of the Mesolithic that were being developed by J.G.D. Clark.

Clearly, Childe and Clark had widely differing views about politics, but in emphasizing these differences, scholars have tended to gloss over more significant similarities in theories and goals. Beginning with The Mesolithic Age in Britain (1932) and culminating in his highly influential work at the site of Star Carr (published in 1954) and in Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis (1952), Clark elaborated an archaeology that required its practitioners to extend their competence to contextual factors. He reminded British prehistorians of the basic disciplinary commitment to understanding how prehistoric societies actually functioned, rather than just contenting themselves with charting the distributions of artifact types and culture areas. In this focus on the need to understand society, he was closer to Childe than many others of his time.

Childe’s and Clark’s advocacy of the principles of social archaeology would bear fruit in coming decades. There is little doubt that the crowning theoretical achievement of British prehistoric archaeology during the first sixty years of the twentieth century (despite most practitioners’ lack of interest in this field) was a broadening and deepening of the relationships between history, archaeology, and anthropology. For the majority of archaeologists who focused on issues of typology and chronology, the world was about to change, and social archaeology was to provide a new reason for being.

Narrative: 1961 to the Present

Renfrew (1972) has rightly observed that the cracks in the interpretive consensus of culture-history and typology (brought about by the economic prehistory of J.G.D. Clark) were greatly enlarged by the application of radiocarbon dating to British prehistory. Radiocarbon dates first became available in the late 1950s, and it was soon clear that there were serious disparities between the dates arrived at through conventional typological study (previously the mainstay of British prehistoric archaeology, no matter the period) and those being produced by radiometric means. The first significant impact was on the Neolithic period—famously at the site of Durrington Walls, where the radiocarbon dates were much older than those established by the excavator stuart piggott (then the doyen of British Neolithic studies) on the basis of typological analysis. From this point on no part of British prehistory was immune, although it is fair to say that the major impacts were felt by archaeologists working in the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages. Renfrew (1972) neatly summarized this history as not just being about dates but as fostering a fundamental shift in the direction of European prehistory as well. For example, new dates from Wessex and other places made it clear that cultural elements such as megalithic tombs (once thought to have been diffused from the south of the European landmass) could now be argued to have had a local origin.

It has become clear that no-one is seriously arguing for strong and significant Aegean influence upon the early bronze age of Britain, whether or not there may have been some contacts between the two regions. No-one today would explain the developments of the British early bronze age in these terms…. The Wessex-Mycenae link is no longer regarded, as it was by Evans and Childe, as a lynch-pin for British chronology, nor are the accompanying diffusionist arguments accepted any longer (Renfrew 1974, 33).

Archaeologists had to find new models of British prehistory to account for what now seemed better understood by exploring the internal dynamics of prehistoric societies and seeking explanations for change that emphasized cultural processes, in addition to diffusion through invasion and migration. But there was a significant sense of continuity here as well, as previous work on environmental reconstruction and prehistoric human ecology played an important part in J.G.D. Clark’s demolition of the invasion hypothesis in 1966. It is always risky to point to specific dates as watersheds, but Renfrew’s assessment of the importance of radiometric dating in the development of British prehistoric archaeology after 1966 was very close to the mark.

Although Clark had essentially “created” world prehistory in 1961 by applying radiometric-dating technologies on a global scale, the