by historical state circumstances. The peculiarity of the area character was
interpreted as proof of being a distinctive nation and consequently, for
nationalists, the territory had a right to independence. It is signiWcant in
this respect that regions with a growing national sentiment tended to create
learned societies encompassing the whole area of the new small nation. See
for example the early case of Ireland (1840) in Chapter 12, page 363. In this
period, two emergent nationalist movements in Spain, in Catalonia and
Galicia, are a case in point. In the former, for example, some societies did
not limit themselves to a single Catalan province (Barcelona, Girona, Lleida,
or Tarragona) but tried to represent the whole of Catalonia. Examples of this
are the Catalanist Association of ScientiWc Excursions, founded in 1876 and
its oVshoot, the Catalan Association of Excursions (1878). Presidents of the
Wrst society declared the study of antiquity as an essential condition for the
renaissance of the fatherhood, and requested oYcial funding for archaeo-
logical excavations (Cortadella 1997: 278–9). In terms of museums, the
founder of the Central Archaeological Museum of Galicia (1884), Leandro
Saralegui y Medina (1839–1910), published books inspired by both evolu-
tionism and nationalism, such as his studies about the Celtic period in
Galicia (1867). In this and other works he wrote about the history of the
whole of Galicia, not limiting himself to one of its provinces as was usually
the case in other parts of Spain, and adopted a narrative of progress
subdividing the territory’s prehistory into the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age
(Pereira Gonza ́lez 1996).
Similar processes occurred elsewhere in Europe, especially in the East, in
countries such as Romania (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire),
where a National Museum of Antiquities was created in Bucharest in 1834.
It was funded under the Russian cultural and political patronage, with most
antiquarians being Russian oYcers, and renovated in 1864 under French
inXuence. The museum had been preceded by a museum in Sibiu (1817)
and followed by the Historico-Natural Museum in Iasi (1834) (Anghelinu
2002–3: 31; 2003: 87–8; Comsa in Murray 2001: 1116). Also in Bulgaria the
Bulgarian Academy was founded in 1869 (Todorova in Bailey 1998: 91),
although most developments seem to have occurred after independence
from 1878 (Velkov 1993). The trend towards the regionalization of journals
and institutions discussed above also became even more marked in those
areas with aspirations of total political independence such as Finland. In
Helsinki theWrst chair of archaeology was the Professor Extraordinarius
Johan Reinhold Aspelin (1842–1915) (chair 1878–85), a Finnish historian
who had been trained in archaeology in Sweden by Oscar Montelius and Hans
Hildebrand in 1867–8. Aspelin’s ideas were informed by nationalism. In his
doctoral dissertation he dealt with Finno-Ugri archaeology, declaring in its
384 National Archaeology in Europe