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Prehistory and the Romantic Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Extract

In a stimulating essay published a few years ago, Mr O. G. S. Crawford indicated how the archaeology of the nineteenth century was a natural outcome of the social and industrial background of the period, and resulted from a combination of circumstances which gave opportunities for the investigation of Man's remote past. If we examine the study of British prehistory during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in its relation to contemporary fashions in literature and the visual arts, we shall I think, see that the accurate and precise science which some of us would consider modern archaeology to be began merely as an episode in the history of taste less than two hundred years ago.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1937 

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References

1 The Dialectical Process in the History of Science’, Sociological Review, April-June, 1932.Google Scholar

2 The Druids (1927), chap. I.

3 The Gothic Revival, 78.

4 The Torrington Diaries, vol. 1, 1781–1794 (1934), 69.Google Scholar

5 For a study of certain aspects of Stukeley’s life and work see ANTIQUITY, 1935, 9, 2232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Itinerarium Curiosum, 2.

7 op. cit., Preface.

8 The Gothic Revival, 89.

9 Gray to Mason, 19 December, 1757.

10 Roman Occupation of Britain, Lecture I.

11 The Welshman, 17 September, 1847, quoted by Evelyn Lewes in Out with the Cambrians, 1934, p. 30.

12 Battlemented cases, roughly contemporary, exist at Devizes and Dorchester museums, and probably elsewhere. They might well have roused the ire of the Cambridge Camdenians, who were so incensed at the pews, ‘half–roofed like country villas and sometimes even embattled’ which in response to popular taste were being placed in churches a few years earlier. ( A Few Words to Churchwardens, 1842, 11, p. 6).Google Scholar