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Daniel, Glyn

(1914–1986)

Glyn Daniel grew up in the Vale of Glamorgan in southern Wales, was educated at Barry Grammar School, then went to St. John’s College, Cambridge, on a scholarship in 1932. He switched from geography to archaeology and was at St. John’s all the rest of his life.

Daniel’s first research on the megalithic monuments of the British Isles was later enlarged by studying their cousins in France and across Europe as a whole. His work was published as The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of England and Wales (1950) and The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of France (1960). It was a large task, in the late 1930s, simply to collate knowledge of the chamber tombs and then to relate them to their sister monuments scattered across western Europe.

Working within the “moderate-diffusionist” framework for European prehistory associated particularly with the work and name of vere gordon childe, Daniel devised a scheme (1941) for a dual colonization of western Europe by megalith builders: a passage-grave tradition originating in the eastern Mediterranean and a gallery-grave tradition originating in the western Mediterranean, which between them explained the pattern in northwest Europe, the region where the diffusionist impulse had spread the habit of megalithic building. Like other schemes diligently built to explain European prehistory with slight and ambiguous chronological evidence, this one collapsed in the 1950s when calibrated radiocarbon chronology showed that the northwest European megaliths, especially those in Brittany, were earlier than, or as early as, their supposed ancestors in Mediterranean lands. Instead, Daniel was able to enjoy the role that his native Wales played in originating a style and craft of stone-building through Atlantic Europe that was older than the pyramids of Egypt.

It seems in retrospect that it was not helpful to concentrate research on megaliths as a defined class on their own. The techniques of building with great blocks are much the same everywhere, because the engineering options are few, so similarities of form can only be weak proof of cultural affinity or any direct historic connection. Recent study has instead preferred to integrate examination of the megaliths with evidence from nonmegalithic contexts of the same periods. Even that is still not an easy task because the artifactual evidence that can be used in dating is even now often slight or uncertain; it was certainly impossible to find it a good basis for systematic megalithic study in the prewar and preradiocarbon era.

In 1943, Daniel published The Three Ages, a study of the Scandinavian development in the early nineteenth century of a Stone Age/Bronze Age/Iron Age division of early European archaeology, the key insight in ordering the artifacts that made studying prehistory possible in that century. This was the first of many studies by Daniel in the history of archaeology, including A Hundred Years of Archaeology (1950), The Idea of Prehistory (1962), The Origins and Growth of Archaeology (edited, 1967), and A Short History of Archaeology (1981), that set out the essentials of the nineteenth-century story especially as they have now come to be generally understood. Implicit in this important part of Daniel’s writing, though not unnecessarily emphasized, is the insight that we do not excavate the simple facts of