Bettina Arnold

The past as propaganda: totalitarian archaeology in Nazi Germany

An important element to the future of archaeology in the ex-Communist countries of central Europe will be the freeing of archaeological ideas from the constraints of a particular set of social theories built into the fabric of the state, as Milisauskas noted in the last ANTIQUITY (64: 283–5). This is a timely moment to look at the interference of a different set of social theories in the same region some decades ago

‘Drinking the Feast’: Alcohol and the Legitimation of Power in Celtic Europe

Drinking and feasting were an integral part of life in Iron Age Europe and the British Isles. The distribution of food and especially drink in prescribed fashion played a key role in establishing and maintaining social relationships. Alcoholic beverages were important consumable status items in prehistoric Europe, serving as a social lubricant as well as a social barrier. The metal, ceramic and wooden vessels required for the preparation, distribution and consumption of these beverages were a vehicle for inter- and intragroup competition, and underwent considerable change, both symbolic and material, through time. This article will attempt a cognitive analysis of the material culture of Iron Age drinking and feasting by integrating archaeological and documentary evidence. The impact of contact with the Mediterranean world, gender configurations, and the ideology of power and patronage will be discussed in relation to changing material culture assemblages.

'Honorary Males' or Women of Substance? Gender, Status, and Power in Iron-Age Europe

AbstractThe study of prehistoric Europe continues to be simplified in favour of a male-dominated world view. The interpretation of high-status female burials has been particularly plagued by gender bias, since such graves imply that women in these societies may have achieved positions of social and economic power. Changing burial customs and grave-good inventories, as well as documentary evidence from the Mediterranean, indicates that gender relations were affected in significant ways during the early Iron Age. The social changes that accompanied the late-Hallstatt/early-La-Tene transition cannot be understood without reference to gender, as the paper tries to show.

‘Arierdämmerung’: race and archaeology in Nazi Germany

Abstract Archaeological evidence under the auspices of the National Socialist regime was exaggerated, misrepresented and otherwise abused in various ways to support contemporary military and social agendas, ranging from invasion to genocide. This chapter will review and analyze the complex interplay between several organizations within the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945 that were actively involved in promoting or conducting archaeological research designed to underwrite the ‘racial hygiene’ agenda of the regime. Not only do the roots of this deadly symbiosis pre-date the twentieth century, they were neither uniquely German nor ultimately able to flourish unchallenged even in a totalitarian regime with all the oppressive mechanisms for social control at its disposal.

Slavery in Late Prehistoric Europe: Recovering the Evidence for Social Structure in Iron Age Society

There is a silent majority in Celtic society unrepresented in the tumulus cemeteries and merely implicit in the fortified settlements of the late Hallstatt and La Tene periods which tends to be glossed over or oversimplified in the archaeological literature. Most reconstructions of Celtic society make assumptions about the lower echelons that in fact have no firm investigative basis, but which are seminal to the arguments developed. I believe that an understanding of the nature of this group and its relation to the upper echelons is essential to any general reconstruction of Celtic society, and can no longer be avoided simply because of the difficulties inherent in its interpretation.

Life After Life: Bioarchaeology and Post-mortem Agency

In the alternative fairy tale The Princess Bride, as William Goldmans character Miracle Max reanimates the apparent corpse of the hero Westley, he tells the anxious group observing the procedure: ‘Theres a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive’ (Goldman 2007, 313). Only a select group of the dead can be characterized as being ‘slightly alive’, in the post-mortem agency sense, however, and the case studies presented here explore the many ways in which this subcategory of mostly dead individuals have engaged with and continue to impact the living in the past as well as today. Several themes emerge as especially salient: the iteration in the death-scape of the dynamic tension between the individual and the social group, which can result in transgression as well as conformity in the disposition of the body and its effects on the living; the symbolic capital represented by some dead bodies and the ways in which their potency may be affected by various forms of contextual association; and the ways in which the manipulation of the dead for political purposes is subject to constraints specific to the cultural contexts in which these interactions take place.

The Kartomat: A Field Drawing Machine

AbstractAn aid to more expeditious and accurate recording of archaeological features requiring neither a power source nor specialized training to operate has been developed in Germany and is currently in use on excavations in several European countries. This article presents the specifications of the Kartomat field-drawing machine, provides examples of its application, and offers suggestions for its production and use in the United States.

Europa Emerging from the Sea

critical to her argument. For example, reanalysis shows that living foragers are not (as was traditionally thought) patri local. They are actually far more often bilocal?that is, families may live with the relatives of either the mother or the father. (This characteristic makes them notably different from any of the living apes?although in some wild popula tions, chimpanzees seem to be experi menting with matrilocality.) Obviously, living with the relatives of the mother would greatly improve access to the ma ternal grandmother, assuming she were still alive.

Jean-Pierre Legendre, Laurent Olivier & Bernadette Schnitzler. L'archéologie nazie en Europe de l'Ouest. 496 pages, 216 bw 978-2-88474-804-9 hardback €28.

Henri-Alban Fournier, better known as Alain Fournier, a writer idolised in France for his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, was killed in September 1914 on the Meuse front at the age of 28. The fact that the circumstances of his death were never clearly established and that his body was not found gave rise to a great deal of speculation. The presumed location of the mass grave in which he was apparently buried was first identified in the forest of Saint-Rémy-laCalonne (Meuse). Then, in 1991, excavation of the burial ground was carried out under the direction of Frédéric Adam, an archaeologist working for the French state archaeological service (AFAN), today the Institut de Recherches en Archéologie Préventive (INRAP). It was the first time that excavation of First World War military burial grounds had been entrusted to a team of archaeologists. The importance of the excavation does not only lie in the exhumation of a literary celebrity of the Belle Epoque; it also stands out as one of the very first excavations of French archaeological sites of the twentieth century and inevitably this raised the issue of the legitimacy of an archaeology of the recent past. Should the battlefields of the First World War be henceforth considered as genuine archaeological sites and, if so, how far does the field of chronological intervention in the discipline of archaeology effectively extend?

West-Central European Early Iron Age

The prevailing climate of west-central Europe since the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age (-10,000 b.p.) can be described as temperate, but there are significant differences in climate along the north-south and east-west axes. There are more than 3,500 km separating the northern and southern zones of Europe; the western coastline is influenced by the Atlantic, and the eastern zone is affected by proximity to the vast land mass of Asia. West-central Europe can therefore be described as a mosaic of climate zones that have remained distinct in spite of major climatic shifts since the end of the Pleistocene. Three major zones can be defined for the region: a marine climate zone for the western coastal region characterized by cool summers, mild winters, and significant amounts of precipitation; a Mediterranean climate zone in the south with hot, very dry summers, mild winters, and relatively sparse rainfall occurring mostly in the winter months; and a humid continental climate zone for most of central Europe with precipitation levels and summers similar to the western coast but with much colder winters.