their parallel use in the nationalist arena (as argued by Coye and Provenzano
(1996) for the case of the meeting of Bologna in 1871), others have persua-
sively argued that these congresses merely represented anthropology and
prehistory as viewed by French scholars, who managed to institute French
as the oYcial language in the discussions and proceedings, especially in
opposition to German (Mu ̈ller-Scheessel 2001a; Wiell 1999: 141–2). Paris
hosted three of the fourteen meetings, and Frenchmen got the main positions
within the organization (Richard in Murray 1999b: 93–107). It has been
argued that a reason for the dearth of conferences at a national level was
that prehistory had been institutionalized at an international level (Kaeser
2002). There are, however, exceptions to this; the Congress held in Canter-
bury as early as 1844 mentioned in Chapter 12, and, during the period under
discussion, the Czech anthropological–archaeological conferences held in
Prague in 1880 and 1882 (Sklena ́r 1983: 107) and the Russian Archaeological
Congresses (Klejn & Tikhonov 2006: 199). It may be more appropriate to see
this absence as the result of the still relatively small number of scholars
working in each country, making national meetings nonsensical. It would
only be in the twentieth century, with the increase in the number of archae-
ologists, that national meetings started to be held in many countries. More-
over, as against the apparent neutral internationalism of the CIAPPs, its
French imperialist overtones became clear when the dates of its meetings
are plotted against the power balance between France and Germany. The
CIAPP declined in the late nineteenth century and was eventually substituted
by the International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences led by
Germany, by then the centre of the scientiWc world (Mu ̈ller-Scheessel 2001a).
In addition to the meetings of the German Anthropological Society and
those of the CIAPP, a third set of international congresses dealing with national
archaeology in Europe were the Slavic congresses. TheWrst one had been
organized in Prague in 1848 and in it there were discussions about the feasi-
bility of political consolidation of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians (Ukrain-
ians), and Southern Slavs including Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. All of the latter
were still under Austrian rule with the exception of the Serbians, who had
gained eVective autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in 1867 and being
internationally recognized as a country in 1878. Interestingly, however, some
authors indicate the conference in Moscow in 1867 as the starting point of the
Slavic congresses (Klejn & Tikhonov 2006), and this may be a good indication
of the tensions, negotiations and national rivalries within pan-Slavism (Geyer
1987: 59–61). 4 Slavic archaeology became increasingly popular in many4 Interestingly some authors contrapose pan-Celticism to pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism
(Leersen 1996). It would be interesting to see whether this schemaWts into the three major
international congresses discussed for the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Evolutionism and Positivism 381