Romantic Nationalism did not invent archeology, but did create the conditions for its success. As archeology developed out of, and emancipated from, earlier antiquarian and humanist traditions, the ideals and practices involved in that process derived their importance from national thought and its concepts; conversely, archeological discoveries were instrumental in imagining and maintaining Europe’s nations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Material authenticity and cultural stratification

19th-century archeologists brought ancient objects, monuments and sites to light. They studied in the first place Roman antiquity and, as counterweights, also the vernacular domains of the past, exactly like Romantic-Nationalist linguists, philologists, historians and folk song collectors, and, like painters, architects and folklorists, they highlighted that past’s material manifestations. They too used indigenous material remains as a foundation for the modern nation’s ethnic distinctiveness and cultural specificity. More than other fields of cultural production, archeology was able to literally and directly disclose – indeed, to discover – an authentic cultural past, suitable for modern nation-building.

This authenticity could be attested by two essential features of archeological objects: their materiality and their ground-sitedness. Megalithic monuments, the foundations of a Roman villa, or an excavated collection of spearheads, all these were evidently ancient and they were there. Archeology interpreted these features using methodologies that built on views of humanist scholars and 18th-century antiquarian collectors, who had started to create chronological frameworks in two ways. First, by making up typologies: the comparison and seriation of objects based on their formal characteristics such as shape, size or decoration. Second, and increasingly, also through stratigraphy: the dating of objects in relation to the layer of the soil in which they were found, basically following the principle of “the deeper, the older”. The concept of stratigraphy made archeological discoveries highly instrumental for territorialist views of the nation, the rootedness of a people or a culture in the ground of its homeland. This view gained in strength when archeologists in their interpretations ignored diffusionist models (of ethnic groups migrating through Europe, out of Asia or Africa, and creating their characteristic material cultures in interaction with other groups) in favour of models of local cultural development and continuity within one territory. Archeology thus made the past authentic and grounded in the nation’s territory. Archeology also made the past tangibly present in its objects and sites. Their formal characteristics were rich sources of inspiration for 19th-century cultural production. At the same time, their tangibility and display-value made them highly effective for national instrumentalization, through archeological state museums and tourism. The creation of museums and paid curators formed part of the institutionalization of archeology as a modern discipline.

Thus, the typologically and stratigraphically attested sense of authenticity invoked by archeological discoveries from the nation’s soil – in the words of Anthony D. Smith – “probably did more to undergird and embody the nationalist vision of a world of discrete, unique territorial nations than a library of ancient texts or modern nationalist speeches”. Indeed, the archeological notion of stratification proved essential in cultural-nationalist thought: the very ideal of cultural continuity over time within one territory became legitimized as layered sedimentations throughout the ages, with modern culture covering and resting on primordial autochthonous cultural strata.

Humanist and antiquarian traditions: Classical archeology

Europe has always known some kind of interest in material remains of the past, attested also in the medieval preoccupation with the relics of saints and martyrs. The status and use of the material past changed when it left the exclusive realm of religious worship and accompanied ancient texts as the object of early-modern curiosity, collecting and historical study – initially as a legitimization of the political power of 14th-century Italian states. Also elsewhere in Europe, traces from antiquity attracted the interest of humanists. The Italian merchant Cyriacus of Ancona (1391–1455) described and drew ruins in Apollonia (near Fier, Albania) and in Pergamon, and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople; the Antwerp-based Italian humanist Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589) incorporated a floor plan of a Roman ruin in Holland in his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore (1567); and the Dane Ole Worm (1588–1655) inventorized runic inscriptions in 1625, resulting in his Danicorum Monumentorum (1643). These and many more descriptions and illustrations of archeological discoveries helped to establish the idea of the soil and inscriptions as archives of a country’s past. Most influential in this respect was Antonio Bosio’s (1576–1629) Roma Sotterranea (1632), in which he described for the first time the catacombs under the city of Rome, discovered in 1576. Bosio made Rome not only the Urbs Aeterna in the sense of the capital of the Roman Empire or its universal holiness as the papal city, but also in a worldly-historical sense: the city became the record of the classical and post-classical eras. Bosio helped – together with northern European counterparts such as Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn-burial: A discourse of the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk (1658) and excavations of tumuli in Scandinavia – to establish the idea that antiquity is to be found underneath the earth, thus preparing the way for the archeological concept of stratigraphy.

Early-modern collections of artefacts were equally important for later archeology. Curiosity cabinets and Wunderkammern, like Worm’s renowned one, illustrated the variety and ingenuity of human culture alongside objects of art, while animals and stones illustrated the marvels of God’s creation. Their antiquity became essential for humanist scholarship. Philologists like the Leiden-based Frenchman J.J. Scaliger (1540–1609), or the Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), considered them as crucial in the project of philology, since they could establish authoritative, verifiable knowledge about the (classical or post-classical) past when textual sources proved to be unreliable and failed to help distinguish truth from myth. Inscriptions, coins and seals then served as reference points for dating events in the past. Next to textual criticism and comparative-historical linguistics, chronology thus became a key discipline for philologists, while fields similar to later archeology, such as numismatics or sigillography, became important auxiliary sciences for them.

Out of early-modern scholarly interest, a Europe-wide vogue of collecting and describing remnants of the classical and local past grew in the 17th and 18th centuries, known as antiquarianism: the collection of ancient objects, together with manuscripts, legal documents, pieces of art and naturalia.  Antiquarians elaborated on the humanists’ project and strove for a piecemeal compilation of a local or regional chronology attested by material proof, through the description of found objects and sites. To this end, and in line with practices of empiricism in the natural sciences, they circulated these descriptions in specialized societies, often under royal protection. The example was set by the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Médailles (1663; later Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1716) in Paris, followed by the Swedish Antikvitetskollegium (1666), which gave special attention to runic inscriptions. In 1707, the Danish Society of Antiquaries started studying works of art, manuscripts, objects and also runic inscriptions. The London Society of Antiquaries was established in 1717 and published antiquarian descriptions  in its series Vetusta monumenta (1747) and its journal Archaeologia (1770). Together, these institutions formed a network of antiquarians looking for traces of antiquity throughout Europe.

Some discoveries from the indigenous past gained instantaneous fame, such as the Golden Horns found in Gallehus (Jutland, Denmark) in 1639 and 1734, described by Worm and others; but it was mainly the study of Roman antiquity which led to the next steps in the institutionalization of archeology. The discoveries became larger in size and museums were established to host the growing collections. In Metz and Besançon, during military construction works led by Vauban, entire amphitheatres were found. The resonance of the excavation of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum was enormous from the beginning of the 18th century onward (especially by the Spanish military engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre, who published his descriptions as Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte, “The antiquities of Herculaneum exposed”, 8 vols, 1757-92). Charles III of Bourbon, King of Spain and Naples, established in the 1750s a museum in Naples to store the found objects, along with collections of the Farnese and Medici families. It had been preceded by an archeological museum in Rome, the Museum Capitolino (1733; the Museum Pio Clementino was established in 1771 in the same city). In London, the collection of Hans Sloane (1660–1753), which also had a Medici provenance and was bequeathed to the British state, was housed in the newly founded British Museum in 1759. Around the same time, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) in his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764) systematically periodized Graeco-Roman art, while describing its development in organic terms.

The Danish Golden Horns were melted down in 1802, and indeed, the antiquarian and his collections did not meet with general acclaim; like the bibliomaniac and his library, he even became a type for parody, as illustrated most famously by Walter Scott’s The antiquary (1816). Antiquaries were imputed to be driven by an obsessive collecting instinct bereft of systematic analytical reflection and prone to wayward speculation.

Expeditions and museums: Civilization and national ancestry

The culture-administrative infrastructure of the post-1789 state helped transform humanist and antiquarian traditions, turning their interest in material remains into a matter of national importance, coincidentally shifting the focus from classical antiquity to pre-classical cultures and post-classical, early-medieval tribes, and further institutionalizing the collection and exhibition of archeological objects.

In Revolutionary France, sites from the past were threatened when churches and monasteries, often dating back to the Middle Ages, were demolished. The keeping and study of remaining artefacts was soon institutionalized with the establishment of the Musée des monuments français in 1791, curated by Alexandre Lenoir (1761–1839), and the Louvre museum in 1793. Antiquarian interest was now paired with an sense of salvage from modernity. This was also the case in Catalonia, where Gothic architecture was under revolutionary threat in 1835. Elsewhere and throughout the century, the building of canals, roads and railways, military construction works or the destruction of city walls offered excellent conditions for discovering and safeguarding material traces from the past. In the meantime, modern state statistics were used for archeological purposes as well, as was the case with the Irish Ordnance Survey (1825-46), in which George Petrie was engaged.

The establishment of archeology was more than a side-effect of the modernization of states. Some of the most significant undertakings in the first decades of the 19th century were set up by governments in line with their view of the nation’s place among the greatest of civilizations – Roman, Greek, Trojan, Phoenician and Egyptian – or alongside imperial military campaigns. This was the case in the first place for the archeology of classical architecture. Napoleon Bonaparte gave, as president of the Italian Republic, a new impulse to Rome’s status as the world centre of history, by enabling excavations of the Roman Forum; in 1803 the bottom half of the Arch of Septimius Severus was unearthed by Carlo Fea (1753–1836), who also did archeological work at the Pantheon. (Excavations of the entire Forum were carried out in the 1870s and in 1898, when Giacomo Boni removed all layers to the level of Emperor Augustus’s age.) Similarly, Napoleon ordered in 1804 the removal of medieval ecclesiastical extensions to the Roman Porta Nigra in Trier, Germany (completed in 1815). Around the same time, the Earl of Elgin studied the Acropolis site in Athens and removed the marble frieze from the Parthenon (1803-12), to display it in the British Museum. Its apparently authentic images of bodies from antiquity set an example for a Greek revival in the arts and enticed the practice of athletics and sports in English education.

Most famously, Napoleon facilitated the establishment of Egyptology by taking archeologists along on his military expedition to Egypt (1798-1801), partly under the command of General Jean-Baptiste Kléber (1753–1800), who also was a neoclassical architect (and had taken Maastricht in 1794). During this campaign, the Rosetta Stone was discovered, which would become the key to the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1823. Sketches from Egyptian objects and sites made by artist and archeologist Vivant Denon (1747–1825) were published in 1802 as Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte, while a huge collective effort by hundreds of scholars and artists resulted in Description de l’Égypte (23 vols, 1809-26). In the following years, as Egyptology developed into an archeological specialization, its presented objects became an important source for Egyptian revival architecture, from the Karlsruhe Synagogue (1798) to the Egyptian Bridge (1825-26) and Egyptian Gate (1827-30) in St Petersburg; further ramifications can be noted in other cultural fields as well, far into the century, as exemplified by Verdi’s opera Aida (1871). In the meantime, British imperial thought sought parallels with ancient Phoenician sailors and even found justification in alleged archeological proof of their presence in Cornwall.

Outside Europe and the Mediterranean too, archeological excavations and museums went hand in hand with mining, military expeditions, ethnographical and geographical exploration, mostly under government auspices; witness Alexander von Humboldt’s interest in Mayan ruins and artefacts, or the establishment of a national museum in Mexico in 1825.

Within Europe, Graeco-Roman antiquity continued to attract antiquarian and archeological attention in these decades, from the British Isles to the Black Sea. In all former Roman provinces, ruins, tumuli, monuments and roads helped to interlock the vernacular past with established classical archeology. This was the case, for example, when Hadrian’s Wall, built in the 2nd century across Britain from the North-East to the Irish Sea, was preserved in the 1830s by John Clayton (1792–1890), who published an Account of an excavation recently made within the Roman station of Cilurnum in 1844 and opened the excavation site in Chesters (Northumberland) up to the public; when Caspar Reuvens started excavating Forum Hadriani (near The Hague, the Netherlands) in 1827; or when in 1801 the Englishman William Bentinck discovered a monument to Emperor Trajan’s victory over the Dacians in Adamclisi (now Romania).

In the following decades, however, the lands beyond the limes became increasingly important for the creation of ethnic continuities. Histories of the Romans’ neighbouring tribes, their bravery and opposition against the conquerors, but also their defeat, had been recorded by the Romans themselves (Caesar, Livy, Tacitus), and inspired the glorification, already by Cervantes, of the resistance of Numantia to Roman siege, or the cult of Belgae and Batavi in the Low Countries. Figures of British chieftains like Caratacus and Boudicca, or Gaulish ones like Vercingetorix, boosted a vogue of Celticism which in the mid-19th century linked that ethnonym to the Iron-Age discoveries of Hallstatt (1847-63, Austria) and La Tène (1857-63, Switzerland). The Celts offered a pre-Roman ancestry to the French, and especially the Bretons (Jacques Cambry), as well as the Welsh, Irish, Highland Scots and even, by the end of the century, Spanish Galicians. Artefacts such as the Tara Brooch (discovered in 1850 by George Petrie) were used to illustrate, attest and instrumentalize this Celtic ancestry. Following this Celticism, Portuguese archeologists such as Francisco Martins Sarmento sought to root national history in the pre-historic Lusitanian culture that had opposed not only the Romans and Carthaginians, but even the glorified Celts. For similar nativist reasons, the migrations of Germans, Slavs and Magyars in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages were documented by Russian and Czech archeologists, while the Danish archeological range was expanded to include Icelandic saga-times, and the Irish historical and archeological focus privileged the period before the 12th-century arrival of Anglo-Norman conquerors.

As the field of non-classical national archeology increased in range and importance in the course of the century, government initiatives met the growing demand for archeological museums with paid curators, university chairs in archeology and legislation protecting excavated objects. The first 19th-century archeological museums were the National Museum in Hungary (1802), which exhibited objects from excavations in Buda (by István Schoenwiesner, from 1775 on), and the Danish National Museum for Antiquities in Copenhagen. The first professor of archeology was the Dutch Caspar Reuvens, at the University of Leiden (1818). He had graduated in law in Paris, where he also had seen the antiquities of the Louvre museum. He also became curator of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (“National Museum of Antiquities”) founded in the same city and in the same year, consisting of the university’s collection and a private collection of an Amsterdam family of antiquaries. Other archeological museums, often called “national”, were opened in Bucharest (1830s), Barcelona (1862), Dublin (1890), Lisbon (1893), Istanbul (1891, curated by Osman Hamdi Bey), Estonia (1909), the Faroe Islands (1916); other chairs followed in Cambridge (1850), Dublin (1854), Bucharest (1874) and Uppsala (1914), and a curriculum in archeology in Pest (1862) and Tartu (1919). Protective legislation was enacted in Sweden (1828), Greece, the Ottoman Empire (first 1869), England (1882) and France (1887). At the same time, specialized archeological societies kept on multiplying. In most French provinces, they were formed after the model of the Académie celtique, such as the Société des antiquaires de Normandie (1824). The Frisian Society (1827) also developed archeological activities, as did the Gelehrte Estnische Gesellschaft (1838). Ireland saw the Kilkenny Archeological Society (1849), Portugal the Sociedade Archeologica Lusitana (1849).

The widespread discovery of non-classical material made the antiquarian problem of chronology relevant again. The most influential concept for solving this problem came from the Danish antiquarian and numismatist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865), head of the Copenhagen Oldnordisk Museum since 1816. He combined the methodological principles of formal description and the stratigraphy of finds with the ideal three-age model popular in earlier antiquarian works, and in 1825 he presented his collection divided into a Stone Age, a Bronze Age and an Iron Age, each of which had not only a distinctive material for cutting tools but also different material cultures and burial habits associated with it. His Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed (1836) was translated into German by Christian Paulsen (1798–1854), former student of Savigny and propagator of the Danish language in Schleswig (Leitfaden zur Nordischen Alterthumskunde, 1837) and into English by Francis Egerton (Guide to Northern antiquity, 1848). Its chronology, materially attested as it was, found acceptance throughout Europe for the non-classical past, enabling the establishment of non-classical archeology as a systematic discipline. Thus, in 1877 even in Rome a chair of prehistory could be created.

By the last quarter of the 19th century, many European countries possessed a substantial volume of indigenous artefacts and sites in an established chronological framework, so that archeology could complement national philology and history-writing with a past whose authenticity connected it closely to the modern nation. Even the august study of Greek antiquity was, in Greece, successfully transformed into a Romantic-National archeology – with an archeological society (1813-14), a national museum (1829) and protective laws and a state service created by King Otto. The process benefited from transnational connections of ideas and persons – with the French Expédition de Morée leading to excavations at Olympia (1823-33), the German Ludwig Ross (1806–1859) as the first professor of archeology in Athens (1837), the Archeological Society in Athens (1837) granting scholarships to study in Germany, and the opening of French and German schools in Athens (1846, 1874).

As in history-writing and philology, developments were marked by territorial conflicts and by disputes between professional and political groups. Amateur archeologists in France challenged the centrality of the Gauls in the established historical accounts when burial sites of Franks and Visigoths were discovered. In Estonia, Baltic Germans had until 1850 invoked medieval artefacts to legitimize their presence in the region, but turned, together with Estonians, to pre-historic culture to oppose Russification politics in the 1890s. And even the highly influential excavation of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann (1871-74), for all that its stratigraphical accuracy and comprehensiveness met with the methodological and disciplinary standards of the time, created misgivings in Ottoman quarters. Despite, or even thanks to, these debates, archeology triumphed as a discipline in its intertwining with Romantic Nationalism, offering the modern nation-state an authentic ancestral culture.

The discovery of paleolithic cultures and the scientific turn

Archeology’s accumulating discoveries and the influence from natural sciences made it in some respects also incompatible with the creation of a national ancestry. Especially the discovery of paleolithic cultures, Neanderthals and geological  “deep time” made processes of identification with the past problematic.

Discoveries from the paleolithic (the most primitive stone tools and bones from earliest human species like Homo erectus and Homo habilis – initially referred to as “antediluvian man”, i.e. from before the biblical Flood) did not immediately constitute a watershed between national and scientific archeology. More often than not they were studied along with all other finds, by the same archeologists. Some of the oldest tools and bones, found in Hoxne (England) in 1797, were kept by the Society of Antiquaries, which as late as 1899 also acquired control over the site of Stonehenge. Stonehenge itself had been studied by William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) in his youth, before he explored the pyramids at the Giza plateau (1880). John Evans (1823–1908) published on The coins of the ancient Britons (1864) as well as on The ancient stone implements, weapons and ornaments of Great Britain (1872), and was also president of the Numismatic Society (1874-1908), the Geological Society (1874-76), the Anthropological Institute (1877-79) and the Society of Antiquaries (1885-92).

Problems of – again – authoritative chronology, however, introduced methods and views from other sciences into archeological debate. When in 1846 Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes (1788–1868) publicly argued that the drop-shaped flints he had found in the Somme valley near Abbeville, in northern France, were man-made (Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes, 3 vols, 1849-64), he was exposed to universal criticism until his find was attested by geologists Joseph Prestwich (1812–1896) from London and the Scotsman Charles Lyell (1797–1875). Lyell (whose Principles of geology, 1830-33, contested the accepted biblically-inspired chronology of a 6000-year-old world) identified the chalk layer in which the tools were found with a layer across the Strait of Dover, in Kent. From then on, geological time and archeological culture overlapped. This brought John Lubbock (1834–1913) in his Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages (1865) to subdivide Thomsen’s Stone Age into the “old” paleolithic, with roughly knapped stone tools, and the “young” neolithic, typified by polished stone tools. As a Liberal member of parliament Lubbock also initiated the Ancient Monuments Act, 1882, protecting archeological discoveries; earlier on, he had personally acquired part of the Avebury estate in order to protect its neolithic monuments. He also published on extinct mammals in Doggerland, now at the bottom of the North Sea.

The creation of continuity with material cultures from the homeland’s soil became highly problematic, however, when deep geological layers appeared to contain not only extinct animals (the first dinosaur – Megalosaurus – was scientifically described by William Buckland in 1824 at the Geological Society in London, after fossils and bones had been exhumed for centuries), but also tools near fossil bones of extinct types of man. In 1856, the German Johann Carl Fuhlrott (1803–1877) described a skull found in the Neander valley (Germany), identified by the Irish geologist William King (1809–1886), as a distinct human species, Homo neanderthalensis. This discovery and the Europe-wide spread of this species was attested in 1880 by a child skeleton in a cave in Šipka (now Czech Republic) and two nearly complete skeletons in Spy (Belgium, 1886). Debates on Neanderthal traits as indications of either a distinct species, a race or pathology, involved geologists, zoologists and anthropologists like the German Rudolph Virchow (1821–1902), who also tried to uncover the origins of the German people through antropomorphology. Neanderthals and other fossil primates not only put the biblical account of Creation into question – e.g. in Lyell’s Geological evidences of the antiquity of Man (1863) – but also brought human “transmutation” (evolution) out of primates – in short, the ape as the ancestor of man – to the fore, a theory popularly linked to Charles Darwin’s The descent of man (1871).

On the one hand, the study of paleolithic culture and man separated itself from national archeological infrastructure, as also made manifest by the establishment of a specialized international scientific organization, the Congrès international d’anthropologie et d’archéologie préhistoriques (“International congress of prehistoric anthropologie and archeology”, 1866), while classical and medieval archeology by the end of the century shared new, positivist ideals with historiography, art history and linguistics. On the other hand, cultivation and political instrumentalization of archeological discoveries and principles continued well into the 20th century. In Catalonia, for example, the existing focus on Gothic art – in 1888 still manifest in the Universal Exhibition in Barcelona – shifted towards the Greek culture of the pre-Roman settlement Emporion, which was excavated from 1908 and became cultivated in Noucentismo. The 1911 World Fair in Rome, in the meantime, reclaimed the city’s position as the City of History. Imperial forces were still at play when Carl Humann (1839–1896) excavated the Pergamon altar (1878-86), exported it from the Ottoman Empire and reconstructed its friezes in Berlin, where they were displayed in two succeeding Pergamon Museums (1897-99 and 1910-30). Egyptian inspiration flourished in the years before and after the First World War following the discoveries of Nefertiti’s bust (by the German Ludwig Borchardt in 1912) and Pharaoh Tutankhamon’s tomb (by the Englishman Howard Carter in 1922). And after 1918, archeological research in Transylvania was used for both Hungarian and Romanian claims to the territory.

The connection between anthropological concepts of ethnotypes and races and the archeological (and folkoristic) study of material culture found maximized effects in the Fascist glorification of the pre-Roman culture of the Etruscans, as studied in the field of Etruscology recently created by the German classical archeologist Friedrich von Duhn (Italische Gräberkunde, 1923), the British-American Egyptologist David Randall-McIver (Villanovans and early Etruscans, 1924; The Iron Age in Italy, 1927) and the Italian archeologist Massimo Pallottino. It was mirrored in the Nazi creation of continuity with the Nordic past. Following archeologists such as Gustaf Kossinna and Hans Reinerth, the Nazi regime set up institutions for researching and teaching prehistory, such as the association Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral heritage”), and interpreted finds such as the Extern Rocks (Externsteine) in the Teutoburg forest (1939) as an authentic indigenous German spiritual counterweight to the classical and ecclesiastical hegemony of Rome.