Gustaf Kossinna was a linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and professor of German archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

 at the University of Berlin. Along with Carl Schuchhardt

Carl Schuchhardt

Carl Schuchhardt was a German archaeologist and museum director.Schuchhardt studied classical philology, modern languages, and archaeology in Leipzig, Göttingen and Heidelberg...

 he was the most influential German prehistorian of his day, and was creator of the techniques of Siedlungsarchaologie, or "settlement archaeology." His nationalistic theories about the origins of the Germanic peoples

Germanic peoples

The Germanic peoples are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group of Northern European origin, identified by their use of the Indo-European Germanic languages which diversified out of Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age.Originating about 1800 BCE from the Corded Ware Culture on the North...

 influenced aspects of Nazi ideology; nevertheless, he was rejected by the party as their official prehistorian. That distinction was given to Carl Schuchhardt

Carl Schuchhardt

Carl Schuchhardt was a German archaeologist and museum director.Schuchhardt studied classical philology, modern languages, and archaeology in Leipzig, Göttingen and Heidelberg...

, the rival archaeologist who beat Kossinna in successfully assessing the value of the Eberswalde Hoard

Eberswalde Hoard

The Eberswalde Hoard or Treasure of Eberswalde is a Bronze Age hoard of 81 gold objects with a total weight of . The largest prehistoric assembly of gold objects ever found in Germany, it is considered to be one of the most important finds from the Central European Bronze Age. Today, it forms...

, the largest treasure ever discovered in German history, upon its discovery in 1913.

Life

Kossinna was a Germanized Mazur. He was born in Tilsit, East Prussia

East Prussia

East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...

, Kingdom of Prussia

Kingdom of Prussia

The Kingdom of Prussia was a German kingdom from 1701 to 1918. Until the defeat of Germany in World War I, it comprised almost two-thirds of the area of the German Empire...

. His father was a teacher at the secondary-school level. As a child he learned Latin and piano

Piano

The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...

.

As a university student he matriculated at a number of universities, studying classical and Germanic philology in Göttingen

Göttingen

Göttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...

, Leipzig

Leipzig

Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...

, Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 and Strassburg. He was influenced greatly by K. Muellenhoff, who encouraged him to research the origins of Indo-European

Indo-European studies

Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European , and its speakers, the...

 and Germanic culture. He obtained his doctorate at Strasbourg in 1887 in the subject of the early records of the high-Frankish language. From 1888 to 1892 he worked as a librarian. In 1896 his ideas were expressed in his lecture "The Pre-historical Origins of the Teutons in Germany". In 1902 he was appointed as Professor of German archaeology at the University of Berlin. In the same year he identified the Proto-Indo-Europeans

Proto-Indo-Europeans

The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language , a reconstructed prehistoric language of Eurasia.Knowledge of them comes chiefly from the linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics...

 with the north German Corded Ware culture

Corded Ware culture

The Corded Ware culture , alternatively characterized as the Battle Axe culture or Single Grave culture, is an enormous European archaeological horizon that begins in the late Neolithic , flourishes through the Copper Age and culminates in the early Bronze Age.Corded Ware culture is associated with...

, an argument that gained in currency over the following two decades. He placed the Indo-European urheimat

Urheimat

Urheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language...

 in Schleswig-Holstein

Schleswig-Holstein

Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost of the sixteen states of Germany, comprising most of the historical duchy of Holstein and the southern part of the former Duchy of Schleswig...

.

Thereafter he published many books on the origins of the Germanic peoples, founding the "German Prehistory Society" to promote interest and research in the subject. He became the most famous archaeologist in the German speaking world, and was notable for his use of archaeology to promote claims for an expanded German nation.

Material culture and ethnicity

Kossinna developed the theory that a regionally delimited ethnicity can be defined by the material culture excavated from a site (Culture-historical archaeology or simply Culture history theory). He wrote that "Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular people or tribes." This statement is known as "Kossinna's law", and forms the basis of his "settlement-archaeology" method. Unlike modern settlement archaeology, which refers only to individual settlements or patterns of settlement, Kossinna meant to emphasise, in Stefan Arvidsson's words, that "a unified set of archaeological artifacts, a 'culture', was the sign of a unified ethnicity." Thus Kossinna's ideas were closely tied to the German "völkisch movement

Völkisch movement

The volkisch movement is the German interpretation of the populist movement, with a romantic focus on folklore and the "organic"...

".

These ideas have since been heavily criticised, partly because of the political use to which they were put, but also because of inherent ambiguities in the method. Hans Jürgen Eggers has summarised the problems with this argument:

• There is no clear statement of the method
• There is no definition of “peoples” (“”) or “tribes” (“”)
• There is no definition of cultural geography
• Cultures are construed as monolithic blocks
• There is no proof that material remains equated to ethnicities.
• Continuity of ethnicity is presupposed
• The self-professed method is not followed consistently - arguments frequently rely on special cases, excavation contexts are often ignored
• There is often arbitrary distinction of between trade and "migration"
• There is no investigation of the causes of "migrations"
• Detailed presentation of actual archaeological material is neglected, e.g. generalised distribution maps are the norm
• There is a tendency to ignore taphonomic
  Taphonomy
  Taphonomy is the study of decaying organisms over time and how they become fossilized . The term taphonomy was introduced to paleontology in 1940 by Russian scientist Ivan Efremov to describe the study of the transition of remains, parts, or products of organisms, from the biosphere, to the...
  
   aspects, i.e. possible biases in preservation
• There is a tendency to merge results from different disciplines, notably archaeology and linguistics (e.g. "German" is a linguistic concept, not the expression of material artefacts)
• There is an influence from nationalistic and sometimes racist prejudice, which were politically cannibalised, in particular by the Nazis.

Despite justified criticism of the method and its application by Kossinna, the central technique was not unique to him, but also developed elsewhere in Europe and the US. Even today it has an important role to play in the mapping of prehistorical cultures.

Nationalistic use of archaeology

Kossinna's ideas have been connected to the claim that Germanic peoples constitute a national identity with a historic right to the lands they once occupied, providing an excuse for later Nazi annexations of lands in Poland and Czechoslovakia. For example, in his article "The German Ostmark

Ostmark

Ostmark is a German term meaning either Eastern march when applied to territories or Eastern Mark when applied to currencies.Ostmark may refer to:...

, home territory of the Germans" Kossinna argued that Poland should be a part of the German empire. According to him, lands, where artifacts had been found that he considered to be "Germanic", were part of ancient Germanic territory. In 1919 he allegedly sent a copy of his book "The Vistula Area, an ancient homeland of the German people" to the Versailles conference in order to emphasise that territory claimed for the new Polish state should be German.

Kossinna's popular publications encouraged such thinking. One of his best-known books was Die deutsche Vorgeschichte - eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft (German Prehistory: a Pre-eminently National Discipline). Here Kossinna introduced the idea that an Aryan race

Aryan race

The Aryan race is a concept historically influential in Western culture in the period of the late 19th century and early 20th century. It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race or...

, superior to other peoples, could be equated with the ancient Germans, arguing that Germany was the key to the unwritten history of the ancient world. The purpose of the book is clear from the beginning, as the dedication reads, "To the German people, as a building block in the reconstruction of the externally as well as internally disintegrated fatherland."

Kossinna emphasised a diffusionist model of culture, according to which cultural evolution occurred by a "process whereby influences, ideas and models were passed on by more advanced peoples to the less advanced with which they came into contact." He also emphasised that such superiority was racial in character - the special gift of the "Nordic" peoples of Germany. Kossinna’s Germanic ethnocentric theories aimed to present a history of Germany superior even to that of the Roman Empire

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

: an expansive and powerful culture that spread civilization through heroic migrations. As he argued, "Germanic people were never destroyers of culture, unlike the Romans - and the French in recent times

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

." Combined with Nazi ideology, this theory gave the perfect foundation for the belief that Germany occupied the leading position in world civilization.

See also

• Culture history
• Nazi archaeology
  Nazi archaeology
  Nazi archaeology refers to the movement led by various Nazi leaders, archaeologists, and other scholars, such as Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, to research the German past in order to strengthen nationalism...
  
  
• Józef Kostrzewski
  Józef Kostrzewski
  Józef Kostrzewski was a Polish archaeologist.Kostrzewski was born in Węglewo . He studied first in Kraków, then from 1910 onwards with Gustaf Kossinna at Berlin and graduated in 1914...