“The Peculiar Hellenic Alloy”: Carl Blegen’s Narrative of Greek Racial Development in Context

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’s 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—vertical stratigraphy and ceramic evolutionary typologies—to 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’s 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 “race,” and why it is important to interrogate the entangled relationship between archaeological practice and intellectual history.1