The Advent of the Abbé Breuil

Abstract

In 1930, Boswell made a compelling statement of his faith in the British Palaeolithic sequence as a reliable guide to geological time. The archaeologist Harold Peake (1867–1946), honorary curator of Newbury Museum whose interests ranged from earliest prehistory to the Bronze Age, had attended the same session at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was provoked by Boswell’s conviction to offer a cautious warning: As a geologist he [Boswell] is sceptical of the possibility of solving the problem [of placing the East Anglian glacial deposits in sequence] by geological means, and turns to archaeological evidence as supplying more reliable data for the purpose. As an archaeologist I have similar doubts as to the efficacy of my own subject, though I am inclined to believe that the possibilities of the geological approach have been underrated. I would submit that the true succession of types of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic phases, with which alone we are concerned, appears today to be by no means as certain as it did ten years ago. Broadly speaking we have evidence of successive stages of two industries, a core industry and a flake industry. Peake explained that some stages of the flake industry, which included ‘the types known as Levallois and LeMoustier and perhaps others’, seemed to have existed in Britain before the core industry went out of use. (‘Core’ industries were those like the Chellean and Acheulian: with hand-axes that were often made on nodules or ‘cores’ of flint.) This meant that ‘the simple succession, Early Chelles, Chelles, Evolved Chelles, St Acheul, and Le Moustier no longer holds good’. Early flake industries, like Warren’s Mesvinian from Clacton, had attracted more interest of late. By appearing alongside the hand-axe industries of the simple, standard sequence, they added greater variety to the character of stone tools that had existed at any one period of time, but they also reduced the chronological value of the old Palaeolithic sequence. Boswell, though he was absent from this meeting of 1930 (his paper had been read for him), learnt of Peake’s concern. He complained the following year: ‘If, as Mr. H. Peake has recently said, ‘‘. . . the simple succession Early Chelles, Chelles, Evolved Chelles, St Acheul, and Le Moustier no longer holds good,’’ I personally almost despair of a solution’.