were not barbarians but were in fact far more cultured than anyone else—they were the first to domesticate horses and invent the alphabet and bronze. Other cultures such as the French, celts, and Dacians and Slavs were belittled. For Kossinna the purpose of archaeology lay in connecting the German past to the German present and the German future, which was why archaeology was of vital importance for the nation. He acclaimed the outbreak of World War I as the fulfillment of the original “destiny” of the German people.

Kossinna took the German defeat of 1918 very hard but he continued to develop his claim that territorial rights were determined and measured by the duration of a people’s residence on that territory, and that the descendants of former possessors, even of those from very ancient times, had the right to drive present inhabitants away. Kossinna saw archaeology as a means of proving territorial claims—as a weapon of interstate geopolitics and a potential rationale for extended international and national conflicts. His book The Origin and Expansion of Germans in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times, published in two parts in 1927 and 1928, completed links between his “residence archaeology” and his racial theories.

When Hitler came to power the “extraordinarily national” archaeology of Kossinna was mobilized in the service of Nazism and its territorial claims. Kossinna’s pupil Hans Reinert was placed at the head of the State Union of German Prehistory and Kossinna’s books were reissued many times. While Kossinna did see and express some of the really vital questions about the possibilities, uses, and developments of archaeology, such as the ethnic determination of cultures, the possibility of genetic connections with cultures, culturogenesis (the origin of a certain culture), and the connection of culturogenesis with the origin of peoples and their languages, his conclusions were dangerously simplistic, uncritical, untestable, imbalanced, and wrong. His work is all but ignored.

Leo Klejn