2003 the rise of prehistory

7/28/2019 2003 the Rise of Prehistory

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/2003-the-rise-of-prehistory 1/21

The Rise of Prehistory

Kelley, Donald R., 1931-

Journal of World History, Volume 14, Number 1, March 2003, pp. 17-36

(Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2003.0009

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Bristol University at 03/08/13 6:55PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jwh/summary/v014/14.1kelley.html





The Rise of Prehistorydonald r. kelley

Rutgers University

F rom the beginning of their craft historians have distinguishedbetween matters recent or of record and antiquities that surpassed

memory, if not understanding. Thucydides called the latter “archaeol-ogy” and relegated it to an inferior position, whereas Herodotus had notfeared to pursue his inquiries into the exploration of the deep past, andin this effort he was followed by other venturesome authors fascinatedwith the question of origins. “Doctrines must take their beginning fromthat of the matters which they treat,” wrote GiambattistaVico, and thiswas especially true of human history.1 The problem with human his-

tory, however, has been how to locate this beginning, or these begin-nings. About this there has never been any general and lasting agree-ment, but the quest has continued on many fronts. In the nineteenthcentury, cultivation of the arena of “antiquities” produced a specialfield that was given the name “prehistory” (Vorgeschichte, préhistoire,

preistoria, etc.): the emergence of this back-projected frontier andexploration of this new temporal horizon, which extended and gave anew shape to the study of history itself, is the subject of this inquiry.

Prehistory itself had a prehistory. The questions of pre-Adamite

humanity and of human origins were essential to the ancient genre of universal history still practiced in the eighteenth century according tothe old paradigm, “the grand design of God.” 2 The great eighteenth-century collection by a team of English scholars (1744–1767), for exam-

17

Journal of World History, Vol. 14, No. 1©2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press

1 Scienza nuova, cvi, p. 14.2 C. A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God: The Literary Form of the Christian View of

History (London: 1972).



18 journal of world history, march 2003

ple, remained uncritically tied to the chronology of Scaliger and Ussherand did little more than comment on the Old Testament story.3 JohannMüller’s universal history (based on lectures given in 1778 and pub-lished posthumously in 1811) reviewed the various theories of the“prim-itive condition of mankind,” caught between the idea of a golden ageand that of barbarism, and the estimates of the “antiquity of the humanspecies,” such as that of Buffon (who suggested 80,000 years); but in theface of so much uncertainty and disagreement, he surrendered to bibli-cal convention.4

Herder, in the style of earlier histories of the earth, set his philo-sophical history of humanity (1784–1791) in the largest cosmological(astronomical, geological, biological) framework, and not until thefourth book did he reach the emergence of humanity (der Mensch, diemenschliche Gesellschaft) as the culmination of the evolutionary—“four-stage”—story, laying particular stress on geography and climate andtheir influence on human diversity. Yet like other biologically orientedauthors, such as C.A.Walkenaer, who published a “history of the humanspecies” in 1798, Herder believed in the unity of humanity and, in hisanthropological conjectures and enlightened knowledge, did not denyGenesis—“the oldest scriptural tradition concerning the beginning of the history of humanity.”5 In the next century, Herder’s point of view

was continued in Karl von Rotteck, who defined his “general history”(1812) as “the history of humanity” and “cultural history”; but he wenta bit further by suggesting the “symbolic” nature of origin stories,including that of Judeo-Christian tradition—though at the same timetaking as historical fact both the Flood and the post-Noahan dispersalof peoples (if not the Babel legend).6 Among historians the biblicalparadigm persisted long after prehistorians had rejected it. Amos Dean,for example, in his seven-volume history of civilization (1868), drewextensively on the work of Cuvier and Prichard, and yet, finding “no

certainty” in such speculation, he concluded that investigation of theantediluvian world “must be more curious than useful.” 7 The otherstrategy was essentially to ignore the minefield of prehistory, and thisis that taken by Ranke, who began publishing his Universal History in

3 An Universal History from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Times (London: 1779).4 John von Müller, Universal History (Boston: 1837), p. 16.5 Ideen zur Philosophie der Menschheit (Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man),

Bk. IV (London: 1800); cf. C. A. Walkenaer, Essai sur l’histoire de l’espèce humaine (Paris:1798).

6 Allgemeine Geschichte vom Anfang der historischen Kentniss bis auf unsere Zeit, 3rd ed.(Frankfurt: 1832), p. 101.

7 The History of Civilization, 7 vols. (Albany: 1868), p. I.



Kelley: The Rise of Prehistory 19

1880, on the grounds that the subject could not intelligibly be separatedfrom “national” traditions and in effect public and political sources.8

But the serious and critical pursuit of the story of humanity beforethe advent of written records was carried on for the most part outside of the classical tradition of historical writing. From the “new archaeology”of the fourteenth century “antiquities” (Varro’s antiquitates), beyond thecollection of curious objects, remains, and relics, were accessible mainlythrough the disciplines (or protodisciplines) of mythology, philology,ethnography, and anthropology.9 By the beginning of the nineteenthcentury mythology, which had been associated with poetry and prim-itive wisdom and what Thomas Burnet had called “mythological phi-losophy” had emerged as a discipline.10 As the Homeric scholarThomas Blackwell wrote in 1735, mythology was “a Labyrinth thro’whose Windings no one Thread can conduct us,” although it wasaccessible through an “original tradition” that, though perhaps cor-rupted, linked prehistory and history.11 Idealistic philosophy looked atmythology as an early stage of philosophy in a poetic, symbolic, andunreflective condition. For Schelling, myth was a kind of concealedtruth that held the secret to the primitive and perhaps the popularmind that only philosophy in alliance with history could reveal.

Mythology and philology have at all times been linked, and they

converged more directly in the later eighteenth century. According toSchelling, language was itself was a “faded mythology.” Both myth andlanguage were subject to inquiries about origins and about the transi-tion of humanity from a state of nature to that of culture, both seemedto pass through homologous historical trajectories, both were subject tohistorical as well as comparative methods, and both were revolution-ized by the Oriental renaissance that threw new light on the Easternbackground to Western civilization. The intersection between mythol-ogy and philology can be seen in various studies of the Homeric ques-

tion, including those of Robert Wood, C.G. Heyne, and FriedrichWolf.“The value and dignity of myth has been restored,” Heyne wrote; “itshould be regarded as old sagas, and the first sources and beginnings of the history of peoples, or else as the first childish attempts at philoso-phizing . . . .” 12 And moreover, “In interpreting myth we must trans-

8 Universal History: The Oldest Historical Group of Nations and the Greeks, ed. G. W. Pro-thero (New York: 1885).

9 See Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: 1969).10 Archeologiae philosophicae sive doctrina de rerum originibus (London: 1692), p. 94.11 An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London: 1735), p. 233.12 Ibid., pp. 197–198.




port ourselves back into the manner of thought and expression whichbelonged to that remote period.” 13

Philology, in the form of historical linguistics, promised a moredirect and concrete access to remote antiquity. As J. G. Sulzer wrote in1767, “The etymological history of languages would indisputably be thebest history of the progress of the human mind.” In a more scientific ageK. O. Müller argued that “[l]anguage, the earliest product of the humanmind, and origin of all other intellectual energies, is at the same timethe clearest evidence of the descent of a nation and of its affinity withother races. Hence the comparison of languages enables us to judgethe history of nations at periods to which no other kind of memorial,no tradition or record, can ascend.” 14 In the nineteenth century thisinspired a quest for an original language, whether Hebrew or, throughmore sophisticated methods of historical and comparative philology, alost Indo-Germanic, Indo-European, or “Aryan” root language.15 Looseanalogizing still infected linguistic science, as shown by the work of Gregor Dankovsky, which, on the basis of similarity of words and gram-mar, argued that Slavic languages could be traced back to Greek.16 Butsuch analogical speculation was increasingly challenged and correctedby the harder sort of evidence, which underlay the new discipline of comparative linguistics.

Beginning in the Renaissance, the study of newly discovered savagepeoples seemed by analogy to offer insights into the earliest periods of human history—the North American Indians, for example, beingregarded as the equivalent of the “barbarians” described in Tacitus’sGermania.17 This was a view taken by Justus Lipsius and picked upagain by Giambattista Vico and others, and it opened the way to a mod-ern conception of “anthropology” (which had earlier designated onlythe theory of human nature and was equivalent to psychology). Enlight-enment voyages of discovery contributed much more to the knowledge

of “uncivilized” specimens of the human race. Even Kant acknowl-edged that “[o]ne of the ways of extending the range of anthropology

13 Cited in K. O. Müller, Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, tr. J. Leitsch(London: 1844), p. 256.

14 A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, tr. J. W. Donaldson (London: 1859), pp.I, 4.

15 Hermann J. Cloeren, Language and Thought: German Approaches to Analytical Philos-ophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Berlin: 1988), p. 14.

16 Die Griechen als-Stamm- und Sprachverwandte der Slawen historisch und philologisch dar- gestellt (Pressburg: 1828).

17 See D. R. Kelley, “Tacitus Noster: The Germania in the Renaissance and Reforma-tion,” in Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, ed. T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman (Princeton:1993), pp. 152–167, and “Vico and the Archeology of Wisdom,” New Vico Studies (2001).




is traveling, or at least reading travelogues.”18 And as his contemporaryBaron Degérando wrote, “We shall in a way be taken back to the firstperiods of our own history . . . . The philosophic sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact traveling in time. Those unknown islands are forhim the cradle of human society.” 19

Temporal horizons were expanding even faster than those of globalspace, as the story of human life was set within the framework of nat-ural history, as the transition from a state of nature to a state of soci-ety was in effect historicized, and as nature was linked directly to whateighteenth-century scholars defined as “culture.” Biology, especially inits evolutionary form, furnished the largest framework for human his-tory and the arena for discussions of questions of the unity or diversityof humankind, especially in the form of the significance of race, asBlumenbach substituted physiological standards for distinguishing races(1776) for the cultural criteria of Linnaeus (1758).20

It is in this connection that the “old cultural history,” established inthe later eighteenth century by scholars like J. G. Herder, Johann Ade-lung, and J. G. Eichhorn, began its own ventures across the frontiers of prehistory into the history of the earth and its organic forms. 21 Thesepioneering cultural historians likewise depended at first on mythology,philology, and early ethnographic researches, but then turned to more

scientific methods; by the mid-nineteenth century practitioners of thispopular genre were drawing on the full range of resources available forthe study of prehistory. Gustav Klemm’s cultural history of humanity(1843) followed the pattern of eighteenth-century (and even medievaland Renaissance) universal histories, but turned increasingly, with thehelp of his own collections, to the “material foundations” of culture.22

Friedrich Hellwald’s Cultural History in its Natural Development (1875)began with the history of the earth and “geogeny” and the beginning of life before examining “the dawn of culture”—the transition between

prehistory and history—with reference to contemporary anthropologyand archaeology. Another example was Gustav Kolb, who turned, for abetter understanding of the earliest period of history, away from theo-

18 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, tr. Mary J. Gregory (The Hague: 1974),p. 120.

19 The Observation of Savage Peoples, tr. F. C. T. Moore (London: 1969), p. 63.20 See Michael Banton, Racial Theories, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: 1999), and Clive Gam-

ble, Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Civilization (Cambridge, Mass.: 1994).21 D. R. Kelley, “The Old Cultural History,” History and the Human Sciences (1996), pp.

101–126.22 Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit (Leipzig: 1843), Allgemeine Culturwissen-

schaft (Leipzig: 1854), and Catalog der culturhistorischen Sammlung (Dresden: 1967).




logians and philosophers and archaeologists to geologists, paleontolo-gists, anatomists, and natural scientists (Physiker) for enlightenment,and especially to the ideas of Darwin and Haekel, which produced anew “Copernican revolution” in the human sciences. Kolb focused inparticular on the question of race, citing a dozen Naturforscher of thepast two centuries to illustrate the ever-increasing estimates of thenumber of races of humankind.23

From a historical point of view, however, these projects shared thedefects of that philosophical or “conjectural” history of the Enlighten-ment. Each of them, however, tried to find a more solid base for inquiryinto the deep past. The old cultural history began to include not only“spiritual culture” but also “material culture,” especially in the form of archaeological and art-historical remains. Linguists were similarlydivided between “word philology” (Wortphilologie) and “thing phi-lology” (Sachphilologie), and Müller was one who turned against themythological speculation of Creuzer and Schelling to the realities of social and economic history.24 Indeed the “auxiliary sciences” of his-tory taught in German universities—especially geography, epigraphy,numismatics, and sphagistics—and art history in the style of Winckel-mann offer ways to turn the study of deep antiquity into a hard sciencebeyond intuitions of mythology and analogies of early linguistics.

This new science was “prehistory,” a neologism self-consciouslyintroduced by Daniel Wilson in 1851. 25 Prehistory (Vorgeschichte; préhistoire; preistoria), an international creation of nineteenth-centuryscholarship, drew especially on two new disciplines with old names,that is, anthropology (the philosophical study of human nature) andarchaeology (Thucydidean prehistory).26 Monuments, memorials, andmaterial objects offered historians access to a deeper past than affordedby written records, private or public. Graves, sepulchral urns, runes,and stone implements uncovered in the seventeenth century threw

23 Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit (Leipzig: 19843), p. 27: chronologically from Virey(2), Jacquinot (3), Kant (4), Blumenbach (5), and Buffon (6), to Burke (63).

24 See Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Ger-many, 1750 –1970 (Princeton: 1996), p. 40ff.

25 Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the New World,3rd ed. (London: 1876), p. vii, referring to his Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.

26 See T. K. Penniman, A Hundred Years of Anthropology (New York: 1974); J. O. Brew(ed.), One Hundred Years of Anthropology (Cambridge, Mass.: 1968); Glynn Daniel, A Hun-dred and Fifty Years of Archaeology, 2nd ed. (London: 1975) and The Origins and Growth of

Archaeology (Harmondsworth: 1967); Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought(Cambridge: 1989); and Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past, tr. Ian Kinnes andGilliam Varndell (New York: 1997).




light on the life (as well as death) and migrations of “barbarian” peo-ples, while fossil remains forced Christian scholars to confront, andfinally to acknowledge, the notion of a humanity older than Adam.

John Frere published such evidence from a site in Suffolk in anarchaeological journal in 1800, although its significance was not appre-ciated, or accepted, for another generation, as even the great geologistGeorges Cuvier, who died in 1832, declared that “fossil man does notexist.” In 1813 James Prichard had already held out, in a speculativeway, the possibility of the nonbiblical principle of polygenesis;27 by1846 Boucher de Perthes—“founder of prehistory,” as a later philoso-pher called him 28 —was already publishing his findings about “ante-diluvian man,” though these were not generally accepted in Englanduntil 1859; in 1857 the Neanderthal man was unearthed; and in the1860s John Lubbock was celebrating Frere’s discoveries, adding his ownand those of Boucher de Perthes. About the conventional biblicalchronology he wrote, “The whole six thousand years, which were untillately looked on as the sum of the world’s existence, are to Perthes butone unit of measurement in the long succession of ages.” 29

Nineteenth-century scholars were inclined to celebrate the noveltyof their prehistorical researches, but in a broader perspective the mate-rials for this “new science” had been accumulating for three centuries

and more, without the accompaniment of a theoretical framework butwith a substantial constituency in the Republic of Letters.30 The worksof George Agricola and Conrad Gesner on fossils were followed in theseventeenth century by state-supported efforts, notably in Denmark andSweden, undertaken for the “glory” of the fatherland, and the estab-lishment of societies of antiquities (such as that of London in 1717,and the Dilettanti in 1732), journals (such as that of A. A. Rhode in

27 James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, ed. George W.Stocking (Chicago: 1973 [1813]); and see Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays inthe History of Anthropology (Chicago: 1982), pp. 39–40 .

28 Gérard Lacaze-Duthiers, Philosophie de la préhistoire (Paris: 1931), p. 347; and seeBoucher de Perthes, Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (Paris: 1989 [1847]), and L’Inven-tion de la préhistoire, ed. Nathalie Richard (Paris: 1992).

29 Pre-Historic Times as illustrated by ancient remains and the manners and customs of mod-ern savages, 5th ed. (London: 1890), pp. 1–2; see Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress:The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: 1989).

30 Herbert Kühn, Geschichte der Vorgeschichteforschung (Berlin: 1976); Glen Daniel andColin Renfrew, The Idea of Prehistory (Edinburgh: 1988); Jaroslav Malina and Zdenek Vasi-

cek, Archaeology Yesterday and Today: The Development of Archaeology in the Sciences andHumanities (Cambridge: 1990); and Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (eds.), Nationalism,Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: 1995).




1719, which was the first, and Archaeologia, London 1770), and otherpublications and marks of professionalization. The discovery of Chilperich’s grave in 1653 marked a starting point of French archae-ology. Other inspirations to archaeological inquiry came from thestudy of the ruins of Pompeii and from the study of ancient art historyassociated with Winckelmann. The appreciation of prehistory grew incircles at least marginal to historical scholarship, and in the view of Rhode as expressed in his publication on northern German antiquities,material remains furnished a much better access to the ancient Ger-mans than Tacitus and all the accumulated commentary and derivativehistoriography.

Despite these unsettling discoveries, irreconcilable with the “evi-dences of Christianity” still being celebrated by William Paley in theearly nineteenth century, the big picture, the Eusebian chronology,remained long in place. As one historian of British antiquities wrote of prehistory, “We must give it up, that speechless past; whether fact orchronology, doctrine or mythology; whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, orAmerica; at Thebes or Palenque, on Lycian shore or Salisbury Plain:lost is lost, gone is gone forever.” In his Pre-Historic Times (1861) Lub-bock quoted these words of Palgrave to dramatize the revolution of archaeological science in that generation, and he painted a glowing

picture of the progress of understanding the prehistorical past.31

Reviewing this progress, Lubbock, who had made his own tours of archaeological sites, including those of Denmark, described the peri-odization that archaeology had established (though anticipated byY. A. Goguet in the eighteenth century): the ages of stone (which hedivided into old and new—paleolithic and neolithic), bronze, and iron,which replaced or gave solid reinforcement to the “four-stage” systemof eighteenth-century conjectural history, by connecting it with moreprecise chronological, that is, stratigraphic, calibrations.32

The English came late to this understanding, for continental schol-ars—French, German, and especially Scandinavian—had appreciatedthe high “antiquity of man” (Lyell’s phrase) for almost half a century.33

One pioneering archaeologist was the Danish professor of literatureRasmus Nyerup, who was appointed head of a committee for the pres-

31 Pre-Historic Times, preface.32 Ibid., ch. 1.33 See Donald K. Grayson, The Establishment of Human Antiquity (New York: 1983), p.

200, and Towards a History of Archaeology, ed. Glynn Daniel (London: 1981), especially thepapers of Ole-Klindt-Jensen, Kristian Kristiansen, Bo Gräslund, and Judith Rodden.




ervation and collection of national antiquities.34 One result of Nye-rup’s efforts was the founding of a national museum in Copenhagen in1819, which was directed by his follower, Christian Jurgensen Thom-sen, who was one of the formulators of the three-age system—“archae-ology’s first paradigm.” This convention, already in use by other Scan-danavian, French, and German scholars, was included in his influentialguide to Nordic antiquities (1836), a work translated soon after intoGerman (1837) and English (1838). A variation on the new periodiza-tion was offered by Sven Nilsson, professor of Zoology at Lund—savage,barbarian, agricultural, and (taking over the rubric of historians) civi-lized. Nilsson’s work on the primitive inhabitants of Scandinavia, pub-lished in 1834, was translated in 1868 by Lubbock, who drew on otherScandinavian research and publications.

A central—pioneering as well as popularizing—figure in nine-teenth-century prehistorical studies was J. J. A. Worsaae, whose workaccompanied and ornamented the formation of the Danish state (1849).Worsaae, who prepared himself by traveling to Germany, France,England, Scotland, Ireland, Hungary, Russia, and elsewhere, ended upas both professor of archaeology at the University of Copenhagen andhead of the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities. Worsaae’s first book,which was on Nordic antiquities, was published in 1843 and soon

translated into German and English. The antiquities of Greece andRome had long been under scrutiny, he wrote, but not those peopleswho had never been conquered and overlaid by classical civilization,although materials were now available, such as those collected byThomsen in the Royal Museum.35 Here Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ageartifacts could be examined and Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian cul-tures compared with others; moreover, the transition from warlike toagrarian societies could be traced in more than a conjectural way.

For Worsaae the “progress of culture” was measured not by writing

but “as indicated by the appearance of pile-dwellings and otherremains.” 36 However, though cautious in expanding temporal horizonsmuch beyond the conventional limits set by religious faith, he was con-vinced of the global range of the human species through the culturalcontinuum divided into the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. At first hestopped short of Charles Lyell’s estimate of the age of the human race

34 Daniel, Origins and Growth, p. 90ff.35 Primeval Antiquities of Denmark, tr. William J. Thoms (London: 1849).36 The Pre-History of the North based on contemporary Memorials, tr. H. F. Morland Simp-

son (London: 1886), p. 7.




as about 100,000 years. “Yet this much is certain,” Worsaae later wrote,“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 there-fore most probably under a warmer sun in some more genial clime, themore does that point recede into an endlessly distant undefinablepast.”37

As Worsaae argued, Europe was settled late, and Scandinavia evenlater, after the human race had already spread elsewhere. The evidencefor this was above all Stone Age antiquities, as exemplified by India,where these were regarded with “superstitious awe.” From here human-ity migrated northward, eventually moving as far as the Bering Strait,across to America, and from the western hemisphere to the islands of the South Seas (an assumption which was still guiding Thor Heyerdalover a century later). They also moved to the Mediterranean, and Wor-saae found the great Mommsen wrong in denying settlements in Italybefore agriculture: “The museums of Italy tell a different story andmight have warned so careful an archaeologist from roundly assertinga negative.”38 (Mommsen, in his epigraphical enthusiasm, had littlerespect for what he regarded as the amateurism of field archaeology.)Stone Age peoples migrated northward, between the “so-called iceages,” arriving in Scandinavia after “the Mammoth or Reindeer period

or the ‘Paleolithic’ Age.” Worsaae distinguished between the Danishpopulation and those “higher dominant people” arriving from thenorth, although they shared the same global paleolithic culture, as theevidence of graves indicates.

But the story told by scattered archaeological evidence was incom-plete, Worsaae admitted, and needed to be filled in by comparisonwith modern savage culture beyond the European and Aryan context.This was the argument, too, of Lubbock and others, who turned to theevidence of modern ethnography to supplement what tradition, history,

and prehistory could provide. The idea of the “antiquity of man” wasconfirmed by the evolutionary ideas that emerged and began to prevailin the wake of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species of 1859. Darwinism,preceded by the naïve evolutionism of Spencer, Chambers, and Dar-win’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, gave systematic and scientificbasis (as in Spencer’s “laws of evolution”) to age-old organistic and bio-logical analogies, joined all human races, however defined, in one gen-eral process, and in this way extended the field of comparisons to the

37 Pre-History of the North, p. 2.38 Pre-History of the North, p. 4.




entire globe, which had been the scene of the Stone, Bronze, and IronAges. The uses of archaeology diminish, however, with the emergenceof written culture, so that “monumental records and ancient relics,” asWorsaae acknowledged, “become mere illustrations of the internal andexternal contemporary conditions of civilisation, the main features of which are already known in history.”39 Later archaeologists, such asGabriel de Mortillet, likewise insisted on the priority of cultural overnarrowly paleontological criteria.

Scandinavian history drew extensively on archaeology as well asphilology, medieval chronicles, documentary collections, and Latinscholarship, which, as in the cases of the major states, had been pub-lished since the sixteenth century, and some of it was translated intoGerman, French, and English. In 1832 Eric Geijer, professor of historyat the University of Upsala since 1817, published his history of Sweden,in which he drew on “relics” as well as tradition, mythology, and medi-eval and classical sources.40 More directly relying on archaeologicalsources was Thomsen’s guide to Nordic antiquities, published in 1837,which included illustrations of graves, ships, tools, medals, and runicinscriptions, with comparative asides about American antiquities culledfrom Alexander von Humboldt’s discoveries.

In 1852 P. A. Munch published a study of Norse folk history, dedi-

cated to Rudolf Keyser (himself later the author of a comprehensivebook on Norse social history)41 and making use of the work of Wor-saae as well as Grimm and German explorations of the “mark” organi-zation apparently shared by Germans and Scandinavians.42 C. F. Allen’spioneering history of Denmark, inspired by a competition of the Soci-ety for Posterity (Selskabetfor Efterslaegten) and supported by a massivebibliographical foundation, inquired into Danish prehistory, mythol-ogy, language, and runes to illuminate the early phases of nationalculture (including manners, customs, domestic life, laws, institutions,

literature, and above all language).43

This is only a sampling of a vastbibliography, only a small fraction of which achieved European cur-rency.

In 1870 Louis Figuier argued that the science of prehistory did not

39 The Pre-History of the North, p. 181.40 Eric Gustave Geijer, The History of the Swedes, tr. J. H. Turner (London: 1845).41 The Private Life of the Old Norsemen, tr. M. R. Barnard (London: 1868).42 Munch, Det norske folks historie (Christiana: 1852), and Nordens aelteste Historie

(Christiana: 1872).43 F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark depuis les temps les plus réculés jusqu'à nos jours, tr.

E. Beauvois, 2nd ed. (Copenhague: 1878).




yet exist but rather was a “chaos” of geology, ethnology, paleontology,archaeology, and history.44 Forty years earlier, the “antiquity of man”and the ages of stone, bronze, and iron were still being denied, even bymen of science, but the growing mass of evidence, such as that of Frereat the beginning of the century, drove even the cautious Cuvier toadmit the possibility of a deep antiquity for the human species. Mean-while there appeared a large accumulation of books, popular and schol-arly, addressing and trying to give historical and scientific form to this“chaos” and to the notion of pre-Adamic culture, about which Renais-sance scholars had also speculated.

All of this historiography was shaped by the intellectual and polit-ical currents of Europe before and after the traumatic experiences of 1848, and then of 1870. Allen in particular took part in the linguisticnationalism that fired European states in the nineteenth century. In thestoried Schleswig-Holstein question, the Danes, as a minority in theDuchy of Schleswig, were menaced and eventually conquered by thenew German state, and in 1848 Allen already published a book on thedeep background of the underlying Sprachkampf.45 The “fanaticism” of the Germans had deep roots, and so did their tendency to overreachtheir natural—that is, national—bounds, as in their conflicts with theSlavs. In the mid-nineteenth century this linguistic (underlying a

poorly concealed political) imperialism was threatening not only theequally old and rich Danish language but also the culture of which itwas part. So Allen, like other representatives of small nationalities,invoked cultural history against the new state politics of his age—invain, of course, except for the outer reaches of European historicalunderstanding.

Prehistorical studies outside of the historiographical traditionincreasingly provoked skepticism even among historians about the bib-lical paradigm, as in the universal histories of Friedrich Scholsser and

especially Gustav Struve, who, while acknowledging that history beganin darkness, attacked the “blind Bible-believers” who denied the pre-Adamic existence of humanity, including that of America and Austra-lia.46 Evolutionism became commonplace in the wake of Darwin’s Ori-

gin of Species (1859) and the work of Ernst Haeckel and Friedrich Ratzelin Germany. The connection with prehistory became more direct in thework of Ratzel, who extended the views of Herder into the new disci-

44 L’Homme primitif (Paris: 1870), preface.45 Allen, On Nationality and Language in the Duchy of Sleswick (Copenhagen: 1848).46 Weltgeschichte, 3rd ed. (New York: 1853), p. 6.




pline of “anthropogeography” and who published works both on thehistory of humanity and “the prehistory of European humanity.” 47 Aphilosophical emphasis was added by Otto Caspari, who, investigating“the prehistory of humanity with a review of its natural development of the earliest intellectual development,” followed the anti-Kantian cri-tique of Herder, insisting on the growth of human reason rather thanthe structure of “pure” reason.48 In any case, by the later nineteenthcentury prehistory was not something that students of world history(or indeed national history) could ignore.

How did the New World fit into the prehistorical perspective thatwas emerging in the nineteenth century? The discoveries of Columbusand his followers and the imperial extensions of the Conquistadoreswere incorporated without much difficulty into the “universal histo-ries” of European tradition, although at first the political and culturalcategories of the colonial intruders were imposed indiscriminately onthe original inhabitants.49 The old theme of the four world monarchieswas replaced by the modern succession of empires—Spanish, English,Dutch, French, and American—as a way of periodizing the grand nar-rative of Western history, and historians of all nationalities gave inter-pretations of the consequences of the opening of the new hemisphere.The old stereotypes of barbarism and civilization, too, were employed

to distinguish not only the vanquished from the victors but also theprimitive stages of historical development from those produced bymaterial and spiritual culture, whether governed by laws of providenceor of secular progress.

There was a tradition of pre-Columbian history, too, though it waslargely expressed in old rumors, prophecy, and poetic visions goingback to Dante and Petrarch, and not until the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries did scholars pass beyond myth and ungrounded spec-ulation to ethnological inquiries into the origins of the Indian popu-

lations of the Americas, such as arguments for the Israelite origins of the Indians and Grotius’s choice of the Scandinavians.50 Indeed, wrote Justin Winsor, “there is not a race of eastern Asia—Siberian, Tartar,Chinese, Japanese, Malay, with the Polynesians—which has not beenclaimed as discoverers, intending or accidental, of American shores, or

47 Vorgeschichte des europäischen Menschen (Munich: 1874).48 Die Urgeschichte der Menschheit mit Rücksicht auf die natürliche Entwickelung der früh-

esten Geisteslebens, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: 1877).49 Kelley, Faces, 156–161.50 De Origine rerum Americanarum (1642).




as progenitors, more or less perfect or remote, of American peoples,”and none of them, he went on to add, without some plausibility. 51

These were not questions investigated by George Bancroft, RichardHildreth, and other early national historians, but other scholars hadlong discussed them. The Asiatic theory of American origins, upheldby Lafitau, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Lyell, among others,was the most popular, although specific tall tales of Chinese discover-ies were discredited, and it was reinforced by the fact of the narrownessof the Bering Strait and its frozen condition in winter. Long beforeHeyerdahl’s ideas of Polynesian contacts were defended and those of the Welsh (at least indirectly, even by Tylor), and so were Irish claims,based on legend. Less plausible but no less long lasting were argumentsfor Jewish migrations to the New World, based on speculations aboutthe Ten Tribes of Israel, a theory, assisted by ingenious linguistic analo-gies, which was apparently accepted by Roger Williams and WilliamPenn. The vast work of William Prescott’s predecessor Lord Kings-borough, otherwise a useful scholarly collection, was a late effort—“moonshine theory,” Prescott called it—to prove the Jewish origins of Mexican civilization.52

At first American antiquarian studies were locked into biblical chro-nology and ethnological speculations drawn from the Old Testament.

In1833

, for example, there appeared Josiah Priest’s work on Americanantiquities that begins on Mount Ararat after the Flood, which he triesto explain in natural terms rather than as an effect of “God’s power.” 53

Priest proceeded through conjectures about linguistic connections andabout ancient discoveries attached to many scattered archaeologicalfinds (drawn from antiquarian journals). He described the remains of mammoths (which Jefferson believed still existed) in awe-struck termsand associated them with the behemoth mentioned in the book of

Job, and his ethnographic interpretations are likewise tied to scriptural

passages. Although Priest believed that the peopling of America wasantediluvian, he was especially interested in finding possible Jewishconnections, as well as Roman, Greek, Phoenician, and of course Scan-dinavian connections.

51 Narrative and Critical History of America, I, part 1 (Boston: 1889), p. 59.52 Winsor (ed.), Narrative and Critical History of America, 8 vols. (Boston: 1889), I,

part 1, p. 86; The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott (Norman, Okla.: 1961),II, p. 43; Tudor Parfitt, The Last Tribes of Israel (London, 2002), 58ff.

53 American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, 3rd ed. (Albany, 1833), p. 127; andin general see Alice Beck Kehoe, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology (New York: 1998).




Another devout study of American antiquities was published in1841 by Alexander Bradford, who claimed to spurn such conjecturesand to rely on the most trustworthy authorities. Geological evidence,monuments, mythology, and traditions (some “as old as the deluge”)were, through scientific publications like the transactions of the Amer-ican Philosophical Society and Archaeologia Americana, the means toextricate historical fact from the“folly and superstition” of earlier ages.54

Bradford affected to see traces of traditions about the New World inPlato and Proclus. He examined the various theories of origins—Hebrews, Carthaginians, Egyptians, Hindus, Chinese, Tartars, Malays,Polynesians, Northmen, Welsh, the Indians themselves—and judgedthem in “moral,” not “demonstrative,” terms, that is, according to thedegree of probability, but also admitting comparisons and analogies,including physical similarities, as the basis for plausible argument. Heconcluded that racially the Indians may be traced to almost all of these,though the question of earliest origins remains a mystery, and historymust now, he thought, turn to the time “when a new race, and theChristian religion, were appointed to take possession of this soil.” 55

What effect did these inquiries and discoveries have on the writingof American history? Pioneering authors like George Bancroft, RichardHildreth, and John Gorham Palfrey preferred to skirt the question with

a few references to earlier speculations, but of course they were writingwhen the issues were in a state of massive confusion and deadly con-troversy. In 1843 Prescott, confronting the question in the context of Mexican civilization (and in an appendix to his book), surveyed themyths and theories deriving from discredited notions of the unity of the human race, including the transplantation of animals, whether byangels or men, to the New World. The key question was preciselywhere men reached America.56 Religious analogies, including theFlood, communion, and baptism, had been invoked, as had those in

science, art, architecture, language, especially Mayan hieroglyphics,and physical structure and appearance; but in the end Prescott doubtedthose who claimed to see similarities, and he found the differencesmore striking. So he rejected Hebrew, Egyptian, Chinese, or Tartar ori-gins for East Asia, but in a period “so remote, that this foreign influ-ence has been too feeble to interfere with the growth of what may be

54 American Antiquities and Researches into the Origin and History of the Red Race (New

York: 1841), preface.55 Ibid., p. 435.56 The Conquest of Mexico (London: 1909), II, p. 375.




regarded, in its essential features, as a peculiar and indigenous culture.”In other words, prehistory was largely a matter of speculation, andscholars should confine themselves to recorded and accessible periods.

But of course traditional historians could not evade the discoveriesand debates provoked by prehistorians. The major issues have focusedon the pre-Columbian contacts made by the Scandinavians over sev-eral centuries, testified to mainly by the traditions preserved in Ice-landic sagas and later historical writings, especially those collected inthe Landnamabók.57 The sagas had been put into writing by the thir-teenth century, and Scandinavian scholars have tended to give themgreat credence, beginning with the seventeenth-century historianOlaus Magnus and including the later works (cited by Winsor) of P. H.Mallet, E. J. Geijer, P. A. Munch, K.Keyser, Henry Wheaton, and Mau-rer. Part of the story is the colonization of Greenland by Erik the Redand Leif Eriksson, based on materials collected in the Antiquitates Amer-icanae, edited by C. C. Rafn (1837).58

Most controversial was the story of the voyages to Vinland, whetherregion or island, mentioned in Adam of Bremen and Ordericus Vitalisas well as in a number of other manuscripts. 59 Wheaton argued thatVinland should be sought in New England and Humboldt, somewherebetween Newfoundland and New York; Daniel Wilson accepted the

view in general, but Bancroft and Hildreth remained skeptical.60

Argu-ments for the thesis were geographical, linguistic, ethnological, physi-cal, and archaeological, only the last of which seemed very persuasive,but even these (for example, the Dighton Rock) seemed to be of Indianorigin. The Norsemen did meet American natives (Skraelings), but theywere probably Eskimos.61

The problem was proving such claims, many of them arising fromnational pride, and the criteria for such proofs came to depend onincreasingly strict and scientific standards of historical linkage. Argu-

ments were supported by interpretations of myth and legends, similar-ities of customs and rituals, intuitive etymologies, comparative linguis-

57 Winsor, p. 83.58 Translations in North Ludlow Beamish, The Discovery of America by the Northmen in

the Tenth Century (London: 1841); and B. F. de Costa, The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen, 2nd ed. (Albany: 1890).

59 Winsor, p. 89.60 See Wheaton, History of the Northmen, or Danes and Normans, from the earliest times

to the conquest of England by William of Normandy (London, 1831), and Wilson, PrehistoricMan: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the New World (London: 1875).

61 Winsor, p. 106.




tics, physical and cultural anthropology, and archaeology (later to besupplemented by radiocarbon and DNA testing); and though the stan-dards and techniques change, the results are still coming in. The ques-tion of the “antiquity of man” raised by Charles Lyell, a recent convertto Darwinism, in his book of that title published in 1863, was importedinto America, and at first encountered the same sort of religious resis-tance as it had in Europe, especially in England. But the work of Tylor,Lubbock, Bastian, and Theodor Waitz, which was based on studies of American Indians, eventually shifted opinion within the scientificcommunity, and in 1896 Andrew Dickson White could celebrate thevictory of Darwinism and the findings of comparative ethnology andcomparative philology over the obscurantist theological champions of the “fall of man.” 62

White’s work signaled the victory of evolutionism in some circles,but questions of prehistory were pursued along more sophisticated linesarising from the “New Science of Anthropology” and especially archae-ology. “Between 1780 and 1860,” according to Bruce Trigger, “archae-ology in the central and eastern United States passed through an anti-quarian phase which recapitulated the development of archaeology inEngland and Scandinavia between 1500 and 1800.” 63 As in Europe, thefact that human remains were found along with those of extinct mam-

mals forced acceptance of the antiquity of man and, as C. C. Abbottconcluded, following Scandinavian scholars, his existence in paleo-lithic times in America.

Proofs, assembled by Winsor, continued to accumulate, especiallywith the collective efforts reflected in the proliferation of archaeolog-ical museums and periodicals, beginning with the transactions of theAmerican Philosophical Society (1769), whose president, Thomas Jef-ferson, was himself a pioneering archaeologist, the American Academyof Arts and Sciences (founded “to promote and encourage the knowl-

edge of the antiquities of America”), the publications of the Ameri-can Antiquarian Society (1812), the American Ethnological Society(founded by Albert Gallatin), the proceedings of the American Asso-ciation for Advancement of Science (begun in 1848), the publicationsof the American Geographical Society (1852), the American Naturalist(1867), the American Antiquarian (1878), the Archeological Institute of America (1879), the American Journal of Archeology (1881), the Amer-

62 A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: 1907),I, pp. 86, 303.

63 A History of Archaeological Thought, p. 105.




ican Folk-Lore Society (1888), the Smithsonian Institution (1846),the Peabody Museum (1866), and others.64 The assault on the remotepast was concerted and broadly based, and yet, as in Europe, the effortswere mainly descriptive and analytical, with no stable synthesis—except the macro-doctrine of Darwinian evolution—appearing beforethe twentieth century.65

American antiquarianism was created in the pious old Europeanimage. The American Antiquarian Society called its proceedings

Archaeologia Americana, in memory of the eighteenth-century English Archaeologia, and associated itself with a grand tradition going back toCharlemagne, under Alcuin’s aegis (if not the legendary Irish societyfounded seven centuries before Christ), the English Society of Anti-quaries of the sixteenth century, and the recent foundation in Copen-hagen. In 1813 the Reverend William Jenks gave an address in whichhe remarked on the “high antiquity” that infidels like Dupuis andVolney had assigned to the Egyptians, but was pleased to add the such“pagan fictions” had been disproved by “learned Antiquaries”acquainted with the truths of revelation (citing Georg Horn and Rob-ertson, among others).66 The society was especially solicitous aboutcollecting books, but it also sponsored field work, for example on the“Western mounds of earth,” which promised enlightenment on pre-

Columbian America. But of course over the next two generations, asthe thesis of the “Antiquity of Man” gained support, the society wasitself drawn into infidelity and even Darwinist ideas, as were otherorganizations. In its first annual report (1881), for example, the Amer-ican Bureau of Ethnology, directed by J. W. Powell, was showed itself fully committed to ideas of evolution, at least in language.67

The “antiquity of man” in North America was well established bythe time of the publication of Winsor’s great “narrative and criticalhistory,” of which the first volume was dedicated to “prehistory” (the

Americans accepting Wilson’s coinage). Evidence had come to the sur-face earlier, but that was, wrote one contributor, “before the science of prehistorical archaeology had formulated her laws.” 68 There was no

64 Winsor, I, 2nd ed., 437.65 See Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology, 2nd

ed. (San Francisco, 1980), and Willey, “One Hundred Years of American Archaeology,” inOne Hundred Years of American Anthropology, ed. J. O. Brew (London: 1968), p. 35.

66 Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 1812–1849 (Worcester: 1912), p. 28.67 Bureau of Ethnology, First Annual Report to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

1879–80 (Washington, D.C.: 1881).68 Winsor, I, 2nd ed., p. 356.




“mysterious, superior race” and indeed no “civilized peoples” beforethe great discoveries, but paleolithic remains suggested that humanityin the NewWorld, paradoxically, was older than that in the Old World.In any case, by the later nineteenth century European and Americanprehistorical researches had come to a global consensus, if not in theirconclusions, then in the agenda for further explorations of the darktimes before recorded history.

This was the old paradigm of prehistory, but of course it was toundergo fundamental alterations in the twentieth century in the wakeof technical advances and accumulated discoveries that underminedthe linear pattern underlying not only the writing of universal historybut also early evolutionary thought. As the three-stage theory waselaborated into four, then five, stages, growing awareness of globaldiversity drove archaeology, anthropology, and so prehistory to notionsof cultural multiformity and plurality, complicating the grand narrativeof Eurocentric history. Modern cultural studies and multiculturalismopen another story, but it is useful to recall that they have their rootsin a smaller vision of the world and its history, which venturesomeinterdisciplinary scholars expanded and transformed, perhaps againsttheir hegemonic instincts, in the spirit of curiosity and exploration.Moving from the known (familiar and traditional concepts of time and

space) to the unknown and unimagined, they sought worlds lost toexperience and illuminated at least some of the buried traces of humanexistence in the undefined, perhaps undefinable, period of prehistory.

“Prehistory” is a western coinage, if not invention, but from thebeginning it had global aspirations and tried to extend its practiceaccordingly, as archaeology, anthropology, and paleontology were pur-sued by an increasingly international community, a new and more sci-entific incarnation of the old Republic of Letters, despite local interestsand the forces of nationalism in the twentieth century.69 Increasingly,

too, prehistory was joined to the Western historiographical tradition inthe search for a global perspective, a “grand narrative” to encompassthe divisive interpretations of national histories and the invidious oneof Western history.

In Henri Berr’s great series on “the evolution of humanity,” thestudy of prehistory—“still in its infancy”—takes a place of honor witheleven volumes devoted to aspects of the subject, including Jacques deMorgan’s Prehistoric Man (1925), and no survey of human civilization

69 See Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett, Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archae-ology (Cambridge: 1995).




can omit to consider this period before the appearance of written“sources” (the beginning of which also marked the beginning of his-tory and end of prehistory). Before spiritual advance came materialendowment, and before language came the tool; the understanding of this link leads back to a modern sort of “conjectural history,” whichunderlay the efforts of the post–World War I generation, includingscholars such as de Morgan and V. Gordon Childe (whose Dawn of European Civilization also appeared in 1925), to achieve a “new synthe-sis” for the study of humanity in its terrestrial home. “Aided by arche-ology,” as Childe put it, “history with its prelude prehistory becomes acontinuation of natural history.”70 It is a noble dream, though stillunrealized; for while a vast amount has been learned about global civ-ilization since Jacques de Morgan published his synthesis three quar-ters of a century ago, his conclusion still holds at the beginning of anew millennium: “What we know to-day is very little in comparisonwith what remains to be learned.” 71

70 What Happened in History (New York: 1946).71 Jacques de Morgan, Prehistoric Man: A General Outline of Prehistory, tr. J. H. Paxton

and V. C. C. Colum (New York: 1925), p. 296.

2003 the rise of prehistory

Documents