Problems of the Borderland of Archaeology and Geology in Britain: Presidential Address for 1936

Abstract

To be the President of the Prehistoric Society is an honour that has a particular personal appeal to me. When the Society was founded in 1908, with a title that identified it with East Anglia, I was resident in Ipswich, the very place that was to become the Mecca of students of the Old Stone Age. My pride in being an early adherent of the Society is tinged with regret that I was not one of the small group of founder-members. Only one circumstance prevented me from so participating, and that was my impression that my close attachment to geology was not an appropriate qualification for membership. This is in itself a significant sidelight on the gap that then lay between the study of later geological history—the Pliocene and Pleistocene (in which I was especially interested)—and investigations relating to the traces of Early Man.In the quarter of a century that has elapsed since the founding of the Society, the gap between the two lines of approach has closed in a remarkable manner: geologists and archæologists now work side by side, and the effects of even the warmest arguments are merely transitory. The story of this interweaving of the sciences is now familiar to us all, and reference to some of the earlier phases of the rapprochement need only be incidental.