J World Prehist (2008) 21:1–18

DOI 10.1007/s10963-008-9011-1

EDITORIAL

Prehistory vs. Archaeology: Terms of Engagement

Timothy Taylor

Published online: 31 May 2008

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008

…we will gain by being forced to realize and understand the coeval nature of
prehistory with the present
Christopher Matthews 2007, ‘History to Prehistory: an archaeology of being Indian’
Editing the Journal of World Prehistory entails a vision of a field of study, to be shared
or challenged, and certainly developed, by contributors and readers, supported by
institutions. Yet prehistory is a complex, loaded term, understood variously; and aspiring
to a global mission raises questions of the form, and even desirability, of contributions to
‘grand narrative.’ Is archaeology something distinctly other than prehistory? And is
world prehistory a single subject—essentially the biggest area-period available to
archaeologists and fellow travellers—or a practice, ideally characterized by some total-
izing theory?
David Clarke wrote that ‘A modern empirical discipline ought to be able to aim at more
rewarding results than the maintenance of … a steady flow of counterfeit history books’
(Clarke 1978, p. 1), and it seemed very clear to him that ‘archaeology is archaeology is
archaeology’. When done analytically, it could contribute to an interpretive picture that
might be a source for writing prehistory, or even history, but it was—or should be—
disciplinarily distinct. More recently, Richard Bradley, decrying a ‘loss of nerve’ among
archaeologists, has insisted that we must ‘aspire to write human history’ (1993, p. 131).
And, outlining the emerging theory of ‘materiality’, I have described artefacts as ‘social
things that yet survive’, and therefore entities with a potential for ‘eroding Clarke’s
politely drawn but never wholly convincing distinction between archaeology as a study of
artifacts and prehistory as a form of history made possible by it’ (Taylor 2008, p. 315). I
will return to this later, but note that, at least from outside our discipline(s), descriptions of
what we do, and its preferred terminologies, may be confusing. Are they actually
confused?

T. Taylor (&)
University of Bradford, Bradford, UK
e-mail: timftaylor@googlemail.com

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In Search of Boundaries

Perhaps the painful truth, masked for many of us by vocational familiarity, is that neither
prehistory nor archaeology is a self-evident field to a broader public. Fossils, cave men,
Roman forts, Inca sacrifices, flint choppers and pyramids may be palaeontology, prehis-
tory, archaeology, cultural anthropology, antiquarianism and/or history. They may merge
in popular conceptions, be confused by academics in non-cognate fields, or conflated in the
brutally-concertina’d timeframes of religious fundamentalists. Palaeontology (with, in
common parlance, its ‘prehistoric monsters’) is an aspect of natural history, while pre-
history-plus-hominins begins to include cultural history too and, proximally, the reflexive
history of prehistory itself, or how what Glyn Daniel reminded us was a ‘back-looking
curiosity’ came to develop into a series of distinct subjects. Daniel was not especially
careful in separating them: Leo Klejn asserts that, by his 1962 title The Idea of Prehistory,
‘he just meant archaeology’ (Klejn 1995, p. 40). We could leave it there, and simply do
what we do. But if we want to be supported in our endeavours, we must have vision; pre-
eminently, a vision based on an understanding of how our scholarship has arisen in its own
past. And we must confront the fact that there is more than one conception of prehistory in
the historiography of our discipline(s). There have been vast conceptual differences within
Europe alone (Biehl et al. 2002, p. 26).
First used in English by Daniel Wilson in 1851 (Trigger 2006, p. 133), ‘prehistory’ was
long prefigured. As Zdeněk Vašı́ček has shown, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in
Europe produced a number of formulations for a far-distant past: the most remote Age of
Man in 1677; le premier Age du Monde in 1730; älteste Geschichte in 1774; le monde
primitif in 1776; and the terms Vorwelt and Urwelt in 1785 (Vašı́ček 1994, p. 21). Peter
Rowley-Conwy, in From Genesis to Prehistory, has shown that the term forhistorisk was
used by Hans Mollbeck in lectures as early as 1833 (Rowley-Conwy 2007, p. 44; see also
2006). This was the same year that ante´-historique appeared in a work on bone caves by
Paul Tournal (Tournal 1833; see also Grayson 1990). Yet these uses were preceded by
Vorgeschichte (pre-history) in 1818 and Urgeschichte (primal or primitive history, con-
cerned with origins) as early as 1790 (Vašı́ček 1994, p.21); either one of these was
typically paired with Frühgeschichte (early history), usually meaning Early Medieval
archaeology (for a detailed discussion of these terms and their methodological and theo-
retical contents see Eggert 2001, 2006).
Klejn notes that many German university institutions in which the collocation ‘Ur- und
Frühgeschichte’ appears have tended to focus solely on archaeology (Klejn 1995, p. 40)—
to which one might add that, until a decade ago, it was an essentially asocial archaeology
principally comprising refinements in typology. Practice was actually similar to David
Clarke’s conception of an analytical archaeology, but with a different, often implicit,
theoretical framework; it is clear that this ‘escape into supposedly ‘‘objective’’ scholarship’
was a reflex of both Nazism and the subsequent ideological demands of the communist
DDR and Eastern Bloc in general (Marciniak 2006, p. 159).
All the above terms were first developed with the more or less specific aim of providing
a narrative of ‘what happened’ during Old Testament times in non-Bible lands through the
assessment of antiquities in the ground. Thus C.J. Thomsen, responsible from 1816
onwards for the cataloguing of the artefacts held by the Danish Royal Commission for the
Preservation and Collection of Antiquities, could be seen to be at once developing key
procedures for a new discipline through the concept of the seriation of closed finds,
allowing the famous tripartite Stone Age via Bronze Age to Iron Age system (Petersen and
Thomsen 1837, although independently developed in Germany by Danneil 1836; see

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Hansen 2001), and continuing to respect the then conventional church chronology of
Creation. Put another way (pace Masterman 1970), Thomsen may have created a new
construct paradigm, which was essentially archaeological, but he left the metaphysical
paradigm of (religious) history intact, along with its attendant sociological paradigm.
Ironically, there was (and still is) rather little to observe in Scandinavian archaeological
contexts that necessitates forcing the chronological envelope wider than what seemed an
ample 6,000 years.
Yet in the gravel beds of the Atlantic west of Europe, precedence was accorded to the
construct realm. Through dependence on logical, parsimonious (uniformitarian), and thus
scientific, reasoning, a deep prehistory emerged to challenge ‘para-Biblical’ or ‘histori-
cally-pegged’ prehistories. Indeed, Vašı́ček notes that a concept of prehistory was
articulated as early as 1795 by Condorcet, who was able to ‘distingue déjà dix stades de
développement, dont trois préhistoriques (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progre`s de
l’esprit humain)’; considered along with Ferguson’s 1792, essentially sociological, clas-
sification of successive periods of ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’, Condorcet
created both a phasing and an essential mode of expression for prehistory as a discipline
(Vašı́ček 1994, p. 40). The same shift was famously signalled in England in 1797, when
John Frere sent some flint artefacts to the secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London
with a letter suggesting that their situation (stratigraphic context) ‘may tempt us to refer
them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world’ (Frere 1800).
The rise of evolutionary thinking in the century that followed revolutionized discourse
about the past, while destabilizing history as a unitary concept in a way that has continuing
resonance. Thus, as Bruce Trigger pointed out in relation to disciplinary styles in North
America, ‘Prehistoric archaeology has been characterized by dramatic oscillations between
evolutionary and anti-evolutionary perspectives and by a general failure to recognize that
history and evolution are complementary rather than antithetical concepts’ (1989, p. 19).
The history of scholarship relating to prehistory and archaeology reveals a very wide
range of explicit and implied definitions. This is unsurprising when the subject matter
concerns not merely ourselves, the nature of humanity and its grades, biological, cultural,
and social, but also the development of a form of knowledge that is independent of, and
could be said to circumvent, self-consciously produced history—less history’s ‘hand-
maiden’, more its unwelcome spoiler. We are concerned with recovering events, structures,
intentions and values from a record that, while it may sometimes have been intended as
expressive (carrying meanings to ancestors, enemies, gods and so on), was never expected
to be subject to scrutiny and revision. This contrasts with historians’ history, with its
embedded defence of versions which we discern from the time of Herodotus onward. But
then, as Foucault wrote in L’Arche´ologie du savoir, history has also diversified in its
sources (1969, p. 15).
Different intellectual traditions, and different dimensions of operation, enabled and
constrained by politics, funding, public interest, religion and the varying nature of the
archaeological record itself, colour outlook, terminology, theory and practice. So although
an inclusive geography does not appear to pose special issues of a theoretical nature
(promising instead practical and methodological challenges), in terms of representative-
ness, linguistic biases, the incommensurability of certain disciplinary terms and so on, it
rapidly becomes clear that the World part of our journal’s title does indeed have theoretical
content. Frere’s use of ‘the present world’ is inherently comparativist and signals the broad
scope of a discipline whose formation at that stage lay very largely ahead. It echoes with
this journal’s mission to work within a (broadly) enlightenment perspective and understand
humanity universally, that is, throughout time and globally.

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A fair representation of human prehistory in terms of content presupposes a project with

inherent comparative aspects—a series of updates, footnotes, errata, appendices and even
new chapters added to, or modifying, the kinds of overview provided by Grahame Clark in
World Prehistory (1977, originally 1961). We may note at the outset that Clark’s seminal
volume, like the more recent edited volume The Human Past (Scarre 2005), did not stop
with the start of state-level societies and the emergence of writing, with its consequent
historical dimension (sensu strictu), but incorporated a wide range of data on early empires.
Clark explicitly addressed the question of scope and limits in the third edition of World
Prehistory, asking where his book should begin and end. In terms of a start, he recognized
that ‘To a thorough-going evolutionist there can be no logical point of departure’, while an
empirical convention for archaeologists was to notice the first appearance of ‘implements
and tools made to standard patterns’ (Clark 1977, p. xvii). The end point was harder to grasp,
‘equally a matter of convention’ for Clark, as ‘history is nothing if not continuous’. Given
that written records apply only for the last few millennia and then only for a minute area,
‘almost the whole of human history is prehistoric in the technical sense … vast territories
remained ‘‘prehistoric’’ until ‘‘discovered’’ by western man in recent centuries. Indeed, the
remoter parts of territories like Australia, New Guinea or Brazil remained outside the range
of recorded history until our own generation’ (Clark 1977, p. xvii).
To this we could add the conceptions of Eric Wolf’s People Without History (1982),
and, more particularly, Elizabeth Scott’s Those of Little Note (1994), which make a case
for tracking through their physical residues and material products those whom written
history overlooks. Archaeology, by this token, would run partly in parallel with written
history, and provide accounts of phenomena that precede it, including those in the form of
historical narratives sensu lato (that is, prehistory sensu strictu), but also supply sources for
thicker and even alternative narratives in historically-documented periods. Anglo-Saxon
archaeology might be a good case in point, as the extent to which it is held within or
beholden to an overarching framework created by fully coherent written annals is highly
questionable. Is there, then, a sense in which Anglo-Saxon archaeology provides a ‘pre-
history’ for a significant amount of human existence in space and time that is more or less
identical in form to recognizable prehistory? For Clark, clearly, the answer was yes. His
book deals with Anglo-Saxons and Vikings (1977, p. 202ff) as part of European later Iron
Age societies, and he only signals ‘the end of European prehistory’ (p. 206ff) with the
establishment of Genoese trade relations with China by AD 1260. The counterpart to this is
his later section on ‘Indo-Chinese civilization’, which ends up dealing with the mid-third
century AD kingdom of Fou Nan, the Khmer, and their succession by Sukhodaya, who
founded modern Thailand around 1292 AD (1977, p. 347ff).
Scarre’s Human Past nuances the boundary between prehistory and the historical
periods in its subtitle World prehistory and the development of human societies. More
tentative about endings than Clark, it barely allows itself to run past AD 300 in Europe, and
rapidly terminates the narrative with the crowning of Charlemagne as ‘Emperor of all the
Romans’ in AD 800. Where Clark came up to AD 1933 in the vast archipelago off Tierra
del Fuego, comparing a photograph of a Yahgan canoe Indian using a harpoon with
stratified archaeological versions of a similar ‘prehistoric’ artefact from Englefield Island,
Scarre’s volume effectively ends with the Spanish conquests in the Americas. Clark’s
(never explicit) choice in abandoning ‘prehistory’ in any area of the globe not only at the
point of a clear onset of a wide range of historical sources, but with the emergence of a
tradition of self-conscious and increasingly self-reflective and critical history, contiguous
with particular national presents (essentially the dawn of historiography in various
regions), seemed to make good sense.

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Excavating History

Mention of historiography brings us neatly to Robin Collingwood, whose profound and

provocative considerations of the nature of historical knowledge and the place of
archaeology in relation to it, made from a dual scholarly position as both a philosopher and
an archaeologist of Roman Britain, are known, typically, only in caricature. In a section at
the start of The Idea of History (1946) titled ‘history’s nature, object, method, and value’,
Collingwood without demur defines history as science: ‘all science begins from the
knowledge of our own ignorance: not our ignorance of everything, but our ignorance of
some definite thing—the origin of parliament, the cause of cancer, the chemical compo-
sition of the sun, the way to make a pump work without muscular exertion on the part of a
man or a horse or some other docile animal. Science is finding things out: and in that sense
history is science.’ It is worth noting in this connection that perceptions of antagonism
between history/archaeology as humanities disciplines and, say, physics, as a science, arise
only in part from the ‘post-modern’ or ‘post-processual’ movement of recent years (though
in itself all the more curious given Foucault’s unambiguous delineation of history as a
science too, not to mention his antagonism towards anthropology). The fault line has also
been stressed from the opposite side, by what I have termed ‘explanatory tyranny’, where
science is perceived (wrongly) as requiring a specific form of explanation based on ex-
perimento-predictive work within a predominantly hypothetico-deductive framework. The
historical sciences, by which is meant those forms of inquiry with an ontologically unique,
significantly non-replicable dimension (much evolutionary biology, cosmology, and pre-
history), are characterized by a different kind of less determinate, less emphatically causal,
form of explanation of phenomena—‘how … possibly’, rather than ‘why … necessarily’
(Taylor 2001).
Explanatory tyranny comes in many forms, including what Martin Wobst, at a time when
the New Archaeology was still trying to find its feet, called ‘ethno-tyranny’ (1978); yet the
subsequent divergence of theoretically engaged forms of ethnoarchaeology, ethnohistory
and historical archaeology often served to undermine confidence in general theory in
archaeology (see Maclachlan and Keegan 1990). More recently, we can see the hypnotic
power of ethnography disrupted from two directions: for example, in Andean scholarship,
there is now mature critical appreciation of the background contradictions of texts if all are
taken ‘at face value’ (Pillsbury 2008), while interdisciplinary archaeology supports some
text-based inferences while challenging or confuting others (Wilson et al. 2007). Similar
processes are underway in Africa (Lane 2005). In Australia, a relatively simple division
between a ‘deep’ prehistory grading into a more recent prehistory, in turn informed by the
direct historical record, began to be undermined by the realization that aboriginal societies
that were apparently ‘prehistoric’ had already been profoundly restructured by disease
vectors travelling ahead of actual culture-contact (Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999, p. 4);
this, and the successful development of interdisciplinary, science-based approaches, has
now allowed archaeology to shape our primary understanding of Australian history sensu
lato, tracking 50,000 years of more or less continuous change (Hiscock 2008).
The European three age system has been adopted in India, the Near East and elsewhere
(with terms dropped and combined, with varying usefulness), and retained more often for
earlier periods, as reflected in JWP issues passim (Fuller 2006; Asouti 2006). In Western
Asian archaeology, the issue of ‘prehistory’ can sit uncomfortably: to name archaeology
‘prehistoric’ on sites without, say cuneiform tablets, and ‘proto-historic’ when levels with
such artefacts are found, is not a particularly useful activity. And, notwithstanding the
continuing place of textual scholarship, it is again archaeology that is leading the way in

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the production of new knowledge (see Matthews 2003, Ur et al. 2007). In China, stone
ages of more or less familiar structure are followed by the Bronze Age and then the Shang
and subsequent dynastic history. But the shift from prehistoric to early historic is cross-cut
by distinctive, pervasive and long-lived classes of evidence, such as the oracle bones used
for divination, often thought of as mainly inscribed but more often plain, both in the pre-
literate and literate epochs (Flad, forthcoming). New approaches in Japan challenge tra-
ditional zoned treatments of the early prehistoric—later prehistoric—protohistoric
sequence (Palaeolithic—Jomon—Yayoi—Kofun), and signal a more theoretically engaged
and integrated social archaeology (Mizoguchi 2002; Habu 2004).
Since Clark, we have become much more aware of the extent to which history, sensu
strictu, is patchy. Thus Hicks and Beaudry, in their editorial introduction to the Cambridge
Companion to Historical Archaeology, write ‘Rather than claiming that historical
archaeology is the study of ‘‘people with history’’ … we use the term historical to refer
broadly to the post-1500 period, strongly resisting any attempt to separate the field from
the archaeology of earlier periods’ (2006, p. 2).
For Collingwood, history’s subject is ‘the actions of human beings that have been done
in the past’ (deeds or, as Collingwood puts it, with a legal evidential connotation, res
gestae); its procedure or method ‘consists essentially of interpreting evidence’; and its
value ‘is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is’ (1946, p. 9f). History
is a discipline independent of the forms of materials it deals with, textual, artefactual,
palaeoclimatological or genetic.
Collingwood cites as an example a third millennium BC Sumerian text describing a
conflict between the rulers of Kish, Lagash and Umma, mediated by the gods: from it we
learn of the removal of a stela inscribed by Mesilim, the king of Kush; a conflict with Ush,
the isag of Umma; and of enemies laid low and funerary tells placed in their stead upon the
plains. But this is not an historical text (‘The ancient Sumerians left behind them nothing
that we should call history’) though it can be used as historical evidence. As Collingwood
explains:
‘a modern historian with his eye fixed on human res gestae can interpret it as actions
done by Mesilim and Ush and their subjects. But it only acquires its character as
historical evidence posthumously, as it were, in virtue of our own historical attitude
towards it; in the same way in which prehistoric flints or Roman pottery acquire the
posthumous character of historical evidence, not because the men who made them
thought of them as historical evidence, but because we think of them as historical
evidence’ (Collingwood 1946, p. 12).
When Arthur Evans excavated at Knossos, he was investigating prehistory but, in
uncovering the Linear B tablets, he also uncovered a potential history: archaeological
objects with recognizable, though at first indecipherable, writing on them. The implication
was that Minoan civilization might have had its own history, in the sense of chronologi-
cally ordered records of aspects of human activity, whether thought or action, as well as
being about to have a writable history for us, in terms of some exegesis of the list of
Minoan expressions and relationships for which evidence emerged, allowing us access to
past thoughts (see Burns 2005). After Michael Ventris discerned a dialect of Ancient Greek
in ‘the mysterious writing used by this fabulous people of prehistory’ (as Chadwick has it:
1967, p. 1), he was able to read sentences such as ‘At Pylos: slaves of the priestess on
account of sacred gold: 14 women’. Precisely what such aide me´moires referred to remains
as enigmatic as some fragment of semi-literate graffiti from a North American contact
context (a deliberate parallel to ‘those of little note’ sensu Scott 1994).

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However semantically obscure, the Linear B tablets, as they became readable, went
from being primarily archaeological artefacts to being primarily historical texts, a shift that
‘provided the dumb monuments of prehistoric Greece with a linguistic commentary’ and
provided for the Greek language ‘a continuous recorded history totalling thirty-three
centuries’ (Chadwick 1967, p. 133). The Aegean Bronze Age thus became, along one
trajectory at least, ‘more historical’ than its preceding Neolithic, or the British Bronze Age,
but remained ‘less historical’ than Classical Greece, which is, in its turn, less historical
than modern Britain. The complexity of this, passing on into the late Antique and, even-
tually, the Age of Philip II, inspired Braudel and others to develop that distinctive style of
historical thinking along parallel scales of different magnitude known as Les Annales, with
its significant influence on the recent disciplinary history of Mediterranean archaeology
(Bintliff 1991; Knapp 1992).
How the rhythms of the past were conceived at the time of Linear B is uncertain, but the
ancient Greek a9qvaiokoci9a meant a discourse on things that were primal in the sense of
being at least outwith living memory. I nearly wrote ‘outwith historical purview’, but
‘history’ for the same Greeks meant no more than some sort of ‘researches’ into the prior
conditions of any present situation; Herodotus used it in this sense in his monumental
History, fusing what we would now understand as folklore with documentary and epi-
graphic records, sociological observations, ethnography, comparative anthropology, a little
travelogue, political and economic analyses, and gossip. In that, like Collingwood, he was
interested to discern res gestae, or what had actually happened. The nature of the sources
was of secondary importance to the critical analysis required to interpret them securely. It
is therefore no surprise that we find, among early uses of the word ‘archaeology’ in
English, this from the 1803 volume of the journal Archæologia XIV: ‘The contents of the
Archaiology of Wales are derived from … old manuscripts’ (p. 211).

The Sense of BC

There is no space here to examine how the archaeological metaphor was adopted and
developed in realms of endeavour such as art history (Panofsky), psychoanalysis (Freud) or
history (Foucault), except to note that the latter produced a coherent ‘archaeological
framework’ for nineteenth-century thought within which a significant part of the devel-
opment of prehistory itself must be nested (Foucault 1970, p. 286). The most obvious badge
of prehistory to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century, especially in Europe, was the
use of ‘BC’ as a way of signalling something, broadly speaking, that occurred before the
Romans, whose names we know and whose laws became ours (in short, a people who made
good use of historians and historical writing). Like in the movies, ‘BC’ does enough on its
own to suggest prehistory, as in Francis Pryor’s Britain BC (2000), reviving a title first used
by Winbolt in 1945. ‘AD’, by contrast, marks the commencement of potential enlighten-
ment by ‘the word’. It is a period in which religions of the book increasingly had the
potential to, and increasingly did, spread around the globe. The BC/AD convention was
initially a product of the early part of that period, from at least the time of Victor of Tunnena
in the sixth century AD, whose Chronicon, although not published from its manuscript
versions until 1861 by Theodor Mommsen, inserted Jesus’ birth (incorrectly calculated as it
would later turn out) as pivot within the established year-on-year chronologies that stretched
back as far as Romulus and Remus and the foundation of Rome.
For short-chronology Creationists, ‘BC’ does not so much mean prehistory as the literal
Biblical history from Adam and Eve to the nativity. This is a very short period in the

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prehistorian’s perception, delineated for many Muslims, Christians, and Jews primarily by
the lifespans of the patriarchs, the lists of their male progeny, a few ethnic movements and
a limited number of natural disasters. At the time that antiquarian pursuits were quickening
in Britain, the nascent discipline of archaeology had to vie with the temporal estimates of
Christian theologians such as James Ussher. By tweaking the degrees of freedom latent in
the historical genealogies of the Old Testament, a start date for all history could be
calculated, ascribing a perfect four millennia before the birth-date of Jesus (Daniel 1967, p.
110; Trigger 2006, p. 50); this allowed six millennium-long ‘divine’ days (echoing the six
days of creation) before the Day of Judgement (looming around the year AD 2000). It is
less well remembered that by Ussher’s time, the perfect date had already been undermined
by the revised calculation of Jesus’ birth-year to 4 BC, necessitating the inelegant back
shift of ‘Day One’ to four thousand and four BC.
Read one way (and setting aside plausible theories about early mistranslations and a
consequent inflation of integer values), the suspiciously-stretched lifespans of the patri-
archs, with Methuselah and Noah living more than 900 years each, and progressively
tailing off to 600, 300 and mere 120-years spans, closer to the historical present of the
writers, can be seen not as the residue of immortality, but as a response to the past. For the
elite among ancient societies in the Near East and Egypt, monuments and ancient artefacts
were already a subject of curiosity and investigation (Trigger 2006), and it must have
become clear to some that the activities of known tribal ancestors could not easily explain
it all, at least if their lifespans were conventional. The long life of Methuselah can thus be
seen, outside the ambit of any fundamental Biblical ‘literalism’, as an inchoate attempt to
conform archaeology to history—an implicit recognition, perhaps, of the necessity of
prehistory.
Outward form is important, as style is the dress of thought. Preserving a tradition
already long-established by Mommsen’s time, this journal will continue to use ‘BC’ and
‘AD’ instead of ‘BCE’ and ‘CE’. Simply, the familiar system and the more recent proposal
are equally flawed, but the former has the great virtue of familiarity. Neither scheme is
entirely arbitrary, being based on the same miscalculated birthday and, despite many
instances of the use of ‘Common Era’ and ‘Vulgar Era’ from the eighteenth century
onward in Europe, the proposals to change away from BC effectively euphemize the word
standing behind the ‘C’. Kenneth Wilson, in the Columbia Guide to Standard American
Usage (1993), writes that ‘at present the familiar Latin/English convention has the con-
siderable advantage of being one most of the world’s written languages use in
communicating with cultures other than their own’, and the point can also be made that, by
directing attention to a hitherto widely ignored issue, the entire dating system risks pro-
gressive fractionation through competing ideological, political or religious ‘point scoring’
by proponents of alternative (pagan, Aztec, Mayan, ancient Chinese, etc) systems. By
following Aldous Huxley’s conception in Brave New World (1932), we could use the date
of the first industrial production line to designate the centuries ‘After Ford’.
‘Before the Common Era’ and ‘Common Era’ both beg the question ‘common to
whom?’ more than the old system begs the question whether some universal Christianity is
assumed to overarch our lives. Simply put, in a JWP context, we do not intend to mean by
BC and AD either ‘Before Christ’ or ‘Anno Domini’ in a literal historico-religious or
devotional sense. We simply mean BC and AD as archaeologists and archaeological
scientists understand the terms. Culturally and historically, it is clear that well-established
alternative counts, such as the Islamic dating system, will continue, but there seems little
reason to nuance BC, in particular, into a form that is less widely understood either by the
audience and contributors of this journal, or by wider publics at large.

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However, one significant chronological new start was signalled by Willard Libby,
whose first radiometric radiocarbon results in AD 1949 recorded the massive effect of
nuclear bomb testing and suggested a logic for back-dating using the half-life of Carbon-14
in which AD 1950 was taken as the conventional ‘year zero.’ From that point on, radio-
carbon ages calculated, at first on bulk carbon samples, later calibrated using
dendrochronology, corrected for C-13 variance and eventually measured by accelerator
mass spectrometry (AMS), are expressed initially in ‘bc’—uncalibrated radiocarbon years
prior to AD 1950 and calibrated, either to Cal BP or, by deducting 1950 years from dates
broadly over two millennia old, Cal BC.
The BC/AD system avoids what may become a real problem with BP as we move
further away from the mid-twentieth century. The sense of this is that, say, the Battle of
Hastings in AD 1066 always remains at 884 BP rather than shifting progressively back
(which would make its date now 952 BP). Writing in the British popular science journal
New Scientist, the poet, comedian and erstwhile archaeology student David Bateman
(1990) made ‘a broad appeal to archaeologists and palaeontologists everywhere to desist—
preferably immediately—from … dating past events with BP (Before Present) rather than
with BC (Before Christ).’ His point was that it served no scientific purpose and created
confusion; certainly he is correct that it is ever more frequently unclear in the writing of
many authors whether BP is intended to mean before AD 1950 or before the date of
writing/publication. ‘Admittedly’, Bateman concludes, ‘the BP system is no more sub-
jective than the BC/AD system, but nor is it more objective.’ The solution here is that we
can happily use ‘rough BP’, meaning before AD 1950 for the deeper, especially pre-
Holocene, sections of prehistory, at least in our broad scholarly present—a generously-
interpreted ‘now’. But as we begin to build in chronometric resolutions that approach the
level of single human generations (25 or 30 years; see, for example, Alcover 2008, this
volume), it can be a problem that we are already two clear generations ‘AP’ (After
Present).
Conventional radiocarbon ages calculated within the last 200 years are termed ‘Mod-
ern’, but those after AD 1950 are ‘greater than Modern, or [Modern’ (Higham 2008;
Higham also points out that the effect of nuclear bomb testing on carbon isotope ratios
since the Second World War means that ‘the ‘‘age’’ calculation becomes a ‘‘future’’ cal-
culation’). Here is yet another reason for defending BC/AD which, where based on
calibrated radiocarbon dates, can be given as Cal BC and Cal AD. We shall usually prefer
such dates for the Holocene for JWP (but will support Cal BP where the chronological
scope of a paper may make this usage more coherent: e.g. Field and Lahr 2005); our
conventions for citing calendrical dates, dates in alternative systems, historical date ranges,
conventional radiocarbon ages (CRAs), calibrated date estimates, other chronometric date
estimates, and so on, will be available in updated notes to contributors at our website.
But this is also more than an issue of convention. The way that we date says something
about the degree to which we emphasize event over structure, or vice versa. Gordon Childe
wrote that ‘As a branch of history, prehistory deals with events in time’ (1940, p. 7). But,
for deep prehistory—broadly speaking the Palaeolithic—as Clive Gamble, among others,
has pointed out (Gamble 1998), the distinctive types of understanding that archaeology
reveals often do not sit on a traditional ‘historical’ scale, and may have patterning of a type
that the participants in the cultures under study would themselves have been unaware of.
The idea then, of prehistory being history continued by other (usually archaeological)
means, requires a careful consideration of what types of inferences and understandings are
made and sought. Do they focus on individual agency, or on overarching longue dure´e
structures, invisible in real time?

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Events and Agents

Let us return to John Frere, writing in 1797, and something that appears to have been
overlooked as insignificant, namely the specific identification of the artefacts in question.
We now term them Acheulian handaxes, but for Frere they were ‘evidently weapons of
war, fabricated and used by people who had not the use of metals.’ That is to say, Frere was
prepared to infer, following Hugo Grotius (1625), a classic historical casus belli, such as
self-defence, reparation and/or punishment, for a pre-Adamite, antediluvial time. It may
have been a retrogression that, with the growth of a different concept of prehistory,
characterized by archetypical existence, the edge was taken from Frere’s awe-inspiring
artefacts, which became (and tend to remain) mere functional tools in a description of
group ecology.
Nowhere has this been articulated more clearly than in Martin Kuna’s article Pre-historic
prehistory. Kuna writes that ‘The lack of comprehensible ‘‘events’’ in prehistory is
understood … primarily not as a data-based bias but as a specific feature of prehistoric social
structure, which refers to a specific mentalite´. Prehistoric mentalite´ can be characterized by
a different perception of time, when compared to how it is perceived in our own culture, and
by little authenticity ascribed to human action beyond archetypal behaviour’ (Kuna 1995, p.
43). By contrast, we are to understand history ‘not only as a referential field where events
happen but better as a specific state of society, a structure which is able to perceive and
generate events or, in other words, which only allows people to change intentionally social
reality, to behave historically’; thus prehistory ‘might be studied as a period ‘‘before his-
tory’’, at least if ‘‘history’’ is not taken as a synonym for an all-embracing process of
evolution but a particular state of the human mind’ (Kuna 1995, p. 49f).
One might wonder to how many people in any period it is ever given to ‘make history’
in these terms. Assuming history to begin when writing does is rather like imagining that
human sexual diversity as a phenomenon post-dates the widespread ability to perceive it
via the internet. Agency, surely, must have been a feature of prehistoric societies, just as
the ‘prehistoric’ mentalite´ Kuna invokes is quite possible in the present. Homer, composing
but probably not personally writing, around 700 BC might not have been recorded (or have
been rejected, as were the many poems recorded in the Tabula Iliacae: Jahn 1873). Nor,
2,000 years later, was much of the output of the great Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym
(c.AD 1320–1380) retained as physical ink-marks. Yet both poets, technically prehistoric
in the sense of belonging first and foremost to oral traditions, were concerned with people
making history, whether it was observation of the mores of an only partly-imagined Bronze
Age court, or satirizing an emergent bourgeoisie in medieval Ceredigion (or Cardigan-
shire). Indeed, it is possible to argue that a continuing relevance of both poets is in their
insights into the relationship between the perceptions of those who self-consciously try to
encourage formative events to occur and the actual historical effects of such intentions,
which, of course, ‘gang aft agley’ (that is, often go wrong or awry—the fate of both human
and animal schemes according to Robert Burns’ poem ‘To a Mouse’).
Nevertheless, we cannot uncritically espouse a global prehistory without confronting the
political dimensions of the formation of the concept, which is particularly clear in its
separation from history sensu strictu, the latter being the property of the civilized—often
‘western’—world and the former a property of primeval, archetypal ‘savages’. This is
particularly clear in relation to terminological developments within the Soviet imperium,
born of a curious tension between the espousal of a global class mission and deep Slavic
chauvinism. This disciplinary history is highly complex (Klejn 1993; Taylor 1993; Trigger
2006), but it is worth noting how little the most straightforward term for prehistory,

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predistoriya has been used, how it detaches from ‘prehistoric’ (doistoricheskii); and how
authors such as Kleijn also translate pervobytnyi as ‘prehistoric’ when it is essentially an
ethnographic term best rendered as ‘primordial’ or ‘primitive’ (e.g. Klejn 1995, p. 42;
Klejn’s translations of the titles of works by Kabo (1979) and Semenov (1979) vary from
those given for Pershits et al. (1968) and Ravdonikas (1939), where ‘primordial’ is pre-
ferred to ‘prehistoric’: see bibliography). What this reflects is a pattern of scholarly
distrust, in which archaeology after the revolution was suspected of having bourgeois
associations, and to be focussed on form alone. To be accused of ‘naked artefactology’ was
to be accused of lack of interest in the Marxist–Leninist relations of production (a lack of
interest that might characterize a class enemy). ‘Archaeology’ was replaced by ‘History of
Material Culture’ at an institutional level, and the prehistoric was essentially submerged in
an ethnological framework in which the origins of primordial peoples and primal social
formations could be theorized, often with scant regard for the actual patterning of the
primary disciplinary data. At the same time, in terms of realpolitik, the marginal and non-
progressive positions of reindeer herders and transhumant sheep pastoralists could be
explicated in such a way that their displacement to allow industrial development (mining
and oil exploration) was seen as inevitable and right.
Marx and Engels deployed typical venom in calling into question something that they
saw as ‘no history at all’, rather ‘the prehistoric period’, decrying the fact that outsiders are
left unable to clarify ‘how we are supposed to move from the nonsense of ‘‘prehistory’’
[diesem Unsinn der ‘‘Vorgeschichte’’] into actual history’ (Marx and Engels 1969, 1970).
They suspected, probably correctly, that, left underdeveloped and unrigorous at a theo-
retical level, it might simply serve to bolster pre-envisaged outcomes by sleight of hand:
‘In their historical speculation [the Germans] seize upon this ‘‘prehistory’’ with especial
eagerness because they imagine themselves safe there from interference on the part of
‘‘crude facts’’, and, at the same time, because there they can give full rein to their spec-
ulative impulse and set up and knock down hypotheses by the thousand’ (1970, p. 48).
Reviewed in the light of an intervening period of Soviet scholarship, it becomes clear that
‘the history of material culture’, by demoting prehistory to timeless ethnographic arche-
types, erected precisely such a past-as-wished-for, shoe-horning archaeological data into—
essentially—the same stages (albeit renamed) of social progress first identified by Ferguson
(see above) and taken up by Engels.
This leads us into a zone odd paradoxes, elucidated clearly by the social anthropologist
Nicholas Thomas in relation to Marshall Sahlins’ (1985) understanding of the dynamics of
contact between indigenous Pacific communities and Captain Cook. Sahlins’ under-
standing of pre-contact society is based on a scheme of ‘prescriptive’ and ‘performative’
cultural structures, the former representing established traditions, which assimilate new
circumstances and events, and the latter supposedly renegotiating and inventing political
forms. In practice, however, a vision of a timeless society is created with ‘events
continuing to be received into a prior scheme, even the same prior scheme’ (Thomas 1989,
p. 105). Thus a discrepancy is set up between a very rigorous scheme of cultural repro-
duction on the one hand and the archaeological records, largely unbeknown to Sahlins,
pocked with major transformations of subsistence and settlement pattern (if not political
organization) in Australasian societies. In short, Thomas saw precisely archaeology as
providing the kind of knowledge of events that could subvert Sahlins’ schema. This is
rather ironic, given that Anthony Giddens’ structuration was at that very time inspiring
archaeologists to eschew the importance of such knowledge.
The false temporal distance that is set up between anthropological knowers and con-
temporary others who are in fact coeval, and the creation of a gulf between ‘our’ heated

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history, which is event rich, and ‘their’ stereotypic reproduction and enactment, is noted
not only by Thomas, but by Fabian (1983), and has ramifications and echoes in debates
between the disciplinary relationships and divides of ethnohistory, historical archaeology
and prehistory (e.g. Welch 2001), extending to where cultural anthropology becomes
applied archaeology (e.g. Maschner and Reedy-Maschner 2005). In areas such as Andean
studies, or the European settlement of Iceland, the traditional reliance on ethnohistory as
providing an unproblematic and holistic account is giving way to increasingly ‘prehistoric’
approaches, privileging archaeological insight over the perhaps self-serving or mytholo-
gized, and certainly frequently self-contradictory, written products that came later. Thus
Kent Lightfoot writes that ‘the full potential of archaeology to contribute to culture studies
is hindered by the current practice of dividing prehistory and history into separate subfields
… Culture contact studies necessitate an integrated approach’ (Lightfoot 1995, p. 211).
Lightfoot argues that wariness on the part of American historical archaeologists in respect
of prehistoric method and theory was more a reaction to the reductivist agenda of early
processualist approaches than a reflection of any inherent block to broader integration.
Going further, the very idea that we move always from prehistory into history has been
challenged by Christopher Matthews, who sees the reverse as equally possible: ‘The
transformation of being Indian in the American southeast from history to prehistory is
obvious’. Matthews cites changes between AD 1800 and AD 1830 that displaced Indian
nations from a system of dynamic, and at times almost symmetric, socio-economic
interaction with various European powers and missions and relegated them en masse to a
timeless primitive fringe. This is visible archaeologically around New Orleans where
Indian ceramics drop out of colonial period contexts by AD 1820. This was partly due to
forced resettlement away from the city, but also partly because gift exchange was over-
taken by commercial exchange, with a consequent loss of self-determination. The Indians
were then ‘placed at the margins of … society and essentialized as persons of different
culture whose principal attribute was their anachronistic ‘‘other’’ way of life’—a process
Matthews terms ‘prehistoricization’ (Matthews 2007), contemporary with the intellectual
birth of prehistory in northern Europe.
This returns us to Collingwood, whose writings (see 1946 and, posthumously, 1992,
1993), informed by philosophy, history and archaeology, were peculiarly sensitive to the
tension between the need for grand narrative (an idea of ‘what really happened’ in Ranke’s
terms) and the historically contingent form of such narrative. If we assume that the whole
purpose of our endeavours, whatever we call ourselves, is to get at the real events of the
past, then there are two intertwined issues: how we know that our inferences concerning
the data we theorize are really constrained by past conditions rather than present concerns
(the problem of underdetermination); and, assuming an acceptable level of constraint
(however judged), how a correspondence can be created between modern mind states and
those in the past (the problem of translation).

Prospective Prehistory

In The order of things, Foucault (1970) argues that the conditions of discourse have had a
tendency to shift dramatically over time, as one period’s episteme is replaced by another’s.
Prehistory, as we have seen, is a structure initially of the 1830s, both in Scandinavia, and in
the way it was deployed to dehistoricize the American Indians as the nascent US economy
accelerated away from them under the conditions of industrialization. But just as the art
historian Erwin Panofsky rejected one sort of ‘archaeology’ (a plodding, stripping-the-

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onion approach to motif and thematic variance) for art history, and replaced it with a
destabilizing archaeology that left the territory of western representation balanced between
historical and transhistorical categories of analysis (Panofsky 1927), precisely the same
point was reached by Collingwood. Championed (albeit briefly) by post-processual
archaeology, because of his emphasis on the human as agent and events as mental, Col-
lingwood was in fact just as concerned with physical realities and constraints
(‘affordances’ in materiality parlance), and a comparativist position that acknowledged the
fundamental coherence afforded by uniformitarianism. Foucault occupies this dynamic
borderland too, being primarily interested in the analysis of statements in history.
The nineteenth century episteme has donated a set of terms to the present—history,
prehistory, archaeology—which can be recombined variously, and understood variously
too. Like many others, Matthews (2007) wrestles with the dual concepts of prehistory as
discipline and prehistory as episteme, arguing that ‘archaeologists are purveyors of the
notion of prehistory. Even in historical archaeology, our job is to recover for present
consumption what has been lost or buried—i.e. made prehistoric—about past human lives’;
but he also cautions that ‘contemporary identities’ may be ‘taken to be pre-historic such
that they are seen as unchanging and unconnected to historical conditions’, that is,
expressive of ‘prehistory as an isolated and distant place where cultures that failed to
survive may be found.’ Dan Hicks identifies a ‘loss of antiquity’ as the ‘end dates of
archaeological research have been extended, encroaching at an increasing pace upon the
present’ (Hicks 2003, p. 316), squeezing the buffer zones of proto-history, ethnohistory,
British ‘post-medieval’ archaeology, and so on, that have served to keep prehistory from
colliding with us.
To summarize, the terms of engagement between prehistory in its various forms (as a
discipline or as a period for instance), archaeology in all its forms (palaeoarchaeology,
classical archaeology, historical archaeology, forensic archaeology, osteoarchaeology,
gender archaeology, Marxist archaeology, and so on), and the various articulations with
other relevant disciplines and fields of study of diverse kinds (palaeontology, evolutionary
biology, biological anthropology, socio-cultural anthropology, linguistics, art history,
sociology, psychology, gender studies, and so on) depend on how much lumping and how
much splitting we find helpful in a particular context.
Fine distinctions between ‘later prehistory’ and ‘protohistory’, or between being—for
example—a Celticist, ancient historian, classical archaeologist or early medievalist, may
make sense in specialist circles, but will not do if we want to develop broad syntheses of
‘what happened in history’, either in Europe or more generally. The way that the health
status of a skeletal population from an epi-palaeolithic cemetery dating to ten thousand
years ago (prehistoric period), or from an eighteenth-century Caribbean plantation (historic
period), is established may be methodologically and theoretically identical. And it will not
necessarily be true that the establishing context of the latter, in terms of additional cultural
information, will be any richer or denser than that of the former. The fact is that
archaeologists typically integrate a range of specialist subfields and data sources, and
giving some threshold priority to the mere existence of textual records of some sort no
longer serves a useful delineating purpose (if, indeed, it ever did). So why retain the term
prehistory at all?
I have tried to demonstrate that there has been a curious schizophrenia in the under-
standing of prehistory. On the one hand, it has been constructed as archetypal existence,
dominated by structure to the detriment of agency (Françoise Audouze has spoken recently
about a contrast between an eventless prehistory without actors and ‘palaeohistory’, an
approach inscribed within the framework of Les Annales: Audouze 2008). On the other

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hand, it is seen as the remedy for those very faults, applied to an ahistorical socio-cultural
anthropology to provide understandings of extraordinary (unpredictable and unpredicted)
cultural change over time. Public perceptions, long dominated by a static model (the school
history textbook that takes us from australopithecines to the Maya and Angkor Wat in two
pages, before getting down to a list of relevant ‘real’ events), are increasingly shaped by an
appreciation of the details of change, human origins, migrations, the origins of farming and
the collapse of civilizations within a long-term and global perspective. The wealth of
information makes coverage by a single author like Clark or, more recently, Fagan (2007),
increasingly hard to write, unless some external ‘universal acid’ is used, such as the
environmental determinism of Jared Diamond (1996). Therefore, multi-author syntheses,
such as Scarre’s, increasingly form the best starting points for more detailed understanding,
and these are increasingly available at regional levels (e.g. Cunliffe 1994; Stahl 2005;
Petraglia and Allchin 2007).
Terms are mostly inherited, and unless we think it sensible to throw them away with
each new generation of scholarship, we have to redefine, develop and nuance them. It is a
tremendous achievement that archaeology over the last half century has managed to
develop in an overtly trans-disciplinary context, with connections to social theory as strong
as those to advanced biological, physical and chemical science. Using the concept of ‘Cal
BC’, with all its methodological and theoretical underpinnings, constrained through
Bayesian modelling, it is possible for Alistair Whittle, Alex Bayliss and co-workers, to
provide an understanding of the initial Neolithic monument sequence in southern Britain at
the temporal resolution of a single human generation (Whittle and Bayliss 2007). The
period is prehistoric, the processes historical in a Collingwoodian sense.
It is to broad synthesis that the Journal of World Prehistory aspires, as to refinement of
the ways in which prehistory may be recovered, constructed, interpreted and refined, the
latter in terms both of consilience—its correspondences to the patterning of the archaeo-
logical and cognate records—and in terms of the history, sensu lato, that may be written
and the interpretative bases so created. The pursuit of prehistory is a collective enterprise,
demanding that disciplinary thresholds be overstepped, but the finer processes of inter-
pretation also often require an individual descent into complex thought worlds: as the poet
Richard Hugo said in another context ‘Prehistoric beaches burn each dawn for loners.’
In a lighter vein, Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), defined the term
‘prehistoric’ as ‘Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and
practice of perpetuating falsehood.’ It should follow, but will nevertheless be restated here,
that readers of prehistory must be able to interrogate the levels and types of archaeological
analyses and the security status of possible current inferences made from them before
deciding what to absorb from any presented narrative. This leads to my final point about
the space available in the pages of this journal for synthetic treatments in extensio. Fol-
lowing the original conception of the first editor, Angela Close, it is clear that if we are to
effectively and responsibly present synthetic area-period surveys today then we need, more
than ever, to be provided with an internal guide to the epistemology, and to have it laid out,
as clearly as possible, without recourse to full monographic publication. Such JWP
treatments should ideally reveal what the data consist of and how they are theorized into
coherent interpretations (Alcover, this issue); propositions about the future of what we do
and how we construct and critique research questions will form JWP position pieces (this
editorial essay; and Bednarik, next issue); while JWP special issues will, from time to time,
review major themes of topical importance with a series of themed contributions.
Echoing Bradley, Graeme Barker has recently restated our mission to make archaeology
into history (2008). In his book of 1947, simply entitled History, Vere Gordon Childe

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situated archaeologists as the students of, principally, technology, a phenomenon that

defined us par excellence as humans (Homo faber) and which ran from a very early time
(then reckoned as ‘perhaps half a million years ago’: Childe 1947, p. 6) up to the present.
Childe saw that technology could not observe the prehistory–history distinction. The
Gutenberg Press and the books it produced, including history books, were technology too.
They require a form of understanding contextualizing them with the development of signs
and pigments, bindings, presses and screws. Through that, perhaps, we can understand
prehistory as needing a material focus but otherwise going forward without limits.

Acknowledgements I am indebted in particular to Angela Close for creating the framework for this
discussion in the form of the Journal of World Prehistory itself, and to Teresa Krauss and the team at
Springer during an exciting (albeit exacting) period of transition. I should especially thank Christopher
Chippindale for stimulating a discussion on ideas of prehistory versus archaeology, though my conclusions
are different from his. Sarah Wright, as always, provided overall critical scrutiny, help with translation of
Foucault and Vašı́ček, and discussion of Russian terms; I am also very grateful to Peter Biehl, Christopher
Matthews, Dan Hicks, Peter Hiscock, Herb Maschner, Alex Bentley, and Matthew Betts for comments and
suggestions; and, for useful discussions, Alistair Whittle, Françoise Audouze, Dušan Borić, Mike Shanks,
Jason Ur, Rowan Flad and Cameron Munroe; thanks also to Zdeněk Vašı́ček; and to John Welch for sight of
his 2000 ms (a longer version of Welch 2001, and from which I have borrowed the Ambrose Bierce
quotation); lastly to my old (perhaps future?) digging partner, Keith Moe, for an introduction to the poetry of
Richard Hugo (2007 edition: the line comes from ‘Dog Lake with Paula’, originally in the 1973 collection,
The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir).

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