From our vantage point in 2021 we can appreciate how our understanding of the world, and ourselves, can change dramatically in a moment. Gamble's account of the time revolution of 1859, when the extent of the antiquity of humanity was first realised, reminds us that we are not alone in feeling the world change, seemingly overnight. In the mid nineteenth century, Joseph Prestwich, John Evans, Hugh Falconer, John Lubbock and Jacques Boucher de Perthes contributed to a discovery that may have felt earthshattering: that the age of humanity could not be reckoned within the 6000 years of biblical history and must rather be considered on a scale comparable with geological time. The author's stated intent is to “extract the time revolution in human history from Darwin's dazzle” (p. 1) and to “humanize a story of scientific endeavour characterized by abundant zeal and perseverance” (p. 3).
We all view the past through the lens of our present, and it is perhaps easiest to project current agendas and perspectives onto the deep past. Gamble reminds us that this projection began from the revolution's inception and that we need to find a way “to understand our deep history that avoids recreating the past with dominant metaphors from the present” (p. 6). Gamble artfully implements a structure that entices the reader to focus wholly on key Victorian-era questions, such as when it came to humankind, “how old was old?” (p. 114), and to forget that we can now answer these questions easily. After presenting an engaging account of this discovery in seven chapters, the author uses the afterword to offer a key additional insight, which fittingly makes the ground tilt under the reader one final time.
The opening chapter introduces the Victorian characters whose passions, idiosyncrasies, perseverance and personal connections drove the time revolution. This could easily have been a story of the triumph of the ‘founding fathers’ of archaeology, but in Gamble's hands it is not. He repeatedly, and with great emphasis, gives space to the women who “hold the reins of memory from which this history of the time revolution is written” (p. 21). It is the work of wives, sisters, nieces and daughters that humanised the telling of the time revolution; women such as Grace McCall, the niece of Hugh Falconer and married to Joseph Prestwich, but also a scientist and time revolutionary in her own right.
The story of the discovery begins in Chapter 2. On 27 April 1859, the stone handaxe that changed the world was found in Saint-Acheul, photographed and removed in the presence of Prestwich, Evans and de Perthes. Keenly aware of the possibility of forgeries, and the need to convince the wider scientific society in Europe, the time revolutionaries ensured that they personally witnessed the in situ recording and recovery of one of the first eponymous Acheulian handaxes. Handaxe secured, they returned to England, convinced of their evidence for the (then unspecified) age of humanity.
Chapter 3 records the events of May to June 1859, as the time revolutionaries faced the daunting task of convincing others of the veracity of their evidence. How do you change peoples’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world? Prestwich and Evans followed a strategy, seductive in its simplicity, of using deliberately neutral language and relying on illustrations to demonstrate their points. Although parallel evidence was soon found (and rediscovered) at places such as Hoxne in Suffolk, England, the revolutionaries were faced with opposition coalescing into two main camps: those who believed the artefacts were anthropogenic but not old, and those who believed the artefacts were old but not human made. This provides the focus of Chapter 4, which details the reception of the finds in the year spanning 1859–1860.
Gamble makes it clear that this reception must be understood broadly, within the context of tensions between individual freedom and societal constraints, a debate connected to a similar tension between a ‘local’, British historical development vs an imposed “universal history of three ages through which every nation must pass” (p. 120). Tensions aside, the three-age system, invented in 1836 by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, ensured that at national institutions, such as the British Museum, these newly significant handaxes marked the starting line for humanity's progress towards civilisation. Chapters 5 and 6 span 1860–1872, marking the shift from consolidation to acceptance of the evidence, when Evans and Prestwich buried “any and all” opposition under a barrage of facts (p. 151). And yet, once the idea of a “vast lapse of ages” (p. 243) for humankind had taken hold, the time revolutionaries found that their belief coloured their judgement of the (presently) well-known fraudulent case of the Moulin Quignon remains.
Gamble does not gloss over the racism embedded in British and European society in the mid nineteenth century or the role of anthropology and prehistoric archaeology in normalising racist attitudes and justifying unequal power relations. As we take action to dismantle persistent systemic racism, Gamble's work is a reminder that we must begin at prehistoric archaeology's very foundation and challenge lingering Victorian-era assumptions. Fortunately, although not having banished systemic racism, we are in a better position today as the ideas of the time revolutionaries won over the polygenism of the “grotesque” James Hunt, leader of the Anthropological Society of London, who “paid lip service to abhorrence of the slave trade” while the Society “set out to provide scientific cover for the continuing institution of slavery” (p. 190).
Chapter 7 presents the time revolutionaries’ personal, scientific and historical legacies, an impressive list to which we ought to add their outmanoeuvring of the then highly racist Anthropological Society.
Finally, we come to Chapter 8, the afterword. Making deep history is a greatly expanded version of a story first told in a debate piece written for Antiquity in 2009 (Gamble & Kruszynski Reference Gamble and Kruszynski2009). The afterword recounts how Gamble and Kruszynski relocated the missing handaxe. Strikingly, there is one key insight offered by Gamble at the very end of Making deep history that is not published in the 2009 article. But I shall not spoil the surprise; instead, I recommend that to appreciate the plot twist at the conclusion, it is necessary to have read the volume in full.
This work delivers a fatal blow to the Victorian idea of separate spheres, clearly showing that the world views and life experiences of Evans et al. informed and influenced their ability to recognise, interpret and convince others of the evidence for the antiquity of humanity. Making deep history is archaeological storytelling at its finest, anchoring the birth of prehistory in the lives of the men—and women—who gave the world the gift of endless time.
