In an interview on Archaeology

I notice that your next book is also a Marxist book?

Yes, Vera Childe’s ''Progress in Archaeology'', published in 1944. Childe became one of the great archaeologists of his time, and his account of cultural evolution is very powerful and convincing. Although people have moved away from these ideas in many respects, it is still very important and influential.

Childe was someone who originally believed in something called the Culture-Historical approach, but subsequently moved to a more liberal perspective. Can you explain what the Culture-Historical approach is?

Yes, it was invented in the very early 20th century and was associated with the German prehistorian Gustaf Kossinna. Culture-Historical theory or, sometimes, Settlement Archeology, roughly says that where you find a given assemblage of material culture there you are dealing with a given people. If say, 300 miles away you dig another hole and find the same pots, the same sort of sickle blades, the same way of constructing a thatched hut you know the same ‘biological’ folk lived in both places, speaking the same language and probably looking similar too.

But there is a great big hole in the theory: similarity of material cultures does not necessarily mean similarity of ethnicity at all, otherwise every time in the future archaeologists dug up coca cola bottles they would say ‘oh Americans lived here.’ See what I mean? There's a big hole in the theory. However it was hugely influential. Kossinna died just before the Nazis came to power, luckily for him. They built a ferociously nationalistic pre-history out of this, and they said, “We are going to show that the Germans were once predominant all over Europe. We’re going to dig a pit and find this Germanic culture and we will know that once the Germans were here and speaking this language’. So in the end, Kossinna’s idea became an expansionist political gospel based on archeology. Essentially, “All you have to do is dig a hole, if you find traces of Germanic culture that means the land once belonged to us.”

Central Europe has never really recovered from the Kossinna method. Even the people who hated the Germans adopted exactly the same methods. The Slavs, the Czechs and the Poles for example, none of whom were independent until 1918, said the German archaeologists are telling vicious lies and we shall use the spade to show that we the Slavs were here before the barbaric Germans and so on and so forth.

Then came 1939 and the invasion of Poland. The SS moved in and surprise surprise, they discovered that early Germanic people had been there first. They also shot Polish archaeologists. I think something like 80% of the Polish archaeological profession died one way or another during WW2. They were murdered because they thought the wrong thing about ‘priority’ - who got there first. That’s what archeology can do when it gets completely out of control. And the difficulty is that although a lot of fences have been mended, a great deal of the central and eastern European world still believes in those terms.