This article illustrates the dangers of mixing religious certitudes and political activities with the study of the remote prehistoric past by critically reviewing the works of one of the 20th century’s most prolific and (once) influential prehistorians, Oswald Menghin. Menghin’s reconstructions of the past were inspired by a moral crusade against the perceived evils of materialist evolutionism, an agenda that during the 1930s assumed an explicitly political dimension consistent with Nazi ideology. His subsequent exile to Argentina was not a simple retreat to a safe haven but an opportunity for him to confirm a universal world history extending back into the Palaeolithic that purported to link major cultural developments in the New World with earlier developments in the Old. Menghin’s theories, which today appear dated and mistaken, were once widely accepted and developed by scholars of the Vienna culture‐historical school of ethnography, one of the main theoretical sources for culture‐historical archaeology. The latter approach, the dominant archaeological practice in many European and Latin American countries, is here reevaluated in the light of this mistaken legacy, and it is argued that “peoples without prehistory” deserve to have theirs rediscovered and reconstructed through archaeological research. The paper concludes by discussing the constraints of archaeological evidence for identifying correct readings of the past and by calling attention to the difference between religious and political convictions and scientific theories that are openly subjected to testing and empirical refutation.
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