As was quite typical of Victorian investigations of the past, the sharpening of focus on these ancient eras depended on the coalescence of a number of approaches. As was often the case, the esteemed Greek and Roman authorities provided an initial framework for comprehension and a crucial source of data—which meant that even if the implications and content of these studies were new, they were also deeply rooted in tradition. However, while the classical authors were widely familiar and had left the only significant written accounts of Britain’s preliterate past, the descriptions themselves were rather sparse and left much room for supposition. In the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar described a population similar to that of Gaul, which was partly civilized on the southern coasts but more barbaric inland. Meanwhile, Tacitus’s Agricola, describing the conquest of the British barbarians in the first century AD, contained a reference that was to cast a long shadow over later interpretations: “Who were the original inhabitants of Britain, whether they were indigenous or foreign, is as usual among barbarians, little known. Their physical characteristics are various, and from these conclusions may be drawn. The red hair and large limbs of the inhabitants of Caledonia point clearly to a German origin. The dark complexion of the Silures, their usually curly hair, and the fact that Spain is the opposite shore to them, are an evidence that Iberians of a former date crossed over and occupied these parts.”Footnote ²⁰ Not only did this rather unexpectedly link the inhabitants of south Wales and southwest England with the populations of Iberia—an idea that was to have much resonance—but it asserted ethnic pluralism deep in the past. When these classically designated tribal groupings were “racialized” by later generations of anthropologists and ethnologists, it implied considerable diversity across the British Isles even before the arrival of “the first Roman sandal.”

Ancient variation was further ingrained by one of the major conceptual revolutions of the early nineteenth century: comparative Indo-European philology. Driven by German scholars such as Friedrich Schlegel, Jacob Grimm, and Augustus Pott, and then popularized in Britain by the likes of James Cowles Prichard, John Mitchell Kemble, and Max Müller, the idea that the main languages (and by extension, peoples) of Europe were genealogically connected to both one another and to Asian languages such as Sanskrit and Persian was ground into historical and cultural discourse.Footnote ²¹ First the Germanic peoples, and then the Celts, were brought within this new Aryan or Indo-European family and taken to represent distinct waves of nomadic horse-warriors galloping from central Asia to the western extremities of the European continent—bringing with them dynamic religious systems, languages, cultural forms, racial strands, and technology (most frequently cited, although not necessarily universally agreed upon, as being bronze tools and weapons).

“Aryanism,” however, contained within itself a significant problem: how to understand European languages that were demonstrably non-Indo-European. Some, such as Turkish, Tatar, and Hungarian, had been brought by historically attested invaders—which gave further credence to the idea that migration was a key force in history. However, those found in peripheral regions, such as Lappish, Finnish, and Basque, could not be explained in this way. Indeed, their remoteness and isolation seemed to hint at them being the last remnants of formerly much more widespread languages. The notion that Europe had not been unpopulated before the migration of the Aryans but was inhabited by other human groups who were either conquered, assimilated, enslaved, or exterminated, became a definite conceptual possibility. In Britain, this manifested in a controversial idea of pre-Celtic “Allophylians,” “Autochthenes,” “Aborigines,” “Ugrians,” “Atlanteans,” “Turanians,” “Euskarians,” or “Iberians”—terms that belied difference, non-Aryan origin, barbarism, and lower forms of agglutinative language but also deep indigeneity and linkages across the non-Indo-European periphery. However, the scholarly authorities remained divided over their existence. Of the most prominent ethnologists, James Cowles Prichard supposed these groups had once existed across Europe but had been either exterminated or disappeared over time, while Robert Gordon Latham discounted the idea as unproven.Footnote ²² The Scottish antiquary Daniel Wilson argued instead that the “aborigines” of Scotland and England had been important precursors to their modern national populations.Footnote ²³ Later, discussions were continued by Joseph Barnard Davis and John Thurnam, two Yorkshire physicians who attempted to integrate the work of the provincial archaeological associations with the networks around the (rather less respectable) Anthropological Society of London, urging that attention be paid to the skeletal remains found in barrows and grave mounds in order to judge the racial character of their inhabitants. Yet when, in their compendious Crania Britannica: Delineations and Descriptions of the Skulls of the Early Inhabitants of the British Islands, the two physicians considered the issue of “Iberian intrusion” into mainland Britain, they were rather skeptical (although more favorable for the possibility in “primitive” Ireland).Footnote ²⁴

For the pre-Celtic peoples to assume any wider importance in national history, the sense of the past itself had to be significantly reworked. This occurred dramatically with the development of the concept of human prehistory. While the ancient age of the earth had been firmly established in the early nineteenth century, it took a series of international endeavors in the midcentury to fully ascertain the presence of humans within the inconceivably vast geological eras. The first of these was the investigation of the interesting, although problematic, tools and artifacts in “antediluvian” geological layers by a French customs official, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, in the Somme Valley from the 1830s onward. While these items were incredibly controversial, the central notions were corroborated (if reinterpreted according to uniformitarian geological perspectives) by the excavations of a series of British sites by the “Cave Committee” of the Geological Society of London. These illustrated that primitive human stone tools indeed could be found alongside the remains of extinct creatures like hyenas, cave bears, and rhinoceroses in ancient geological strata dating to the glacial periods.Footnote ²⁵ In 1859–60, the combination of proofs were publicized in what Donald Grayson describes as “a coordinated onslaught,” as eminent scholars “presented their views to the five British scientific associations whose opinion counted the most: the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of London, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Royal Society of London, and the Society of Antiquaries.”Footnote ²⁶ Credibility was bolstered through the promotion of these finds in France by new proactive metropolitan institutions, particularly the recently founded Société d’anthropologie de Paris. This provided international scholarly credibility for ancient human origins, and the field was corroborated over the following decade by further discoveries and collaborations throughout Europe and the wide-ranging discussion of these ideas in the public arena.

As noted above, this story of this “discovery of human antiquity” has been told many times. However, studies of the conceptual implications of the new prehistoric research on wider social, cultural, and political debates have been rare—with the main exceptions being disciplinary histories of archaeology, which often discuss how the subject fed into discourses of empire or national unity.Footnote ²⁷ As shall be discussed, the findings and models of prehistory certainly had a strong bearing on racial, national, and imperial questions. Yet, it is essential to first emphasize a more conceptual point: prehistory’s separation of the past from written texts. This was crucial, as it linked understandings of human development to intellectual frameworks derived from the geological, cultural, and material sciences rather than those of textual history. Ancient artifacts were arranged into eras of technological improvement, and the model of successive ages of stone, bronze, and iron became slowly accepted. Prehistory then moved to place humanity within progressionist and evolutionary processes that were often universalized.Footnote ²⁸ Ancient European artifacts were compared to those of succeeding and preceding ages and also to those of other peoples believed to exist in similar social conditions. This intrinsically bound narratives of prehistory to understandings of civilization across the globe. Indeed, the most popular work in the genre, John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times was famously subtitled “as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages” and presented the “primitive” Europeans of prehistory as direct analogies to modern “primitive” societies being encountered and colonized beyond Europe.Footnote ²⁹ A “comparative method,” in which observations of contemporary peoples judged to be in a low state of development were seen to provide valid data for understanding prehistoric peoples judged to be at the same level, and vice versa, became a defining feature in both prehistoric archaeology and ethnology.Footnote ³⁰

This was in itself a major reworking of old traditions, as the comparative models of Lubbock and his contemporaries in many respects represented a resurgence of Enlightenment theories of conjectural history. The anthropologist E. B. Tylor went so far as to note that “on a very rough and general comparison,” the three ages of prehistory “may be taken as belonging, stone to savagery, bronze to barbarism or low civilisation, and iron to the middle level of civilisation and onwards”Footnote ³¹—thereby recapitulating the classic phases of Enlightenment stadial theories. The long, prehistoric Stone Age, itself divided by Lubbock into a savage Palaeolithic period of Ice Age hunter-gatherers and a more advanced Neolithic period of small settlements and sophisticated polished stone, therefore needed to be integrated into models of not only national but also general human progress. Prehistory and ethnology linked together to illustrate the growth of society from its savage beginnings to the modern assumed pinnacle of industrial Britain.

Importantly for the themes of this article, these assertions of civilizational hierarchy were also closely related to racial theories. In the 1860s, the anthropological and archaeological associations were not only driving the new field of prehistory but also new methods of racial typology and classification. Particularly significant was craniology, which was pursued with some ardor by this generation. Thurnam and Davis waxed lyrically on how “as the guardian of that ray divine, which is essentially ‘the image’ of his Creator, the receptacle of the grand yet delicate centre of his nervous system, the skull has for some time been recognized as the best epitome of Man. The human cranium stands immensely pre-eminent before all others.”Footnote ³² Put another way, the anthropologist John Beddoe (himself by no means averse to craniological investigations) stated, “Barnard Davis’s enthusiasms for his subject was wonderful, but sometimes it verged on the ghoulish. As Brindley thought rivers had been created to feed navigable canals, so Davis looked on heads simply as potential skulls.”Footnote ³³ These near obsessions grew from deeply held assumptions. Analyzing skulls permitted assessment of brain size and structure, as well as physiognomic qualities such as prognathism and facial proportions. It was therefore easily connected with long-standing (although by no means uncontested) notions that intellectual and moral characters were physically expressed in the body, particularly the head. In addition, craniology allowed prehistoric remains found in archaeological sites to be compared and aligned with modern peoples. In this way, similarities between modern “types” and potential ancient precursors could allow the drawing of lines of genealogical descent and affiliation between populations separated by long stretches of time.

Central to the classification of “the races of Europe” was a statistical measurement termed the “cephalic index,” a figure obtained by dividing the breadth of a skull by its height. This provided a numerical ratio of relative length, a characteristic thought to be directly inherited in unmodified forms down through the generations. The popularizer of this statistic, the Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius, had used it to provide a racial basis to philological categories, arguing that the Germanic types in northern Europe were originally long-skulled (or dolichocephalic) and had conquered an earlier broad-skulled (or brachycephalic) population. Yet, as in the study of Indo-European languages, the “non-Aryan” Basques posed a problem for this simplistic division. Paul Broca, the esteemed founder of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, conducted numerous studies of Basque crania and argued that they were not brachycephales, as the binary model implied: they were, in fact, highly dolichocephalic. However, this still allowed racial characterization. The long headedness of the Basques was not only extreme but was unlike the dolichocephalism of northern Europeans, which was due to the development of the frontal lobes. Instead, it derived from the expansion of the occipital region at the rear of the skull—a characteristic also ascribed to African forms and therefore implicitly a mark of a barbaric race.Footnote ³⁴

These ideas were also influential in Britain, although interpreted in the light of the strongly held model of ethnic sedimentation. Following his earlier doubts in Crania Britannica, John Thurnam parted ways from Barnard Davis to align his work with prehistory and European researches. In the late 1860s, he presented a series of studies on two forms of ancient British grave sites—the “long-barrows” and the “round-barrows”—to the Anthropological Society of London and the Royal Society of Antiquaries. The three-age model identified the long-barrows as the older structures, because “in no instance whatever has an object of metal been found in [their] chambers.”Footnote ³⁵ Meanwhile, the round-barrows contained bronze implements and more artistic pottery, dating them to the Bronze Age. This clear progressive shift was accompanied by racial changes. The skulls found in the long-barrows were (conveniently enough) “remarkably long and narrow,”Footnote ³⁶ and “almost at the top of the scale of dolichocephaly and brachycephaly, and alongside that of the skulls of Negroes, Hindoos and New Caledonians.”Footnote ³⁷ Meanwhile, those of the round-barrows were markedly brachycephalic and similar to those of contemporary Czechs and south Germans, although with a greater diversity of form than the long skulls.Footnote ³⁸ The evident conclusion was that the inhabitants of the long-barrows were the dolichocephalic race of late Stone Age Britain, while the round-barrows were the new brachycephalic—and most probably Celtic—migrants of the Bronze period (thereby also illustrating that broad-headedness could potentially be an Indo-European characteristic). Thurnam was careful, however, to dismiss any idea of the extermination of the long-headed population in the face of the new invaders. The existence of a range of intermediate skull forms in the round-barrows seemed to indicate that racial intermixture had taken place after the conquest: “It is far more likely that they reduced them to slavery, or drove them, in part, into the interior and western parts of the island.”Footnote ³⁹

The simplicity of this model, backed by one of Britain’s foremost craniologists, ensured that it exerted a strong influence, even if it was caricatured by one scholar in that “the distinction of long heads in long-barrows, and round heads in round-barrows, is one so easily remembered, that it is liable on this account, perhaps, to receive greater attention than it really deserves as a criterion of race.”Footnote ⁴⁰ However, the work was lent greater credibility through its connection to French studies. Thurnam visited Paris to examine Broca’s collection of Basque skulls and “was at once struck with their great resemblance to the dolichocephalic skulls from the longbarrows of this country.”Footnote ⁴¹ This simultaneously aligned the aboriginal British population with the Basques and established an ancient similarity between the ethnology of Britain and France.

As such, a series of disciplinary revaluations had occurred by the mid-nineteenth century to build a narrative of early prehistoric development whose content was familiar in some respects but nevertheless quite novel in its structuring and implications. Racial anthropology and archaeology could combine to rework older assumptions drawn from the classics, comparative philology, and ethnology. These were used to show that the migration of peoples and ensuing conflict between different racial types were crucial for the formation of nations and civilization, although in ways that were more complex than simply allowing the ascription of a single ethnic origin. These conceptions of the past even began to work against the idea that the national community or civilization could have any unitary root. That racial diversity and “mixed forms” were identified as early as the Bronze Age seemed to demonstrate that conquest and subordination could often take the form of intermixture and that the onset of new “ethnic” eras by no means represented the complete or immediate transfer of the population. And going further back, the eras of the national past were themselves deepened significantly through the unearthing of new peoples. A variety of strands could be woven together to create the image of strange populations inhabiting Britain before the arrival of the Celts, equipped with polished stone tools and settled into small agricultural communities, who were highly racially and linguistically distinct, decidedly barbaric, and potentially related to the Basques of southwest Europe. The task of uncovering what role these pre-Celts had played in the growth of civilization and what traces they had left for the modern national community depended upon similarly diverse interpretative criteria, which further linked major political and social controversies with these new scholarly approaches to the deep past.

The key figure in this discussion was William Boyd Dawkins, a prolific and well-connected public intellectual of the late Victorian period, who has nevertheless been rarely examined in the secondary literature.Footnote ⁴² A renowned economic geologist and then professor of geology at Owen’s College, Manchester, Dawkins’s professional work included the exploitation of a number of major coalfields; advising on mining and prospecting in South Africa, Italy, and Australia; and planning and lobbying for a tunnel under the English Channel. He was also an authority on mammalian paleontology and a tireless promoter of prehistoric and anthropological research. As an active participant in the Royal Society, Geological Society, and Anthropological Institute, he was an associate of many of the leading scholars of the day. Indeed, a (possibly apocryphal) story based on Dawkins’s friendship with the historian J. R. Green was that, during their undergraduate days at Oxford, “mutual interest in history led to a pact: Green would deal with the history of Britain in the written record, while Dawkins resolved to explore the prehistory as revealed by geology and archaeology”—a division of labor reflecting the complementary means of approaching the past in the period.Footnote ⁴³ Whatever the truth of this story, he followed these explorations with some gusto. In addition to his two major books, Cave Hunting: Researches on the Evidence of Caves Respecting the Early Inhabitants of Europe (1874) and Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period (1880), a “by no means complete” bibliography of his 180 publications between 1862 and his death in 1929 included five presidential addresses to provincial learned associations; the 1911 Huxley Memorial Lecture of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland; numerous papers in Nature and other scientific journals; articles in popular periodicals, such as the Fortnightly Review, the Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood’s Magazine; and a number of lectures to working-class educational bodies and mechanics institutes.Footnote ⁴⁴

Dawkins was thus at the center of a range of networks, presenting his ideas to both the scientific community and the broader public. In this, he provides an example of a prominent scholar who went out of his way to relate concepts of race and civilization within a systematic narrative of British prehistory and use it to elucidate a variety of political and social issues. More than any other writer, he articulated the implications of the Iberian concept, giving it a key role in his synthesis of prehistoric research. While idiosyncratic in many of its details, the interpretation as a whole was constructed within these personal and scholarly networks, using the works of Lubbock, Broca, Thurnam, Green, and others extensively, and with a number of other major authorities corroborating his ideas or basing their own researches on them. More importantly, he provides a clear case study of the ways in which concepts of a British nation constructed through progress, material improvement, empire, and integration could be strongly and quite coherently racialized through these scientific approaches to the past.

As should be expected from the nature of the field and his own background, Dawkins showed archaeology and racial anthropology proceeding from geological and palaeontological bases. Human society in Britain reached back into the lost worlds of the Ice Ages, when Palaeolithic humans survived “under conditions wholly unlike those which are now experienced in this country, under a different climate and a different geography, and surrounded by wild animals, for the most part unlike any now found in Europe.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Two human races were identified in these glacial eras: the river-drift man, explicitly at the same level as the natives of Australia, who “hunted the reindeer, and the other arctic animals, in southern England and in France,”Footnote ⁴⁶ and the “cave-men,” who were slightly more advanced in technology and social organization but still “led a wandering feral life under feral conditions, and had not learned the arts of moulding plants and animals to their various needs, and thus freeing themselves to some extent from bondage to their natural conditions.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Following an extreme version of the comparative method, Dawkins argued that these cavemen did not merely have a similar lifestyle to the modern inhabitants of the Arctic but were, in fact, racially identical. He identified close similarities in their artwork, tools, implements, and skull forms, and he argued that these could “be explained only on the hypothesis that they belong to the same race … there are no savage tribes known which use the same set of implements without being connected by blood.”Footnote ⁴⁸ While analogies between Ice Age Europeans and Eskimos or Lapps were very common in this period (being suggested by both Lubbock in Britain and Gabriel de Mortillet in France), the clear racial parallel was rather extreme. Yet, it was important for the overall interpretation. These peoples had been a key feature in what was to become the national territory—at a time when it was frozen, inhabited by Pleistocene megafauna, and still tied to the Continent by a land bridge. This illustrated a period when Britain was inhabited by Arctic “savages” living under the harsh dictates of environmental pressure and when racial types, technologies, and lifestyles were entirely determined by the natural world.

The Palaeolithic cavemen also demonstrated that dramatic and brutal change was necessary to break the condition of natural man. Not only had climatic shifts pushed them back to those parts of the world where conditions still mirrored those of Ice Age Europe but another trend, migration, and conquest by higher peoples had forced them out in the name of progress. The shift to the next era was characterized as a radical disjunction in all aspects of race and culture: the chipped-stone points, carved bone, representative art, and round skulls of the Palaeolithic were suddenly and rapidly replaced in the Neolithic by polished ax heads, pottery, abstract geometric designs, and long skulls. This indicated invasion by a new group who had forcibly driven out or exterminated the less developed former inhabitants. A deep antipathy was presented through comparative analogies: “the hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two in every country where the remains have been discovered would be impossible had the Palaeolithic race or races been absorbed by Neolithic invaders. How then, can we account for their disappearance? Simply by assuming that at the close of the Pleistocene age, when they came into contact with Neolithic invaders, there were the same feelings between them as existed in Hearne’s times between the Eskimos and the Red Indian, terror and defenceless hatred being, on the one side, met by ruthless extermination on the other.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In this way, Dawkins was an important contributor to the “extinction discourse,” discussed by Patrick Brantlinger as prevalent in contemporary imperial (and particularly settler colonial) contexts, stretching it far back into national prehistory.Footnote ⁵⁰ The implications were clear: when savage humans encountered any higher people, they were doomed, whether due to exterminatory racial warfare or simply “falling back” in the face of modern technology and settlement. The transition from savagery could only take the form of the annihilation of the lower by the higher.

Neolithic society, given these genocidal practices, was depicted expectedly as violent and harsh: “That they were not peaceful and inoffensive people is shown by the number of maces found made of stone, and which were undoubtedly intended for knocking one another’s brains out!”Footnote ⁵¹ However, they also occupied a more advanced stage of development. Comparative analogies slotted them onto a similar civilizational level to modern colonial peoples: “The population was large, but it was split up into small tribal communities normally at war with each other, like the Afghans, the Kaffirs, or the villagers encountered by Mr. Stanley in his voyage down the Congo, each ready either to defend itself or to take the opportunity of attacking any of its neighbours.”Footnote ⁵² Importantly, unlike the Palaeolithic-Eskimo comparison, these analogies between Neolithic Britons and central Asian and African tribes were entirely civilizational. Any assertions of racial similarity were absent. The Neolithic was certainly inferior compared to modern civilization but was above the abject savagery of the Ice Age. In this, the strong echoes of stadial theory and conjectural history can be seen. The growth of agriculture and settlement had allowed a larger and more diverse population, which was beginning to be defined by society rather than solely by nature.

Following the anthropological conventions of Thurnam and Broca, the long skulls of the Neolithics were analyzed to place them within “the same non-Aryan section of mankind as the Basques,”Footnote ⁵³ and their unity of form showed them to be an unmixed and relatively pure race. More strikingly, further studies showed their descendants to have survived into the modern age and that “non-Aryan blood is still to be traced in the dark-haired, black-eyed, small, oval-featured peoples in our own country,” such as the “small swarthy Welshman of Denbighshire (who) is in every respect, except dress and language, identical with the Basque inhabitant of the Western Pyrenees,” and “the small dark-haired people of Ireland, and especially those to the west of the Shannon.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This was corroborated by Dawkins’s associates within the anthropological societies. John Beddoe, a Bristol doctor who conducted major surveys of the complexion of the population of the British Isles, gave these ideas his stamp of approval, noting “a physiognomy strikingly Iberian (or Basque-like, at least) is commoner in South Wales than in any other part of Great Britain.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Meanwhile, the Scottish ethnologist Hector MacLean also found the predominant type in the Highlands to be “dark-skinned, dark-haired, and grey-eyed, dark-eyed, and small in stature” and with “a strong resemblance to the Welsh, the south-western English, the western and south-western Irish.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Not only this, but the parallels were carried into analyses of social conditions. Dawkins noted that his idea of the general character of Neolithic society “is represented in the familiar rhyme:-

If we substitute ‘camp’ for ‘house’ I think that rhyme will represent the social condition of the country at that time as well as any description of mine.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This analogy between not only the physical but also the social condition of the barbaric Neolithics and the modern Welsh raised a significant point. The cultural, racial, and civilizational legacies of the prehistoric past were still preserved, or at least had been until very recently, in isolated peripheral regions of the United Kingdom. This had a strong political and social edge, transforming the primitive and unruly “Celtic fringe” into an “Iberian” one, thus classing its people and social practices as barbaric holdovers from these archaic eras and in dire need of progress and development.

If we were to leave the analysis here, Dawkins would appear to be a quite marked exponent of the harshest forms of Victorian racialism, providing a scholarly gloss linking race and culture, justifying the extermination of “savage” peoples by their betters, and classing the modern “Celtic” peoples as little better than colonial barbarians.Footnote ⁵⁸ And, indeed, these elements are there. However, the persistence of civilizational ideas within the racial mode of analysis meant that important legacies were ascribed to these periods. As stated above, in spite of its contextualized barbarism, the Neolithic was actually presented as a time of immense significance. It was the first period of major settlement, and the archaeological record showed the appearance of agriculture, spinning, weaving, pottery, social differentiations, the domestication of dogs, sheep, goats, and the horse (even if the latter tended to be used for eating), organized religious practices, and basic commerce—in short, all the fundamental elements of civilized life. This ensured that “the introduction of this civilisation is the starting-point of the history of the present inhabitants of Europe. To the Neolithic peoples we owe the rudiments of the culture which we ourselves enjoy.”Footnote ⁵⁹ These “rudiments,” of course, needed to be refined, developed, and improved, often by new racial groups—and the ways in which this was presented will be discussed shortly. However, unlike the relics of the preceding ages of savagery, the Neolithic barbarians could not be wholly swept away. They constituted the fundamental bedrock upon which later layers had settled and were a stable base for future civilization.

A further notable point was that when Dawkins came to analyze the “racial” features of the Neolithics and their modern descendants, they were taken as distinctive but not necessarily inferior. Unlike Broca and Thurman, he made no judgments of “primitive” qualities in their cranial forms, and references to their dolichocephalism being “Africanoid” were notably absent (indeed, Dawkins preferred a central Asian origin—thus making them precursory to the Indo-Europeans). Physically they were “all small men, averaging about 5ft. 4in. in height. They were well-built men, with heads quite capable of holding the brains of a philosopher. They had long heads, and prominent foreheads and noses, delicate oval faces, with the cheek-bones very retreating, the lower part of the face being slight rather than massive, and altogether their features were of a comparatively high order.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Meanwhile, (rather more patronizingly) “some of the dark flashing eyes and raven tresses which are so admirable in the ladies at the present time have been handed down from this Iberian stock—the oldest element in the population of our country.”Footnote ⁶¹ Their persistent brutality and interclan warfare were more due to their civilizational stage than any innate moral character: “It seems to me that the dread of monotony and wearisomeness, and the love of excitement, naturally lead to fighting; and I feel certain that we should be as warlike and marauding as these people were if our lives were equally dreary.”Footnote ⁶² Unlike the river-drift men and the cavemen, they were an improvable people and had partly freed themselves from the dictates of nature and its fatal struggles for survival. Not only had they been incorporated within a developing civilized community but they had laid its material foundations and made valuable racial contributions to its future. While their persistence in pure, unmixed, and unincorporated forms could be seen as a marker of backwardness for particular regions, this was because purity indicated isolation from later progress, rather than that they were in themselves an “unpromising” race.

This ensured that much of later history took the form of ethnic amalgamation, which was followed through in Dawkins’s narrative. Expectedly, he argued that conquest, racial war, and domination by technologically superior groups were important drivers of progress. However, a number of distinct models were presented for this, which corresponded to different stages of advancement and paralleled contemporary imperial and national projects. Ancient national development could represent that of the whole world, and the long chronologies and sharp breaks of prehistory offered a diverse and graded range of examples. The first form of racial conquest, the eradication of hunter-gatherers, has already been noted. However, later invasions followed different dynamics, often marked more by fusion and incorporation than expulsion and annihilation. This is particularly noticeable in Dawkins’s account of the onset of the Bronze Age. The Iberian Neolithics were much too densely settled to be exterminated by “the tall, round- or broad-headed Celts … composing the van of the great Aryan army,”Footnote ⁶³ and so, as in Thurnam’s analysis, they were seen as having intermixed with them. Subordination to a higher caste of peoples, with superior weaponry and social practices, was part of the movement of civilization, and a period of enslavement was followed by racial blending. Skulls found in the Bronze Age barrows showed a mixture of “Iberian” and “Celtic” characteristics, and technological and material advancement continued along the trajectory set in the earlier phase: “The pottery became better, and cups even of amber and gold were used. In harvesting, the ears of corn were cut short off with bronze reaping hooks. In the forests the clearings grew larger than ever they were before, and the ring of the metal axe proclaimed that the land was passing into the hands of the farmer.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This was a salutary period, showing how civilizational progress and racial mixture could go hand in hand.

In addition to depicting racial fusion deep in the past, in the background appears to have been a parallel with contemporary India, where ethnologists and philologists had identified similar Aryan conquerors and non-Aryan indigenes among the native population. Arguments that the Hindu caste system derived from an ancient racial conquest were very common and were echoed in Dawkins’s characterization of Aryan elites and non-Aryan subalterns in ancient Britain. However, this linkage had ambiguous connotations. On the one hand, it accentuated the problem of why India’s Aryans and pre-Aryans had not merged together in the same way as they had in prehistoric Britain. This lack of integration between social groups in India was a heated problem for many scholars. Some put it down to the civilizational and spiritual retardation of Hindu society, while others, such as Herbert Hope Risley, ascribed it to racial factors, with the non-Aryans of India being a decidedly immiscible and unimprovable people.Footnote ⁶⁵ While the example of racial fusion of Aryans and non-Aryans in Bronze Age Europe did indicate that this was possible in some contexts, it still left room for countersuppositions that the Aryans in India had either been swamped, that their civilizational development had been misdirected or retarded, or that Dravidians were a less promising type of non-Aryan than Iberians. Likewise, even if these problems were overcome, the implications were still that this process was a long-term affair taking centuries and that conditions in India reflected a stage more in keeping with Europe’s barbaric prehistory than its modern state.

In this way, Dawkins’s analysis was beset by the ambiguity and uncertainty over the Indian empire that often gripped mid-Victorian thinkers. This was even more directly stressed in his interpretation of the next phase of British history: “The Roman invasion of this country was distinctly analogous to our occupation of India. … They merely occupied it as military colonists; they formed garrisons here and there; they developed trade; they took as much money out of the country as they could by a most oppressive system of taxation; but in exchange for all that they introduced their own laws and system of politics, doing much the same work that we are doing in India. They did not introduce into this country any new ethnical elements which are traceable in the present population.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Far from trumpeting this aspect of imperial mission, the analogy raised the shadow of artificiality and decline. Just as the legacies of Roman rule in Britain had been swept away, the same was likely to be true of British rule in India. This is possibly unsurprising. As both Javeed Majeed and Richard Hingley have noted, parallels between Roman and British imperialism in this period were frequent and could sometimes be complimentary but were also often connected with notions of transience and decline and fall.Footnote ⁶⁷ This was similarly found in Dawkins, for whom progress required racial transfer, mixing, and large-scale migration. However, he made absolutely no suggestion that European interbreeding with the Indian population was a desirable strategy. It seems as if the best course that could be hoped for under the present circumstances was wise and integrative government in accordance with the racial and social structures already present in the country. This could accelerate the development of the existing elements but not engage in real, long-term improvement, which required ethnologically consolidational progress.

The layered and transitional models could also be used to accommodate the Anglo-Saxon identity that has so often been presented as central to contemporary national, historical, and political discourse. A need to incorporate the idea that the country’s governing institutions and much of its population derived from Germanic roots should perhaps be expected, given Dawkins’s aforementioned close friendship with J. R. Green, whose Short History of the English People was a best-selling narrative of populist Teutonism.Footnote ⁶⁸ Far from destabilizing narratives of the migratory Germanic “English,” whose history began in Schleswig rather than the British Isles, Dawkins was keen to assert that both he and his audiences were “Englishmen”: “In the year A.D. 449 certain Englishmen—for they were Englishmen before our England had received its name—came over here from the North of Germany and from the southern shores of the Baltic Sea. They came with their families, and little ones—they brought their England with them; and after a long war of conquest—a series of fightings and battles—they gradually pushed away farther and farther to the west that population which had been in possession of this country before it was England—during the time in which it was known under the name of ‘Britain.’”Footnote ⁶⁹ This migrational project was situated on a clear continuum with modern settler colonialism further afield, which was likewise taking “England” across the seas. Yet, it was only part of the wider schema of development based on ethnic mixture and civilizational advancement. The Bronze Age precedent showed that racial conquests at higher stages of civilization were assimilative rather than exterminatory and that “Englishness” did not reflect the “rooting out” of the earlier population, as was frequently either overtly stated or implicit in much of the history writing:

In this respect, prehistory could illustrate that, while language, institutions, and culture had shifted, the English nation was built on older layers of development. Following the model of ethnic succession, the “English” had now become the leading unifying and progressive force—just as the Iberians, Celts, and Romans had previously been. However, they were leading it further along the same path of incorporation and development, which could not be disrupted.

These continuing evolutionary patterns were seen as relevant to current domestic concerns, particularly the dramatic divisions over Irish Home Rule. Very much a liberal unionist in his views, Dawkins expressly spelled out the political relevance of his ethnocivilizational visions in his public lectures of the 1870s and 1880s. In these, he flatly rejected calls for particular government for any part of the United Kingdom as nonsensical and against the laws of progressive integration. The peoples of the varied nations of the British Isles were not distinct from one another but were “composed of the same ethnological elements … the main difference between them merely consists in the varying proportion in which these elements are mingled in different places.”Footnote ⁷¹ They were all of mixed and diverse origins but had been united over history through the common growth of civilization. Moreover, highlighting the claimed “Celtic” identity of Irish Home Rulers and Welsh separatists, he argued, “if any people on purely racial grounds deserve special consideration, surely it is these original possessors of the soil who have been displaced by Celt, Englishman, Dane, Norman, and Fleming. If the Celt cry “hands off” to the English, with still greater reason should the small dark inhabitants of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland cry “hands off” to the Celt. This is the logical reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that different races require different political treatment simply because they are different races.”Footnote ⁷² In this way, the Iberians were marshaled to undermine “Celtic” nationalism and assert the much deeper basis of the common country, which depended on the coalescence of varied racial forms. To demand separate institutions based on ethnic differences would be a fundamentally backward step, fracturing the nation’s racial conglomerate and rejecting the common civilizational force that was fusing it together as it advanced materially, socially, and nationally.

The importance of ideas of development and integration within Unionist arguments in the 1880s has been well argued in the historiography. Sheridan Gilley has noted that “the imperialist … considered Irish nationalism something local and petty, with no wider perspective beyond itself, and that prejudice precedes the golden heyday of English imperialism,”Footnote ⁷³ and Michael De Nie has stated that the widespread assertions of Irish barbarism still maintained the idea that there was “a kernel or seed of Britishness that could be nurtured with the proper guidance and suitable political and economic conditions.”Footnote ⁷⁴ What is significant in Dawkins’s presentation is the way in which this argument grew naturally from a series of scientific and historical expositions. British prehistory showed civilizational, racial, and historical relationships forging a single national community from a range of ethnological elements. Race was a key factor in human existence and important for improvement, but in the modern age it was subordinated to progress. Attempts to interfere in these processes were not only irrational and artificial but fundamentally against deep-rooted trends, which moved toward integration and mutual elevation rather than division and separation.

Across these works, Dawkins unified concepts of civilizational advancement and racial difference in a way that resounded with contemporary ideas of nation and empire. His models linked with those of other leading ethnological and historical writers, such as Lubbock, Beddoe, Green, and Risley, and strongly impinged upon contemporary debates on the extinction of human groups, the ethnic composition and means of developing colonial territories, and the struggles over Irish Home Rule. The extent of these ideas within the learned context of the period can be illustrated by the ways in which they were discussed and elaborated by others in the following decades. While many scholars did not accept all the details of Dawkins’s presentation, a key point is that any critiques of his work tended to be over terminological details rather than the core model itself. In the 1870s, Wentworth Webster, an Anglican clergymen who had traveled extensively in the Basque country collecting folktales, questioned a notion that had “cropped up in treating of English history, not, indeed, unknown before, but hardly seriously maintained—viz. ‘Our Iberian forefathers,’ meaning by Iberian a race of which the Basques are the presumed modern representatives.”Footnote ⁷⁵ While he stated that “we do not dispute the existence of a pre-Keltic, perhaps a non-Aryan, race in Gaul and the British Isles,” linked with the “black Kelts” of the west of Ireland and south Wales, “we contend that no sufficient evidence has yet been brought forward to prove that this race was the Basque”Footnote ⁷⁶—particularly noting that his own observations of Basque height and physical features did not match those of Dawkins.

Another leading craniologist, George Rolleston, noted in his anatomical appendix to William Greenwell’s British Barrows of 1877 that “I should speak of the crania of the long barrow period, not as belonging to the ‘Iberian,’ as it is becoming the fashion to style them, but as belonging to the ‘Silurian’ type,”Footnote ⁷⁷—adopting a more neutral term from Tacitus that implied no modern relationships. Nevertheless, the general sequence in Greenwell’s work, of a long-head, long-barrow Stone period, a round-head, round-barrow Bronze period, a Roman epoch (which “as indeed might be expected, does not appear to have sensibly affected the character of the population”Footnote ⁷⁸), and “later Anglian immigrants, of whom the present population of the wolds is no doubt to a large extent composed,”Footnote ⁷⁹ presented an identical ethnically and civilizationally sedimentary model. This should indicate that disputes within Dawkins’s scholarly peer group tended to be over whether it was possible in the current state of science to clearly define the racial affiliations of the earliest ethnic strata. However, the depths of prehistory, the strength of the civilizational perspective, and the importance attached to racial layering formed a model that could accommodate a variety of precise interpretations. As such, even if there was some dispute over which modern racial groups the pre-Celtic Neolithic substratum was most closely related to, they were still seen as having been an important part of past national formation.

The significance of the Neolithic period and its pre-Aryan inhabitants was presented across a range of public contexts in the following decades. These tended to retain the core idea of racially consolidational progress, while shifting the implications in ways that reflected changing understandings of the national past, civilizational development, and racial difference. Accounts of short, dark pre-Celts became fairly common in historical works and journal articles on Britain’s early history, which increasingly incorporated archaeological and ethnological elements into their introductions. The first pages of a number of popular histories contained almost straight and rather formulaic restatements of the prehistoric successions found in Dawkins and Rolleston, moving through Ice Age hunter-gatherers and barbaric Neolithic pre-Aryans before the arrival of the Celtic Britons.Footnote ⁸⁰ Additional strands were woven in from the work of Continental scholars such as Alexandre Bertrand, who argued the Neolithic peoples were the builders of western Europe’s evocative megalithic stone monuments, including Stonehenge and Avebury. Often these assertions were connected with sad accounts of the extirpation of the heritage of the prehistoric past (whether racial, civilizational, or architectural) by misguided modern development. One article in the Manchester Times referred to “some ancient tumulus covering the body of an old Euskarian chief, and spared for ages by Celt, Roman, and West Saxon, but long since swept away by the ruthless hand of a modern British squire.”Footnote ⁸¹

However, these descriptions always remained shadowy and mysterious—and, indeed, Neolithic legacies seem to have maintained any sense of appeal through this very mystery. This is best indicated in the interpretation that appears to have had the greatest resonance: that the peoples of the Neolithic provided the basis for legends of diminutive elves and goblins. The first clear assertion of this seems to have been Grant Allen’s article “Who were the Fairies?” in Cornhill Magazine in 1881. He stated that he owed “many of the facts to Professor Boyd Dawkins’s interesting work on Early Men in Britain, though of course he must not be held responsible for any of the deductions which I draw from them.”Footnote ⁸² These “deductions” were obtained through linking prehistoric findings with popular superstitions, which called stone artifacts “elf-stones” and told fairy legends about megalithic sites and barrows. This suggested that “the last traditional memories” of the small, dark pre-Aryans had been preserved by the later Aryan invaders in their folktales. The Aryans had then exaggerated the earlier people’s “diminutive size” and spiteful (if generally impotent) attacks on their conquerors by reducing them to small and capricious stone-wielding creatures playing mischievous tricks upon the unwary.Footnote ⁸³

While this idea generated some discussion in the periodical press, it was most famously developed by the folklorist George Lawrence Gomme, who gave it a darker and more threatening tone. Not only did ancient memories of conflict between Aryans and pre-Aryans persist in folktales and traditions but the psychological traces of the “cannibal rites,” human sacrifice, and head-hunting of the Neolithic tribes remained in rural folk customs in the form of ritual meals for the dead and the worshipping of wells—even being adopted by the modern bearers of Celtic and Teutonic physical forms. Taken out of Dawkins’s optimistic liberal framework, this could offer a gloomier vision that made greater allowances for the persistence of barbarism and meant that “it is impossible to read the glowing pages of Kemble and Green and Freeman without feeling that they have told us only of the advanced guard of the nation, not of the nation as it actually was.”Footnote ⁸⁴ It thus stressed the unevenness and gaps within ethnocivilizational progress and how dark and savage, as well as elevating, residues could be transferred across racial boundaries.

Similar to Gomme’s evocation of the survivals of the Neolithic as barbaric stains on the national body was a periodic connection with class. There were a number of discussions of the prevalence of small, dark types among the urban poor, which offered a rather literal manifestation of the trend within the “Darkest England” fears of the nineteenth century to regard the inhabitants of inner city slums as a “race apart” comparable with colonial “savages.”Footnote ⁸⁵ John Beddoe had noted that large cities showed a similar tendency toward dark complexions as the peripheral regions of the United Kingdom and tentatively put this down to the selective pressure of the urban environment: “In my experience as a physician, it has appeared that, on the whole, dark-complexioned children showed more tenacity of life than fair ones, under some of the unfavourable conditions connected with town-life; and it is conceivable that natural selection … might in the course of a few generations considerably alter the proportions of the prevailing types.”Footnote ⁸⁶ While Beddoe did not link these observations with overt value judgments, some theorists played up the suggestion that darker pre-Aryan types were better suited to the unwholesomeness of modern city life, where they could breed, multiply, and indulge in primitive psychological predilections for violent criminality and radical collectivist politics. This was presented as early as 1872 by J. W. Campbell at the Anthropological Institute, who noted that “little, active, long-bodied, dark-eyed, dusky-skinned, dull-haired, fiery, suspicious, politic, exciteable, drunken, unreasonable, unsteady, pugnacious, thoughtless men, abounded amongst the fighting Communists in Paris,” and also were “in great excess amongst the audience in Hyde Park” during recent Republican gatherings.Footnote ⁸⁷ He classed these as the remnants of pre-Celtic “Atlanteans,” drawing parallels between “uncivilization” in the modern British periphery and the major urban centers of western Europe and highlighting the barbaric nature of socialist ideologies, which were only likely to appeal to such low types. As in Gomme, once decoupled from Dawkins’s broadly optimistic history of progressive integration, these notions could easily be inscribed with a much more threatening significance.

However, it is important not to overstate the extent of these pessimistic ideas. Characterizations of racial psychology, in particular, were always quite tangential and difficult to assert according to the positivistic standards of anthropometry and archaeology, and many scholars argued vociferously over them. A. L. Lewis countered Campbell by stating that, in fact, “the dark-eyed peoples of Europe are the least addicted to drunkenness” and “that statistics conclusively prove them to be the most chaste,”Footnote ⁸⁸ and Hector MacLean noted how they were “possessed of very great self-respect, strong love of home, keen and powerful domestic feelings, extreme attachment to kindred … they excel in the mechanical arts, are ingenious and constructive,”Footnote ⁸⁹ and were therefore quite a good element within the national mix. As was frequently the case in contemporary racial discourse, characterizations were often fluid and varied significantly between different interpreters, to the extent that any “dominant” views become difficult to identify, if not impossible.

Indeed, in some instances the Neolithics gained some appeal through their deep connections with the past and picturesque appearance. A biography of John Lubbock noted how, when attempting to discern the etymology of his surname, “authorities of the British Museum looked into the matter and came to the conclusion that no Teutonic or Celtic derivation of the name could be suggested, as it seems to be one of the few remnants of some aboriginal or at any rate pre-Celtic language”Footnote ⁹⁰—suggesting a strong personal connection to the prehistoric past that he devoted his leisure time to unearthing. More open was the view presented by the American ethnologist William Zebina Ripley, who, while denouncing the “tenuous historical thread” that had provided the basis for the Iberian idea that “has passed current for generations as if founded upon the broadest array of facts,” argued that the dark Neolithics represented a particular concentration of a much more generally distributed Mediterranean race, which was presently dominant across much of western and southern Europe.Footnote ⁹¹ This was something that again placed them within a much broader framework and could even be used to ascribe them with positive features. The Italian anthropologist Guiseppe Sergi wrote a paean to the elevated qualities of “the Mediterranean Race,” which (in an effort to counter broader trends of “Indo-Germanism”) defined these dark-haired, dark-eyed, long-headed peoples as responsible for the origin of culture and civilization in Europe.Footnote ⁹² Prehistoric Britain was therefore potentially placeable within these cross-European trends.

This later multiplicity and diffusion of discourse on “pre-Aryan” heritages certainly merit further study but are important to highlight for underlining the wider points of this article, which go beyond a set of curious scholarly expositions. Across all these debates, whatever disagreements may have existed over terms and implications, there was a general view of nationhood in which the forces of civilizational development were seen to have bound together a range of racial and ethnic components. The British nation had formed through an observable process, which saw racial groupings layer upon one another, relating and shifting over a series of eras through progress and material improvement. The civilizing mission of the modern English was one phase of this and rested on a deeper continuum of development stretching back to the close of the Ice Age. Controversies tended to refer to the patterns of intermixture and the qualities of individual components, rather than the fundamental model itself. Moreover, the varied methodological bases and comparative dimensions of the field of prehistory enabled it to simultaneously look outward and inward. Understanding the formation of Britain’s racial structure required prolonged reflection on how civilization had developed in the national context but also how this indigenous development related to broader international, colonial, and global experiences—thereby potentially making it relevant across domestic and imperial policy. The growth of civilization in Britain showed the world in microcosm, linking into a conception that regarded the growth of the nation, empire, and civilization as part of the same entangled processes.

In this, the scholarly construction of the “Iberians” of the Neolithic occupied an important conceptual position. A population thought of as racially distinct and overlain in all but the most isolated, peripheral, and primitive regions of the country, could nevertheless still be regarded as having left important legacies owing to its civilizational position. The role accorded to them by prominent figures like Dawkins, Beddoe, Thurnam, Gomme, and Rolleston shows how invocations of racial difference in Victorian Britain, in both domestic and colonial contexts, frequently stressed long processes of accretion, development, and blending. This should highlight the need for further broadening understandings of “race” in nineteenth-century discourse and to consider some of its lost meanings. In these discussions, racial and national identities often referred to long-term composites rather than essential or exclusive forms—and indeed, “pure forms” were often stated to only be found at very low stages of development. Later peoples were the amalgamated products of long development, and separating them into their constituent parts was seen as fundamentally against the laws of progress. This ensured that the resulting constructed communities could certainly be conceived of as “ethnological realities,” while also having considerable internal diversity, with different sections having different characters, qualities, and historical significance. This therefore illustrates a clear synthesis between both “racial” and “civilizational” views of nationality and an indication of how the varied ethnic pasts of Victorian Britain could be assimilated. The models of the deep time sciences allowed these to be quite easily reconciled and built into the vision of a nation that had formed over the ages like a stratified, variegated, yet nevertheless coherent and unified geological landscape.