Gustaf Kossinna

Gustaf Kossinna (28 September 1858 in Tilsit 20

December 1931 in Berlin) was a linguist and professor of German archaeology at the University of Berlin.
Along with Carl Schuchhardt he was the most inuential German prehistorian of his day, and was creator of
the techniques of Siedlungsarchaeologie, or settlement
archaeology.[1] His nationalistic theories about the origins of the Germanic peoples inuenced aspects of Nazi
ideology; nevertheless, he was rejected by the party as
their ocial prehistorian.[1]

archaeological cultural areas correspond unquestionably

with the areas of particular people or tribes. The statement is known as Kossinnas law and forms the basis
of his settlement-archaeology method. Unlike modern
settlement archaeology, which refers only to individual
settlements or patterns of settlement, Kossinna meant to
emphasise, in Stefan Arvidssons words, that a unied
set of archaeological artifacts, a 'culture', was the sign of
a unied ethnicity.[3] Thus, Kossinnas ideas were closely
tied to the German "vlkisch movement".
His ideas have since been heavily criticised partly because
of the political use to which they were put.but also because of inherent ambiguities in the method. Hans Jrgen
Eggers has summarised the problems with this argument:

Life

Kossinna was a Germanized Mazur. He was born in

Tilsit, East Prussia, Kingdom of Prussia. His father was
a teacher at the secondary-school level. As a child he
learned Latin and piano.

There is no clear statement of the method

There is no denition of peoples (Vlker) or
tribes (Vlkerstmme)

As a university student he matriculated at a number of

universities, studying classical and Germanic philology in
Gttingen, Leipzig, Berlin and Strassburg. He was inuenced greatly by K. Muellenho, who encouraged him
to research the origins of Indo-European and Germanic
culture. He obtained his doctorate at Strasbourg in 1887
in the subject of the early records of the high-Frankish
language. From 1888 to 1892 he worked as a librarian.
In 1896 his ideas were expressed in his lecture The Prehistorical Origins of the Teutons in Germany. In 1902
he was appointed as Professor of German archaeology
at the University of Berlin. In the same year he identied
the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the north German Corded
Ware culture, an argument that gained in currency over
the following two decades. He placed the Indo-European
urheimat in Schleswig-Holstein.[2]

There is no denition of cultural geography

Cultures are construed as monolithic blocks
There is no proof that material remains equated to
ethnicities.
Continuity of ethnicity is presupposed
The self-professed method is not followed consistently, arguments frequently rely on special cases,
and excavation contexts are often ignored
There is often arbitrary distinction of between trade
and migration
There is no investigation of the causes of migrations

Thereafter he published many books on the origins of the

Germanic peoples, founding the German Prehistory Society to promote interest and research in the subject. He
became the most famous archaeologist in the Germanspeaking world, and was notable for his use of archaeology to promote claims for an expanded German nation.

Detailed presentation of actual archaeological material is neglected, e.g. generalised distribution maps
are the norm
There is a tendency to ignore taphonomic aspects,
i.e. possible biases in preservation
There is a tendency to merge results from dierent disciplines, notably archaeology and linguistics
(German is a linguistic concept, not the expression of material artefacts)

Material culture and ethnicity

Kossinna developed the theory that a regionally delimited ethnicity can be dened by the material culture excavated from a site (clture-historical archaeology or simply culture history theory). He wrote, Sharply dened

There is an inuence from nationalistic and sometimes racist prejudice, which were politically cannibalised, in particular by the Nazis.
1

6 SEE ALSO

Despite justied criticism of the method and its application by Kossinna, the central technique was not unique to
him, but it has also developed elsewhere in Europe and
the US. Even today, it has an important role to play in the
mapping of prehistorical cultures.

Nationalistic use of archaeology

of the Nordic peoples of Germany. Kossinnas Germanic ethnocentric theories aimed to present a history
of Germany superior even to that of the Roman Empire:
an expansive and powerful culture that spread civilization through heroic migrations. As he argued, Germanic
people were never destroyers of culture, unlike the Romans - and the French in recent times. Combined with
Nazi ideology, this theory gave the perfect foundation for
the belief that Germany occupied the leading position in
world civilization.

4 References
[1] Klein, page 233.
[2] Arvidsson, Stefan, Aryan Idols, 2006, University of
Chicago Press, p. 143
[3] Arvidsson, Stefan, Aryan Idols, 2006, University of
Chicago Press, p. 142

Gothic and other Germanic settlements, 1800100 BC, according

to Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, following
Kossinnas model (1916)

Kossinnas ideas have been connected to the claim that

Germanic peoples constitute a national identity with a
historic right to the lands they once occupied, providing an excuse for later Nazi annexations of lands in
Poland and Czechoslovakia. For example, in his article
The German Ostmark, home territory of the Germans
Kossinna argued that Poland should be a part of the German empire. According to him, lands, where artifacts had
been found that he considered to be Germanic, were
part of ancient Germanic territory. In 1919 he allegedly
sent a copy of his book The Vistula Area, an ancient
homeland of the German people to the Versailles conference in order to emphasise that territory claimed for
the new Polish state should be German.[4]
Kossinnas popular publications encouraged such thinking. One of his best-known books was Die deutsche
Vorgeschichte - eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft
(German Prehistory: a Pre-eminently National Discipline). Here Kossinna introduced the idea that an Aryan
race, superior to other peoples, could be equated with the
ancient Germans, arguing that Germany was the key to
the unwritten history of the ancient world. The purpose
of the book is clear from the beginning, as the dedication reads, To the German people, as a building block in
the reconstruction of the externally as well as internally
disintegrated fatherland.[5]
Kossinna emphasised a diusionist model of culture, according to which cultural evolution occurred by a process whereby inuences, ideas and models were passed
on by more advanced peoples to the less advanced with
which they came into contact. He also emphasised that
such superiority was racial in character - the special gift

[4] Institut fr Ur- und Frhgeschichte und Archologie des

Mittelalters, Freiburg
[5] Arnold, Bettina The past as propaganda: How Hitlers
archaeologists distorted European prehistory to justify
racist and territorial goals. Archaeology July/Aug 1992:
30-37

5 Bibliography
Klein, Leo (1999), Gustaf Kossinna: 1858-1931,
in Murray, Tim, Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The
Great Archaeologists: Volume I, ABC-CLIO, pp.
233246, ISBN 1-57607-199-5

6 See also
Culture history
Nazi archaeology
Jzef Kostrzewski

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