Starting with Paul Henri Mallets "History of Denmark" of 1755, this contribution analyses the construction of European national prehistories from the late Enlightenment to the middle of the 19th century. Mallet, as Cluverus and Pelloutier before him presented the Celts as the ancestors of most European nations. His English translator, Bishop Thomas Percy, saw reason to correct him and already in 1770 tried to separate Celts, Teutonic people and Sarmatians by language, customs, laws and religion. After 1800, and under the influence of linguistic research, several waves of consecutive immigrations from the East were seen as causing a horizontal stratigraphy of peoples across the whole of Europe. An increasingly nationalist climate made shared ancestors increasingly suspect. Ludwig Lindenschmit can be identified as one of the founders of a germanocentric German prehistory that contained antisemitic and racist elements from 1848 onwards
