Abstract
THE progress of prehistoric archæology, the youngest of the inductive sciences, is one of the more important facts in the history of the intellectual development of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Up to 1870, attention was chiefly directed to the antiquity of man and his place in the geological record, and to the classification of his advance in the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages in Europe. Man was proved to have lived in a remote past, not to be measured by years and under climatal and geographical conditions totally different to those now met with in Europe. The next ten years were chiefly spent in elaborating the details as to the range of Palæolithic man, and in working out the sequence of events, separating the Pleistocene period from the dawn of history. The Neolithic, Bronze, and Prehistoric Iron ages of human progress were traced far and wide over nearly the whole of the old and the greater part of the new worlds. In the last decade the centre of archæological interest has shifted slowly in the direction of the frontier of history. On the one hand the researches of Flinders Petrie have revealed the close connection of ancient Egypt with the nations of the Mediterranean long before the rise of the Greeks, and have rendered it possible for us to use the Egyptian chronology as the standard to fix the date of prehistoric events in Southern Europe and in Asia Minor. On the other, in these latter areas, many workers, among whom Schlie-man stands foremost, have revealed the manners and customs, the daily life, the modes of warfare, the habitations, fortresses and tombs of the very peoples who were in touch with Egypt. We even know, thanks to Arthur Evans, that there was a system of writing in the Ægean area long before the introduction of the Phœnician alphabet, and we may look forward to his future researches to make it intelligible.
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DAWKINS, W. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia. Nature 54, 78–80 (1896). https://doi.org/10.1038/054078b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/054078b0