Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich

Kossinna was among the first to articulate the idea that cultures of the past that were spread across large geographic regions could be recognized through similarities in style of the artifacts they left behind. He also went further in viewing archaeologically identified cultures as synonymous with peoples, and he originated the idea that the spread of material culture could be used to trace ancient migrations, an approach he called the siedlungsarchäologische Methode, or “Settlement Archaeology.” Based on the overlap of the geographic distribution of the Corded Ware culture with the places where German is spoken, Kossinna suggested that the cultural roots of the Germans and of Germanic languages today lay in the Corded Ware culture. In his essay “The Borderland of Eastern Germany: Home Territory of the Germans,” he argued that because the Corded Ware culture included the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and western Russia of his day, it gave Germans the moral birthright to claim those regions as their own.26 Kossinna’s ideas were embraced by the Nazis, and although he died in 1931, before they came to power, his scholarship was used as a basis for their propaganda and a justification for their claims to territories to the east.27 Kossinna’s suggestion that migration was the primary explanation for changes in the archaeological record was also attractive to the Nazis because it played into their racist worldview, as it was easy to imagine that migrations had been pro...