THE SCANDINAVIAN AND GERMANIC COUNTRIES: THE
NATIONALIZATION OF PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGYThe nationalization of monuments and artistic objects, so crucial to the study
of Roman, medieval and post-medieval archaeology, only partially aVected
prehistoric archaeology, and when it did so it mostly concerned protohistory
(i.e. the period covering the centuries before the Romans). On rare occasions
monuments from even earlier periods, such as the most outstanding mega-
lithic structures, were considered of national interest. The main reason given
for the diVerence in treatment of prehistoric and historic remains was the
considered inadequacy of prehistoric objects and buildings for the classical
artistic canon. Initially, this resulted in a widespread lack of interest in
prehistoric archaeology as a source of historical knowledge. One should,
however, distinguish between enquiry, on the one hand, into the stages of
later prehistory, where theWnds included pottery, polished stone axes and
metals, and, on the other, into that into earlier periods. The former developed
in Scandinavia. An attempt to understand the developments here necessarily
takes us back to our discussion of the search for the roots of the nation in the
medieval period in the previous section. In a context of long-standing interest
in antiquities (Chapter 2), the lack of a break between the medieval and the
prehistoric periods helped Scandinavian archaeologists to push back their
work into earlier eras. However, few countries were eager to follow this
northern example, a situation which, as we shall see, would only change
later in the century, when elements of race and language became central to
nationalism. This transformation will be discussed below and in Chapter 12.
The archaeology of the most remote periods, which became identiWed as the
Stone Age or Palaeolithic, and to which we can now add the Mesolithic,
developed mainly in France and England. Yet, this interest was stimulated
more by geological than historical concerns. Only with the rise of evolution-
ism in the last decades of the century was intellectual space for these periods
created in the historical narrative.
Scandinavian antiquitiesIn Scandinavia, the interest in prehistory took oVmuch earlier than in
most European countries. In 1806 the Danish Professor, Ramus Nyerup
(1759–1829), proposed to emulate the Museum of French Monuments. His
initiative included not only rooms dedicated to the Middle Ages but also, linked
to them by a so-called runehall, an area in which prehistoric objects were
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