of the age,’ still less against rival sciences,—but against that which can alone permanently degrade any science, an unphilosophic or sterile system” (Oldfield 1852, 1).

The appeal to system was one way for archaeologists to find their way through the mass of conflicting positions that had been developed from the crucial issues of the day. Needless to say, such an appeal to the corrective and rational powers of empiricism was more often honored in the breach than the observance, precisely because the issues were critical ones about which all educated people had to form opinions and because the positions that could have been adopted were frequently undeveloped beyond perspective and polemic.

Oldfield proceeded to outline the position of British prehistoric archaeology relative to other disciplines. For him, this archaeology had three major uses. First, it purveyed facts to other disciplines, with the test of archaeological efficiency being the value of the evidence to these disciplines. Second, it provided illustrations of personal life among English ancestors—who they were and what they did, thought, and felt. The methodology here was to start with the most complete case (usually folkloric studies) and argue from the known to the unknown. Third, prehistoric archaeology could use the evidence of other disciplines to improve this reconstruction. An example of the first use was easy to find:

In those branches of ideal and ornamental design which are known distinctively as the “Fine Arts,” the best models are to be found in the Past; not from any inherent superiority in the genius or taste of preceding ages, but simply because in that which is not in its nature progressive, but the independent offspring of independent intellects, the competition of all Time has naturally vanquished the efforts of a single generation. To discover, select and preserve such models, and render them available for aesthetic teaching, is the honourable tribute of Archaeology to Art

(Oldfield 1852, 3).

The value of archaeological data clearly stretched beyond the immediate needs of the discipline and was further exemplified by the discoveries at nineveh, which Oldfield referred to as the “California of Archaeology” (1852, 4). However, not all antiquarians or archaeologists were swayed by either Newton or Oldfield, and remnants of an older framework for interpreting and explaining archaeological data were still to be found, especially in a classic paper by A.H. Rhind in the tenth volume of the Archaeological Journal (1853). Rhind’s interpretation of the so-called Pict’s House was primarily based on literary evidence, in this case Pennant’s tours of north Scotland, where he had observed the inhabitants living underground in conditions of great squalor. These more current “folkloric” observations, allied with material derived from Diodorus Siculus, allowed Rhind to claim that the Pict’s House had a much more recent antiquity than that given it by daniel wilson. Yet much of Wilson’s work was acceptable to Rhind. Though he may have offered a critique of a particular ascription from the literary evidence, Rhind had no intention of disputing Wilson’s method or the broad sweep of his results. For Rhind at least, if not for others, the three-age system and its attendant methodology were not open to question.

It must, however, be noted that ancient though they undoubtedly are, there nevertheless seems to be a tendency among archaeologists to ascribe them a more remote antiquity than the existing data warrant. Wilson, for instance, incorporated them in the first section of his recent, excellent work, The Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, implying that they date from the earliest ages of permanent human occupancy, and Munch of Christiana, in a letter addressed to a correspondent in Orkney and published in a northern journal (John O’Groats Journal, May 30, 1851), expressly declared that these buildings belong to the stone-period, or to that mysterious people of the stone-period whose nationality is not yet ascertained

(in Rhind 1853, 223).

There was still some problem squaring archaeological and ethnographic authorities with older literary ones, and Rhind considered it dangerous to dispense with knowledge gained from this other source. Citing Tacitus and Diodorus Siculus and the fact that no stone artifacts