university departments that train professional archaeologists, whose members undertake research designed to expand the frontiers of knowledge and understanding; archaeologists (either freelance or employed by government or nongovernment agencies) who are directly involved in the management of archaeological heritage; archaeological societies (both local and national) whose members (be they amateur or professional) are actively engaged in exploring the archaeology of Britain and communicating its importance to others; television stations, publishers, tourism operators, and others who “market” the archaeology of Britain for commercial gain; and members of the general public who visit sites, have their rights to use land encumbered, protest the destruction of archaeological heritage, or simply live in rich archaeological landscapes. Tracing the evolution of such an important social, political, and cultural force since the days of John Leland and William Camden is well beyond the scope of this entry.

This overview will, however, provide a brief and very general narrative of that evolution, isolating several themes that are generally considered to be historically significant. As mentioned earlier, one of the consequences of the lack of research into that history was the perpetuation of questionable perspectives, and in the following passages this shortcoming will be explored through one case study dealing with the relationships between British prehistoric archaeology, ethnology, and physical anthropology in the mid-nineteenth century. This highly specific and detailed case study stands in sharp distinction to the generalizations of the rest of the text, which incorporates a conventional reading of the evolution of British prehistoric archaeology and a brief recounting of some of the more notable circumstances of the postwar era that are considered to be the subject of commonsense understandings.

It is perhaps predictable that the history of British prehistoric archaeology reaches back into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the time of the antiquaries such as William Camden and John Speed and well before the creation of prehistoric archaeology as a distinct discipline. It is a commonplace of the history of British archaeology that we can find the origins of the discipline in the questions and methods of the antiquaries and natural historians. Their questions related to the history of Britain prior to Roman times—Who were the occupants? Who created the ruins in the British landscape at places such as Stonehenge and avebury?—and have inspired British prehistoric archaeology ever since. Indeed, the theme of establishing a connection between past and present, of making the physical remains of the past play a role in the history of Britain (thus becoming intelligible and worth preserving), is the central feature of British prehistoric archaeology. Other themes flow directly from this sense of making history: the relationship between the British Isles and the rest of Europe; the relationship between the early history of the British Isles and the contemporary indigenous communities found at the margins of the British Empire; the close relationship between prehistoric archaeology and what was to become anthropology in the late nineteenth century; and the central role to be played by prehistoric archaeology in imagining the British nation—either as a succession of conquests or as an accretion of cultural and ethnic diversities.

These themes have provided the cognitive underpinning of technical and methodological developments from the early landscape studies of the antiquarians to the science-based analyses of archaeological data that have featured so prominently in British prehistoric archaeology since the 1950s. They have also been significant in the development of theory in British prehistoric archaeology, but though it is important to stress the reality of continuity, it is also very true that the interpretation of those themes has shifted dramatically over the last 500 years. Changing patterns of interpretation and explanation have influenced the ways in which archaeologists have sought to pursue research and to make sense of their findings.

Parry (1995), Piggott (1976), and others have clearly established that the long history of British antiquarianism prior to the 1830s was based on the gradual acceptance that what we would now call archaeological data (sites, monuments, landscapes, material culture) had the