had been found in the Pict’s House, Rhind concluded that they were recent enough to be “in harmony with archaeological data and the statements of the earliest authors, who offered us a glimpse of the internal condition of our own country” (1853, 223). Rhind may not have considered the temporal limitations of ethnographic analogy, the eternally frozen ethnographic present for archaeology, but he did understand that if archaeologists aspired to know the manners and customs of people from the remote past and to explain the archaeological data themselves, then they had to use ethnographic analogy. He further emphasized the importance of national differences in the remote past in his assessment of the three-age system, “On the History of the Systematic Classification of Primeval Relics”(Rhind 1856).

Rhind spoke of the one great stride that separated the old order from the new—the constitution of archaeology as an inductive science with a diversity of theory incident to a speculative inquiry—and concluded: “Here, then, is a change which, as is sometimes insisted upon, is no less salient than the annals of any intellectual pursuit have recorded—a change implying a total revolution of an important inquiry” (1856, 210). However, in gaining this systematization, British prehistoric archaeology also gained a diverse range of interpretative and explanatory theory from ethnology, philology, and comparative human anatomy, which placed even greater pressure on the archaeological data because it became clear that those data could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Archaeology became involved in the clash between monogenism and polygenism, as well as the long-running conflict between universal history and historicism.

This involvement entailed significant consequences that archaeologists have had to live with to this day. Shifts in the general framework for understanding human nature, which had provided the spur to the recognition of the value of archaeological data for writing a rational history of the remote human past, also established concepts and categories within prehistoric archaeology that its practitioners found increasingly difficult to reformulate in terms of the data at hand. In the mid-nineteenth century there was every danger that the search for an intelligible human past would bring archaeology under the sway of other disciplines such as ethnology, philology, and comparative human anatomy, whose practitioners regarded archaeological data as contingent, useful supporting information. The real question was whether prehistoric archaeology could exist as more than a concatenation of techniques designed to wrest historical or ethnological data from archaeological data.

This danger was exemplified in a paper by J. Barnard Davis (the associate of the great barrow digger Thurnam) entitled “On Some of the Bearings of Ethnology upon Archaeological Science” (1856), in which the concept of race (and its links to nation and history) was used in a synthetic role. Davis thought that although comparative philology would be useful (1856, 316), it alone was not enough to make headway because “Man, in his origin, his relations and alliances in all their extent, constitute a series of complex and difficult subjects of inquiry” (1856, 316). Ethnology, based on an understanding of the laws governing the variety of the human physical form, was considered by Davis to be the surest guide to the formation of a science of archaeology, but he felt that this could only be achieved within an empiricist framework. If archaeology ignored the scientific laws of racial formation, it would never attain the status of a science: “This must first of all require fixed and well-defined principles before it can deserve the name of a science. It must first before all be ascertained by a close and thorough investigation of different races of people, that they have and do observe something like definite laws in their origin, developments, alliances, and mutations, before ethnology itself can have any firm ground to stand on” (1856, 316–317).

Davis, an ardent polygenist, argued that race was immutable. He also held that mental and moral qualities were both immutable and racially distinct. Moreover, racial differences existed between Caucasians, Negroes, and Chinese, as well as among Caucasians themselves. Thus, the Celts and Anglo-Saxons not only behaved differently, they were also different in physical character. Davis perforce had to come