Archaeology as a Science

Abstract

Archaeology, like anthropology, is a very young science, and like anthropology it has grown at a most astonishing rate. In the true sense it is scarcely a hundred years old, for its birth may be placed about the middle of the last century, unless we are willing to give a rather artificial value to that false dawn which came with the occupation of Egypt by Napoleon. I should rather prefer to say that it begins just about 1850. Layard was excavating at Nineveh in 1845. Boucher de Perthes published his first work on stone implements in 1841; and the entire theory was made known in England in 1858, in the same year that Darwin and Wallace read ‘On the Origin of Species’. Keller's work on lake-dwellings appeared in 1854. Lartet and Christy were doing their chief work in 1861,a nd Pigorini from 1862 onwards. Schliemann's excavations of Troy began in 1870.