Abstract

Beyond usual and helpful tendencies towards new interpretations, acquisition of new data and innovative readings, the protohistory (even more than prehistory) has always been subjected to a political and ideological revisionism. On the basis of the nationalist and racist theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, both totalitarian regimes and regionalist-independentist movements used the protohistoric archaeology as a tool to shape identitarian feelings, through the representation of a fictional past whose antiquity would be the ancestral foundation of the theories currently propounded. From a methodological point of view, this «revisionism of the origins» stresses the concept of ethnic identity, disregards the phenomena of acculturation between the different people and uses (manipulates) archaeological data to construct completely fake cultural genealogies. The recent folkloric and political activism about the alleged Celtic origins of some territories is a good indicator of the (scientific and political) dangers inherent in the «revisionism of the origins».