Mixing, migration and the lessons of history

Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie's lifelong beliefs in race science and eugenics underlay his significant work as an archaeologist and Egyptologist. His detection of race in ancient art provided a basis for other scholars’ construction of racial typologies. His commitment to colonialist paradigms of excavation moved numerous objects, and human remains, from Egypt and Palestine to Britain. In the 1930s, in two letters to The Times and the Palestine Post, the aging Petrie came out against Nazi understandings of race, arguing that 'foreign migration has been the making of Britain’. Petrie's claims reflected his understanding of civilisation, in antiquity and today, as a product of the 'right sort’ of racial mixing through migration of the fit, hearty, and talented. This critical reflection considers the role of archaeology in constructing race, taking Flinders Petrie’s work on migration as a case study and situating it in wider intellectual trends of the time. Understanding how Petrie’s racial logic allowed him to oppose Nazism while promoting eugenic ‘weeding’, allows us to move beyond simplistic understandings of early twentieth century race science. We can then detect the pernicious persistence of frameworks from this discipline in popular discourses about migration and culture in Britain today

Biopower · Colonialism · Eugenics · Judaism · Nazism · Race (biology) · Racial hierarchy · Racism · The Holocaust · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Medical History and Research · Race, Genetics, and Society