Conclusion

Across the nineteenth century, there was a persistent yet constantly shifting relationship between the international context of the sciences of the ancient past, and their implications for the nation and its formation. As in much of modern history, the First World War acts as something of a caesura—although not, of course, a complete break—in these processes. As in the Franco-Prussian War, many scholars personally participated. Joseph Déchelette, the archaeologist discussed at the end of the last chapter, enlisted as soon as war broke out (at the age of 52), and was killed in September 1914 at the First Battle of Aisne. One posthumous memorial work recollected that he died ‘in the vicinity of one of the vast Gaul-ish necropolises which he described from 1911,’ and joined ‘the phalanx of scholars, artists and men of letters gloriously killed in the course of a war of epic grandeur which would be crowned by French victory.’ ¹ Both sons of John Lubbock, who had himself been active in the Anglo-German Peace Movement in the 1900s, were also to die in the conflict. The metropolitan learned societies continued their activity throughout the war, but were increasingly empty. Those anthropologists and archaeologists who had acquired university positions, such as Sollas and Kossinna, found many of their students enlisted and killed. Even the location of the battlefields was poignant, with trenches dug across the very regions where Schmerling and Boucher de Perthes had conducted so many of their researches. Arthur Keith, whose Antiquity of Man appeared in 1915, noted that:

A year has passed since the proofs of this book were corrected and its preface written. The events of the year have revolutionized the outlook of all of us; we have burst suddenly into a critical phase in the evolutionary progress of mankind; we have had to lay aside the problems of our distant past and concentrate our thoughts and energies in the immediate present. Liège and Namur, which figure in this book as the sites of peaceful antiquarian discovery, have become the scenes of bloody war. And yet, amidst all the distractions of the present time, the author hopes there may be some who will wish to survey the issues of the present fateful period from the distant standpoint of a student of man’s early evolution. It is in such a hope that this book is now put forth. ²

Regardless of these hopes for the future, anthropology was also often more directly involved in war effort. As Andrew Evans has shown in a fascinating recent study, Entente prisoners of war were studied extensively by German and Austrian scholars investigating physical characteristics, racial descent, folk traditions, songs and dialect—an experience which he argues was critical for the final displacement of the discipline’s liberal tradition. ³