Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931) (2001)

Kossinna was an outstanding German archaeologist who specialized in prehistoric archaeology and was the founder of the ‘residence or settlement school of archaeology’ (Siedlungsärchaologie). He was a contradictory figure. Although he taught many prominent archaeologists, he very rarely attended excavations. A man of extraordinary erudition, an incomparable connoisseur of a huge range of archaeological material, he was a militant amateur in the discipline. He is considered, with some justification, to be the precursor of Nazi archaeology. However, it was not his conception but rather that of his opponent Carl Schuchhardt that became the official archaeological line in Hitler’s Germany. Kossinna’s method of settlement archaeology was implemented in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. His rather dull hagiographical biography was written in Nazi Germany, but his person and activity are described vividly, sensibly, and critically in Eifurrung in die Vorgeschichte (Introduction to Prehistory) by H.-J. Eggers (1959), and some of the early episodes with Alfred Gotze and Schuchhardt are discussed in detail in that book. Gustaf Kossinna was born in 1858 in Tilsit, in what was formerly East Prussia. His father was a secondary school teacher; his mother descended from the gentry. A small and sickly child, Kossinna absorbed the humanistic and pedantic culture of German teachers, mastering Latin and literature, playing the piano, and working hard. This culture— impregnated with German nationalism, with national enthusiasm, and missionary hopes—was the direct result of the politics of the time, when Prussia was the leader of German unification. Kossinna consecutively attended the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, Berlin, and Strasbourg. In Berlin he attended lectures in classical and German philology, history, and geography. Lectures by K. Müllenhof on German and Indo-European linguistics (the latter was called Indo-German then) especially fascinated him. The problem of the location of the original Indo-German homeland (Urheimat) was to preoccupy him for his entire life. In 1881 he defended his thesis in Strasbourg on the purely linguistic subject ‘Ancient Upper- Frankian Written Monuments’. He then became a librarian and from 1892 worked in the library of the University of Berlin.