| Page 1152 | |
enormous. First and foremost, he discovered the Trojan and Mycenaean civilizations at Ilios, Mycenae, Orchomenos, and Tiryns. Scholars had doubted their existence, and the unearthing of that world was one of the great moments of archaeology, and because of it, Homer’s epic poetry and mythology became sources of historical information. Schliemann enriched Greek history by bringing 2,000 years into the historic record, and his findings linked classical, oriental, and prehistoric archaeology in a new way. Finally, Schliemann brought public attention to archaeology and raised the profile of the discipline through his discoveries, his publications, and his extraordinary success.
References
For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1. Ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 124–125.
(1790–1836)
Born in Delft in the netherlands, Philippe Charles Schmerling served as a medical officer in the Dutch army from 1813 to 1816. In 1825, he completed a degree in medicine at the University of Liège, but during his four years of study Schmerling became interested in paleontology and geology after being given presents of fossils collected by workers in a nearby quarry. Beginning in 1829, he systematically explored over forty caves in and around the Liège region of belgium and became professor of geology at the University of Liège in 1835.
Schmerling’s published finds (especially in his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles [1833– 1834]) included more than sixty extinct fossil animal species, but it is for his discoveries of human remains that he has gained lasting fame. Schmerling excavated at the caves of Engis and Engihoul, Chokier and Fond-de-Foret, and under a layer of brecchia he found human remains in association with the bones of extinct fossil animals and with what he described as stone and bone tools. He also found an infant skull that, in 1935, was proved to be that of a Neanderthal child. Although Schmerling’s work attracted the cautious interest of the English geologist sir charles lyell, the latter was unable to accept the possibility of high human antiquity until hugh falconer and others had conclusively demonstrated the case at brixham cave and had argued for the validity of French archaeologist jacques boucher de perthes’s discoveries in the gravels of the Somme Valley in 1859.
References
van Riper, A. Bowdoin. 1995. Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(1898–1978)
Sergei Semenov was a Soviet archaeologist and author of Prehistoric Technology (1957), in which he determined the uses of prehistoric stone and bone tools by identifying the processes that caused the use-wear patterns found on them. His approach followed the USSR’s Marxist interest in production methods and a historical view of the past. The translation of his book had a large impact on the profession of archaeology in the West. Semenov’s techniques became the basis of modern use-wear studies (particularly on stone tools from the Paleolithic), which have unlocked much new information about the use of ancient technology.
See also
References
Semenov, S.A. 1957. Prehistoric Technology: An Experimental Study of the Oldest Tools and Artifacts for Traces of Manufacture and Wear. Translated by M.W. Thompson. London: Cory, Adams, and Mackay.
Shanidar is a major cave site in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, in northeastern Iraq, excavated by Ralph Solecki from 1957 to 1961. The site is considered to be particularly significant due to the excavation of the remains of
| |