by Michael G. Lamoureux, March/April 2009
Although the early archaeologists of the 18th and 19th centuries were often considered to be risk-taking adventurers who were more interested in wealth and personal glory than scientific fact, the reality is that they were the fore-fathers of modern archaeology who gave us many of the basic techniques and theories that are still in use today. The basic techniques and theory of excavations, the importance of artifacts in reconstructing early cultures, chronological analysis, linguistic methodologies that were key to deciphering early written records, ethnological classification, landscape archaeology, stratigraphy, funerary archaeology, and the importance of publication and public interest were all initiated by pioneering archaeologists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Moreover, if it was not for the thought leadership of great archaeological (and geological) minds like John Frere, William Pengelly, and Charles Lyell (the founder of uniformitarianism), we might still believe that the earth was formed in 4,004 B.C. as per the Biblical chronology of James Usher.
In 1800, John Frere (1740-1807) published a letter on his excavations at the English site of Hoxnein in Diss where he concluded from his findings of artifacts twelve feet below the earth's surface below three higher, later deposits that "the situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world". The implication was so radical by the standards of the day that it was overlooked for almost six decades. The idea was not reiterated until William Pengelly (1812-1894), who performed stratigraphic excavations at a number of cave sites in the 1850s and 1860s, including Kents Cavern at Devon, found Paleolithic flint tools and fossils of extinct animals that allowed him to develop reasoned arguments against the Biblical chronology.
The foundations of modern excavation, including the site survey, meticulous documentation, and stratigraphy, were developed by early archaeologists in the early 18th century. William Stukeley (1697-1765), who had "a taste for antiquities linked with a passion for botany, astronomy, and mathematics", was among the first to include a description of the landscape in his excavation methodology and paid careful attention to the layers of the earth, paving the way for greats like Thomas Jefferson to develop the foundations of stratigraphy. (Stukeley was also noted for his pioneering, but speculative, attempt to interpret the purposes of the great stone enclosures of Avebury and Stonehenge.)
In 1784, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), while exploring an Indian burial mound on his Virginia estate, avoided the common practice of simply digging downwards until something turned up. Instead, he cut a wedge out of the mound so that he could "walk into" it, look at the layers of occupation, and draw conclusions from them. This paved the way for the likes of Augustus Pitt-Rivers, J.J.A. Worsaae, Sir Arthur Evans, and Sir William Matthew Flanders Petrie to further refine stratigraphy (the study of rock layering), and biostratigraphy (the study of fossil evidence in rock layers) as a powerful archaeological tool.
Augustus Pitt-Rivers (1827-1900), who is often called the father of British archaeology, was among the first to stress the need for a total excavation of the site through stratigraphic observation and recording, as well as the need for prompt and complete publication of findings. He was also the first to insist that all artifacts, not just beautiful or unique ones, need to be collected and catalogued, as he understood that a focus on everyday objects was the key to fully understanding and reconstructing the past. This was a decisive break from past archaeological practice, which often bordered on treasure hunting.
Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941), considered a pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization, along with Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) who was also a pioneer in the creation of public interest in antiquity, was the first to use stratigraphy and ceramic evidence to conclude that there was a civilization on Crete before the civilizations that were discovered at Mycenae and Tiryns by Schliemann. And when he discovered the magnificent Minoan civilization of Crete in 1900, he dated the palace of Knossos by means of Minoan pottery fragments excavated in faraway Egypt whose dates were known. In effect, he was also one of the first archaeologists to introduce us to cross-dating techniques enabled by ceramic sociology (which was devised in the mid-20th century by Constance Cronin) and stratigraphy.
In 1871, Henrich Schliemann used a quasi-historical source, Homer's Iliad, to discover the site of Bronze Age Troy, effectively linking the study of pre-historic societies with the later classical societies linked to history.
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), a celebrated Egyptologist, was a pioneer of the systematic method of archaeology who, building on the works of the great archaeologists before him, devised a system of excavation and charting that is still in use today. He believed that the earth should be pared away, inch by inch, to see all that was in it and how it lay and this attention to detail allowed him to make several small, but significant, finds at dig sites, such as Tanis, that would have been lost under older systems of excavation.
Petrie's systematic methods allowed him to arrange a large number of tombs in the large prehistoric cemetery at Diospolis (in Egypt) in chronological order in 1902 using pottery, making him one of the first archaeologists to use ceramic typology as a dating methodology. Careful study of the groups of pots buried with each skeleton allowed him to organize them in an order that displayed a gradual change in features like handle design. This led to a series of "sequence dates" for each vessel form that gave way to a chronology that was so accurate that it was used by archaeologists for decades to date newly found sites in Egypt.
In addition to stratigraphy and the need for meticulous documentation, which was also echoed by Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741) who devoted part of his religious texts to antiquities and attempted to explain them by illustrating them with as much detail as possible, the art of typology (the classification of things according to their characteristics) also has its roots in the early 18th century. In the mid 18th century, the Count of Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe de Tubieres de Grimoard de Pestels de Levis (1692-1765), proposed the replacement of the classic philosophical model with a more experimental paradigm based on laws that would allow every object to be assigned to a place and period by virtue of a cultural determinism that was observable and quantifiable, thus laying the foundations for the likes of Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, Gabriel de Mortillet, and Franz Boas.
Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788-1865), who was the first to construct a museum on the succession of stone, bronze, and iron age artifacts and tools, argued for the necessity of comparing the technologies of archaeological and ethnographic objects. He expanded the typological rules of the Count of Caylus and provided archaeologists with a way of analyzing objects that was both descriptive and technical. This work, which was verified and refined by his student and later colleague J.J.A. Worsaae (1821-1885), laid the foundations for the development of a prehistory that was no longer dependent on historical texts. (J.J.A. Worsaae conducted excavations in burial mounds that verified that the stone tools from deeper layers were older than the bronze tools they underlay which were, in turn, older than the iron tools they underlay.)
Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet (1821-1898) observed the gradual change of objects as curator of the museum at St. Germain and demonstrated the direction of typological change by the development of typological series. This allowed him to subdivide the Nordic Bronze Age into six distinct periods. His belief that there were universal stages of societal evolution, which he called unilineal evolution, provided a solid foundation for ethno-archaeologists to understand the evolution of cultures without a written record.
Franz Boas (1858-1942), the father of American anthropology, distinguished between the physical and historical sciences in his work and argued that geography is historical in the sense that it requires an understanding of phenomena in their own terms. He argued that ethnological phenomena must be considered in serious anthropological study developed and published the principles of ethnological classification. These principles emphasized the local context of a find and suggested that a form an artifact took reflected the circumstances under it was produced and used, giving us a basis for a modern contextual typology of artifact organization. Boas also emphasized the rigorous collection of great amounts of well controlled and documented archaeological, ethnographical, and linguistic data for a society to aid in the reconstruction of a unique cultural history for each society.
Chronological analysis was also developed side-by-side with stratigraphy and typology by the early archaeologists. In addition to William Stukeley, who tried to infer a chronologic timeline in his stratigraphic analysis, and Sir Arthur Evans, who was able to infer an earlier Aegean civilization by the stratigraphic location of early ceramic pottery, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) was the first to define the discipline of art in his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art) which chronicled the growth, maturity, and decline of civilizations through its art. He was the first to postulate that if we look closely, art reveals many of the cultural factors of a society, including its religion, politics, climate, freedom and craft.
The 19th century also saw great progress in the development of linguistic methods, which were necessary for deciphering many of the ancient writings and runes that were found on various artifacts across Europe and ancient Mesopotamia. One of the leading archaeologists in this field was Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832) who developed a method of decipherment that allowed him to decipher parts of the Rosetta stone and the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.
Finally, the 19th century also saw the development of the theory of organic evolution by Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). The father of biogeography, Wallace was a leading evolutionary thinker who, with Charles Darwin, gave us the theory of organic evolution, the Wallace line, and, most importantly, the "Sarawak Law". The "Sawawak Law", which states that every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species, creates the basis for the zoogeographic regions still in use today (and his text on "The Geographical Distribution of Animals", published in 1876, was the definitive text on zoogeography for 80 years). Zoogeographic regions, now known as ecozones, are large areas where animals developed in relative isolation over time, allowed pre-historic archaeologists to define prehistoric regions which could be studied in relative isolation.
Thus, while they may be represented as risk-taking adventurers by modern day writers, who are likely more interested in public attention than deep scientific study, the early archaeologists of the 18th and 19th centuries were the fore-fathers of modern archaeology who gave us many of the basic techniques and theories that are still in use today. They alerted us to the importance of every artifact and observable ecofact, no matter how small. They developed the basics of chronological analysis, typology, linguistic analysis that allow us to date, and translate finds. And they demonstrated the importance of a careful survey, stratigraphic study, scientific process, and meticulous documentation in site excavations and, in the case of Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, gave us basic methods of excavation and charting, which, in a slightly revised form, are still in use to this day. They were great explores in heart and in mind.