Craniology and the Adoption of the Three-Age System in Britain

Abstract

The development of the three-age system in Scandinavia has been of great interest to historians of archaeology, but the system's spread to the British Isles has received little attention, leaving a false impression that its importance has always derived from the revolutionary methodology of C.J. Thomsen. It was not Thomsen's method of putting artefacts in a chronological series, however, that first appealed to British researchers in the mid 19th century. Instead, early British researchers, working mainly in the science of ethnology, used the system to establish a sequence of races for Britain's past based on cranial types. This initial use of the three-age system as a means of creating a racial sequence left a mark on British archaeology that outlasted even the craniological ethnology that formed its first scholarly context.