---
title: "Archaeology and racism"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_and_racism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:06:33.220717+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Flinders Petrie ==
Flinders Petrie worked closely with the scientific racists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson and over the years of his excavation career sent bones, skulls, and horses to their Anthropometric Laboratory at the University College London, forming personal relationships with both. Petrie's ideas on society were informed by their analyses of the biometric data. Historian Debbie Challis writes, "Petrie was a prestigious advocate of Galton's anthropometric data gathering and racial science in understanding ancient Egypt and archaeological evidence, as well as a backer of Galton’s eugenic vision in contemporary society." Petrie argued, based on skeletal remains and material culture changes, that the culture of ancient Egypt was derived from an invading Caucasoid "Dynastic Race," which had entered Egypt from Mesopotamia in late predynastic times, conquered the "inferior, exhausted mulatto" natives, and slowly introduced the higher Dynastic civilisation as it interbred with them. Dynastic race theory is no longer widely accepted, and Egyptian state formation is understood as a mainly indigenous process.

== Gustav Kossinna ==
Gustav Kossinna, a German archaeologist, used archaeology to promote the ideology that a prehistoric 'Fatherland', and a superior 'Aryan race', once existed in ancient Europe that extended beyond Germany into Poland and other areas, and that this territory should be reunified to restore the German state. Later his ideas were adopted by the Nazis, and Kossina's theories became official doctrine. Archaeology was heavily expanded in Nazi Germany, but those who disagreed with Kossinna's archaeology were removed from teaching positions. Kossinna's approach, and its association with the Nazis, had a long-lasting effect on European archaeologists, making them reluctant to investigate questions of race or ethnicity in archaeological contexts.

== See also ==
Giant human skeletons
Hyperdiffusionism
Nationalism and archaeology

== References ==