As a former archaeology student with an interest in history, I never really thought about how the two disciplines could be combined into one until now.
History Today – Beyond the Great Divide : Why do we have history and archaeology?
In the light of our understanding of ‘deep time’ Daniel Lord Smail argues that it is high time that the two disciplines were reunited.
I’m familiar with the concept of “deep time,” as I’m interested in geology too, thanks to being born in a very geologically interesting place. A lucky encounter with the books of John McPhee introduced me to the term, and familiarised me with what I guess you could call “popular geology,” rather than the serious study of strata and metamorphic forces.
The discovery of ‘deep time’ during the middle of the 19th century has long been understood as a transforming moment in the histories of biology, archaeology and geology. We are only just beginning to realise, however, that the time revolution also shaped the practice of history itself. For several centuries western history had been written in the certainty that the human past could be no older than the chronology allowed by the book of Genesis. The publication between 1859 and 1865 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man and John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times put an end to that. In the wake of the excitement spawned by the time revolution, historians confronted a question they never really had to ask before: when does history begin? If history cannot begin at the beginning, then historians must draw a line across the march of time and claim that this is the point at which historical time commences. All else, necessarily, is prehistory.
As Doris Goldstein has shown, historians like Edward Freeman and J.R. Green, writing in the aftermath of the time revolution, were intrigued by the idea that the terrain of history could stretch to embrace the primitive past. For others, however, the trauma of deep time generated resistance which took shape in arguments we now find scattered across the general histories and textbooks published in the decades before 1900. If some of the resistance was explicitly Christian, designed to preserve the integrity of holy scripture, most was not. There were serious concerns, raised by J.B. Bury and others, about whether history could properly deal with humans before the advent of society. Historians fretted about the absence of tangible dates. But the most telling justification for excluding prehistory from the realm of history centered on the nature of the evidence. In 1898 the French historians Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos took a logic of exclusion common to many authors and boiled it down to this lapidary expression: ‘No documents, no history.’ And that, it seems, was that.
Interesting, especially as it touches on the topic of “explicitly Christian” resistance to scientific discovery, ie., anything that threatened the traditional view that human history began with Genesis. I ought to have heard of Lubbock before, since I almost majored in archaeology in college (or maybe I did, but forgot all about it. I’ve actually seen (and photographed) the tomb of Darwin in Westminster Abbey that Lubbock helped to engineer, too. Seems they were quite close, although I think Lyell predated them (his tomb was in the same section of the Abbey).