Ancient traces of stone suggest humans have lived in buildings for at least 350,000 years. If the features and dates from the Paleolithic site of Terra Amata, France, are interpreted correctly (de Lumley 1969; cf. Villa 1983), early humans built small, temporary huts of saplings, cobbles, and brush on the edge of the Mediterranean during the Holstein interglacial. More permanent dwellings date from ca. 12,000–10,000 bp, as proto-agricultural Natufian peoples crowded around permanent springs in the post-Pleistocene Levant (Henry 1989) and sedentary hunters and gatherers using Jomon pottery settled the forested river valleys of the Japanese islands (Aikens and Higuchi 1982; Pearson 1986; Watanabe 1986). An unbroken legacy of human buildings stretches from the massive walls and tower built 9,350 years ago at Jericho, perhaps the oldest example of communal construction (Kenyon 1952,1972; cf. Mellaart 1975; Bar-Yosef 1986), to the Louisiana Superdome, the world's largest arena with seats for 95,000. And with an apparent inevitability which is simply an artifact of hindsight, humans translated early dwellings into other architectural forms as rooms served as burial crypts, pithouses became kivas (Cordell 1979: 134; Scully 1975), and houses of men were transformed into dwellings of gods (Bukert 1988; Fox 1988). Over the last 10,000 years, the built environment has become coterminous with the human environment, as people have raised artificial boundaries defining private and public, secular and sacred spaces.

This study presents a case of interpretive abuse. One unfortunate archaeological data set has been forced to yield two diametrically opposed interpretations in the service of two ideological movements, one heinous (the Nazis) and one innocent (eco-feminism). Oddly, both interpretations share the same theoretical and logical form; it is only a politically motivated reversal of the “good” and the “bad” that separates them. Neither interpretation can be empirically justified. Sadly, the archaeological and linguistic matter lying quietly at the root of this disagreement – the archaeological identity of the ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European – offers unprecedented access to the ideals, beliefs, and symbolic structures of a truly remote prehistoric society. A robust body of linguistic research on Proto-Indo-European language, social organization, and comparative mythology presents to archaeologists what is probably the richest collection of knowledge of its kind anywhere in the world. But the history attached to the subject has prompted many scholars to avoid it out of suspicion, a situation which has bred ignorance and indifference within most of the archaeological community.

Indo-European linguistics and archaeology have been exploited to support openly ideological agendas for so long that a brief history of the issue quickly becomes entangled with the intellectual history of western Europe. The search for Indo-European origins began in the nineteenth century within the same intellectual circles that spawned today's hermeneutic and ideologically based doubts about rationality and objective understanding.

A nationalist interpretive framework, emphasizing the antiquity, uniqueness, purity, and importance of Chinese civilization, is so basic to the pursuit of history and archaeology in China that it would seem a moot exercise to expound on it. If our objective is to lie in sounding out the intellectual atmosphere of present-day Chinese archaeological practice, it may be more relevant, as well as more interesting, to explore how subtle inter-regional tensions within the country have lately been symbolically played out through the public presentation of archaeological data. This is the main task of this chapter. We shall, however, never veer far from the topic of nationalism in archaeology; understanding the new regionalist paradigm in Chinese archaeology may indeed help us to perceive in more general terms how nationalism has come to be culturally reconfigured in China during the eighties and early nineties.

New frameworks of interpretation

During the last decade, the study of prehistoric and early historical archaeology in China has undergone a change of paradigm. Until the late seventies, all of Chinese civilization had been perceived as originating from a narrowly circumscribed area along the middle reaches of the Yellow River, from where it gradually spread outward.

Archaeology in Korea is viewed, as it is elsewhere in east Asia, as a branch of history rather than anthropology. One consequence of this position is that attention to the remote past has been focussed largely on Korean ancestors: who they were in reference to Chinese historic documents; and how and when they came to the Korean peninsula. By the time of the formation of states in the southern Korean peninsula and the Japanese islands, a fully Korean presence in the peninsula is assumed, and the identity of Koreans within the peninsula is complete.

Questions of ethnic origins have thus been paramount in terms of approaches to prehistory in Korea, and in the past answers have been found with reference to mythology and by appeal to ancient texts. More recently, archaeology has been asked to supply some answers to ethnic questions, or in some cases archaeology has been used to validate the established mythological or legendary constructs regarding the original ancestors. At this intersection of mythology, history, and archaeology lie many problems for the interpretation of the past. Political and nationalistic motivations for preferring one interpretation over another, although more covert than overt, are at the heart of these problems.

Although ethnicity is called upon to validate political claims in many places, Korea's particular variation on the theme helps to illuminate the way ethnicity in the past is and has been approached.

In August 1945 the Japanese people, crushed by years of war and numbed by the final horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, awaited the arrival of the Allied Forces. Within a few months the work of rebuilding postwar Japan would begin. Part of this process involved the creation of a new vision of the Japanese people's national identity, a new image of what it meant to be Japanese.

In this paper I will trace the relationship between postwar Japanese archaeology and this new sense of Japanese national identity. I will argue that in the aftermath of World War II, Japanese archaeologists believed that their discipline could prevent a revival of emperor worship and extreme nationalism by using material remains to rewrite ancient Japanese history. This approach, which focussed on the retrieval and description of primary data, was highly empirical. In the 1950s and 1960s, a goal of archaeological work was to collect and organize materials excavated through academic research projects. Later, during the 1970s and 1980s, information began to come mainly from administrative rescue excavations. Archaeologists found themselves unable to keep up with the constant need both to excavate sites threatened with destruction and to publish the results in a form accessible to the general public. Consequently, archaeological information has gradually been incorporated into a broader discourse, one which revolves around the definition of a new Japanese national identity.

Chinese archaeology was characterized by numerous discoveries and significant research during the thirty years from 1949, the year of the founding of the People's Republic of China, to 1979, the year the Chinese Communist Party held its Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee and began to correct the “leftist” errors of Mao Zedong. Compared to the period prior to 1949, many achievements are evident: archaeological excavations expanded into every area of the country, compiling abundant new data that filled in many historical gaps; the adoption of new techniques, such as C 14 dating, provided invaluable new insights into the prehistoric record; the training of younger archaeologists and the establishment of archaeological museums and institutes in each province provided proper conditions for the storage and study of newly unearthed antiquities; and the opening of a special publishing facility (Wenwu Publishing House) and the printing of several archaeological periodicals guaranteed the publication of important data. In addition, being a socialist country in which all the land belongs to the state, China owns all the antiquities and ancient remains on or under the ground. During the period under discussion, the Antiquity law, which prohibited the export of antiquities, was very strict and efficiently enforced by the police and customs offices.

Studies of ethnogenesis (or “the formation of peoples”) played a prominent role in the USSR for many years. Western scholars often are genuinely surprised at the development (if not overdevelopment) of such studies relative to other research programs. Why was the question of ethnogenesis so important for Soviets, especially for the intellectuals? Was this a response to purely academic challenges or stimulated by external forces? Also, were the ethnogenetic studies always emphasized in Soviet scholarship or were they introduced at a certain period of its development? Probably, only a few people remember now that Soviet scholars only began to study questions of ethnogenesis in the late 1930s. What happened then? What forced scholars to revise almost completely their former concepts and methodologies? In this respect, it is worth mentioning that many ideas, approaches, and theories that continued to dominate Soviet academic research until very recently were deeply rooted in developments during the late 1930s and 1940s. Thus, what happened at that time in the USSR greatly affected subsequent Soviet scholarship.

The intellectual climate and political background of early Soviet times

To answer these questions one needs to return to a somewhat earlier period and to explore the ideological climate in Soviet scholarship from 1920 through the early 1930s. At that time the so-called “Pokrovski school” was dominant in the historical disciplines, and the field of linguistics was involved in a critical transformation initiated by academician Nikolai Ya.

The systematic and institutionalized abuse of archaeology for ideological and political ends during the Third Reich has contributed significantly to developments in post-war German archaeology. The legacy left by the Nazi system has manifested itself as a theoretical void in West German archaeology and the exclusively Marxist perspective of East German archaeology since 1945 (Härke 1989a, 1989b, 1991). German reunification poses urgent questions regarding future developments in German archaeology, both in academia and in state-funded research. It remains to be seen how this future will be determined. The post-World War II histories of these two modern nation-states have been very different politically but very similar with regard to the identity crisis now faced by archaeology as a discipline. The much-needed theoretical debate in German archaeological research, which seems now to be developing actively for the first time since 1945 (Hassmann n.d.), should contribute to a better understanding of the symbiotic relationship between archaeology, politics, and nationalism in other national contexts as well.

Just as Faust struck a bargain with Mephistopheles, German archaeology had a relationship with the Nazis that has continued to affect developments within the discipline. The legacy of the “Faustian bargain” entered into by German archaeologists during the Third Reich has several components, which can be subdivided as follows.

Causes:

1. The awkward debt, in the form of research institutes, museums, university chairs and funding sources established between 1933 and 1945, owed to the National Socialist regime by the current archaeological establishment.

2. An historical emphasis in German archaeological research on typological classification, what Jankuhn has called “stamp collecting” (Hӓrke 1991:204).

3. […]

European thought has been dominated for over 200 years by a pervasive dichotomy between rationalism, universalism, and positivism on the one hand and romanticism, particularism (or “alterity”), and idealism on the other. The first of these philosophical packages was initially associated with French liberalism, the second with German reaction (Dumont 1991). Both ethnic nationalism and post-modernism (which in archaeology is the essence of post-processualism) are products of the romantic side of this polarity.

Archaeology, idealism, and relativism

Post-processualism remains a minority position in archaeology, but derives considerable prestige from the preeminence of post-modernism in comparative literature and its dissemination throughout the humanities and social sciences (Hunt 1989; Laudan 1990; Rose 1991). Post-processualism propagates the idea that, because every decoding of a message is another encoding, all truth is subjective (Tilley 1990:338). It thereby transforms relativism into an absolute principle. Because of this, many post-processualists conclude that there is no difference between knowledge and faith and further deny the validity of distinguishing science from magic and religion (Barnes 1974, 1977). Archaeologists such as Shanks and Tilley have concluded that the only goal of their research can be a political one (Shanks and Tilley 1987a:195). In their view, the aim of archaeological discourse should be to disempower political and intellectual elites by affirming the relativism, and hence the equal validity, of all explanations of the past (Bapty and Yates 1990; Shanks 1992; Shanks and Tilley 1987a, 1987b, 1989; Tilley 1990, 1991; Ucko 1990).

Nowhere has it been made more horrifyingly clear that the past is a prize, a resource to covet and for which to contend, than in the west Balkans today. When the towers and walls of ancient towns are shelled for no military purpose, when medieval churches and mosques become targets, and when the calls to arms unfurl histories like banners, then it is starkly apparent to what extent the past can intertwine with the present – and to what effect. Memories, real and imagined, ancient and new, sustain the civil conflict in Croatia and Bosnia and Hercegovina as much as any weapon. The wars of the Balkans unequivocally show that possession of the past is no trifling matter, and that the construction of the past is fraught with consequence. One need look no further than the ranges, valleys, and fields of the Dinaric Mountains to see that the past and the present are inextricably bound together.

As the papers in this volume demonstrate, archaeologists have recently exhibited a growing concern about two aspects of the relationship between past and present. First, it is coming to be appreciated that many of the notions about the past held by archaeologists are derived from present conditions. Secondly, it appears that, often, archaeological efforts are geared overtly or covertly toward serving a political agenda of the present.

As the essays in this volume demonstrate so clearly, images and symbols from the past play conspicuous and powerful roles in the present. In the many twentieth-century examples cited here by the authors, we can see how archaeological finds become battle-banners of modern ethnic groups and nations; how the dubious evidence of ancient ethnic migrations and diffusions can be used to legitimize modern territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing; how patterns of archaeological funding and scholarly interest can place interest on certain politically useful sites and certain classes of evidence; and how archaeological interpretation can often both reflect and reinforce the centralizing policies of emerging nation-states. Yet this chapter will attempt to show that such nationalist bias in archaeological research and interpretation is neither a regional aberration nor merely a curable symptom of an identifiable scholarly disease. It will argue that archaeology has by its nature an unavoidable political dimension – and that nationalism is simply one of many possible manifestations of its character as both a scientific and a political enterprise.

Although most of the chapters in this volume deal with regions with long historiographical traditions, where images of ancient enmity have fueled modern ethnic or political conflict, archaeology can also be seen to manifest its political character in superficially peaceful surroundings and “shallow” historical contexts.

This book developed out of a symposium examining the relationship between nationalism and archaeological practice which was organized for the American Anthropological Association meetings, Chicago, November 1991. Several of the articles published here (Wailes and Zoll, Arnold and Hassmann, Anthony, Kaiser, Kohl and Tsetskhladze, von Falkenhausen, and Fawcett) represent expanded versions of the papers presented in that symposium; the others (Diaz-Andreu, Lillios, Shnirelman, Tong, Chernykh, and Nelson) were later solicited by the editors for this publication, as were the general commentaries by B.G. Trigger and N.A. Silberman. Initially, we planned to obtain an essentially “global” coverage of issues relating to nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology, and more than two dozen archaeologists were contacted in hopes of obtaining such coverage. The articles that appear here deal exclusively with European and East Asian archaeology, an unintended focus representing the contributions of those scholars who responded affirmatively to our invitation.

It is unfortunate, of course, that certain areas are not covered. We particularly regret lack of coverage on the nationalist practices of archaeology in Israel, Turkey, and other Middle Eastern countries; in North and sub-Saharan Africa; in South Asia; in Mexico; and in Peru and neighboring countries (e.g., conflicting interpretations of Tiahuanaco), but it is also obvious that the issues associated with the relationship between archaeology and nationalist politics, whether considered historically or in terms of contemporary developments, are ubiquitous.