were major preoccupations. Numerous protohistoric burial sites as well as Roman villa complexes on the Campagna Romana,the fertile loess belt of central Belgium, were unearthed during the second half of the century. Several hoards of bronzes were found, and in the first years of the twentieth century, at the Royal Museum for Art and History, Jacobsen undertook chemical analyses of these in order to determine their production centers.

Completely separate from that milieu, the first prehistoric sites were investigated in the karstic caves of the Meuse and some of its tributaries and in the region of Mons. philippe charles schmerling, a professor of zoology at the University of Liège, found human fossil bones, including a Neanderthal child skull as it later appeared, in 1830 at the cave of Engis. Observing the association of these fossils with extinct mammal bones and their similar physical appearance, he came to believe in the antiquity of man. Having almost by accident become involved, Schmerling was truly a precursor of the science of prehistory. In his own opinion, the human fossils were not essential in establishing human antiquity as is indicated by this oft-cited phrase: “Therefore, their [stone and bone tools] presence is very important. Even if I had not found human bones in a condition suggesting that they belong to the antediluvian era, the existence of man would have been proven by the presence of these worked bones and stone tools.” He agonized over the way in which human bones and other faunal remains might have become associated and wondered if the latter would not have been reworked from older deposits. Schmerling stood alone in holding this theory, and his importance was only acknowledged much later.

However, from the 1860s onward, the intellectual climate changed radically. Prehistory not only became an acceptable science, it also became a matter of national prestige. Research into the antiquity of man was of great interest in neighboring countries, and the academy would not have Belgium’s potential unexploited. At its request, the government appointed geologist Edouard Dupont in 1863 to explore the Meuse caves. At the age of twenty-two Dupont undertook this massive task, which he worked on until 1869. His first problem was the establishment of a regional relative chronology. On the assumption that both the formation of the caves and the deposition of the lowermost sediments within them were contemporaneous with progressive river incision, altitude above the present water level became a chronological marker for human occupation in the caves. In all later accounts of Dupont’s work, this principle is singled out as a major flaw, and some critics go so far as to have Dupont extend his assumption to the complete sediment fill and to wrongly deny him any knowledge of the principle of superposition. But clearly, Dupont showed a most explicit concern with superimposed depositional units and the occupation levels (sols d’habitat) within them. In his thinking about both the science of prehistory (or ethnography, in his own terminology) and its methods, he was exceptional.

During the same period, industrial activities in the basin of the Haine, a tributary of the Scheldt River, led to the discovery of a number of open-air Paleolithic sites and of Neolithic flint mine shafts at Spiennes. Over a number of years, the question of the eoliths and Tertiary man was argued in Belgium as it was in neighboring countries. Until the mid-twentieth century, Rutot would remain an ardent defender of eoliths and Tertiary man, although Dupont had already expressed his doubts on the subject.

Early Belgian prehistory was the work of anthropologists, naturalists, geologists, and engineers and was not considered to belong to the realm of archaeology. This view came about because the field methods were entirely different and material culture typologies were much less of a concern than in national archaeology. The fields grew closer when the Archaeological and Historic Federation of Belgium was established at the initiative of the Royal Academy for Archaeology in 1884, and the discovery of two Neanderthal fossils at Spy by De Puydt and Lohest, both from the University of Liège, was announced at the federation’s second national congress. Study of the fossils by Fraipont established widespread acceptance of the Neanderthal species. In a review publication of scientific developments in Belgium on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the federation,