For decades, archaeologists have investigated the history of the discipline and, more recently, some have suggested that self-reflection be incorporated into fieldwork and archaeological reports. These efforts should promote critical understandings of archaeological practice as well as of the data and interpretations originating from such practice. This dissertation represents an exploration of the influences, at various levels, affecting one body of data (constituting the German Hamburgian) and interpretations about that data. The Hamburgian was first defined as a late Paleolithic cultural complex on the North European Plain in the early 1930s. Throughout its research history, avocational archaeologists have played a prominent role in the discovery and interpretation of the Hamburgian record. The most influential of these amateurs was Alfred Rust, whose fieldwork at the now-classic sites of Meiendorf and Stellmoor was carried out at the very inception of Hamburgian research. His discoveries inspired a host of other explorations of Hamburgian sites in northern Europe and shaped subsequent expectations and interpretations about this prehistoric period. These findings were eagerly followed by an interested public and were the source of intense regional and national pride during the unique social, political, and economic climate between the World Wars in Germany. Among the early investigations that followed upon the heels of Rust's work was the excavation of Pennworthmoor 1 in Cuxhaven-Sahlenburg by another self-trained archaeologist, Paul Büttner. Sixty years later Pennworthmoor 1 was again the site of archaeological fieldwork at which time I played a part. Past practices of Hamburgian archaeology in northern Germany, in general, and at the site of Pennworthmoor 1, in particular, are considered through documentary and collections research. The formative first decade of Hamburgian archaeology is the primary focus. In addition, a reflexive approach to my own fieldwork at the Pennworthmoor 1 site is offered to illustrate the complexities and effects of daily practice involved in data recovery and interpretation that cannot be readily gleaned from historical records.

The years between the two world wars, which just preceded the emergence of the neo-Darwinian "new synthesis," were intellectually difficult ones for paleoanthropology in America. Patterns of thought deeply ingrained in biology and anthropology pushed writers on hominid evolution into interpretive "blind alleys." Most prominent among the patterns was what Ernst Mayr has called "typological thinking," which often mixed with a tendency to project "scientific" racism back into the hominid past. A "splitting" habit in taxonomy combined with these and with belief in "orthogenetic" change to make polyphyletism the norm. Hesitance to accept as human ancestors any Pleistocene forms exhibiting "primitive" characters led to phylogenies which put the known fossils on side-branches. Anatomically modern humans were thus left "ancestorless" by most writers, though nearly all continued to use existing fossils in their evolutionary scenarios by designating them as "structural ancestors." Research conducted in Europe before 1914 on the Neanderthal skeleton and on the interperetation of endocranial casts, along with the Piltdown fraud, did much to establish these phylogenies and scenarios. In tandem with these general themes came the ascendancy of several specific hypotheses that eventually clashed with accumulating evidence. That the brain had led the way in hominid evolution, that Neanderthals and other "low-brows" could be ruled out as ancestors, and that modern Homo sapiens had appeared early in the Pleistocene, became even harder to maintain. The close evolutionary bond between humans and great apes theorized in England by Sir Arthur Keith and elaborated in America by William King Gregory remained vigorous, however, despite challenge. The present study examines these issues through an analysis of the five Americans whose writings on hominid evolution were most extensive and varied--Henry Fairfield Osborn, George Grant MacCurdy, Ales Hrdlicka, Earnest A. Hooton and William K. Gregory. The writings of each are analyzed separately, so that both general themes and responses to the changing state of the discipline can be traced. This approach reveals that shared patterns of thought did not prevent considerable diversity on nearly every main issue, a fact which rendered the field fertile for rapid growth later.