Interest in the classical world also stimulated an interest in the standing monuments of Europe—the henges, hill forts, and ancient churches—particularly by scholars who could not afford the cost of travel to Mediterranean Europe (Daniel 1975, 22). A romantic, barbarian past was created, bound up with an interest in natural history as taught by the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.

By the late eighteenth century, antiquarian interest had extended to the excavation of Roman and pre-Roman remains, but as the Danish scholar rasmus nyerup bemoaned, the past seemed to be wrapped in a thick fog and was a period for which no measure of time was available (Daniel 1975, 38). Some indication of the problem can be gauged from john frere’s 1797 account of flint artifacts buried with bones of extinct animals. He illustrated two pieces, now recognized as hand-axes, and commented that they came from “a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world” (cited in Grayson 1983, 57). However, while Frere appeared to argue for the existence of people who lived in a world not yet in its modern form (Grayson 1983, 59), it is likely that his notions of past times were simply those of the book of Genesis (Sackett 2000). The artifacts he had found had belonged to people who had lost the art of metalworking during the time before the biblical great flood and they, like the animals whose bones lay with their artifacts, had succumbed to the deluge.

Frere, like his contemporaries, faced the problem of imagining a history unrelated to that described in the records of the classical writers (Sackett 2000). Celtic-speaking Gauls, as described in the texts, might populate Europe, but if other societies had existed in the past, it was hard to imagine what they might have been like or when they might have existed. Frere lacked a method for recognizing that similar types of artifacts and monuments cluster in time and space and that a culture history could be constructed from this information. It took sixty years for such methods to be developed and the significance of his finds to be recognized.

The method that Frere lacked was developed by christian thomsen, curator of the Danish National Museum. Thomsen sorted artifacts according to the material from which they were made. Although this was not a new technique (the historian Vedel-Simonsen had already proposed such a method [Daniel 1975, 40]), under Thomsen the technique won wide acceptance. Not only could artifacts be separated by raw materials, but the groups of artifacts that resulted suggested to another Danish archaeologist, sven nilsson, that an age of stone was followed by an age of bronze and then by an age of iron (Daniel 1975, 42). Nilsson found functional analogues for antiquities in the objects used by modern-day peoples outside Europe (Daniel 1975, 48).

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideal of universal human progress seemed to have a material representation, one that the archaeologist jens jacob worsaae was able to establish in stratigraphic excavations using the recently established laws of superimposition. Materials changed through time but so did artifact form and decoration. Nilsson and Worsaae applied the methods of Linnaeus to artifacts and thereby developed the forerunner to the typological method as well as seriation (Daniel 1975, 47). Worsaae’s Copenhagen museum guide of 1836 was probably the most important archaeological work produced in the first half of the nineteenth century since it laid down the principles of a prehistoric archaeology (Daniel 1975, 45).

One of the reasons why Frere’s discovery of 1797 caused so little comment was that scholars had been attempting to identify humans contemporary with the biblical flood for many years (Schnapp and Kristiansen 1999). The evidence for human antiquity existed, but the concepts and methods needed to make sense of it were not in place until midway through the nineteenth century. First, it was critical that artifacts be recognized for what they were: the product of human modification of natural materials. Human remains were also potentially important, but compared to artifacts, such remains are rare in the archaeological record. Although differentiating artifacts from natural objects continued to be a problem in some cases, artifacts were recognized as such by the end of the eighteenth century, at least partly as a result of European worldwide colonization and parallels between