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time periods. Notwithstanding these arguments, many archaeologists would readily accept the assertion that Paleolithic archaeology was transformed by Bordes’s vision. In his spare time, Bordes wrote science-fiction stories and cultivated an interest in cartooning.

Tim Murray

Botta, Paul Emile

(1802–1870)

The son of distinguished Italian historian Carlo Botta, Paul Emile Botta was physician to Pasha Mohammed Ali of Egypt. In 1833 Botta was appointed French consul in Alexandria and in 1840 he was transferred to Mosul in northern Iraq with instructions to find and excavate the biblical city of nineveh.

Botta began excavating at Quyunjik, which was believed to be Nineveh, in 1842 but found little to interest him in his initial excavations. There appeared to be more of archaeological interest at nearby Khorsabad, and in 1843 Botta moved his excavations to this site, where he unearthed the palace of Sargon II (721–705 b.c.). With the support of the French government, and with 300 workmen, Botta dug Khorsabad for two years, acquiring magnificent bas-reliefs, artifacts such as four-meter-high winged bulls with human heads, and many cuneiform tablets, which were displayed at the louvre in Paris in 1846. Botta’s discoveries caused huge interest in Paris—equivalent to the excitement engendered by Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition.

Botta and artist Eugene Flandin published the Monument du Nineve, a four-volume record and illustration of the site, between 1846 and 1850. The Paris revolution of 1848 put an end to French work in Mesopotamia, and in 1851 Botta was dismissed in political disgrace. He was transferred to minor diplomatic posts in Jerusalem, Tripoli, and Syria. He died in Lebanon in 1870.

Tim Murray

Boucher de Perthes, Jacques

(1788–1868)

A French customs official, an amateur antiquary, and a provincial man of letters, Boucher de Perthes has been sometimes described as the founder of the discipline of prehistory because of his discovery of ancient bifacially flaked stone tools in the gravels of the Somme River in northern France, tools that he attributed to “antediluvian” (pre-flood) human beings.

As president of a regional learned society he began his career in prehistory at the age of 49, assisting his friend Dr. Casimir Picard, who was compiling an archaeological survey of the Somme Valley. He continued this work after Picard died. In 1837 during an excavation underneath the town walls of Abbeville, Boucher de Perthes found stone tools in the same stratigraphic levels as animal remains and pottery. While these artifacts became part of the Natural History Museum’s collection, they were not recognized by the scientific establishment as being made by humans, and were classified as geological and paleontological—of natural rather than human scientific interest.

Boucher de Perthes also excavated at Menchcourt-les-Abbeville, a site formerly dug by Georges Cuvier, which was full of fossil elephant and rhino bones. Here he found not only stone tools but also polished pebble stone axes. Boucher de Perthes believed that if the tools and the bones were found in the same undisturbed stratigraphic unit then they were likely to be of the same age. In 1842 he retrieved a bifaced stone tool from these units and he continued to find and collect stone tools from numerous local railway cuttings, canal building sites, and quarries. Boucher de Perthes begun to write up his discoveries in what was to become the first part of Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes, in which he argued for the great age of the stone tools he had discovered. In this highly idiosyncratic work Boucher de Perthes advocated the need for methodological conventions of description and analysis that he felt would distinguish a science of archaeology, while at the same time arguing that his stone tools had been made by Celts who lived before the biblical flood. While he was not without supporters, the French scientific establishment,