ABSTRACT
In this chapter Peter Heather explores the close and changing relationship between historical interpretations and ideas of nationhood. He focuses on the ways in which the nineteenth-century development of particular narratives of the past, underpinned by the emergence of the scholarly fields of linguistics and archaeology, laid the intellectual groundwork for nationalist ideologies. The archaeological argument, based most fundamentally on the interpretation of pottery types, that Europe had long been populated by distinct and rival cultural groups, was quickly co-opted into late nineteenth-century nationalist agendas, and enshrined within the patriotic school curricula of the rapidly expanding state education systems of the period. In the aftermath of fascism, which took this perspective to its extreme, there was a strong counter-reaction: from the 1960s onwards, supported by new anthropological approaches and reinterpretations of material culture, archaeologists and historians increasingly emphasized the malleability of cultural identities, which displaced the earlier assumption that waves of invasion explained changes in European placenames and styles of material production. This account of the past also readily found political support, particularly from the European Union during its period of peak expansion and optimism in the 1990s. Heather’s analysis shows how the interpretation of the history of first millennium ce has long been, and remains, a key domain for the formation and contestation of the deep structures of European collective identities.
