page_title: Gustaf Kossinna
section_title: Ideas
hierarchical_section_title: Gustaf Kossinna / Ideas
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of the 19thC archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna
context_page_description: Gustaf Kossinna was a German philologist and archaeologist who was Professor of German Archaeology at the University of Berlin.
  Along with Carl Schuchhardt he was the most influential German prehistorian of his day, and was creator of the techniques of settlement archaeology. His nationalistic theories about the origins of the Germanic peoples and Indo-Europeans influenced aspects of Nazi ideology. For this reason, Kossinna has often been referred to as the evil mastermind who built the ideological foundations for Nazism. Though politically discredited after World War II, Kossinna's methodological approach has greatly influenced archaeology up to the present day.
  In the years following World War II, Kossinna's theories of settlement archaeology were widely dismissed as pseudoscience. In June 2015, two ground-breaking archaeogenetic studies appeared to confirm certain key aspects of Kossinna's theories on settlement archaeology and Indo-European migrations, in what has been referred to as Kossinna's Smile. The apparent validation of Kossinna's theories at the expense of post-World War II theories have sparked intense controversy and anxiety in the archaeological community.
context_section_description: By 1895, Kossinna had developed theory that a regionally delimited ethnicity can be defined by the material culture excavated from a site (culture-historical archaeology or simply culture history theory). He wrote, "Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular people or tribes". The statement is known as "Kossinna's 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 Arvidsson's words, that "a unified set of archaeological artifacts, a 'culture', was the sign of a unified ethnicity."  
  Kossinna's 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 1902, Kossinna identified the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the Corded Ware culture, an argument that gained in currency over the following two decades. According to Stefan Arvidsson, Kossinna placed the Proto-Indo-European homeland in Schleswig-Holstein. In studying the prehistory of the Germanic peoples and ancient Indo-Europeans, Kossinna saw the key to the unwritten prehistory of Europe.
  Kossinna emphasised a diffusionist model of culture, according to which cultural evolution occurred by a "process whereby influences, ideas and models were passed on by more advanced peoples to the less advanced with which they came into contact." He emphasised that such superiority was racial in character. Kossinna’s theories aimed to present a history of the Germanic peoples superior to that of the Roman Empire. He considered the Romans and the French as destroyers of culture as compared to the Germanic peoples. One of his best-known books was Die Deutsche Vorgeschichte - Eine Hervorragend Nationale Wissenschaft (German Prehistory: A Pre-Eminently National Discipline). It was dedicated "To the German people, as a building block in the reconstruction of the externally as well as internally disintegrated fatherland."
caption: Portrait of Kossinna with an example of excavated pottery
exif: {}