stipulated an original homeland in Central Asia, had arrived in Europe and
several theories competed (Mallory 1989). In any case, archaeologists increas-
ingly tried to trace their movement throughout Eurasia. In 1835, the Asiatic
Society of Bengal sent two bronzes found after a landslide near the village of
Niora in the province of Etaweh (India) for metallurgical analysis to Copen-
hagen. Their analysis showed that they contained very little, if any, tin in the
alloy. In 1877 Worsaae, who, as we have seen, was an evolutionist and an
explicit believer in the usefulness of archaeology for the national cause (see
Chapter 12), gave a lecture to the Nordic Society for Antiquarianism and
History. In it he undertook an overview of world prehistory. He presented a
list of non-tin alloys mainly from Europe among which he included the two
pieces from India. The reason for grouping these together was made explicit
in hisNordens Forhistorie(The Prehistory of the North) (1881). When talking
about the Bronze Age of Scandinavia he stated that ‘here, too, evidence more
and more points to the age-old cultures and countries in Asia andWrst and
foremost to the copper- and tin-rich India’ (in Sørensen 1985: xiii). Worsaae
concluded ‘that India, if not the proper or only cradle of the Bronze Age, was
then at least one of the earliest and most important points for its beginnings’
(ibid.). These ideas would later be taken up by his younger Swedish colleague,
Oscar Montelius, and, more generally later in the early twentieth century, by
the culture-historical school. So, for him, as well as for many others in this
period, the creation of national accounts, that distinguished one nation from
the rest, was not incompatible with the belief that objects, and for some even
people, had moved across space in prehistory and later periods. In sum,
evolutionism, diVusionism, soft racism, and nationalism could go hand in
hand, although conversely they could contradict one another, and could be
used against one another.
CONCLUSIONAt the turn of the century, professional archaeology increasingly became less of
a gentleman’s pastime in which one dug a hole in a few hours to discover a
national treasure, and more an enterprise in which meticulous techniques were
being imposed both in theWeld and in the analysis of the data. Many signiWcant
events had happened in the last four decades of the nineteenth century. The
nationalist cause had been accepted in the political imagination of most
Europeans and this meant that the study of history and of archaeology
increased its appeal even more than earlier in the century. One of the most
remarkable transformations was that gradually national histories pushed
Evolutionism and Positivism 395