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Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums and the German–Danish Borderlands

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/gerhis/ghv148

1477-089X

Kristin Poling,

Historical and Archaeological Studies

In the gentle grassy mounds of the Danevirke earthworks or the empty fields left behind by the lost town of Haithabu, the archaeological sites of the German–Danish borderlands seem out of step with the storminess and bombast of nineteenth- and twentieth-century national conflicts. This is a quiet landscape, where history sleeps in the peat bogs and an expert eye is required to distinguish ordinary hedgerows from Viking Age fortifications. In his engaging study, J. Laurence Hare makes the most of this very incongruity to tell a nuanced and multifaceted story about how antiquarians and archaeologists, both experts and amateurs, sought to make the distant past useful to their present-day worlds. Excavating Nations explores the intersections between interest in antiquity and nationalism in the German–Danish borderlands from the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. In an era when both were on the rise, Germans and Danes discerned national fortunes in the fates of prehistoric objects and archaeological sites. In the wake of the first British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1801, Danes lamented the destruction of the Golden Horns of Gallehus by an opportunistic thief as a tragic national loss, the precious artifacts’ disappearance representing Denmark’s fall from its heroic past. After a Danish schoolteacher discovered the Nydam Boat in 1863, Germans sought the impressive relic, displayed in Flensburg, as a war trophy, only to find that the Danes had carted it away—preserving the region’s past, if not its present, as Danish property. Through incidents such as these, Hare provides a unique and lively view into the long history of German–Danish national conflicts.