{"id":10592,"date":"2025-03-18T18:46:53","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T22:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ajaonline.org\/?p=10592"},"modified":"2025-03-18T18:46:53","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T22:46:53","slug":"the-peculiar-hellenic-alloy-carl-blegens-narrative-of-greek-racial-development-in-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ajaonline.org\/article\/the-peculiar-hellenic-alloy-carl-blegens-narrative-of-greek-racial-development-in-context\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Peculiar Hellenic Alloy\u201d: Carl Blegen\u2019s Narrative of Greek Racial Development in Context"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In two short publications from the early 1940s, Carl Blegen characterized the development of prehistoric culture in Greece as a continuous process of racial mixing that laid the foundations for classical, and even modern, Greece. This article situates Blegen\u2019s narrative of racial mixing within a longer tradition in Aegean prehistory, as it developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and especially how 19th-century ideas about race influenced archaeological understandings of culture. Along with his friend and collaborator the British archaeologist Alan J.B. Wace, Blegen additionally used archaeological practice\u2014vertical stratigraphy and ceramic evolutionary typologies\u2014to buttress an argument for progressive racial mixing that ultimately preserved a continuity of culture between prehistoric and historic Greece. Despite disciplinary shifts in the decades after World War II, I argue Blegen\u2019s narrative had a degree of staying power both because of its emphasis on language as an indicator of culture, which was strengthened by the decipherment of Linear B, and because it appealed to those who rejected notions of racial purity. This study therefore reveals how racialized understandings of culture can persist without the word \u201crace,\u201d and why it is important to interrogate the entangled relationship between archaeological practice and intellectual history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In two short publications from the early 1940s, Carl Blegen characterized the development of prehistoric culture in Greece as a continuous process of racial mixing that laid the foundations for classical, and even modern, Greece. This article situates Blegen\u2019s narrative of racial mixing within a longer tradition in Aegean prehistory, as it developed in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10595,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[904],"tags":[3,41],"issues":[960],"region":[802],"class_list":["post-10592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","tag-bronzeage","tag-historyofarchaeology","issues-960","region-greece"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>\u201cThe Peculiar Hellenic Alloy\u201d: Carl Blegen\u2019s Narrative of Greek Racial Development in Context | April 2025 (129.2) | American Journal of Archaeology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ajaonline.org\/article\/the-peculiar-hellenic-alloy-carl-blegens-narrative-of-greek-racial-development-in-context\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cThe Peculiar Hellenic Alloy\u201d: Carl Blegen\u2019s Narrative of Greek Racial Development in Context | April 2025 (129.2) | American Journal of Archaeology\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In two short publications from the early 1940s, Carl Blegen characterized the development of prehistoric culture in Greece as a continuous process of racial mixing that laid the foundations for classical, and even modern, Greece. 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