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The Method of Prehistoric Archaeology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
Extract
During the last fifty years prehistoric archaeology has developed with extraordinary rapidity into a firmly established branch of science. A system has been constructed, the frontiers of several cultural phenomena have been laid down, and the outlines of prehistoric chronology have been formed. Hypotheses and assertions have been made concerning the ethnographical groups of prehistoric times, and lengthy ‘prehistoric’ periods have literally been transformed into ‘historic’ ones. The inscription on the medal struck for Oscar Montelius– ‘Fifty years of research have mastered millennia of human culture ’ –may serve as a short motto summarizing the results of archaeology as a whole, not merely the achievements of one man.
The method which has led to this result is that of the empiric sciences, based on the theory of evolution, namely, that of typology. The starting-point of research has for the most part been morphology. When synthesis has been the objective, the student’s instruments of research have consisted primarily of forms or shapes of objects, or ornaments and tombs and so forth, and their comparison.
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- Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1937
References
1 This article was first published, in French, in Professor Tallgren’s journal, Eurasia Septentrionalis Antiqua, vol. x, 1936. The English translation has been revised by Professor Tallgren, whom we wish to thank for his permission to print it. In the same volume is another article, in English, giving an account of the author’s recent tour in the USSR, and the impressions received there.
2 cf. the publications of the Russian Academy for History of Material Culture, viz. Soóbshchenya 1931, 1932 : Problemy 1933.
3 cf. The Illustrated London News, which has for many years given authoritative and original reports on current work and excavations.
4 As do the Russians, quite correctly in my opinion.
5 When he asked the Vogulians in Siberia about their ethnic relation to the Samoyeds and Zyrians, Professor A. Kannisto of Finland got a very characteristic reply : the first two tribes form an ‘ethnographic unit’ (‘their religion is common to both, but each has its own language’); but the Zyrians are foreigners—they are Christians, ‘that is to say, Russians’.
6 Holmsten, Problems of the Russian Academy, etc., 1932 no. 11–12.Google Scholar
7 Holmsten, op. cit.
8 Latterly the importance of these conditions and of economics in the study of prehistoric cultures has been frequently emphasized in the archaeological literature of Northern Europe. In this new orientation the many excellent syntheses of A. W. Brøgger dealing with Norwegian archaeology are models of their kind. Professor H. Moora, of Tartu, amongst others, is working on the same lines. In Britain, Crawford (in Man and his Past, 1921) foreshadowed the approach of a synthetic study of cultures, which would attempt to reconstruct the economic conditions of a society by means of its material products and by restoring its natural environment. To do this has been the aim of the best British excavators in recent years, as their reports indicate. In general archaeology this view-point is perhaps most conspicuous in the works of Professor Gordon Childe, particularly in his last, fully reviewed in ANTIQUITY, December 1936. ‘Typology’ and pure formalism are in fact already becoming rare almost everywhere.
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