National-Socialist Archaeology in Europe and its Legacies | Martijn Eickhoff, Daniel Modl, Katie Meheux, Erwin Nuijten

This edited volume is dedicated to national-socialist archaeology as a Europe-wide phenomenon. It analyses the national-socialist attempts to denationalize the archaeologies of the European nations by creating a new unifying European archaeology on a racial base. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, archaeology has developed into an important force behind processes of nation building. At the same time there were structures of transnational academic collaboration that strongly contributed to the internal dynamics of the primarily nationally organized research field. In those European countries that were confronted with national-socialist occupation and repression between 1939 and 1945, the transnational archaeological networks turned out to be an important starting point for developing national-socialist archaeological policies. This volume will also show how national-socialist archaeology, to some extent being valued positively as highly innovative, influenced the archaeology of non-occupied countries and how, in the end, it generally failed to overtrump the national archaeologies of Europe. It furthermore 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 terms, institutional structures or popular representations of the early past?