The Nationalistic Trend in South Korean Archaeology: Documenting the Development of a Unilinear Evolutionary Trajectory of a Homogeneous Korean Peoples

Abstract

This article aims to trace historical process of nationalism becoming embedded in general evolutionism in South Korean archaeology. The mindset sedimented in South Korean archaeologists is that all groups and polities in prehistoric and proto-historic Korea must be incorporated into a unilinear evolutionary stage model as a single people. Since 1945, South Korean archaeologists have endeavoured to establish the ethnic origin of this people, along with the timeline of Korean prehistory in order to reconstruct the unilinear independent history of the homogenous nation. By adopting periodization systems created in Western archaeology—such as the Three Age System and neo-evolutionism—leading South Korean archaeologists have attempted to objectify their irrational ideological idea of homogeneity and a unilinear evolutionary process. Even today, periodization itself is a very important issue in Korea, because it is not easy to combine the internal development pattern with the impact of external cultural traits diffused from China and incorporate various contemporary groups with different development levels into a single stage. These issues cause severe disputes; South Korean archaeologists, however, fail to offer an adequate solution, instead deepening the contradictions entailed in a unified timeline model, because they cannot change the fundamental premise of South Korean archaeology, namely the homogenous Korean nation formed in the Bronze Age. Moreover, these disputes rather prevent the application of a multi-evolutionary process model based on the political economy approach to the prehistoric and ancient Korean cases.