out against hybridity of the races, an article of faith in the polygenist camp. Finally, he contended, civilization was for given races only. The data of archaeology, to Davis’s mind at least, formed an important basis from which to mount an argument against the reality of monogenism, despite the arguments of James Cowles Prichard and others: “It is scarcely necessary to allude to the most extraordinary doctrine that the discovery of stone weapons and implements in every quarter of the globe, is a valid evidence that the very same race, a nation of workers in stone, has been spread over all these vastly separated countries. Such incredible hypothesis is by no means necessary to account for this fact” (Davis 1856, 324).

Instead of the monogenist hypothesis, Davis offered the fact that, within very broad bounds, humans have similar physical structures and bodily needs. Yet notwithstanding these similarities, the use of stone occurred during different periods and to different extents. On this basis Davis considered the term stone-period or stone-age to be incorrect (an objection frequently voiced by Rhind and others but not necessarily for the same reasons). Davis’s conclusion was that archaeology had to become ethnology and contribute to the debates that were conducted under its aegis. The first step toward a useful contribution was for archaeologists to do more ethnology, particularly within the British Isles, where racial differences were thought to be marked.

Narrative: 1860–1900

During the forty years between the acceptance of high human antiquity (in 1859) and the end of the nineteenth century, British prehistoric archaeology became widely accepted as a science. By that most delicate of measures—the passage of legislation to protect ancient monuments, which limited the private rights of individuals and established government agencies to bring that legislation into effect (see Murray 1990)—the science of prehistoric archaeology had gained popular and scholarly recognition as an important Victorian scientific and cultural endeavor. As mentioned, serious debate had taken place before this period about the nature of prehistoric archaeology, and the issues raised by Davis and others mentioned in the case study continued to plague practitioners until the 1870s. It is important to note that the fights between the proponents of ethnology, anthropology, archaic anthropology, and prehistoric archaeology (which were just some of the many diverse positions taken up by people with an interest in the prehistory of Britain) were primarily waged at the level of institutions and societies. Although relationships between the British Archaeological Association and the Royal Archaeological Institute were far from cordial, they had nothing of the viciousness that characterized the exchanges between the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London and between the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (see Stocking 1971).

Despite the significance of the application of the three-age system to British prehistoric archaeology after Thomsen’s and Worsaae’s works were translated, it was the discovery of high human antiquity that seized the imagination of the scientific world. D.K. Grayson (1983) and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (1996) have discussed this history in considerable detail, and much has also been written about the role played by Sir John Lubbock (and his Prehistoric Times [1865]) and E.B. Tylor (and his Researches into the Early History of Man [1865] and Primitive Culture [1870]) in the creation of what Trigger called “evolutionary archaeology.” But the dominance of evolutionary theory in British prehistoric archaeology was always tempered by the needs of history—particularly the racial history of the British Isles. Attempts to square British history with the three-age system would be made by generations of barrow diggers such as Canon Greenwell, John Thurnam, Charles Roach Smith, and Thomas Bateman (who was among the first to apply the principles of the system in Britain in his Vestiges of the Antiquities of Derbyshire [1848]).Yet there was never universal approbation of that concept or of the idea that the British past could unproblematically serve Lubbock’s or Tylor’s universal models of human history. Certainly, the canny observer Daniel Wilson well understood the difference and forswore the more serious of Lubbock’s overgeneralizations. But again, although much of the period after 1860 was devoted to an elaboration of the