ABSTRACT
The person who introduced professional archaeology in Slovenia was Karel Dežman Carl Deschmann. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed as the result of defeat in the First World War, the Slovenian lands seceded and became part of the new state of the south Slavs. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, it was mainly succeeded by parties were openly chauvinistic, racist and anti-liberal. To sum up, the situation of archaeology in Slovenia between the two World Wars was one of acute underdevelopment, and that is true especially of prehistoric and early medieval archaeology. Nationalistic abuse remained subtleties in archaeological interpretation that reveal the weaknesses of its dependence on its changing social and political context. This chapter focuses on one final point, which is about its public image in the period immediately preceding the collapse of the Yugoslav federation. For all its problems, the tradition of academic archaeology in Slovenia as presented here comes rather close.
