three-age system and its subdivisions (both in Britain and in France), such elaborations inevitably led to an appreciation of difference and variety, as well as change, in both prehistoric Britain and its Continental neighbors.

This recognition of variety (and of the reality of history) became all the more obvious as truly systematic attempts to describe the artifacts of British prehistory increasingly came to the fore, an outcome that also rested on the gradual improvement in excavation strategy and techniques that had been fostered at Brixham Cave but greatly enhanced by the work of Pitt Rivers, especially at Cranborne Chase (1887). Building on the traditions of Fausett, Roach Smith, and others, Sir John Evans, in two remarkable books (Ancient Stone Implements: Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain [1872] and Ancient Bronze Implements [1881]), developed the typology of such artifacts to the level at which the patterns of chronology and distribution raised significant historical questions. Although British prehistory was devoid of an absolute chronology for all but the later phases of the Iron Age, sufficient information existed for Boyd Dawkins and other workers to set the British Paleolithic within a Continental sequence (a task also completed by gabriel de mortillet in France) and for oscar montelius’s European chronology to be applied to Britain. The essence of that chronology and of those sequences was that British prehistory was a kind of afterthought to the great forces of moving populations and changing climates that characterized Europe. But there were always bits that failed to fit, as arthur evans was able to demonstrate in his celebrated analysis of the cemetery at Aylesford in Kent (1890). The task of comprehending the prehistory of Britain as a problem in itself was to occupy archaeologists for the next half century, as the dual inheritances of evolutionary universalist archaeology and the historicism of the three-age system played themselves out in what was later proven to be an illusory temporal environment. The absence of absolute chronology and the essentially circular interpretive logic that flowed from the relative chronologies of Montelius and de Mortillet would heighten the concentration on simple historicist explanations for cultural change at the very time when prehistoric archaeology (certainly as espoused by Gordon Childe) required more.

Evans was, of course, quite right about the significance of the evidence from Aylesford. What British prehistoric archaeologists urgently needed to do was to write history, to make the classifications of Montelius and others relate in real historical terms to the patterns being noted in the field. But prehistoric archaeology (as a part of anthropology) was far from alone in this concern with history and historicism. Although from the 1880s onward perceptions of human diversity made a forceful return to the ranks of anthropological theory, this diversity was clearly to be located in ethnic and cultural, rather than purely physical, differences. The explanations for diversity and similarity would increasingly be sought in cultural-historical factors, instead of the doctrine of independent inventions and the psychic unity of humankind. Real historical forces acting on real (different) groups of people, past and present, could explain the peculiar differences between human beings far more convincingly than generalized uniformitarian forces. Anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, previously focused on providing evidence of the evolution of human beings and their societies and cultures, now became more firmly linked to a less encompassing task—writing the ethnic histories of European nations.

Narrative: 1901–1960

Often described in histories of British archaeology as the phase of culture-history in which archaeologists further honed their excavation skills and used their abilities in artifact analysis and the creation of typologies to create histories of British prehistoric “cultures,” the first sixty years of the twentieth century saw both continuity and change. There was continuity in the sense that the typological studies and Continental prehistories of Montelius, de Mortillet, and others provided an essential starting point. And there was change also in the sense that serious debate about the relationships between archaeological and anthropological knowledge tended