language. It is not clear whether Wilson understood the seriational principles on which Thomsen’s work was based or merely copied his sequence. Wilson’s major achievements were to distinguish history and prehistory not merely as time periods but as different approaches to the past, and to realize the potential of material objects as a rounded source of information about how human beings lived in the past.

In 1853, Wilson became professor of history and English literature at University College in Toronto, Canada, where in 1857, he began offering a course on ancient and modern ethnology. His encounters with Indians still living in a traditional fashion convinced him that the New World constituted a “laboratory” for studying European prehistory and understanding better the “essential characteristics” of all human beings. In Prehistoric Man (1862), Wilson used physical anthropological data to refute claims that American Indians constituted a separate species; interpreted archaeological findings as evidence of parallel, if unequal, cultural development in the Old and New Worlds; and interpreted what had happened to Europeans, Africans, and aboriginal peoples in the Western Hemisphere since 1492 as evidence that all peoples possess the same basic drives and abilities and, hence, could participate in cultural development. Wilson continued to uphold the principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as they had been understood in the Edinburgh of his youth.

Wilson also continued to adhere to a biblical chronology. It was not until the 1870s that he was prepared to admit that human beings might have evolved from other animals, and even then he refused to consider an evolutionary origin for human reason or moral sense. Wilson continued to publish anthropological papers, but the problems he had in coming to terms with Darwinian evolution prevented him from becoming one of the leading anthropologists of the late nineteenth century. In his later years, Wilson continued to publish important works of literary criticism and was increasingly preoccupied with academic administration, which culminated in his becoming president of the University of Toronto in 1887. He died in Toronto 6 August 1892.

Bruce G. Trigger

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 91–92.

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim

Winckelmann was born on 9 December 1717 in Stendal, Germany. He went to the local grammar school and later spent a few months at the Collnisch Gymnasium in Berlin. For two years (1737–1739) he studied theology in Halle and then moved to Jena in 1741, where he enrolled for classes in mathematics and medicine. In 1743 he took a post as associate rector at a school in Seehausen, which he held for five years, a period of intensive study of the classics. He was taken on by Heinrich von Bünau as librarian in Nothnitz near Dresden in 1748; here he did research on the Ottonian emperors for Bünau’s History of the Empire.

Winckelmann’s earliest unpublished writing was notes from a lecture on recent general history in which he brought out the close connections between art and history. He moved to Dresden and published On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks in 1755, a depiction of classical Greece in which art could develop freely and free citizens could live in a state that was founded on liberty and democracy. Enthusiastic descriptions of the Laocoon group and the Herculanean Vestals form a contrast to the way he conceived his own times. In his theory of imitation he established the need to copy the natural and ideal beauty of Greek sculpture, its “noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” He converted to Catholicism and, helped by a stipend from the Saxon court, went to Rome in 1755. He began an inventory of Roman works of art, commenting on them both as iconography and in terms of restoration and described the Belvedere statues in the Vatican. At the same time he was striving for a language that would be appropriate to art and would reflect the essence of the works of art in question. His descriptions had a great influence on German scholarly prose. From his inventory there emerged a new system of historical classification, based on the criteria and the style of nations,