modern “primitive” peoples and prehistoric Europeans (Trigger 1989, 52).

Second, stratigraphy and the law of superimposition were essential concepts if a method were to be developed that could be used to order events that had occurred in the past. This method was also in place by the end of the eighteenth century. However, the ordering of levels on their own provided only localized sequences, and the third method to be developed linked strata identified in different places according to their fossil content. English geologist William Smith assigned relative ages to rocks based on their fossil contents in 1816 and argued for orderly deposition over a long period of time, but the great French anatomist, Georges Cuvier, who collected and described fossil animals at the end of the eighteenth century, had laid the basis for the approach (Schnapp and Kristiansen 1999).

The fourth method was based on the recognition that geological deposits in Europe contained both the remains of extinct animals and artifacts of human manufacture. Cuvier recognized the former based on his discoveries in the Paris basin, and he proposed that the earth had passed through a series of stages in which every successive landscape and plant and animal community was replaced by another, each one coming closer to the modern world (Sackett 2000). Each stage was separated by a geological catastrophe with people present only in the most recent period—the Holocene (from 10,000 years ago). This scheme was the one into which evidence for human antiquity was fitted during the first half of the nineteenth century. Cuvier estimated that the last catastrophe, which separated the Pleistocene from the Holocene, was dated some 5,000–6,000 years ago. At the hands of British geologists—first Jameson, then Parkinson, and finally Buckland—this final catastrophe quickly became associated with the biblical flood (Grayson 1983, 59). Thus, in Great Britain, more so than in Continental Europe, the lack of human remains until the Holocene period took on theological as well as geological significance (Grayson 1983, 98).

Opposition to the catastrophist theories of Cuvier and Buckland can be found in the work of James Hutton, who published the forerunner of a uniformitarian theory in 1785 (Daniel 1975, 37). However, the development of an effective alternative to catastrophism is associated with charles lyell, who argued during the early nineteenth century that the processes responsible for the formation of the geological record operated in a uniform way and at a uniform rate (Daniel 1975, 38). Catastrophes were unnecessary to explain the history of the world, for the conditions existing in the past were essentially the same as those that existed in modern times. Therefore, the deposits that william buckland attributed to the flood were the result of geological processes operating over a long period of time, and the extinction of animals whose bones appeared in these deposits must also have occurred in the remote past (Grayson 1983, 82).

However, Lyell did not accept a great antiquity for humanity. Like the catastrophists, he supported a notion that humans are unique in the world and appeared late in its history (Sackett 2000). In fact, by removing the link between deposits containing the remains of extinct animals on the one hand and the biblical concept of the flood on the other, Lyell removed the need to discover human remains dating from the period after Adam and Eve had been expelled into the world but before the deluge (Grayson 1983, 70). The remains of extinct animals now suggested a much older age for the premodern world than had been previously imagined. If humans appeared only in the modern world, their remains should not appear in ancient deposits, and those few instances that appeared to contradict this position were dismissed as the result of a fluvial mixing of deposits—a particular problem in limestone caves (Grayson 1983, 71).

Geological deposits with the remains of extinct animals occur in three forms in Europe: caves, rock shelters, and gravel terraces (Sackett 2000). Of the three, caves (i.e., large cavities in limestone bedrock) were the most often investigated in the first half of the nineteenth century. These frequently contained substantial deposits of animal bones but only limited artifacts. More substantial artifact deposits awaited archaeological research on the rock overhangs in the limestone cliffs running along the valley