As Walter Gratzer’s excellent The Undergrowth of Science shows, the ideal of science as a ‘pure’ pursuit, free of politics or ideology, is just so much bunkum – at least in reality. Theoretically, science should be decoupled from politics, except that science is practiced by scientists, who are just as fallible, venal and prey to ideological derangement as any other humans.
Sometimes more so: witness, for instance, the self-evidently ludicrous behaviour of too many scientists during Covid. Not least, the same scientists who shrieked that we all had to be quarantined from one another, making a ‘just-cos’ exception for BLM protests.
Race is probably the most ideologically bastardised field of science. From 19th century phrenology and eugenics, to the modern conceit that race ‘doesn’t exist’, the scientific study of race is consistently warped by the changing winds of political fashion. Daniel Gasman’s The Scientific Origins of National Socialism shows how the scientific theories of pioneering evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel were brutally warped and abused after his death by the rising Nazi movement.
In reaction, post-WWII science has too-obviously treated the study of race as a sort of embarrassing skeleton in its closet, to the point that even well-established facts, such as the nexus between race and IQ, are strenuously denied. This ‘progressive’ denialism extends to the fact of race itself, culminating in the ludicrous piety that race doesn’t even exist, even though millions of people now use genetic testing that explicitly details their racial makeup.
The increasing application of DNA to archaeological questions is demolishing ‘progressive’ academia even further and lending a belated legitimacy to an archaeological-historical theory long derided as ‘racist’, and therefore, obviously, false.
This was the “culture-historical model” of Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931).
Synthesising prior authors, Kossinna proposed a new historical framework that became known as the “culture-historical model,” which hypothesised the movement of culturally – and biologically – distinct peoples as the dominant driver of historic and prehistoric cultural change […]
Kossinna’s thesis was that prehistoric Europe can be divided into Kultur-Gruppen – cultural units that correlate directly with specific ethnic groups – and that the movement of a Kultur-Gruppe entails the movement of a physical group of people, and not merely a bundle of cultural artefacts. Kossinna’s model allowed him to pinpoint the history of ancient kinship groups as they migrated, conquered, and settled. This was the crux of his model, and he termed it Siedlungsarchäologie – “settlement archaeology.”
Unfortunately for Kossinna, like Haeckel, his ideas were usurped and abused by genuinely racist ideologues who only half-grasped (at best) what he actually said.
Like other academics at the time, he divided all ethnicities into Kulturvölker, culturally creative peoples, and Naturvölker, culturally passive, “natural” peoples. It is therefore not hard to see why later archaeologists treated his work with great caution.
The influence of the culture-historical model grew throughout the early 20th century, and for a while, it became the dominant archaeological model in the West and beyond. It remains the predominant interpretive frame in many parts of the world today, including in much of Asia and Africa. In the West, however, Kossinna’s very influence would also be his undoing. Kossinna died in 1931, shortly before the Nazis seized control of his country, but the applicability of his ideas to their aims ensured their enshrinement in the educational curricula of the Third Reich. When the Nazis fell, Kossinna’s ideas were discredited by association.
Instead, they were replaced by ideas whose associations should have been more than enough to discredit them in turn. Expanding on Marx’s ideas of ‘history’, “processual archaeology” held that human behaviour and environmental constraints, not migrating tribal groups, were central to cultural development.
This model would, in turn, give way to “postprocessualism,” which rejected processualism as overly deterministic. Postprocessualism favoured a postmodern approach that […] rejected the correlation of material cultures with biologically related kinship groups, and downplayed the importance of violence and tribal identity in shaping prehistory.
In the place of conquest and large-scale migration, postwar scholars elevated trade, intermarriage, and the peaceful mingling of peoples and ideas as the dominant culture-shaping processes.
If you’ve wondered where the ludicrous modern “We Wuz Kangz” claims that every ancient European group, from Swedes to Britons, were somehow identical to sub-Saharan Africans, here’s your starting point.
Over the last few decades, a deconstructive approach to ethnic groups has even extended to historically documented migrations and conquests, from the Anglo-Saxon invasions of England to the Dorian invasion of Greece and the Indo-Aryan invasion of India.
Then along came the field of ancient DNA (aDNA), which extracts and analyses the genomes of ancient remains, to muck up their ‘progressive’, post-modern pieties. Once again, Marxism fails in the face of brute facts.
The first bombshells dropped in 2015 with the publication of a paper, the mere title of which sent shockwaves through the fields of archaeology and linguistics: “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe.” For decades, the dominant understanding had been that the modern population of Europe was a mixture of aboriginal Ice Age hunter-gatherers and farmers who began arriving about 6,000 years ago […]
As [geneticist David Reich] puts it in his book [Who We Are and How We Got Here], “The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.”
Around the end of the Neolithic era, just under 5,000 years ago, and on the cusp of the Bronze Age, a new people had burst into Europe from the steppes above the Black Sea. Bearing a martial culture, an affinity for horses, and a predatory social structure, they swept away the old world they found and inaugurated a new one in its place. They were almost certainly the carriers of the Indo-European languages now spoken throughout nearly all of Europe and beyond.
The ‘beyond’ in this case is even more startling. From north-central Europe, these invaders swept into India, bringing the Indo-European languages with them. In other words, the ‘discredited’ pre-WWII notion that an Indo-Aryan invasion had brought the Vedic culture and its Sanskrit language to India was resurrected.
To make matters even more uncomfortable, while the original Indo-Europeans, though light-skinned, appear to have been brown-eyed and brown-haired, the specific ancestors of the Vedic Aryans were a largely blond, light-eyed population, having picked these traits up after mixing with the Neolithic peoples of central Europe.
Even more damaging to post-modern pieties, the ‘mere legends’ of the Swahili of East Africa, that they are the descendants of Persian adventurers from Shiraz, are vindicated.
In Britain, the traditional narratives of a huge population movement bringing over the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons have now been confirmed beyond doubt. We can now trace the migrations of the Bantu peoples over Africa, the arrival of the modern Japanese in Japan, and even the definitive proof of pre-European contact between ancient Polynesia and the Americas. These are grand epics, etched in the hieroglyphics of our genes; stories of vast and often cataclysmic shifts spanning countless millennia, only now being unravelled.
These inconvenient facts are so threatening to the cosy narratives of generations of academics that the scientific establishment is hurriedly imposing explicit censorship, in the form of ‘guidelines’ ordering that scientists must continue to ‘deconstruct’ any notions of Europeans’ ancestral connection to their own ancient homelands.
Compare this with the endlessly recycled orders to genuflect before ‘indigenous’ groups’ claims of ‘unique spiritual connection’ to ‘colonised’ lands, and tell me that the scientific dice aren’t being loaded by ideologically deranged zealots.
