‘still resembles in many leading features the picture drawn by Tacitus’ (Herder in
Ergang 1931: 95), and strove to discover early Germanic culture (Marchand
1996a: 152). Following Rousseau’s ideas, expressed inOn the Social Contract
(1762), he maintained that each nation was a product of nature whose laws
regulated the national growth (Herder 1784–97 (1999): 52–7). In this way, the
idea of evolution and progress became linked to that of the nation, a link that
would become crucial to the archaeology of the mid and late nineteenth century.
Herder’s exaltation of the native and the national made him a forerunner (and
indeed his writings acted as one of its motive forces) of the Romantic movement,
whose inXuence in archaeology will be discussed in the following chapter.
Younger than Herder, the other two intellectuals who acted as a hinge
between eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany were the Humboldt
brothers, Karl Wilhelm (1767–1835) and Alexander (1769–1859), whose
ideas would be extremely inXuential in the long-term development of the
diVerentWelds of archaeology. Both followed a similar method of study—
induction and reasoning—but their interests diVered. Alexander von Hum-
boldt focused on the natural sciences and his contributions helped to establish
geography as a scientiWc pursuit and greatly inspired the unfolding of a related
Weld, anthropology. Of especial signiWcance in the historical development of
geography were Ritter and Ratzel (Holt-Jensen 1999), authors that nowadays
are also identiWed as anthropologists in the history of the discipline. Alex-
ander von Humboldt’s prote ́ge ́, Carl Ritter (1779–1859), would act as a
bridge, linking theWrst third of the nineteenth century to itsWnal decades
and the development of the Kulturkreise school in the twentieth century
(Zwernemann 1983). Ritter, who was theWrst Professor of Geography in the
University of Berlin, began to investigate the relationship between nature and
human history. Ritter argued that a people’s character, the peculiarities of a
nation, was a product of its history and, following Herder’s ideas, that it was
inXuenced by the environment. Indeed, he went as far as to defend geograph-
ical determinism. He maintained that ‘the customs of individuals and nations
diVer in all countries, because man is dependent on the nature of his dwelling-
place’ (1863 in Bunzl 1996: 41). He also became interested in migrations as a
way to explain cultural vestiges and change. Ritter’s ideas contrasted in their
emphasis with those held by contemporary and late nineteenth-century
French and British anthropologists and prehistoric archaeologists, who
believed in universalism. In practice, however, the latter group’s practice of
building teleological accounts of the nation, region or empire made their
positions closer, at least at this level. Ritter’s interest in migrations was later
developed by Ratzel and would become an extremely popular explanation for
cultural change in archaeology during the early twentieth century.
332 National Archaeology in Europe