This not entirely comfortable reconciliation of the differences between universal history and historicism became a frequent subject of debate within archaeology through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Was it possible to glimpse the general through the analysis of the particular? Was the prehistory of Europe the only sure guide to reconstructing the chain of human development? By 1850 some self-congratulations were thought to be due. The “Introduction” to volume 7 of the Archaeological Journal (1850) was a retrospective on the history of archaeological research, which naturally concluded that great progress had been made. Prior to 1850 an interest in archaeology had been deemed “mere learned but unprofitable trifling” (1850, 1). Archaeology had, therefore, been sneered at, if not completely ignored, until recent years. The anonymous author evidently believed that this view was not unfounded because in his assessment, the “sole interest of archaeology was to collect scraps of antiquity without selection, order or application” (1850, 4). It was thus pure dilettantism. This was a harsh judgment on those who had collected antiquities as exemplars of taste and who certainly did so with criteria of selection. It was also a thinly veiled attack on the Society of Antiquaries. By 1850 the rules of the game had changed dramatically.

No longer was collection for the cultivation of taste enough of a purpose, when the reasons for collection were themselves the subject of debate. Although the preceding centuries had seen the methods of Camden and Speed developed by Aubrey and even by Stukeley to the stage at which archaeological data were widely considered to be important and meaningful in the writing of British history, additional measures of practical value were incorporated in the nineteenth century. For the members of the RAI (and many within the Society of Antiquaries), the purpose of collection had to include a relevance to contemporary problems—and there were no more relevant problems than race and nationalism. The author of the 1850 Archaeological Journal Introduction obviously had this in mind. The purpose of collection, he asserted, should be to link the objects with the history of national descent and to promote “sentiments of national attachment” (1850, 5–6).

In keeping with the general attitude of the RAI, the emphasis was on providing justifications for preservation, through the process of “illustration”:

The study of the habits which have belonged to different ages of social life, will induce the consideration of the intricacies of race, and in this the philosopher and the antiquary will be usefully combined. Archaeology will then assume a still more dignified station among the objects of mind, and will justly be recognized as a necessary and most valuable auxiliary in the elucidation of the interesting speculations that are now being developed in connection with ethnological inquiries (1850, 6).

This new basis for archaeology, fostered by Worsaae but also confirmed by the racial and linguistic theorists, was to provide the ultimate justification for the preservation of the monuments. In so doing, it also exposed archaeology to debates concerning human nature and the nature and meaning of human history that, despite decades if not centuries of disputation, remained firmly at the level of polemic. No one perspective had been able to convincingly demolish all the others. Archaeology was called into the fray precisely because all sides agreed that it might well provide an important empirical justification for their views (a justification that was sorely lacking).

The framework in which British prehistoric archaeology had been practiced over the preceding 200 years thus changed as a result of pressures external to the recovery and analysis of the record itself. Accordingly, the monuments had begun to undergo a subtle change in meaning that was still historical and still ethnographic (in the sense that they could be interpreted through the classical and Amerindian ethnographies), but they had now also become firmly national and racial.

The reconciliation between universal history and romantic historicism mentioned earlier was indeed an uncomfortable one because it presupposed links to other disciplines such as ethnology and philology, and the generalizations that