Barbarians

by Peter Bogucki

  Barbarians in the media

  Archaeological discoveries have always made for a good story. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper frequently covered Keller’s 1854 discoveries of the Swiss lake settlements, and Keller in turn made sure that the press became aware of his latest finds and his theories about the form of the pile dwellings. Excavations at Biskupin were described in the Polish press as the ‘Polish Pompeii’ during the 1930s, and visits of leading Polish politicians and clergy to the excavations were widely publicized. I have a folder full of press clippings about excavations my colleague Ryszard Grygiel and I conducted at the Stone Age sites of Brześć Kujawski and Osłonki in Poland. We were periodically visited by a local reporter and made sure we had a good story for him.

  Archaeology was a subject made for the era of glossy, mass-market magazines. The Illustrated London News routinely featured the archaeology of Europe. Many articles were illuminated by the artwork of Alan Sorrell (1904–1974), perhaps the foremost archaeological illustrator of the mid-twentieth century, who took field observations and drawings and brought them to life.4 His bird’s-eye views of Maiden Castle show the complexity of the fortification system. National Geographic today is continuing the tradition of lavishly illustrated articles about archaeology and is finally paying attention to the Barbarian World, with articles about Ötzi, Stonehenge and other discoveries in temperate Europe.

  Since archaeology inherently has visual interest, the golden days of radio did not do much to promote it. It was not until the advent of television after the Second World War that archaeology found a new medium for generating public interest. In 1951, the director of the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Froelich Rainey (1907–1992), began to host a show entitled What in the World? On this show, a mysterious archaeological or ethnographic object of unknown function was presented to a panel of experts, drawn from the Penn community of archaeologists and anthropologists, who tried to figure out what it was and its cultural context.5 It ran for about fifteen years and was my first exposure to archaeology growing up in Philadelphia.

  The success of What in the World? became known in the international archaeological community and inspired Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? which made its debut on the BBC in 1952. It was hosted by Cambridge archaeologist Glyn Daniel (1914–1986), but it made its frequent guest Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976) a star, such that he was named the British ‘Television Personality of the Year’ in 1954.6 With his upturned moustache, military bearing and witty repartee, Wheeler was a telegenic natural who went on to appear on other archaeology shows during the 1950s.

  After a relative absence of several decades, archaeology again seems everywhere on television. Channels such as National Geographic and Discovery feature archaeology prominently in their programming. Time Team, in which archaeologists excavated a site per episode, ran for almost twenty years on Britain’s Channel 4. The latest discoveries at Stonehenge are always good for an hour of programming, and Ötzi appears from time to time when a new theory about his death is publicized. Most shows benefit from the advice of professional archaeologists, who have methodological and interpretive standards and who often become media personalities themselves.

  Sir Mortimer Wheeler, star of Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?

  An archaeological event that routinely makes the news is the celebration of the winter solstice at Newgrange. Unlike Stonehenge, where the summer solstice has been appropriated by neo-druids, the winter solstice observance at Newgrange is a more straightforward recognition that its Stone Age builders incorporated an astronomical alignment into the tomb. Many people gather around its fake limestone facade to wait for dawn. Only a few can fit inside for the full effect of the rising sun shining down the passage at 8.58 a.m. A free annual lottery is held to determine the lucky ones.7 Actually, this effect can be observed from 18 to 23 December, and winners are chosen for each of six mornings from over 30,000 entries. Unfortunately, this being Ireland in winter, the possibility of the sun shining down the passage is never certain. Even if it is not possible to be inside, the feeling of waiting in darkness, as people had done in the Stone Age, for the longest night of the year to end must be very powerful.

  Barbarians serve the state

  An important role of archaeology in modern society, of which the public is rarely aware, has been its mobilization for the creation of a common national identity and providing legitimacy to leaders and their policies. Archaeologists are generally uncomfortable with this appropriation of their discipline. Over the last century, some have resisted actively while others made careers under state patronage, but most have tried to ignore it and keep on doing their research and scholarship. Yet unbeknownst to most of the public, archaeological monuments, sites and finds have often been turned into symbols that then become manipulated to fit a political agenda. Only recently have archaeologists taken a reflective look at how their discipline has been used to legitimize narratives of national origins and territorial claims.

  Napoleon III (1808–1873), emperor of France from 1852 to 1870, was the first national leader to realize the potential of archaeology. He sought to create a national identity that was linked to both Gauls and Romans. This would not be a simple task. The Gauls, resisting a foreign invader, would seem a natural candidate to be the heroes, but historical France owes its language, culture and institutions to the Romans, so they were also good guys in the end. It was not a simple ‘us versus them’ or a heroic defeat by an oppressor. So Napoleon III chose three of the oppida mentioned by Caesar and turned them into symbolic focal points.8 The three – Alésia, Bibracte and Gergovia – were linked by association with Vercingetorix and his struggles with Caesar in 52 BC. At Bibracte, Vercingetorix was chosen to lead the confederation of several tribes; at Gergovia, he was victorious; and at Alésia he was defeated by Caesar.

  Alésia was the site chosen for the most intense investment. Napoleon III commissioned excavations with generous financial support, and in 1865, a statue 6.7 metres (22 ft) high of Vercingetorix by Aimé Millet was erected on an elaborate pedestal designed by the famous architect Viollet-le-Duc. Flowery dedications linked Napoleon III to Vercingetorix, who was elevated to the stature of a patriot. At the same time, Caesar’s conquest, the triumph of civilization over barbarism, was invoked to support French colonialism in Africa and the Pacific. The physical substantiation of the past and its monumentalization at Alésia fused the two messages: Gauls as resisters and Romans as civilizers, the combination of which formed the French national identity.

  Gergovia and Bibracte also saw excavations sponsored by Napoleon III, but their transformation into sacred places came later. The sudden end of the Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 derailed this project. After things settled down, the role of these sites in the national collective memory was transformed from the complicated tension between Gallic resisters and Roman civilizers to a simple nationalist ideology of resisting foreign invaders – in this case, Germans. At Gergovia, a monument to Vercingetorix was not erected until 1900 and, by then, the only collective memory was of defeat and a desire for revenge. A statue of Joan of Arc, who also resisted foreign occupiers, was added to that of Vercingetorix at Alésia, in case anyone did not get the message.

  Around the same time that Vercingetorix was being elevated to national hero in Napoleon III’s attempt to create a national origin myth, similar developments were taking place in Germany. Just as the Romans were central to the French narrative, they also played a leading role in the German one. The difference was that in France, the Romans eventually won and illuminated the defeated but noble Gauls with their civilization; in Germany, the Romans were defeated soundly and their expansion halted. Central to this narrative was the slaughter in the Teutoberg Forest of Varus and his legions by Arminius, where the Romans were definitely the bad guys, and the Germans won.

  Monumental statue of Vercingetorix by Aimé Millet on Mont Auxois, Burgundy, France.

  By the nineteenth cen
tury Arminius had been renamed Hermann, a mistranslation sometimes attributed (although this is disputed) to Martin Luther. Nationalists in nineteenth-century Germany, divided into many states such as Bavaria and Prussia, adopted Hermann as a representative of their shared ancestry.9 After all, Arminius/Hermann formed a coalition of tribes to defeat the Romans. Moreover, the French rhetoric about their Roman origins played into this, since it enabled the Germans to draw a distinction between themselves and Napoleonic France, which was of course destined for defeat just like Varus.

  Following this complex web of associations is a challenge, and it is not necessarily coherent, but it provides some early examples of the Barbarian World being used centuries later to construct a usable past for the advancement of national(ist) goals. For the time being, these goals were symbolic and did not involve world domination. The First World War provided another impetus to such projects, and like many of its unanticipated consequences, begins the next episode in which the archaeology of the Barbarian World was saddled with the purpose of authenticating historical claims.

  By this time in Germany, the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931) had achieved prominence. Today, Kossinna is definitely not seen as a good guy, whereas in his time, his general approach to archaeology was not much different from that of his contemporaries.10 He saw diagnostic artefacts of distinctive types and styles as markers of collective affiliation within a particular region. Kossinna’s research focused on the borderlands between Germans and Slavs, mostly during the first millennium AD. Certain artefacts identified Germans, while others were markers of the Slavs. Trade and other forms of connectivity were not taken into account. Today, we would not draw such simplistic equivalencies, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, this was mainstream archaeological thinking.

  Where Kossinna went off the rails was in his insistence on sharp and impermeable boundaries between cultural groups that persisted into historical times. This view played right into the hands of nationalists seeking authentication of claims to land in the east, on the principle that once an area was inhabited by Germans, Germany as a nation had a perpetual claim on that territory. Kossinna was sympathetic to such thinking, and in popular writings expressed nationalist opinions openly. His identification of ancient Germanic artefacts at sites in the Vistula drainage supported his opinion that this region should belong to Germany in the twentieth century. Moreover, he considered the ancient and modern Germans culturally superior to the peoples who lived to the west and the east of them.

  Kossinna died in 1931, and within two years, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party had taken control in Berlin, beginning perhaps the closest connection ever between archaeologists and a national government to promote and authenticate an official view of the past.11 The archaeologists involved were a mix of disciples of Kossinna and others who saw career opportunities in the new order. Typically, the Nazi regime set up two separate archaeological operations, one under the auspices of Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) and the other within the empire led by Reichsführer-ss Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945). Both had the same goal: the legitimation of the mythical narrative of a German ethnic and racial identity with prehistoric roots and eventually authentication of prior German presence in conquered lands.

  The main archaeologist in Rosenberg’s office was Hans Reinerth (1900–1990), successor to Kossinna in Berlin. Reinerth was the excavator of the Bronze Age waterside settlement of Wasserburg Buchau, mentioned in Chapter Two. He received the title of Reich Deputy for German Prehistory and oversaw the Confederation for German Prehistory, which promoted archaeology to support German racial theories and patriotic fervour. Rosenberg had some ideas of his own about prehistory, including a theory that Germanic peoples originated from a lost Atlantic island, a Nordic-Aryan Atlantis.

  Monumental statue of Arminius/Hermann in the Teutoberg Forest.

  Not to be outdone, in 1936 Himmler brought an archaeological research group into his ss structure as part of his fascination with Germanic heritage. This larger group became a section of the ss-Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage), an umbrella organization that included many different historical disciplines to create a vision of the German past. The ss-Ahnenerbe did not confine its activities to the German heartland in central Europe. In addition to domestic research, it launched expeditions to seek evidence for Aryan precursors in the Near East and Tibet. An expedition to Bolivia was cancelled when the Second World War broke out. If this sounds familiar, it is because the ss-Ahnenerbe’s overseas activities inspired the Nazi characters in the films Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).

  When Germany overran other parts of Europe, ss-Ahnenerbe archaeologists moved into occupied territories. In 1940–42, an ss-Ahnenerbe team conducted excavations at Biskupin, which they renamed Urstadt. After the fall of France in 1940, the Rosenberg group quickly moved in to investigate the menhirs at Carnac to see if they could make an Aryan connection, as part of a failed scheme to generate separatist sentiment in the Breton population. The ss-Ahnenerbe was not pleased that the Rosenberg organization had got there first, but the following year it redirected its attention to Crimea and the Caucasus.

  After the war, some Nazi archaeologists were removed from the discipline or relegated to provincial assignments. Reinerth, for example, became director of the pile-dwelling museum in Unteruhldingen. Others, including Herbert Jankuhn (1905–1990), who became head of ss-Ahnenerbe’s archaeology section in 1940, passed through a perfunctory de-Nazification process and went on to prominent academic careers.12

  Meanwhile, back at Gergovia, the monumentalized site was put to use by Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856–1951) to legitimate his Vichy regime. In 1942, Pétain organized a commemoration around the monument erected in 1900, involving veterans of the First World War, to evoke the memory of Vercingetorix the hero and to link the Gaul to himself. Alésia had too much anti-German baggage, which would not have sat well with Vichy’s overlords, so Gergovia was a more palatable choice. No one was particularly impressed by this attempt to link the heroic Vercingetorix to the subservient Pétain.13

  After the Second World War, archaeologists became much more aware of the potential of their field for political manipulation. They were chastened by the willingness of many of their colleagues to take up such activity in return for being allowed to practise their profession. Moreover, the discipline had moved away from methods employed by Kossinna to trace the presence of ethnic boundaries in later prehistory. Politicians are always there, however. For example, in the 1980s, François Mitterrand (1916–1996) had a monument erected at Bibracte and a decade later built a large museum there in an effort to link the Vercingetorix story to a pan-European ‘Celtic’ identity.14 He even expressed a wish to be buried there, although that did not happen.

  Heritage management

  Today, the archaeological record of the Barbarian World is the province of an activity known as ‘heritage management’. In a sense, heritage management channels the use of national patrimony into more benign paths, although still within a framework of stewardship for the material remains of the past. Participation by archaeologists is central to heritage management, and it now forms a major part of the programme at many international archaeological conferences. National heritage management programmes have resulted in excavation and preservation of many sites threatened by development as well as suppression of trade in illicit antiquities.

  Each European country has a governmental agency charged with overseeing the archaeology of heritage management. Some of these agencies have a long historical legacy themselves. For example, the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) can trace its lineage back to the seventeenth century. Often, these governmental agencies include representatives from archaeology, architecture, museums, planning, tourism and engineering, along with legal staff. In Scotland, the agency formerly known as Historic Scotland was renamed Historic Environment Scotland in 2015 to reflect a more holistic view of he
ritage management.

  Many of the countries whose territory constituted the Barbarian World are members of the European Union. The EU has an array of legislation to protect antiquities and also to suppress international trade in antiquities. While much of this trade comes from the Mediterranean and the Near East, artefacts of the Barbarian World are also in high demand by collectors who do not comprehend that their quest for these objects drives looting and destruction of sites. Let me appeal to the reader never to purchase antiquities from anyone. The archaeological record is our legacy from the past and should be available for all to experience in museums and through its professional study.

  Infrastructure development throughout Europe, particularly in countries like Ireland and Poland that did not see much investment in roads and pipelines until recently, has driven an explosion in rescue archaeology. Rescue archaeology has been practised since the beginning of the field, but often in connection with local construction. Now motorways and pipelines are carving long slices across the countryside, and they often cut through areas rich in archaeological sites. In my own research in Poland, the building of the A-1 motorway has yielded an avalanche of new data on early farmers, as well as later prehistoric periods. The costs of such research are usually built into the contracts for the construction, leading to the use of the term ‘developer-funded archaeology’. In addition to research institutions like universities and museums, private archaeology firms have been established by archaeologists to bid on rescue projects.