“The Peculiar Hellenic Alloy”: Carl Blegen’s Narrative of Greek Racial Growth in Context | April 2025 (129.2)

In two quick publications from the early Nineteen Forties, Carl Blegen characterised the event of prehistoric tradition in Greece as a steady technique of racial mixing that laid the foundations for classical, and even fashionable, Greece. This text situates Blegen’s narrative of racial mixing inside an extended custom in Aegean prehistory, because it developed within the late Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and particularly how Nineteenth-century concepts about race influenced archaeological understandings of tradition. Alongside together with his buddy and collaborator the British archaeologist Alan J.B. Wace, Blegen moreover used archaeological follow—vertical stratigraphy and ceramic evolutionary typologies—to buttress an argument for progressive racial mixing that in the end preserved a continuity of tradition between prehistoric and historic Greece. Regardless of disciplinary shifts within the many years after World Conflict II, I argue Blegen’s narrative had a level of endurance each due to its emphasis on language as an indicator of tradition, which was strengthened by the decipherment of Linear B, and since it appealed to those that rejected notions of racial purity. This research due to this fact reveals how racialized understandings of tradition can persist with out the phrase “race,” and why it is very important interrogate the entangled relationship between archaeological follow and mental historical past.