The Historiography of Prehistoric Archaeology in Britain: A Brief Outline

Surveying the Historiography of Archaeology

These days, almost everyone has remarked on the sheer amount of history of archaeology being written. Nonetheless, there remains a great deal of work before us to achieve a clear understanding of the institutional structures of the discipline, of the wider intellectual contexts of archaeology, or of other sociological aspects of archaeological knowledge production. Until recent years, analysis of the taken-for-granted aspects of the history of archaeological practice and archaeology’s relationships with its cognate disciplines has been few and of variable quality.¹

After the late 1980s, things began to change with the publication of two books. First, Bruce Trigger’s A History of Archaeological Thought (1987, 2nd edition 2006), which, notwithstanding its shortcomings, represented a quantum leap from what was then available in English.² Second, Alain Schnapp’s Discovery of the Past (English translation 1997), which did so much to remind prehistoric archaeologists of the riches of ‘The Great Tradition’ as well as the many virtues of antiquarianism as a system of study.³ Around the same time, archaeologists more versed in the history and philosophy of science, such as Wiktor Stoczkowski, became active, and serious discussion about the historiography of archaeology began to occur in mainstream contexts such as the Society for American Archaeology.⁴ Andrew Christenson’s Tracing Archaeology’s Past was the first collection of essays in English from researchers strongly committed to writing the history of archaeology in North America.⁵

Subsequent discussion, for example Bruce Trigger’s entry on historiography in the Encyclopedia of the History of Archaeology, was also the subject of intense debate.⁶ Trigger, Corbey and Roebroeks sought to classify academic production either through a straightforward division between popular, intellectual and social histories (Trigger) or through an application of Ernst Mayr’s taxonomy – lexicographic, chronological, biographical, cultural and sociological, and problematic histories (Corbey and Roebroeks).

However, the editors of Studying Human Origins were seeking something more than classification. Their goal was to seriously explore the why, what, how and indeed whether of such histories. Difficult questions, such as why historians seemed to be ignoring the history of archaeology, were asked, and the manifest shortcomings of archaeologists as historians of their own discipline were given thorough discussion. This has since become a common theme, sometimes taking on the characteristics of a turf war, which is hardly unusual in the history of science.

Nonetheless, the last decades have seen a very welcome expansion in the scope and scale of archaeological historiography.⁷ Significantly, this expansion has not been confined to Europe or to the United States of America, and has been spreading around the globe, with many discussions being published in mainstream journals such as the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology.

A History of Prehistoric Archaeology in Britain

I have begun to explore these general themes in a longitudinal study of prehistoric archaeology in Britain. The scope of this research is sufficiently broad (some 800 years) to allow me to demonstrate the genesis and development of the perspectives of prehistoric archaeology in that country. However, my focus on the period between 1800 and 1980 also helps me to examine that history, considering the histories of anthropology and history over the same period. I covered some of the same ground in my previous project on authority structures in archaeology.⁸ My current research focuses on a more detailed analysis of the impact of the Three Age System in Britain, the role of county archaeological societies, an expanded consideration of the impact of major figures other than Sir John Lubbock and E.B Tylor (such as John Evans and Hugh Falconer), the careers of several colorful ‘excavating clergy’, and a specific analysis of 20^th century British archaeology.⁹

Producing a comprehensive narrative history of English prehistoric archaeology is something of a challenge. requiring us to take account of the fact that British prehistoric archaeology is a large and complex entity made up of a web of producers and consumers of archaeological knowledge who intersect with the fabric of the discipline through a wide range of institutional, social, political and cultural contexts.

The difficulty of the task is increased by two related factors. First, the practice of British prehistoric archaeology has had global implications since 1865, when Lubbock published Prehistoric Times. Much of the methodological and theoretical landscape of global prehistoric archaeology has been strongly influenced by people based in Britain or working on British materials. By the same token, the interpretation of British prehistory has relied on inferences drawn from all over the world. Second, each temporal division (Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age) has its traditions and its rhythms, and it is a challenge for archaeologists to acquire an understanding and appreciation of these matters in all prehistoric periods.

As is the case in most Western countries, British archaeology is also a complex social institution that does not necessarily display a high degree of institutional coherence. Some of the most important elements of British prehistoric archaeology include:

• Heritage legislation passed by the British Parliament (and the agencies such as English Heritage which have been created to administer it).

• Policies and practices of local government and the heritage management industry.

• University departments that train professional archaeologists and whose members undertake research designed to expand the frontiers of knowledge and understanding.

• Archaeologists (either ‘free-lance’ or employed by government or non-government agencies) who are directly involved in the management of archaeological heritage.

• Archaeological societies (both local and national) whose members (be they amateur or professional) are actively engaged in exploring the archaeology of Britain and communicating its importance to others.

• Television stations, publishers, tourism operators and others who ‘market’ British archaeology for commercial gain.

• Members of the public who visit sites, have their rights to use land encumbered, protest at the destruction of archaeological heritage, or who simply live in a rich archaeological landscape.

Given the scale of the task coverage in the present context, attempts such as this one will generally tend towards the synoptic and selective. What I can do is to provide a brief and very general narrative of its evolution and to isolate several historically significant themes. One of the consequences of the history of archaeology not being a mainstream area of archaeological research for such a long time has been the perpetuation of questionable perspectives. Significantly, recent publications have begun to light a way towards a more comprehensive and deeply considered historiography of British prehistoric archaeology.¹⁰ This will be exemplified in several case studies, the most significant being the experience of theoretical archaeology from 1968–2000. In this short paper, I will show (through some brief narrative summaries) how many of the issues, personalities, sites, debates and controversies that form the core of current research might be considered.

A Narrative to the 1850s

British prehistoric archaeology has a history reaching back into the 16^th and 17^th centuries, to the time of the antiquaries such as William Camden and John Speed, and well before the creation of prehistoric archaeology as a distinct discipline. The origins of that discipline have long been understood to lie the questions and methods of antiquaries and natural historians. These questions related to the history of Britain prior to the Roman times – who were the occupants, who created the ruins in the British landscape at places such as Stonehenge and Avebury?

Such questions have inspired British prehistoric archaeology ever since, and the theme of establishing a connection between past and present, of making the physical remains of the past play a role in the history of the country (thus becoming intelligible and worth preserving), is the central feature of British prehistoric archaeology.¹¹ Other themes flow directly from this sense of making history:

• The relationship between the British Isles and the rest of Europe.

• The relationship between the early history of the country and the contemporary indigenous communities found at the margins of Empire.

• The close relationship between prehistoric archaeology and what was to become anthropology in the late 19^th century.

• the central role to be played by prehistoric archaeology in imagining the nation – either as a succession of conquests or as an accretion of cultural and ethnic diversities.

These themes have provided the cognitive underpinning of technical and methodological developments from the early landscape studies of the antiquarians to the science-based analyses of archaeological data that are so much a feature of British prehistoric archaeology since the 1950s. They have done the same with the development of theory in British prehistoric archaeology, but while it is important to stress the reality of continuity, it is also very much the case that the interpretation of those themes has changed dramatically over the last 500 years. Changing patterns of interpretation and explanation have influenced the ways in which archaeologists have sought to pursue research and to make sense of their findings.

Parry, Piggott and others (especially Trigger), have clearly established that the long history of English antiquarianism prior to the 1830s was based on the gradual acceptance that what we would now call archaeological data (sites, monuments, landscapes, material culture) had the capacity to assist in the writing of prehistory.¹² Much antiquarian scholarship was based on close analysis of the classical authors who were considered to have much the same status as eyewitness testimony. However, there was also an increasing element of material analysis – coins, inscriptions, and other artefacts that had been accumulated by antiquaries in ‘cabinets of curiosities’. These collections – sometimes vast, as in the case of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1570–1631)- were a significant resource for the antiquaries. They also formed the core of many institutions, such as the Ashmolean and the British Museum.

The rigorous analysis of material culture was a vital source of direct information about the prehistoric past, but this was equally true of field studies of monuments. Notable early exponents of such work were John Aubrey (1626–1697), William Dugdale (1606–1686), Edward Lhwyd (1660–1709) and Robert Plot (1640–1696), who amassed records of hundreds of sites of ‘pre-Roman’ age during the 17^th century. This tradition continued in the 18^th century, most notably by William Stukeley (1687–1765), whose long career in the field was crowned by his careful excavations at Stonehenge. The realignment of British antiquarian interest from a concentration on the analysis of literary sources, coins, and field survey to including the excavation of sites (particularly mounds and barrows) is the most significant innovation (along with the foundation of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1718) of the 18^th century.

Something of an excavation mania gripped English antiquarian circles from the mid-18^th century until well into the 19^th century. Most notable among these early excavators was the Reverend Bryan Fausett (1720–1776), who focused on Saxon tumuli and is reported to have excavated over 750 of them. There can be little doubt that Fausett’s enthusiasm was not matched by his skill, and the damage done through uncontrolled excavation is probably incalculable. Nonetheless, he was an ardent collector and an untiring propagandist for British antiquity. Fausett’s passion was shared rather more usefully by the enigmatic James Douglas (1753–1819), whose Nenia Britannica (1793) was a thorough and at times brilliant discussion of the burial customs of ‘ancient Britons’.

Generations of systematic (and frequently unsystematic) fieldwork had, by the end of the 18^th century, created a crisis in British antiquarian circles. Although a very great deal of material culture had been excavated, swelling the collections of antiquaries and providing the foundations for the collections of new museums, its usefulness for writing history was severely curtailed by what seemed to be insuperable problems with establishing chronology.

Many of the more careful observers (especially those with field experience either in excavation or survey) well understood that everything could not be the same age and that there was variation within and between sites and artefact types. Nonetheless, things pretty much came to a grinding halt from then on. Naturally, this did not stop antiquaries from continuing their research. Indeed, in many ways, through the work of people like Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838) and William Cunnington (1754–1810), the problem became more acute. In books such as Ancient Wiltshire (1810–1821), Colt Hoare was at pains to limit his interpretations to the physical data he had to hand – interpretations that were consequently limited to admitting his inability to write the history of prehistoric Wiltshire.

It is one of the givens of the history of archaeology that the solution to Colt Hoare’s problems, the Three Age System, had already been worked out in Scandinavia by Thomsen and Worsaae.¹³ Although Christian Thomsen’s great work was not translated into English until 1848 (as the Guide to Northern Archaeology), and Jens Worsaae’s (as The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark) until 1849, some English antiquaries were au fait with the System before then.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the Three Age System received a mixed welcome in Britain and from institutions such as the British Museum.¹⁵

Thomas Wright (1810–1877), who regarded himself as one of the leading English antiquaries, would have none of it. Nevertheless, Sir John Lubbock enthusiastically embraced the Three Age System as a major step forward. Throughout the rest of the period (and continuing for the rest of the 19^th century) differences of opinion about the value of the Three Age System or (perhaps more spectacularly the discovery of high human antiquity) were discussed in a wide variety of scientific and antiquarian associations (some of which such as the British Archaeological Association and the Royal Archaeological Institute are included as case studies).

Certainly, excavation continued right across Britain, but the goals of such work became increasingly diverse as the problems with chronology so apparent in the work of Colt Hoare and his predecessors were gradually resolved through adjusting the Three Age System to more closely fit regional realities in British prehistoric archaeology. One example of this increasing diversity was the work of John Thurnam (1810–1873), whose primary interest was in the skeletal remains to be found in barrows and tumuli. Thurnam (later in partnership with J.B. Davis (1801–1881)) sought to use these remains to write the racial history of Britain, a goal that he and Davis believed they had achieved with the publication of Crania Britannica (1856–1865).¹⁶ Others, such as Thomas Bateman (1787–1835), Charles Roach Smith (1807–1890) and the indefatigable Canon William Greenwell (1820–1918), continued to dig barrows at express pace and with rather broader interests in mind. Greenwell’s British Barrows (1877) was to represent the high tide of antiquarian activity in a world where the kind of prehistoric archaeology practiced had clear cultural and political implications.¹⁷ It is testimony to the Three Age System that (however imperfect) resolution of chronological problems could release such passion and creativity in writing the prehistory of Britain.

Narrative 1860–1900

During the thirty years between the acceptance of high human antiquity (1859) and the end of the century, British prehistoric archaeology became widely accepted as a science. By that most delicate of measures (the passage of ancient monuments protection legislation, which limited the private rights of individuals and established government agencies to bring that legislation into effect), the science of prehistoric archaeology had gained popular and scientific recognition as an important Victorian scientific and cultural endeavor.¹⁸ Prior to this period, serious debate had taken place about the nature of prehistoric archaeology, and the issues raised by Davis and others in the case study continued to plague practitioners until the 1870s.

It is important to note that conflicts between the proponents of ethnology, anthropology, archaic anthropology and prehistoric archaeology (which were just some of the wide range of positions taken up by people with an interest in the prehistory of Britain) were primarily fought out at the level of institutions and societies. Although relationships between the British Archaeological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute were far from cordial, they were streets ahead of the viciousness that characterized the exchanges between the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London, and between the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.¹⁹

Notwithstanding the significance of the application of the Three Age System to English prehistoric archaeology after its translation into English, it was the discovery of high human antiquity that seized the imagination of the scientific world. Gamble, Grayson, O’Connor and Van Riper have discussed this history in considerable detail,²⁰ and much has also been written about the role played by Sir John Lubbock (and his Prehistoric Times, 1865) and E.B. Tylor (and his Researches into the Early History of Man, 1865 and Primitive Culture, 1870) in the creation of what Trigger called evolutionary archaeology.²¹

However, the dominance of evolutionary theory in British prehistoric archaeology was always tempered by the needs of history – particularly the racial history of the British Isles. Generations of barrow diggers such as Thomas Bateman (who was among the first to apply the principles of the Three Age System in Britain in his Vestiges of the Antiquities of Derbyshire, 1848), were to make their own attempts to align British prehistory with the vision of Thomsen and Worsaae.²² Nonetheless, there was never universal approbation of it or of the idea that the British past could unproblematically serve Lubbock’s or Tylor’s universal models of human history. Certainly, the canny observer Daniel Wilson (1816–1892) well understood the difference and foreswore the more serious of Lubbock’s overgeneralizations. Again, while it was true that much of the period after 1860 was devoted to an elaboration of the System and its subdivisions (both in Britain and in France), such elaborations inevitably led to an appreciation of difference and variety, as well as of change both within prehistoric Britain and its Continental neighbors.

This recognition of variety (and of the reality of history) became all the more obvious as systematic attempts to describe the artefacts of British prehistory came more to the fore. This outcome also rested on the gradual improvement in excavation strategy and techniques, which had been fostered at Brixham Cave but greatly enhanced by the work of Augustus Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900), especially at Cranborne Chase (1887).

Building on the traditions of workers such as Fausett and Charles Roach Smith, Sir John Evans (1823–1908) in two remarkable books, Ancient Stone Implements: Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain (1872) and Ancient Bronze Implements (1881), developed the typology of such artefacts to a level where the patterns of chronology and distribution raised significant historical questions.²³

Although British prehistory was devoid of an absolute chronology for all but the later phases of the Iron Age, sufficient information existed for workers such as Sir William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929) to set the British Palaeolithic within a Continental sequence (a task also completed by Gabriel de Mortillet (1821–1898) in France), and for Oscar Montelius’ (1843–1921) European chronology to be applied to Britain. The essence of that chronology, and of those sequences, was that British prehistory was a kind of afterthought to the great forces of moving populations and changing climates that characterized Europe. Nonetheless there were always bits that failed to fit, as Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) was able to demonstrate in his celebrated analysis of the cemetery at Aylesford in Kent (1890).

Comprehending the prehistory of Britain as a problem was to occupy archaeologists for the next half century, as the dual inheritances of evolutionary universalist archaeology and the historicism of the Three Age System played themselves out in what was later proven to be an illusory temporal environment. The absence of absolute chronology and the essentially circular interpretive logic that flowed from the relative chronologies of Montelius and de Mortillet, was to strengthen a concentration on simple historicist explanations for cultural change at the very time when prehistoric archaeology (certainly as it was to become espoused by Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957)) required more.

Evans was, of course, quite right about the significance of the evidence from Aylesford. What British prehistoric archaeologists urgently needed to do was to write history, to make the classifications of Montelius and others relate in real historical terms to the patterns being noted in the field. However, prehistoric archaeology (as a part of anthropology) was far from alone in this concern with history and historicism. Although from the 1880s, perceptions of human diversity made a forceful return to the interpretative armory of anthropology, this diversity was clearly to be in ethnic and cultural, rather than purely physical differences. Explanation for diversity and similarity was increasingly to be sought in cultural-historical factors, rather than by appealing to the doctrines of independent inventions and the psychic unity of humankind. Real historical forces acting on real (different) groups of people, past and present, could explain the peculiar differences between human beings far more convincingly than generalized uniformitarian forces. Anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, previously focused on providing evidence of the evolution of human beings and their societies and cultures, now became more firmly linked to a less encompassing task – writing the ethnic histories of European nations.

Narrative 1901–1960

Often described in histories of English archaeology as the phase of culture history where archaeologists further honed their excavation skills and used their abilities at artefact analysis and the creation of typologies to create histories of English prehistoric ‘cultures’, the first 60 years of the 20^th century saw both continuity and change. Continuity, in the sense that the typological studies and continental prehistories of Montelius, de Mortillet and others provided an essential starting point, change in the sense that serious debate about the relationships between archaeological and anthropological knowledge tended (except for Gordon Childe and Sir Grahame Clark) tended to fade from view.

However, change was uneven across the entire field of prehistoric archaeology. For example, although a great deal of argument continued to be caused by the Eolith controversy and its eventual links to the Piltdown forgery, amateur Palaeolithic archaeologists continued to scour the countryside looking for old sites.²⁴ More senior figures, such as Miles Burkitt (1890–1971), were engaged less in fieldwork than in continuing to refine tool typologies and chronologies on a global scale, although others, such as Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968), still retained a strong commitment to field study.²⁵ During this period, the primary locations for change within the study of English prehistoric archaeology were in the later periods, exemplified by Grahame Clark’s brilliantly innovative studies of the Mesolithic, Stuart Piggott’s (1910–1996) Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles (1954) and Christopher Hawkes’ (1905–1992) penetrating studies of Iron Age Britain.²⁶

Change and development also occurred in the technical and methodological sides of prehistoric archaeology, most notably in the work of the Fenland Research Committee (established in 1932), which undertook foundational research into the reconstruction of ancient English landscapes and environments. Excavation techniques were also developed from those inherited from Pitt Rivers and Flinders Petrie, most notably by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976) at Maiden Castle and elsewhere, and by Gerhard Bersu (1889–1964).²⁷ Wheeler, and especially Glyn Daniel (1914–1986), were especially responsible for enhancing public understanding of the prehistoric archaeology of Britain through engaging with visitors to sites and the development of television programs such as Animal, Vegetable and Mineral, which was screened by the BBC to very large audiences.

The global reach of British prehistoric archaeology was also extended by the foundation of the Institute of Archaeology in London, in which Wheeler was particularly influential, and which had Gordon Childe as its first Director. Students from all over the world came to study there, learning the techniques that would be used to undertake foundational work in countries as diverse as China and India. A further extension of interest was achieved with the foundation of the journal Antiquity by O.G.S. Crawford (1886–1957), and the transformation of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia into simply the Prehistoric Society.

Notwithstanding the significance of these developments, the period is most notable for the work of Gordon Childe and Grahame Clark. Between 1925 and 1956, Childe literally transformed archaeology in the Anglo-Saxon world (and beyond) through a series of publications that exerted great influence on both the professional and public understanding of British prehistory and of archaeology in general. The tradition of rigorous analysis of artefacts from Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age contexts, which was to provide Childe with much of his British information, was developed and enhanced during this period.

Renfrew correctly identified Abercromby’s Study of Bronze Age Pottery (1912) as an early example of British archaeologists exploring the spatial distribution of material culture types (the real potential of which was established by O.G.S. Crawford in Man and His Past (1921)).²⁸ However, it was Gordon Childe’s development of the concept of the archaeological culture that provided the core interpretive perspective needed to make such culture histories plausible. Childe demonstrated the potential of this new way of seeing in The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) and elaborated it in The Bronze Age (1930) and subsequent publications. Renfrew also stressed that in the 1930s, English prehistoric archaeologists were also able to consider the spatial organization of culture within the terms of human geography.²⁹ This approach was expounded by Sir Cyril Fox (1892–1967) in his path-breaking ‘regional prehistory’ The Personality of Britain (1932), which became a major influence on their practice.³⁰

Historians of archaeology (particularly Trigger 2006) have seen the time between the late 1930s and the advent of radiometric dating in the late 1950s as a long period during which Childe’s account of the archaeological culture and the project of culture history was elaborated.³¹ There is merit in this assessment of a period during which change in later British prehistory was almost always explained as being the outcome of migrations, invasions or diffusions, certainly of forces which (along with climate change) lay external to the societies whose histories Childe and others were trying to understand. There is little doubt that Childean archaeology dominated the theoretical landscape of English prehistoric archaeology during this period, but there were significant tensions between Childe’s culture history and the detailed economic and ecological approaches to understanding the archaeology of the Mesolithic, which were being developed by Grahame Clark.

It is well understood that Childe and Clark had widely differing views about politics, but these have tended to gloss over more significant differences over theory. Beginning with The Mesolithic Age in Britain (1932) and culminating in his highly influential work at Star Carr (published in 1954), and in Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis (1952), Clark elaborated an archaeology that required archaeologists to extend their competence to contextual factors.³² Clark argued that archaeologists needed to be recalled to a basic commitment to understanding how prehistoric societies functioned, rather than just contenting themselves with charting the distributions of artefact types and culture areas. In this focus on the need to understand society, he was closer to Childe than many others of his time.

Childe’s (and Clark’s) advocacy of the principles of social archaeology was to bear fruit during the next period. There is little doubt that the crowning theoretical achievement of British prehistoric archaeology during the first 60 years of the 20^th century was, despite the general lack of interest displayed in it by the bulk of practitioners, a broadening and deepening of the relationships between history, archaeology, and anthropology. For the bulk of archaeologists who focused on issues of typology and chronology, the world was about to change, and social archaeology was to provide a new reason for being.

Narrative 1961–2000

Renfrew has observed that the cracks in the interpretive consensus of culture history and typology (brought about by Clark’s economic prehistory) were greatly enlarged by the application of radiocarbon dating to English prehistory.³³ These dates began to be available from the late 1950s, and it was soon clear that big differences existed between the dates arrived at through conventional typological study, which had previously been the mainstay of British prehistoric archaeology (no matter the period), and those being produced by radiometric means. The first serious impact was in the Neolithic, famously at Durrington Walls, a site excavated by Stuart Piggott (then the doyen of British Neolithic studies). From this point on, no part of British prehistory was immune, although it is fair to say that the major impacts were felt by archaeologists working in the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages. Renfrew neatly summarized this history, not just being about dates, as fostering a fundamental shift in the direction of European prehistory.³⁴ For example, new dates from Wessex and other places made it clear that cultural elements such as megalithic tombs (once thought to have been diffused from the south of the European landmass) could now be argued to have had a local origin.³⁵

Archaeologists now had to find new models of English prehistory to account for what now seemed to be better understood by exploring the internal dynamics of prehistoric societies and seeking explanations for change that emphasized cultural processes in addition to diffusion through invasion and migration. However, there was a significant sense of continuity here, as well as previous work on environmental reconstruction and prehistoric human ecology, which played a significant part in Grahame Clark’s demolition of the invasion hypothesis in 1966. Although it is always risky to point to specific dates as watersheds, Renfrew’s assessment of the significance of radiometric dating in the development of English prehistoric archaeology after 1966 seems to be very close to the mark.

Although Grahame Clark had essentially ‘created’ world prehistory in 1961, flowing from the application of radiometric dating technologies on a global scale, it was the clear demonstration that previous interpretive frameworks no longer satisfactorily explained prehistoric Britain that underwrote the great flowering of British theoretical archaeology in the latter part of the 20^th century. Where once archaeologists had spent their lives elaborating typologies (largely for the purpose of establishing relative chronologies), radiometric dating provided a release from all that, and an opportunity to take up Gordon Childe’s challenge, that they should seek to understand the nature of prehistoric societies and their histories.

These kinds of challenges were being experienced by archaeologists all over the world, and what was happening in Britain influenced and was in turn influenced by what was happening elsewhere (particularly in the USA). This expansion of interpretive and explanatory horizons (both in terms of the sense of problem as well as the community of scholars working on it) very soon demonstrated that archaeologists could disagree about almost all the issues related to understanding prehistoric societies. The pathway, which eventually led through all the varieties of archaeology that have since been explored to resolve those disagreements (occasionally referred to as a kind of alphabet soup – Analytical, Behavioural, Cultural, Ecological, Demographic, Economic… Post processual and Processual etc.) was opened in the process.

British prehistoric archaeologists also played a major role in the development of scientific applications to archaeology. I have already referred to the early work of the Fenland Research Committee and its impact on the development of Clark’s economic archaeology, but the period after 1960 saw a massive development in this aspect of English prehistoric archaeology, ranging from Eric Higgs’ development of Palaeoeconomy through the British Academy Major Research Project on the Early History of Agriculture (1967–1976). Here, faunal analysis and environmental reconstruction played a vital role in understanding prehistoric resources, which then meshed with new methodologies for surveying and sampling sites, new analyses of artefacts, and new approaches to forensic archaeology (see Brothwell and Higgs as a very early example of this).³⁶ It is worth noting that the Science Based Archaeology Committee (1975–1995) both promoted and underwrote much of this research, which will stand as one of the major legacies of British prehistoric archaeology during the period.

At the same time, the social and cultural context of British archaeology also underwent massive changes. In common with other countries, there was a massive expansion of the ‘applied’ side of archaeology. This applied side has ranged from archaeological heritage management, the interpretation of sites for cultural tourism, through to the rapid growth in popular archaeological publishing and television media, such as programs such as Meet the Ancestors and the Time Team.

By the same token, the global reach of British prehistoric archaeology in professional circles was most closely established with the activities of major English publishers such as Cambridge University Press and Routledge, that have made it possible for the post 1960s generations of British archaeologists to be heard. Many of the archaeologists produced in that period – during a time when Archaeology Departments grew in numbers and in size, found work in the Heritage Management industry (which became, as elsewhere, by far the biggest source of funds for excavation and analysis in Britain). Others staffed the new and expanded Departments or left to fill academic posts in other countries,³⁷ while the remainder swelled the ranks of a public already strongly committed to supporting British prehistoric archaeology though participation in amateur societies, visiting sites, and maintaining a knowledgeable interest in the past.

Over the same period, we have seen the production of new histories of archaeology that have served to provide the context for the development of new approaches to archaeology itself. Beginning with the early work of Lewis Binford (1931–2011) in the United States and David Clarke (1937–1976) in Britain, but reaching its apogee in the work of post-processual archaeologists such as Ian Hodder (b. 1948), Daniel Miller (b. 1954), Christopher Tilley (1955–2024) and Michael Shanks (b. 1959). These newer histories were expressly designed to justify the development of alternative archaeologies and were therefore tightly focused on using histories of archaeology in much the same ways as Childe and Grahame Clark (but not Glyn Daniel) used them.³⁸

Concluding Remarks

Part of my goal in this all-too-brief discussion of the history of prehistoric archaeology in Britain has been to establish whether the very great diversity of its past and its contemporary practice could be effectively synthesized through the identification of overarching themes and issues. Previous syntheses have only been partially successful, primarily because there was, until recent years, a serious lack of primary research into that history. Certainly, in those areas where detailed research has been carried out, a complex and frequently counter-intuitive history has been revealed. Given the fact that British prehistoric archaeologists have long had a considerable impact on the practice of prehistoric archaeology outside of Britain (particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world), a deeper understanding of its social and cultural history is as important for all archaeologists, not just those from Britain.

But having said this, I think that while histories of archaeology should be sensitive to histories of other disciplines, such as anthropology and history, historians of those disciplines should also not ignore what is happening in archaeology. Many prehistoric archaeologists in the English-speaking world still adhere to the tenets of anthropological archaeology and the proposition that archaeology is a subset of anthropology, particularly in terms of the theories it deploys. Yet in recent times, the naturalness of this relationship has been questioned as practitioners begin to comprehend that the archaeological record poses significant problems and issues that have never been considered part of anthropology or historiography. Thus, archaeologists might yet face the prospect that other archaeologies are possible and possibly desirable, and new histories that might conceivably reassess the history of relations with anthropology and history will need to be written.