Rise of Prehistory

In fact the materials for the "new science" of prehistory had been accumulating for three centuries and more, without the accompaniment of a theoretical framework but with a substantial constituency in the republic of letters. The works of Georgius Agricola (Georg Bauer; 1494–1555) and Conrad Gesner (1516–1565) on fossils were followed in the seventeenth century by state-supported efforts, notably in Denmark and Sweden, the establishment of societies of antiquities (such as the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1717, and the Society of Dilettanti, 1732) and of journals (that of A. A. Rhode in 1719, and Archaeologia, London, 1770), and other signs of professionalization. Archaeological inspirations came from the discovery of Chilperich's grave (1653), the study of the ruins of Pompeii, and the history of ancient art associated with Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). In the view of Rhode writing on north German antiquities, material remains furnished a much better access to the ancient Germans than Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56–c. 120 C.E.) and all commentary and derivative historiography.

Throughout the century local evidence continued to accumulate. John Frere reported on evidence for the antiquity of man from a site in Suffolk in an archaeological journal in 1800, although its significance was not appreciated, or accepted, for another generation. In 1813 James Prichard had already held out the possibility of the nonbiblical principle of polygenesis. By 1846 Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes (1788–1868), acknowledged founder of "prehistory," was publishing his findings about "antediluvian man." In 1857 Neanderthal man was unearthed, and in the 1860s John Lubbock was celebrating Frere's discoveries, adding his own and those of Boucher de Perthes. About the old biblical chronology he wrote, "The whole six thousand years, which were until lately looked on as the sum of the world's existence, are to Perthes but one unit of measurement in the long succession of ages" (pp. 1–2).

Even before the English scholars, French, German, and especially Scandinavian archaeologists had appreciated the high "antiquity of man" (Charles Lyell's phrase) for almost half a century. One pioneering archaeologist was Rasmus Nyerup, whose efforts led to the founding of a national museum in Copenhagen in 1819, whose first director, C. J. Thomsen, was one of the formulators of the three-age system, which was "archaeology's first paradigm." A variation on this scheme was offered by Sven Nilsson: savage, barbarian, agricultural, and (adopting the rubric of historians) civilized. Nilsson's work on the early inhabitants of Scandinavia, published in 1834, was translated in 1868 by Lubbock, who drew on other Scandinavian researches and publications. In 1861 Lubbock painted a glowing picture of the progress of understanding prehistory and described the new periodization in this way: the ages of stone (which he divided into old and new—Paleolithic and Neolithic), bronze, and iron, which replaced or gave solid reinforcement to the "four-stage" system of eighteenth-century conjectural history, by connecting it with more precise chronological—that is, stratigraphic—calibrations.

A central figure in nineteenth-century prehistorical studies was Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae (1821–1885), who was both professor of archaeology at the University of Copenhagen and head of the Royal Museum of Northern Antiquities. For Worsaae the "progress of culture" was measured not by writing but "as indicated by the appearance of pile-dwellings and other remains." As for the "antiquity of man" he stopped short of Charles Lyell's estimate of the age of the human race as about 100,000 years. "Yet this much is certain," Worsaae added, "the more our glance is directed to that epoch-making point of time, when the Creator wakened man in all his nakedness into life, and therefore most probably under a warmer sun in some more genial clime, the more does that point recede into an endlessly distant undefinable past" (The Prehistory of the North, p. 2).