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scientific approach to archaeology in eastern North America.
For the next century, most histories of archaeology were popular accounts of archaeological discoveries, and they emphasized the romance of exploration and the most spectacular discoveries. As a result, they generally concentrated on the archaeology of ancient civilizations and important Paleolithic finds. One of the most widely read works dealing with the history of archaeology was the rather superficial Gods, Graves, and Scholars (1951), written by the Czech journalist C.W. Ceram (pseudonym for Kurt Marek). The continuing demand for works of this type is demonstrated by the success of Brian Fagan’s The Rape of the Nile (1975).
Some popular histories of archaeology have sought to do more than entertain. Stanley Casson’s Progress of Archaeology (1934) attempted to provide a balanced survey of the development of archaeology while the Assyriologist Seton Lloyd’s Foundations in the Dust (1947; 2d ed., 1981) recounted the history of Mesopotamian archaeology in a manner that was of interest to professional archaeologists as well as to the general reader. Both Geoffrey Bibby’s The Testimony of the Spade (1956), which dealt with European archaeology, and Michael Hoffman’s Egypt before the Pharaohs (1979) sought not only to provide regional histories of archaeological research but also to explain to readers how archaeology was carried out. The Egyptologist John Wilson’s Signs and Wonders upon Pharaoh (1964) was a celebration of American contributions to Egyptian archaeology and Egyptology, while Jeremy Sabloff’s The New Archaeology and the Ancient Maya (1990) sought to explain to nonarchaeologists how processual archaeology has provided more superior insights into the ancient maya civilization than did culture-historical archaeology.
In England, there has long been a receptive audience for popular biographies of archaeologists. These stress personal life and social contacts more than the intellectual context and scholarly contributions of their subjects. One of the earliest and best of these was Joan Evans’s Time and Chance (1943), which recounted the lives of her father, john evans, and her brother arthur evans. More recent examples include Jacquetta Hawkes’s Mortimer Wheeler, Adventurer in Archaeology (1982), H.V.F. Winstone’s Woolley of Ur (1990), and, from the United States, J.J. Thompson’s Sir Gardner Wilkinson and his Circle (1992). Personal and professional disputes are aired in autobiographies such as w. m. f. petrie’s Seventy Years in Archaeology (1931) and mary leakey’s Disclosing the Past (1984). Popular anthologies of archaeological literature include Edward Bacon’s The Great Archaeologists (1976), a collection of articles from the Illustrated London News describing major finds between 1842 and 1970, and Jacquetta Hawkes’s two-volume The World of the Past (1963), which contains excerpts from the publications of archaeologists who had worked around the world arranged geographically.
A final genre is the history of archaeological institutions pioneered by Joan Evans’s A History of the Society of Antiquaries (1956) and exemplified more recently at its best by The Scottish Antiquarian Tradition (1981), a history of the society of antiquaries of scotland edited by A.S. Bell.
The principal characteristic of popular histories of archaeology is their emphasis on spectacular discoveries. The archaeologists who feature prominently in them include many individuals, such as howard carter, who made celebrated discoveries but contributed little to the intellectual development of archaeology. On the other hand, archaeologists whose ideas played a major role in shaping the discipline, such as oscar montelius, vere gordon childe, and grahame clark, are rarely mentioned in such works. To take account of the contributions of such individuals required the development of a more strictly professional history of archaeology.
The modern scholarly history of archaeology began in England in the late 1930s, as a growing awareness of generational differences among professional archaeologists and the accumulation of a corpus of essential literature revealed changes in the conceptual basis of prehistory. A few far-sighted prehistoric archaeologists became convinced that knowing the reasons for the decline of evolutionary explanations of the
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