Every collector developed his or her own system for displaying the collected antiquities, as, a little later, did the museums that inherited them. Although none of these systems have survived, we may assume that at least some of them involved primitive, ad hoc classifications, perhaps according to the materials employed, artistic similarities, or places of finding. This type of ad hoc classification, while it has been partially superseded by other and purportedly more scientific systems, has by no means disappeared from archaeology. For example, it is still a common practice to divide up the total assemblage of material to be described in an archaeological monograph according to the material employed, so that there are separate chapters on pottery, objects of stone, objects of bone, and the like.

If the Renaissance was preeminently an era of discovery and collecting, the Enlightenment—essentially coeval with the eighteenth century—was above all an era of systematization. The dominant concern during the Enlightenment was to bring order and system to the mass of materials and facts that had been collected, not only in the natural world but in the social and political spheres as well. This effort resulted in a proliferation of botanical, zoological, and geological classifications, best exemplified by the “system of nature” developed by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus in the eighteenth century (Linnaeus 1735). At the same time, the moral philosophers, especially in France and in Scotland, developed logically coherent social and political schemata, including what came to be known as the three-stage schema of prehistory. This framework envisioned successive hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural stages in human development and was proposed almost simultaneously by Turgot in France and by Ferguson and Millar in Scotland (Meek 1976).

In the broadest sense, the classificatory methods of Linnaeus and other naturalists provided a methodological foundation for the later development of artifact classification while the three-stage schema of the moral philosophers was equally basic, at least conceptually, to the subsequent development of culture classification. However, the real development of classification as an essential, rather than merely an incidental, feature of archaeology had to wait for the beginnings of scientific archaeology, which came about only when the true antiquity of the human race began to be recognized. That recognition was one of the signal achievements of the nineteenth century.

The Beginnings of Scientific Archaeology

Scientific archaeology arose from the recognition that material remains from the past can be sources of information as well as of aesthetic enjoyment. Once that happened, scientific classification followed more or less inevitably. Artifacts began to be classified first and foremost with an eye to the information they could yield, information about themselves and about their makers and their times.

Scientific advances in archaeology have often begun in areas where the archaeological record was scantiest; where, in other words, careful and precise investigation was required to extract any information from the little that has survived from the past. This was undoubtedly the reason why European scientific archaeology, including classification, had its beginnings in Scandinavia, a region that was outside the realm both of classical antiquity and of the prehistoric megalith builders. Scandinavians at the outset of the nineteenth century were gripped by the same spirit of nationalism that affected nearly all European peoples, and like many of the others, they began to regard prehistory as an essential part of their national heritage. Without major architectural monuments or conspicuous objets d’art, however, they had a much more difficult job recovering that heritage than their neighbors in the more southern countries. It was in that context that scientific archaeology had its beginnings, mostly in denmark.

The Danes pioneered in the development of both culture classification and artifact classification. In the beginning, the two went hand in hand, but with the dominant concern always on the classification of cultures, since that was an essential step in the reconstruction of national prehistory. Artifact classification was ancillary, or instrumental; that is, it was undertaken, not to learn about the artifacts themselves, but to