of this volume, large areas of the world—especially the African continent, but
also parts of Asia and the PaciWc—were partitioned by the powers, and the
expansion of white settlers displaced native populations in countries as far
apart as the US, Argentina, South Africa and Australia. The appropriation of
the informal colonies’ Great Civilizations has been discussed in the chapters
in Part II of this book. Chapter 10 looked at how the colonial encounter with
the uncivilized in the framework of increasingly exultant nationalism brought
a new perspective to contemporary ‘primitive’ societies. This chapter will
examine how this situation inXuenced the view of the non-state societies
which had settled in Europe in prehistoric times. The discussion will also
cover the developments in both classical and medieval archaeology in Europe.
EVOLUTIONISM, RACISM, AND NATIONALISMPolitical persuasions and racism in archaeologySome commentators have linked the radical approach of many French archae-
ologists to their upbringing during a period when the European liberal
revolutions of 1848 were either in progress or their memory was still very
much alive (Fetten 2000: 171). This may explain the selection of the title of
‘history of labour’ as the theme of World Exhibitions, such as those in Paris in
1867 and in Vienna in 1873 (Mu ̈ller-Scheessel 2001b; Sklena ́r 1983: 108). In
the case of German archaeology, the overlap between Virchow’s liberal and
left-wing politics and his interest in the human sciences has also been noted
(Smith 1991b: 54). Yet, not all archaeologists—indeed perhaps only a minor-
ity of archaeologists—in the last four decades of the century were left-wingers.
Nor was evolutionism a theory that can be classiWed as such (or, in fact,
the other way round, a right-wing theory). It is true that evolutionism, the
assumption that things evolve through time, usually from the simple to the
complex, became, from the 1860s (Grayson 1983: ch. 7), a radical theory
which directly challenged the biblical interpretation of human existence. Yet,
the increasing prestige of science among individuals of all political persua-
sions and the search for intermediate doctrines on human origins led even the
most conservative scholars and members of the general public to rethink and
eventually overcome their initial rejection of it. The connection between
evolutionism, revolution, and liberalism does not appear to have operated
in countries such as Britain, where conservative ideologies seem to have been
prevalent in academia. General Pitt Rivers is a good example—albeit perhaps
an extreme one—of a conservative mind in British archaeology. Despite his
374 National Archaeology in Europe