Academic Relations Between Italian and Spanish Archaeologists and Prehistorians, 1916–1936

Relations between Spain and Italy are always described, by the inhabitants of both countries, as ‘fraternal’. Spanish archaeologists had close intellectual and personal ties with Italian archaeology and its archaeologists, after all they shared a Latin culture and a Roman past.

Prior to the Spanish Civil War, and through the efforts of Spanish archaeologists Bosch Gimpera and Hugo Obermaier, this network, that spanned both Classical and prehistoric archaeologies, was used to support the holding of the IV International Congress on Classical Archaeology in Barcelona in 1929, and this lead, among other things, to the foundation of the Congrès International des Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques in Berne in 1932 (CISPP), the forerunner of today’s UISPP.

However, common Spanish and Italian archaeological interests also caused the development of Italian-style monumentalist archaeological projects at Romano-Hispanic sites. Eventually under the new Fascist government in Spain, and archaeologists such as García y Bellido, Santa Olalla, Taracena and Almagro, archaeology was used to justify Spanish nationalism, and its ideology of empire, strong central leadership, and political and linguistic unity.