The Beginnings of Scientific Archaeology
Brian M. Fagan, Nadia Durrani · 2020
Archaeology began as part of a lively curiosity about the human past that began as long ago as Roman times. How old was humanity? The controversies over the antiquity of humankind culminated in 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and French antiquarian Boucher de Perthes’s discovery of humanly made stone axes and the bones of extinct animals in the gravels of the Somme River in northern France. These advances opened up the chronology of the human past far beyond the biblical chronology of a mere 6,000 years. Christian Jurgenson Thomson, a Danish museum curator, developed the Three-Age System (Stone, Bronze, and Iron) to subdivide prehistoric times in his museum. Its validity was later proven by excavation. The reminder of the chapter describes some of the early methods used to explain changes in human society, among them unilinear cultural evolution, diffusion, and culture history. Old World and American archaeology are compared, with the chapter culminating in a discussion of multilinear evolution and cultural ecology.