foreword that his aim was the tracing of the Finnish people back to prehistoric
times. Aspelin founded the Finnish Antiquarian Society in 1874 and under its
umbrella organized several expeditions to Siberia, aiming to uncover Ugro-
Finn antiquities (Salminen 1994b).
The switch of nationalist ideology from civic to ethnic nationalism had
made it possible for new nationalisms to come to the fore. Thus, in Catalonia
the consideration of the Romans as a superimposed, but separate, race had
already been put forward by archaeologists such as Buenaventura (Bonaven-
tura in Catalan) Herna ́ndez Sanahuja (1810–91)—the excavator of many sites
in Tarragona, the ancient Tarraco. Yet, a clear link between this theory and
Catalan nationalism was established from the late 1860s, when many writers
alluded to the struggle against the Romans by the ancient leaders Indivil and
Mandonio as the origin of the separatist Catalan spirit. Nationalism was
clearly on the agenda, as can be illustrated by comments by the Catalan
politician, historian and archaeologist, Salvador Sanpere i Miquel (1840–
1915), in his book onOrigens i fonts de la Nacio ́Catalana(Origins and sources
of the Catalan Nation) (1878):
If nationality reappears in a more favourable place and time... it is because ‘the
people’ who formed it have not died. If it were dead, the aboriginal race would also
have died and the nationality would not have been able to reappear because the
diVerential element would have been missing.
The Catalan race, therefore, is for us today well known. It travelled without fainting
through Roman and Gothic times, [for these were] completely alien to its aboriginal
character... Hence, there is a Catalan race, a Catalan people...Yes,aCatalan people
made of Iberian stock with a strong Semitic component.
(Sanpere in Cortadella 1986: 85).ColonialismIn Chapter 10 it was argued that collectors in the colonies commonly looked at
the sequences established in European prehistoric archaeology as a model to
organize their archaeological and ethnographicalWndings and that this further
contributed to the image of natives as backward. Yet, this was not a one-way
process. As recent studies have suggested, colonialism triggered changes in the
metropolis that would have long-lasting eVects, such as the creation of
passports and other symbolic paraphernalia of the nation. In archaeology the
encounter with the ‘Other’ inXuenced the image of Europe’s own past. In this
way, the archaeology of the uncivilized, both in the colonies and in prehistoric
Europe, became closely intertwined. On the one hand, the catalogues
created by European prehistoric archaeologists served as an essential tool to
Evolutionism and Positivism 385