past and their replacement by culture-historical ones was essential for understanding what was happening in their discipline. Following a lull during World War II, this sort of investigation has since increased exponentially and has spread around the world.

The original studies tended to be strongly influenced by British intellectual historians who, inspired by such works as Christopher Hussey’s The Picturesque (1927) and Kenneth Clark’s The Gothic Revival (1928), sought to relate changes in a literary and artistic fashion to shifts in the broader history of ideas. Many of these historians stressed rationalism and romanticism as alternating views of reality that influenced the understanding of human behavior. Historians of archaeology were also strongly influenced by the philosopherR.G. Collingwood’s subjectivism, which denied that there could be any definitive version of the past since the past existed only as it was relived in the minds of individual historians and their readers. This idea encouraged the archaeological historians, like the historians who were disciples of Leopold von Ranke, to believe that the core of their discipline was the data they collected and that the interpretation of these data was little more than an expression of personal opinion. Many of these pioneering studies also surveyed their subject matter on a grand scale.

The first major study was Stanley Casson’s The Discovery of Man (1939), which was written to justify an already moribund evolutionary archaeology. Casson sought to trace how from earliest times humanity had struggled against ignorance and superstition in an effort to understand itself more objectively. This struggle reached a new and definitive stage in the nineteenth century when evolutionism transformed and unified the study of human beings. Although only archaeology could trace humanity’s physical and cultural development, it depended heavily on ethnology for an understanding of human behavior. Although Casson maintained that both disciplines were influenced by broader intellectual trends, he defined these trends vaguely. They often amounted to little more than a zeitgeist, such as the spirit of intellectual freedom that allegedly arose from the discovery of the New World.

The systematic study of the history of archaeology was initiated and for several decades guided by glyn daniel. His work The Three Ages (1943) launched research that culminated in A Hundred Years of Archaeology (1950; 2d ed., 1975), the most comprehensive history of archaeology until recently. Daniel maintained that changes in archaeology occurred gradually and largely adventitiously. He accorded great importance to the expanding database and to the role played by new scientific techniques, especially radiocarbon dating, in shaping the development of archaeology. Yet he maintained that archaeological interpretation was mainly influenced by randomly shifting intellectual fashions and therefore refused to assign absolute validity to any theory that purported to explain the past. The main lesson to be learned from studying the history of archaeology was that “the final truth” of any given period breaks down as new facts accumulate and new explanations are developed. Still, the main theme of his book was the rise and decline of evolutionary interpretations and their replacement by a culture-historical perspective.

Daniel clearly favored a culture-historical orientation, arguing that without it archaeology would decline into a new object-oriented antiquarianism. Although he sought to write a general history of European archaeology, his main emphasis was on the period from 1840 to 1900. He felt less confident about his ability to view the twentieth century objectively, and his account of it remained largely a catalog of discoveries.

Earlier phases in the history of British archaeology were studied by sir thomas kendrick, whose British Antiquity (1950) interpreted the development of antiquarianism during the Tudor period as a triumph of renaissance over medieval thought, and Michael Hunter, whose John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (1975) sought to demonstrate how aubrey’s archaeological research was shaped by the Baconian principles being promoted by the Royal Society of London. stuart piggott, in his magisterial William Stukeley (1950; 2d ed., 1985), argued that a general shift from rationalism to romanticism among British intellectuals accounted for what he saw as that antiquarian’s