Rise of Prehistory

The idea of the "antiquity of man" overcame initial resistance, especially through the work of Tylor, Lubbock, Adolf Bastian, and Theodor Waitz, based on studies of American Indians, and eventually shifted opinion within the scientific community; in 1896 Andrew Dickson White celebrated Darwin's victory over the obscurantist theological champions of the "fall of man." But prehistorical investigations were also pursued along more scientific lines. "Between 1780 and 1860," wrote Bruce Trigger, "archaeology in the central and eastern United States passed through an antiquarian phase which recapitulated the development of archaeology in England and Scandinavia between 1500 and 1800" (p. 105). As in Europe, the existence of human remains along with those of extinct mammals forced acceptance of the antiquity of man and, as C. C. Abbott concluded, following Scandinavian scholars, of his existence in Paleolithic times in America.

And proofs continued to accumulate, especially with the collective efforts reflected in the spread of archaeological museums and periodicals, beginning with the transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1769), whose president, Thomas Jefferson, was himself a pioneering archaeologist, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (founded "to promote and encourage the knowledge of the antiquities of America"), the publications of the American Antiquarian Society (1812), the American Ethnological Society (founded by Albert Gallatin), the proceedings of the American Association for Advancement of Science (begun in 1848), the publications of the American Geographical Society (1852), the American Naturalist (1867), the American Antiquarian (1878), the Archaeological Institute of America (1879), the American Journal of Archaeology (1881), the American Folk-Lore Society (1888), the Smithsonian Institution (1846), the Peabody Museum (1866), and others.

In Henri Berr's great series on "the evolution of humanity" the study of prehistory—"still in its infancy"—takes a place of honor with eleven volumes devoted to aspects of the subject, including Jacques de Morgan's Prehistoric Man (1925); and no survey of human civilization can omit consideration of this period before the appearance of historical "sources" properly speaking. Before spiritual advance came material endowment—before language came the tool; and the understanding of this link leads back to a modern sort of "conjectural history," which underlay the efforts of the post–World War I generation, scholars such as Jacques de Morgan and V. Gordon Childe (whose Dawn of European Civilization also appeared in 1925), to achieve a "new synthesis" for the study of humanity in its terrestrial home. "Aided by archeology," Childe wrote, "history with its prelude prehistory becomes a continuation of natural history." Yet there is still truth in the remark made by Morgan in the synthesis published three quarters of a century ago, that "What we know to-day is very little in comparison with what remains to be learned."