Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Because of this he has come to be seen as one of the most influential figures in the history of prehistoric archaeology.
We examine this image here, in terms of his influence on contemporaries both in Britain and in France, where early excavations were providing materials that came to form the basic periodization of the Palaeolithic that is still in use today.
We show how Lubbock contributed to this emergence of a professional Palaeolithic archaeology, and what he did and did not achieve in the critical decades of the s and s before his interests moved elsewhere. John Lubbock's pre-eminent position at the hub of Victorian science and society cannot be doubted. His work as a politician laid the foundations for modern heritage legislation andβperhaps more importantly to most UK residentsβprovided us with the bank holiday. He holds a special place in the history of prehistoric archaeology, however, for his monumental Pre-Historic Times , a collection of previously published essays brought together in monograph form in , which ran into seven editions until In its opening chapter, Lubbock introduced for the first time names for two of the most widely recognized periods of prehistory, the Palaeolithic and Neolithic , or Old and New Stone Age, respectively, the first of which is of concern here:.
From the careful study of the remains which have come down to us, it would appear that Pre-Historic archaeology may be divided into four great epochs β¦. Firstly, that of the drift; when man shared the possession of Europe with the Mammoth, the cave bear, the woolly-haired rhinoceros, and other extinct animals.
The influence of Pre-Historic Times was huge: Trigger 2 described it as the most influential book on archaeology published during the nineteenth century; as we discuss below, this opinion had become dogmatic by the early twentieth century and is still held today.
