presumption that the Latin races were inferior to the northern ones, some-
times personiWed in the Aryans (to which the Greeks were linked (Bernal
1987; Leoussi 1998; Marchand 1996a)), reinforced the diYculties scholars
had in maintaining a positive view of the Roman period. Historians of the
national past also considered race a key concept for their interpretations. This
was the case of the French author Thierry, who envisaged France as occupied
by an aboriginal population racially formed by Gaulish and Frankish types
(Hannaford 1996: 240–1). Thierry’s work is an early example of what would
become common later in the century: the study of the proto-historical period
and, above all, the Middle Ages, in order to discover the roots of the nation.
Both Niebuhr and Thierry, like many after them, understood race in a
deterministic way, therefore considering physical features to be a reXection
of mental and cultural characteristics.
As in history, the study of race and language became pivotal to archaeology.
Language groups became connected with races, and both with particular types
of material culture. An example of this equation was the linkage made between
the Indo-European language and the Aryan race (Bernal 1987: 226–33;
MacDougall 1982: 120–3; Stocking 1987: 58–60). The widely held belief in
the superiority of the Aryan race became a central issue in archaeological
debate. Changes in material culture through time were used as proof of
movements of peoples or races across territories. Thus, in relation to the
Middle Ages, in England medieval specialists attempted to trace the arrival of
the three main tribal migrations of Anglo-Saxons, who—so the theory went—
had either exterminated or pushed the original Celtic population towards the
west (MacDougall 1982: chs. 6 and 7). The belief in the unity of the northern
Germanic nations, as opposed to the previous occupants of the country, the
Romano-Celts, was commonplace by the second half of the century. Such
ideas were reinforced by comparative philology’s linking of the Anglo-Saxons
to their German ancestors within the Indo-European language family
(Stocking 1987: 62). Intellectuals from Latin and Slav countries—the latter
belonging to the third major European race according to Germaine de Stae ̈l’s
(1766–1817) proposal formulated in 1813 (Marchand 2003: 158)—saw things
diVerently. In Russia archaeologists proudly reconstructed the history of the
ancient and medieval Slavs and searched for the most ancient traces of
Christianity (Shnirelman 1996: 225). Further to the southwest, the archae-
ology of the Latin nations also regarded the linguistic and racial components
of their medieval populations as central to archaeological interpretations, and
in cases such as that of Spain they were inseparable from the religious
opposition between Christians and Muslims (Dı ́az-Andreu 1996). Judging
by the interests of learned societies, language was a major concern in prehis-
toric archaeology. Thus, as seen in Chapter 11, the French Acade ́mie Celtique,
352 National Archaeology in Europe