In Darkest England: European exploration in Africa and its effects on 19th- and 20th-century perceptions of prehistoric Britain

Abstract

ABSTRACT From the sixteenth century, antiquarians regarded the ‘savage’ inhabitants of remote ‘uncivilised’ countries as a model for the inhabitants and the landscape of ancient Britain. At the end of the nineteenth century important figures in the newly emerging discipline of archaeology were influenced both by contemporary accounts of equatorial Africa and the tenets of Darwinism. This led them to propose that the apparent concentration of prehistoric monuments on chalk and limestone uplands resulted from the whole of prehistoric lowland Britain being covered by a dense, impenetrable and uninhabitable jungle, which remained in existence until it was cleared by the Anglo-Saxons. This model, although contested by some from the 1930s onwards, remained a central principle of archaeological thought until the 1970s, by which time evidence from palaeobotany, aerial survey and surface collection rendered it untenable.