the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes in the Somme had convinced him of high human antiquity. Evans read a similar paper to the society of antiquaries of london (Daniel 1975, 58). A number of French scholars supported the British proposals. édouard lartet, for instance, almost immediately thereafter published the results of a study of cut marks on the bones of extinct animals that suggested the presence of humans in the remote past. The speed of his publication suggested that he had accepted high human antiquity sometime before the 1859 consensus (Sackett 2000).

The year 1859 also marked the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, but the two events were not connected. Darwin’s theory of evolution to explain human ancestry was owing to Thomas Henry Huxley, who had published Man’s Place in Nature in 1863 (Daniel 1975, 65), and Darwin’s theory dealt with descent with modification, that is, successive generations of a species over time change in form, character, and behavior. The establishment of high human antiquity demonstrated that humans, like other animal species, had a long history on earth, which inevitably led to questions about the nature of human evolution.

The intellectual climate had changed considerably before 1859 as a result of debates between supporters of monogenesis and polygenesis. Those who supported a theory of monogenesis suggested that all humans belonged to a single species, and this was the prevailing view during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, after the 1840s, scholars who believed in multiple human species, or polygenesis, were able to use archaeological discoveries made in Egypt to argue that different human races were in existence as early as 2500 b.c. If a pre-1859 biblical chronology was accepted for the antiquity of humanity, there remained insufficient time for human racial differences to occur. Morton was able to use this evidence in support of the case of polygenesis (Grayson 1983, 158). In attempting to refute this position, monogenesists like Pickard were forced to abandon the biblical chronology to provide sufficient time for the development of racial differences. Therefore, well before 1859, many scholars were convinced that the Bible was inadequate as a source for determining human antiquity.

Early Years of the Discipline: 1860–1880

Three challenges dominated archaeological research following the acceptance of high human antiquity: establishing the validity of the three-age system; explaining progress in terms of economic, social, and political factors; and relating patterns of technological change in the archaeological record to human evolution.

French archaeologists proposed two ages of stone, the période de la pierre taillée (flaked-stone tools) and the période de la pierre polie (polished-stone tools), and these periods were adopted by Sir John Lubbock (lord avebury) in his book Pre-historic Times (1865). He applied the term Paleolithic to the period when artifacts were deposited with the remains of mammoths, cave bears, and rhinoceros, and the term Neolithic was applied to the period when polished stone artifacts were made. Such technological changes could be demonstrated through stratigraphic excavation and showed a pattern of increasing complexity through time—thus illustrating the universality of human progress.

By the 1860s, the twofold division had been increased to four based on the excavations of Lartet and henry christy in the Dordogne region of southern france (Lartet and Christy 1865–1875), where Lartet provided stratigraphic evidence for their existence based on associated animal remains. The cave period of the aurochs, or bison, was preceded by the reindeer period, the woolly mammoth and rhinoceros period, and finally the cave-bear period. To these Garrigou added earlier periods based on the presence of warm climate fauna. Finds from the Somme River gravel terraces associated with such fauna suggested that the people there lived mainly in open sites. The great bear and mammoth periods were characterized by both rock-shelter and open-site deposits (Daniel 1975, 100).

In his use of paleontological categories as a basis for organizing archaeological materials, Lartet was well ahead of his time (Daniel 1975, 101). Indeed, the book by Lartet and Christy (1865–1875) on their Dordogne research reads