Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles

Abstract

THE study of our prehistoric antiquities has A already passed through several phases. The early antiquaries of Tudor and Stuart times are perhaps the most to be envied, for they could travel the country and indulge in picturesque speculation on what they saw, untrammelled by any established body of knowledge. The later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of excavation, excavation which, while it began to accumulate the factual material necessary for later scientific study, was too often little more than looting to satisfy the collector's instinct and the land-owner's vanity and curiosity. By the beginning of the present century a rickety framework of information had been put together, and the achievement of outstanding individuals such as General Pitt-Rivers already gave promise of the extraordinary blossoming of a truly scientific archaeology which took place in the period between two wars. The greater part of this happy period was naturally occupied with the essential preliminary task of extending conventional history backwards by establishing a fixed chronology, tracing invasions, the development of cultures and their interactions. But latterly a new trend was evident. Excavation had become sufficiently widespread, exact and selective to enable some archaeologists to be less purely historical and more generally sociological in their approach. Attention began to be focused on the manner of prehistoric life, the structure of early societies, their economic basis and the density of their populations.

Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles

By Prof. V. Gordon Childe. Pp. xiv + 274 + 16 plates. (London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, Ltd., 1940). 20s. net.