This edited volume is dedicated to national-socialist archaeology as a Europe-wide phenomenon. It analyses national-socialist attempts to denationalize the archaeologies of European nations by creating a new unifying European archaeology on a racial basis.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, archaeology began to develop into an important force behind processes of nation building. At the same time, structures of transnational academic collaboration contributed strongly to the internal dynamics of the research field, which was primarily organized on a national basis.
In those European countries that were confronted with national-socialist occupation and repression between 1939 and 1945, these transnational archaeological networks were to prove crucial for the development of national-socialist archaeological policies.
This volume will reveal how national-socialist archaeology was to anextent valued positively in its time as highly innovative, even influencing the archaeology of non-occupied countries. Although in the final instance, it generally failed to displace the national archaeologies in Europe, the volume also analyses the long-term impact of national-socialist rule on the development of European archaeology. How did the attempts to create a unified European archaeology after 1945 continue to influence networks, methods and terminologies, institutional structures, or popular representations of the early past?
Chapter 1 Is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via Springerlink.
Chapter
1. Introduction: National Socialist Archaeology in Europe and
its Legacies.
Chapter
2. Prehistoric Archaeology in Germany and National
Socialism.
Chapter
3. Archaeology in Austria during the Nazi Era.
Chapter
4. National Socialist Archaeology in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia.
Chapter
5. Poland reborn: the Ethnic Origin of Past Societies and Contemporary Land
Affiliation. Polish and German Prehistorians during the Twentieth Century.-
Chapter
6. Dreams of Germanic unity: the desire for Scandinavia and the use
of archaeology.
Chapter
7. Dangerous Liaisons of a Nazi sort: a failed
Icelandic expedition and the legacy of Bruno Schweizer.
Chapter
8. National
Socialist Archaeology in the Low Countries.
Chapter
9. National Socialist
Archaeology and France.
Chapter
10. National Socialist Archaeology in
Serbia: Power and Ideology at the Völkerstrasse.
Chapter
11. "Unrestricted
research opportunities with unpleasant surprises German archaeologists
in Greece during the National Socialist era".
Chapter
12. The Kunstschutz in
World War II occupied Crete.
Chapter
13. Lithuanian Archaeology during the
National Socialist Occupation.
Chapter
14. The Struggle to Survive and Work:
Archaeology in Latvia during the German Occupation (1941-1945).
Chapter
15.
Between the rock and a hard place: Estonian archaeology at the times of
national, socialist, and national socialist ideologies.
Chapter
16.
Archaeology in Ukraine during World War II.
Chapter
17. Interactions between
British Archaeologists and National Socialism: Pragmatism, Neutrality,
Opposition and Compromise.
Chapter
18. Adolf Mahr: What was his impact and
what is his legacy for contemporary prehistoric research in Ireland?.-
Chapter
19. Walking on egg shells? Archaeology in Switzerland torn between
submission and resistance from 1933 to 1945.
Chapter
20. Visigothic
Archaeology. An example of the influence of National Socialism in Spain?.-
Chapter
21. Redistributions of the National Socialist archaeological research
program within the study of prehistory in Portugal during Estado Novo.-
Chapter
22. "Was Italian archaeology influenced by National Socialism? A
provisional assessment".
Chapter
23. Albania and the Period of Fascist
Archaeology.
Chapter
24. Hungarian Archaeology in the Shadow of National
Socialism (19201945).
Chapter
25. Nationalism and National Socialism in
Romanian archaeology in the interwar period and World War II (1918-1945).-
Chapter
26. Bulgarian-German relations in archaeology before and during the
time of National Socialism.
Chapter
27. Archaeology and National Socialism
in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945).
Chapter
28. Epilogue:
Legacies and continuities, and what to do about them.
Martijn Eickhoff is director of NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and professor by special appointment of Archaeology and Heritage of War and Mass Violence at the University of Groningen. He researches the history, cultural dimensions, and after-effects of large-scale violence and regime change in Europe and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Daniel Modl is curator and research assistant at the Department of Archaeology & Coin Cabinet at the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz. His primary areas of expertise lie in history of archaeology, archaeometallurgy, mining archaeology, speleology, and experimental archaeology. He recently published the edited volume 'Archäologie in Österreich 1938-1945' (2020), which contains over 30 contributions by international authors on archaeological research in Austria during the Nazi era.
Katie Meheux works for the University College London department of Libraries, Culture, Collections and Open Science (LCCOS) as the librarian of the Institute of Archaeology Library. An archaeologist by training, her research focuses on the history and historiography of archaeology, with a particular interest in the twentieth-century development of the profession within contemporary political contexts. Katie is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of HARN (Histories of Archaeology Research Network).
Erwin Nuijten is a project assistant at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. After his studies in anthropology, he followed the Masters programme Holocaust and Genocide Studies and completed his second Masters degree in 2015. In 2016 he became the project assistant and managing editor for this edited volume.
