ABSTRACT
A desire to attach an identity to particular objects or monuments, most frequently expressed in terms of the ethnic group or ‘people’ who produced them, has figured at the heart of archaeological enquiry (see Hides 1996). From the Renaissance period onwards archaeological material has been attributed to historically attested peoples, such as the Britons, Romans, Saxons and Danes in England, and Germanic tribes of the Heruli and Cimbri in Central Europe. Moreover, the spread of nationalism during the nineteenth century provided fertile ground for an escalation of interest in archaeological remains, and in particular to tracing their national or ethnic pedigree (see Díaz-Andreu and Champion 1996a; Sklenár 1983; Trigger 1989). By the early decades of the twentieth century such interests had become explicitly formulated in the methodological principle that archaeological culture areas reflect past ‘peoples’ or ethnic groups, as in the work of archaeologists such as Kossinna (1911) and Vere Gordon Childe (1929).
