All Quiet on the Western front? Paradigms, Methods and Approaches in West German Archaeology

Abstract

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, German archaeological thinking had a profound influence on European archaeology, in some areas until as late as the 1960s. Shortly before the First World War, Gustaf Kossinna gave prehistoric archaeology the first paradigm of its own: the ethnic paradigm. One of Kossinna's foremost critics was Hans Jurgen Eggers who, with refined methods of archaeological source criticism, demonstrated that many of Kossinna's apparently straightforward interpretations were based on wrong assumptions about the nature of archaeological distributions. As far as approaches and attitudes are concerned, the study of later prehistory occupies the other end of the spectrum. It is in the archaeology of the Bronze and Iron Ages that the influence of the antiquarian school of Gero von Merhart is most obvious. Proto-historic archaeology has its share of traditional, antiquarian approaches, but on the whole it presents a more lively and varied picture, the influence of Herbert Jankuhn who taught socio-economic archaeology.