As the examples below suggest, many books have been published that cover one or more facets of proto-archaeology:
What one is left with, after perusing many such volumes, is the very strong sense that treasure hunting, antiquarianism and accidents might well have accounted for everything we now know about past human societies, were it not for three books published over a three-decade span around the middle of the 19th century. These three books profoundly changed the way most people thought about the past, and it was from such change that archaeology as we know it today was born.
The first book was published in three volumes from 1830-1833. Penned by an independently wealthy former lawyer, the title proposed that (1) geologic change was an accumulation of tiny changes over enormously long spans of time and (2) such changes are still going on and are thus subject to interpretation by direct observation (i.e., the present is the key to the past):
Charles Lyell was not advancing his own original scholarship in this suggestion, but rather popularizing an idea, uniformitarianism, advanced previously by James Hutton. Lyell's synthesis would have an enormous impact on the author of the third book we are examining here.
The second book to profoundly influence how people thought about the past was first published in 1836, though not translated into English until 1848. Like Lyell's great work, it was a synthesis of others' work and theories, especially that of the great French antiquary Nicholas Mahudel:
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen had used the work and theories of Mahudel and others to re-organize the antiquarian collections of the National Museum of Denmark. Previous theories had suggested that humankind's earliest history had been one of progress through three successive ages: stone, bronze and iron. But such theories had not actually suggested a reliable way of dating actual finds. Thomsen, using his museum's vast collections, was able to group similar artifacts with similar artifacts in closed finds, thus establishing an evidential basis for the three-age system of early material culture. His Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed (Guide to Northern Antiquity) gave Hoare's followers (see yesterday's post) and others one of the keys to deciphering finds like Stonehenge.
Lyell had expended a considerable amount of ink in the second volume of his Principles of Geology attempting to refute the evolutionary theories of J. B. Lamarck. (Lamarck's theories were not well known at the time -- they were in fact not translated into English until 1914.) But Lyell's objections, and -- more importantly -- his synthesis of uniformitarianism, were both important grist for the idea mill of Charles Darwin:
Darwin's theory (that all forms of life descended [with modifications] over time from common ancestry) formed -- along with the works of Lyell and Thomsen -- the building blocks for archaeology as we know it today.
Excavations would be undertaken around the world to prove or disprove the theories of Lyell, Thomsen and Darwin, as well as the host of theorists who followed in their wake. The more contemporary of these excavations were necessarily flawed by today's standards, and were usually profoundly Eurocentric in their interpretations.
Two of the more "notorious" such excavations focused on Aegean civilizations during the Bronze Age. These were not excavations conducted by highly-credentialed peers working as teams. They were basically one-man shows. The excavators were wealthy and self-taught and, above all, passionate....
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