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The Rise of Prehistory
DONALD R. KELLEY
Rutgers University
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From the beginning of their craft historians have distinguished
between matters recent or of record and antiquities that surpassed
memory, if not understanding. Thucydides called the latter "archaeology"
and relegated it to an inferior position, whereas Herodotus had
not feared to pursue his inquiries into the exploration of the deep
past, and in this effort he was followed by other venturesome authors
fascinated with the question of origins. "Doctrines must take their
beginning from that of the matters which they treat," wrote Giambattista
Vico, and this was especially true of human history.
1
The problem with human history, however, has been how to locate
this beginning, or these beginnings. About this there has never
been any general and lasting agreement, but the quest has continued
on many fronts. In the nineteenth century, cultivation of the arena
of "antiquities" produced a special field that was given the name
"prehistory" (Vorgeschichte, préhistoire, preistoria,
etc.): the emergence of this back-projected frontier and exploration
of this new temporal horizon, which extended and gave a new shape
to the study of history itself, is the subject of this inquiry. |
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Prehistory itself had a prehistory. The questions of pre-Adamite humanity and of human origins were essential to the ancient genre of universal history still practiced in the eighteenth century according to the old paradigm, "the grand design of God." 2The great eighteenth-century collection by a team of English scholars (1744–1767), for example, remained uncritically tied to the chronology of Scaliger and Ussher and did little more than comment on the Old Testament story.3 Johann Müller's universal history (based on lectures given in1778 and published posthumously in 1811) reviewed the various theories of the "primitive condition of mankind," caught between the idea of a golden age and that of barbarism, and the estimates of the "antiquity of the human species," such as that of Buffon (who suggested 80,000 years); but in the face of so much uncertainty and disagreement, he surrendered to biblical convention.4 |
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