Forty years ago, Fritz Saxl (1957:73) pointed out that ‘we cannot fully understand our own times unless we pay heed to its unscientific tendencies.’ The Russian historian Bitsilli (1928:351-52) demonstrated that the birth of a nation is always accompanied by some sort of mythology. The idea became especially useful recently with the current development of ethnonationalism, combined with a shift of the international community's sympathy with groups' rights, resulting in an unexpected phenomenon which I call an ‘alternative prehistory’. This alternative prehistory is an explicitly ethnocentric vision of the past, namely, a glorification of the great ancestors of the given people, who are treated as if they made the most valuable contribution to the culture of all humanity. This obviously odd vision of the past flourishes especially at crucial moments of ethnic history: (1) when forceful assimilation and acculturation endanger an ethnic group with cultural and language losses, (2) when particular minorities are fighting against racial discrimination or its consequences, (3) when the people struggle for political liberation, (4) when new states are being built from the ruins of a fonner empire, (5) when a fonner imperial people suffers political, social, and other losses because of unfavourable changes in its status, (6) when two peoples claim rights over the same territory which they have inhabited for years, (7) when a new ethnic group is formed in a given territory out of newcomers of various ethnic origins, and (8) when a formerly united people finds itself under conditions of a diaspora. In all these cases, the myth of the past is aimed at inspiring self-esteem in order to withstand hardship and to mobilise people for decisive social and political action. At the same time, as Wailes and Zoll (1995:24-25) point out quite reasonably, the myth of the past results in an explicit or implicit discourse about who has civilised whom which tends towards the construction of a hierarchy of groups headed by one of them as an ‘elder brother’ (Shnirelman 1996b:60). That is not just an intellectual game since quite often there are real political, social, and economic interests at stake. lbis paper is a result of my comparative studies made during the last few years dealing with contemporary ethno-nationalist myths of the past based on the idea of ethnogenesis. In other words I have tried to investigate how contemporary ethno-nationalists manipulate materials (true, fictitious, or even consciously falsified) on the origins of peoples, how they invent ancestors and their glorious deeds, and why they do it. My analysis is based mainly on data from the former USSR and contemporary Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), but information from some other countries was also considered (Shnirelman 1993a; 1993c; 1994b; 1995b; 1995c; 1995d; 1996a; 1996b; 1996c; in press a and bi Shnirelman and Komarova 1995). Here, I shall discuss the general features of this sort of mythology and its consequences. A problem is that, in order to make its claims for political rights and ambitions much stronger, a group has to demonstrate the deep roots of its culture, the distinctiveness of its language, and all its outstanding cultural achievements. Keeping these ends in mind, the cultural activists occupy themselves with what Eric Hobsbawm (1983) called ‘an invention of traditions’ (see also Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991). But the main strategy nowadays is the use and abuse of history and, in many cases, prehistory or proto-history.

This article is, in a way, a dissenting voice from the conviction that central European archaeology plays an essential role in settlement research. In central European archaeology, one constantly finds that a modified version of evolutionism is applied, based mainly on an intimate knowledge of the source materials, ordered into the most precise chronological sequences possible. Settlement research is not only a mere spatial study of a society but also a study of societies through space. For different research to be comparable, it is necessary to maintain similar rules and methods of explanation. This article deals with the traditional concepts of settlement research pertaining to central European archaeology.

Although archaeology is the study of the past, archaeologists have always been among the first to espouse the latest technology of the present to further their ends. The World Wide Web is no exception; but how is this to benefit archaeology and what are the short- and long-term gains to be expected? On 1st June 1995, the Museum of Antiquities of the University and Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne was the first museum in Britain to release a museum exhibition in virtual form on to the Internet via the World Wide Web (WWW). Its location on the Internet (the URL) is http://www.ncl.ac.uk/∼nantiq/index.html. In this article, the authors will use the experience gained directly from this experiment to open the debate about communicating archaeology via the Internet.

This paper examines the cultural influences from the European continent on the material culture of Scandinavian local communities during the late Bronze Age. A connection between the cremation ritual and pottery as ritual equipment is claimed. The paper suggests a close link between religious ritual and the elaborate pottery types that characterise the late Bronze Age; a connection between material culture and mental ideas. The emphasis on pottery during the Bronze Age is thus a product of the change in meaning for pottery. The new pottery styles have an embodied symbolic meaning connected to the new religion with its different ideas and rites. There is also a change from a domestic sphere to a ritual one.

Two new series of radiocarbon dates on human bones from passage graves in the Falbygden area in south-western Sweden are presented. It has long been nearly axiomatic that dolmens appeared earlier than passage graves, but the new dates indicate taht both types of megalithic grave were introduced at the same time in the later part of the early Neolithic. This also means that the oldest types vary between different regions. In Denmark, the oldest type of megalithic grave is the domens, while passage graves were built from the beginning in Falbygden.

A critical evaluation of the appropriateness of traditional ‘Hellenization’ and recently popular ‘world-systems’ interpretive perspectives on the colonial encounter in Iron Age western Europe is offered. These approaches are shown to have some common flaws stemming from shared implicit premises resulting from a profoundly embedded cultural legacy of hegemonic Helleno-centrism that permeates interpretive discourse. This legacy is a result of the construction during the Renaissance of a European identity with ancestral roots in ancient Greece and Rome and the consequent importance of these classical cultures to the definition of ‘cultural capital’ in modem Euro-American society. Additionally, world-systems models have problematic tendencies toward mechanistic structural overdetermination and reductionism. An alternative interpretive strategy, grounded in the anthropology of consumption and the historical anthropology of colonialism, is applied to the initial phase of the colonial encounter during the Early Iron Age. This brief example illustrates the necessity and possibility of restoring a consideration of local agency and culture to the archaeological analysis of colonial situations and of developing a more subtle means of understanding the relationship between local practice and global structures and processes.

The author shows that the model of world systems economic theory remains the most probable explanation of the forms of contacts between indigenous peoples and colonists. The six zones where the imported goods from Mediterranean ‘states’ are found to be most numerous are analysed here. They are distributed from east to west across Europe along a discontinuous arc at some distance from the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. They have analogously similar structures, conforming to the principles of world-systems economics. Such similarities are surprising because the a priori probability of finding such similarities is so small given the environmental, historical, and cultural differences, as well as those of the human spirit, imagination and inventiveness. We must suppose that a powerful logic was driving this phenomenon. The criticisms directed at this model are often made by those who are habitually ‘anti-’ … More complex and interesting is the alternative explanation proposed by J. Bintliff and M. Dietler. An analysis of the correlation of the drop in the number of sites with these imported goods and increased distance contradicts their alternative. Moreover, there is not one example of development on the same scale and level of integration as these ‘chiefdoms’ without mediterranean contacts. Finally, the significance of the model may be measured by the frequency that oppontents caricature it in order to criticise it more easily.

This paper summarises the present state of research concerning late-Iron-Age rectilinear enclosures of central Europe known as ‘Viereckschanzen’. For several decades these large earthen enclosures were believed to be Celtic temples or sanctuaries. In the context of recent excavations, multiple social, political, and religious functions have been suggested, but these arguments are rarely linked to detailed study of archaeological materials and features at the enclosures. Critical analysis of presumed ‘cultic’ features and objects at thirty-six excavated Viereckschanzen reveals little support for the suggestion that all enclosures were religious sanctuaries. A functional study of ceramic finds indicates important differences in pottery assemblages between the enclosures and contemporary settlements. The enclosures are then examined within a dialectical landscape context, and it is suggested that they may have functioned as feasting places that often made reference to traditional forms of socio-political organisation represented at earlier cemetery sites.

There are three sources of information regarding the social, political, and economic status of women in the European Iron Age, and all three are problematic. First, there are the classical sources, which describe Celtic society from the ‘civilised’ Mediterranean perspective, whether Greek or Roman. These often tell us more about the observer's culture than about the Celtic societies being described. Second, there are the insular Celtic laws and legends, which are compromised by time, distance, and the transformative effects of Christianity. Third, there is the archaeological record, which can only produce answers if the questions asked are the right ones, and is often seriously flawed with respect to preservation and recovery. Unfortunately, archaeologists are still some way from developing a methodology of reconstructing gender roles on the basis of excavated material culture remains. I would like to discuss an archaeological example which may provide some useful guidelines for generating such a methodology, with reference to all three of the sources mentioned above. The approach presented here makes use of written, ethnographic, and archaeological sources in a way that is not always possible in all research contexts. However, there have been a few recent attempts at such a synthesis (Claassen 1992; Spector 1993; Robb 1994), which suggest that a partnership between the written, ethnographic, and archaeological records regarding the subject of gender yields more than any of these sources of information alone can produce. Where such complementary data sets exist they should be made to work in tandem, as this discussion will show.

Archaeological developments east of the Rhine in the fifty years before 15 BC, such as the abandonment of oppida, collapse of complex manufacturing systems and diversification of material culture suggest that Caesar encountered a society in the process of change, although once broadly similar to that of ‘Gauls’ west of the Rhine. The significance of Caesar's distinction between ‘Gauls’ and ‘Germans’ has long concerned archaeologists and historians. An approach based on anthropological studies of cross-cultural contacts in colonial situations offers a new perspective on the question. By distinguishing between the ways that indigenous groups represented their identities through their material culture, and descriptions of those groups that Caesar and other writers left, we can gain a clearer understanding of the native peoples in temperate Europe at the time of the Roman conquest.

A Germanic settlement at Heeten, which was only partly excavated, produced evidence for large-scale iron production. Combining several research methods, an attempt was made to gain insight into the operation, scale, and structure of this production. The research was not only focussed on the excavation area itself, but also on the surrounding area. Apart from X-ray combined with sieve-residue analysis of soil-samples (taken primarily for archaeo-botanical purposes), core sampling and geoprospective explorations were carried out. The aims of these investigations were not only of scientific relevance, but can also contribute to the protection and management of the remaining part of the site.