Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T22:20:28.324Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The industrial archaeology of deep time†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2016

JENNY BULSTRODE
JENNY BULSTRODE*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK. Email: jb597@cam.ac.uk.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

For geologists and antiquaries of the late 1850s debates over ancient stone tools were frustrated by a lack of accepted criteria. The artefacts were hard to interpret. It was not self-evident how to judge whether they were ancient or modern, natural or man-made; or indeed whether stone tools could pre-date the use of metal tools at all. Antiquary and papermaker John Evans provided a system that offered to resolve these issues. His criteria and his use of re-enactment, making his own stone implements, gained acceptance among flint experts across fluid disciplinary boundaries and enabled authoritative interpretations of the underdetermined objects. This paper explores how Evans drew on the concerns of his industrial culture to make sense of prehistoric artefacts and support his claim to access the past through his own actions. Situated industrial concerns provided the resources for his flint work: from a patent dispute with astronomer and fellow industrialist Warren de la Rue, through his role in the Victorian arms trade, to the struggle to displace skilled manual labour in his factories. Evans is remembered for pioneering the techniques and classificatory system of modern Palaeolithic archaeology and as one of the founders of the re-enactment science of experimental flint knapping. His work played a significant role in helping reconceive the antiquity of man, yet the system of proof for this grand claim was deeply situated in his industrial culture. This paper explores how the industrial resources of a Victorian papermaker made human history.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 1 - 25
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

This is an expanded version of one of the two essays jointly awarded the Singer Prize of the British Society for the History of Science for 2014.

References

1 For the 1859 controversy in the Athenaeum see A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 120–123.

2 Nathan Schlanger, ‘Axes of perfection: stone implements and the predicament of progress in nineteenth-century prehistoric archaeology’, presented at the Berlin Summer Academy on Human Origins, 2001, pp. 2–3.

3 Mark White, ‘Out of Abbeville: Sir John Evans, Palaeolithic patriarch and handaxe pioneer’, in Sarah Milliken and Jill Cook (eds.), A Very Remote Period Indeed: Papers on the Palaeolithic Presented to Derek Roe, Oxford: Oxbow, 2001, pp. 242–248, 242.

4 Lamdin-Whymark, Hugo, ‘Sir John Evans: experimental flint knapping and the origins of lithic research’, Lithics (2009) 30, pp. 45–52Google Scholar, 45.

5 White, op. cit. (3), p. 243.

6 Lamdin-Whymark, op. cit. (4), pp. 50, 52.

7 John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 46.

8 Mauss, Marcel, ‘Techniques of the body’, Economy and Society (1973) 2, pp. 70–88Google Scholar, 85. Chris Wingfield, ‘Anthropology of technology: a French tradition?’, in The Other Within, University of Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum, 2009, at http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-anthropology-and-technology.html, accessed 2 October 2014.

9 Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, London: Sage, 1985, p. 106.

10 John Evans, ‘Man and his earliest known works’, in Some Account of the Blackmore Museum, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 1868, pp. 4–22, 87–103; Evans, ‘On the manufacture of stone implements in prehistoric times’, International Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology and Anthropology, 1869, 3rd session, pp. 191–193; Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain, London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1872.

11 Clare Pettitt, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 38.

12 Samuel, Raphael, ‘Workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop Journal (1977) 3, pp. 6–72Google Scholar, 58.

13 Christine MacLeod, ‘Concepts of invention in the patent controversy’, in Robert Fox (ed.), Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1996, pp. 137–154, 141.

14 Exhibition flyer, c.1889, personal papers of Sir John Evans, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University (hereafter Ashmolean), JE/E/4/1.

15 Alison Petch, ‘The products of industry? The early development of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, in The Other Within, op. cit. (8).

16 David F. Harding, Smallarms of the East India Company 1600–1856, London: Foresight Books, 1997, 1, pp. 119–120. Whittaker, John C., ‘“The oldest British industry”: continuity and obsolescence in a flintknapper's sample set’, Antiquity (2001) 75, pp. 382–390Google Scholar, 382. LeClair, Daniel R., ‘The “greased cartridge affair”: re-examining the Pattern 1853 Enfield cartridge and its role in the Indian Mutiny of 1857’, International Ammunition Association Journal (2015) 504, pp. 98–109, 100–104Google Scholar.

17 Evans, ‘Man and his earliest known works’, op. cit. (10), p. 17.

18 On Darwin see Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 79–103. Robert Young, Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 23–55, 124–125; on Lyell see Martin Rudwick, ‘Transposed concepts from the human sciences in the early work of Charles Lyell’, in Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (eds.), Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences, 2nd edition, Chalfont St Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1997, pp. 77–92; on Thomson see Wise, M. Norton and Smith, Crosbie, ‘Work and waste: political economy and natural philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain I’, History of Science (1989) 27, pp. 263–301Google Scholar, 291–292.

19 Joan Evans, Time and Chance: The Story of Arthur Evans and His Forebears, London and New York: Longmans & Co., 1943, p. 60; family correspondence, 1839–1840, Ashmolean, JE/A/2/1.

20 Joan Evans, The Endless Web: John Dickinson & Co. Ltd, 1804–1954, London: Cape, 1955, p. 44.

21 Evans, op. cit. (19), pp. 63–64, 81.

22 Evans, op. cit. (20), p. 91.

23 Iwan Morus, ‘More the aspect of magic than anything natural: the philosophy of demonstration’, in Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds.), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 337–370, 337, 349.

24 For a related study see Sibum, H. Otto, ‘Reworking the mechanical value of heat: instruments of precision and gestures of accuracy in early Victorian England’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (1995) 26, 73–106Google Scholar.

25 Evans, op. cit. (19), p. 92.

26 Bill of Complaint, 24 October 1856, John Dickinson and Company Ltd, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (hereafter Hertfordshire), D/Edi/1/4/17/7/p. 15.

27 Scrapbook, c.1859–1905, Ashmolean, JE/D/1/10.

28 Patrick Boylan, ‘Evans, geology and palaeontology’, in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Sir John Evans 1823–1908: Antiquity, Commerce and Natural Science in the Age of Darwin, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2008, pp. 52–67, 52–57.

29 Schlanger, Nathan, ‘Series in progress: antiquities of nature, numismatics and stone implements in the emergence of prehistoric archaeology (1776–1891)’, History of Science (2010) 48, pp. 344–369Google Scholar, 348.

30 White, op. cit. (3), pp. 242–243.

31 John Evans, ‘Works of art in the drift’, Athenaeum, 1859, p. 841.

32 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), p. 12.

33 Bill of Complaint, op. cit. (26), D/Edi/1/4/17/5/p. 8.

34 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), p. 12.

35 Schlanger, op. cit. (29), p. 348. Schlanger, Nathan, ‘Coins to flint: John Evans and the numismatic moment in the history of archaeology’, European Journal of Archaeology (2011) 14, pp. 465–479Google Scholar, 468.

36 White, op. cit. (3), p. 244.

37 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), p. 49.

38 Evans, ‘Man and his earliest known works’, op. cit. (10), p. 8.

39 Goodrum, Matthew, ‘The idea of human prehistory: the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the problem of human origins in Victorian Britain’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (2012) 34, pp. 117–145Google Scholar, 124–125.

40 Rule, John, ‘Artisan attitudes: a comparative survey of skilled labour and proletarianization before 1848’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History (1985) 1, pp. 22–31Google Scholar, 22; Rule, ‘The property of skill in the period of manufacture’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), Historical Meanings of Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 99–118, 107.

41 White, op. cit. (3), p. 243.

42 Edward Stevens, ‘Report of the Blackmore Museum’, Some Account of the Blackmore Museum, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 1868, pp. 105–238, 118–120.

43 Mr Hawkin's Opinion, 4 April 1857, Hertfordshire, D/Edi/1/4/17/2/p. 3.

44 Christine Macleod, Heroes of Invention: Technology Liberalism and the British Identity, 1750–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 140–142.

45 ‘Steam and the steam engine’, draft, n.d., Ashmolean, JE/D/3/18. For Watt and heroic invention see Macleod, op. cit. (44); on interventions in patentees' rights see Macleod, op. cit. (13) pp. 138–139.

46 Legal records, 1814–1907, Hertfordshire, D/Edi/1/4/2-9. Bill of Complaint, op. cit. (26), D/Edi/1/4/17/p. 5.

47 Macleod, op. cit. (44), p. 212.

48 Pettitt, op. cit. (11), pp. 1, 20, 89, 95–96.

49 Evans, Chris, ‘Soldiering archaeology: Pitt Rivers and “militarism”’, Bulletin of the History of Archaeology (2014) 24, pp. 1–20Google Scholar, 7–8.

50 Schlanger, op. cit. (29), pp. 348–349.

51 Jim Secord, ‘How scientific conversation became shop talk’, in Fyfe and Lightman, op. cit. (23), pp. 129–156, 30.

52 George Stephens to John Evans, 28 March 1872, Ashmolean, JE/B/2/82.

53 Susanne Bangert, ‘Evans, Scandinavia and international exchange networks’, in MacGregor, op. cit. (28), pp. 231–256.

54 Bangert, op. cit. (53).

55 Secord, Jim, ‘King of Siluria: Roderick Murchison and the imperial theme in nineteenth-century British geology’, Victorian Studies (1982), pp. 413–442Google Scholar, 417.

56 John Evans, ‘On the Manner in which the British Paper Manufacturer is affected by Foreign Legislation’, presented to National Association for the Promotion of Social Science at Edinburgh, 1863, Ashmolean, JE/E/1/1.

57 Evans, op. cit. (56).

58 Evans, op. cit. (19), p. 105.

59 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), p. 20. Sven Nilsson, The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1868, p. xlvii. Johnson, L. Lewis, ‘History of flint knapping experimentation, 1838–1976’, Current Anthropology (1978) 19, pp. 337–372Google Scholar, 337.

60 Nilsson, op. cit. (59), pp. 5–6.

61 Assimina Kaniari, ‘Evans's sketches from the human antiquity controversy: epistemological proxies in the making’, in MacGregor, op. cit. (28), pp. 257–284, 259.

62 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), p. 13.

63 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), p. 13. Whittaker, op. cit. (16), p. 382. LeClair, op. cit. (16), pp. 100–104.

64 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), pp. 14, 16.

65 Harding, op. cit. (16), pp. 119–120.

66 LeClair, op. cit. (16), p. 102. Harding, op. cit. (16), p. 120.

67 See www.griffenmillhandmadepaper.com/articles.php, accessed 18 September 2015.

68 Jill Penwarden and Michael Stanyon, ‘The business foundation for a public career: Evans, the paper industry and life at Nash Mills’, in MacGregor, op. cit. (28), pp. 39–51, 41.

69 LeClair, op. cit. (16), p. 105.

70 John W. Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857–1858, London: W. Allen, 1880, pp. 488–489, quoted in LeClair, op. cit. (16), p. 98.

71 Evans, op. cit. (19), p. 90. Evans, op. cit. (20), p. 100.

72 Lamdin-Whymark, op. cit. (4), p. 49. James Park Harrison, ‘On the British flint workers at Brandon’, Report of the Fiftieth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London: John Murray, 1880, pp. 626–627, 627.

73 Sydney Skertchly, ‘On the Survival of the Neolithic Period at Brandon, Suffolk’, Report of the Forty-Ninth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London: John Murray, 1879, 400–401.

74 Sydney Skertchly, On the Manufacture of Gun-Flints, the Methods of Excavating for Flint, the Age of Palaeolithic Man, and the Connexion between Neolithic Art and the Gun-Flint Trade, London: printed for HM Stationery Office, 1879, p. 1.

75 Skertchly, op. cit. (74), pp. 69–78. Evans, op. cit. (19), pp. 123–124, 127.

76 Patrik Boylan, ‘The controversy of the Moulin-Quignon jaw: the role of Hugh Falconer’, in Jordanova and Porter, op. cit. (18), pp. 175–202, 185. Jim Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian–Silurian Dispute, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 61. Evans, op. cit. (49).

77 Evans, op. cit. (49), quoting Pitt-Rivers, p. 5.

78 Evans, op. cit. (49), pp. 1, 13, 3.

79 Hugh Falconer to John Evans, 5 May 1863, 23 May 1863, 6 May 1863, Ashmolean, JE/B/1/2.

80 Evans, op. cit. (20), pp. 100, 95.

81 Lewis Evans, The Firm of John Dickinson and Company Limited, London: Chiswick Press, 1896, p. 10. Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘The machine breakers’, Past & Present (1952) 1, pp. 57–70Google Scholar, 58.

82 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), p. 17.

83 Secord, op. cit. (76), pp. 125–126. Secord, op. cit. (55), p. 417.

84 Evans, op. cit. (56).

85 Secord, op. cit. (76), pp. 125–126. Secord, op. cit. (55), p. 417.

86 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, pp. 1–36.

87 Lamdin-Whymark, op. cit. (4), p. 49. Park Harrison, op. cit. (72), p. 627.

88 Johnson, op. cit. (59), p. 337.

89 Colin Taylor, ‘William Blackmore: a 19th century Englishman's contribution to American Indian ethnology’, in Christian Feest (ed.), Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, Aachen: Edition Herodot, 1987, pp. 321–336, 321.

90 The chairman, ‘Comments’, Some Account of the Blackmore Museum, op. cit. (42), pp. 48–49.

91 George Catlin, Last Rambles amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, London: Sampson Low & Co., 1868, p. 188.

92 Stevens, op. cit. (42), p. 134. Edward Stevens, Flint Chips: A Guide to Pre-historic Archaeology, London: Bell and Daldy, 1870, p. 83.

93 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), p. 22.

94 Evans, op. cit. (20), p. 239.

95 ‘The International Exhibition’, Mechanics' Magazine (1872) 96(2492), p. 575.

96 Evans, op. cit. (20), p. 25.

97 On Robertson see Topham, Jonathon, ‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley, and the production of cheap periodicals in the 1820s’, Book History (2005) 8, pp. 75–106Google Scholar, 91; on descriptions as patents see Pettitt, op. cit. (11), pp. 1, 20, 89, 95–96.

98 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, New Castle, DE and Winchester: Oak Knoll Press and St Paul's Bibliographies, 195, p. 207.

99 Paper Record, 15 November 1887, Ashmolean, JE/E/4/1.

100 Samuel, op. cit. (12), p. 58.

101 Bill of Complaint, op. cit. (26), D/Edi/1/4/17/7/p. 15.

102 Evans, ‘Man and his earliest known works’, op. cit. (10), p. 17.

103 Gaskell, op. cit. (98), p. 207.

104 Evans, op. cit. (20), p. 239.

105 Evans, John, ‘On the occurrence of flint implements in undisturbed beds of gravel, sand and clay’, Archaeologia (1861) 33, 280–307Google Scholar, 280.

106 Evans, ‘Man and his earliest known works’, op. cit. (10), pp. 12–13.

107 Glossary of papermaking terms, British Association of Paper Historians, at www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20120711134922/http://baph.org.uk/reference/glossary.html, accessed 25 February 2014.

108 Augustus Muir, The British Paper & Board Makers Association, 1872–1972: A Centenary History, London: British Paper and Board Makers' Association, 1972, p. 2.

109 Gaskell, op. cit. (98), p. 222. Evans, op. cit. (20), pp. 111–112.

110 Evans, op. cit. (20), pp. 109–110, 235.

111 Paper Record, op. cit. (99), JE/E/4/1.

112 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), pp. 284–285, 249, 36, 33.

113 Cushing, Frank, ‘Manual concepts: a study of the influence of hand-usage on culture-growth’, American Anthropologist (1892) 5, pp. 289–318Google Scholar, 292–302, 308, 309.

114 Johnson, op. cit. (59), p. 337.

115 Frank Cushing, Zuñi Breadstuff, New York: Museum of the American Indian, 1974, pp. 518–519.

116 Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, op. cit. (10), pp. 80, 99, 100, 172.

117 History of the collection, Sir John Evans Centenary Project, at http://johnevans.ashmolean.org/artefacts/collection-history.html, accessed 25 February 2014.

118 Joseph Warren to John Evans, 30 January 1863, Ashmolean, JE/B/1/2.

119 Evans, ‘Man and his earliest known works’, op. cit. (10), p. 95.

120 Evans, ‘Man and his earliest known works’, op. cit. (10), p. 95.

121 Collins, op. cit. (9), p. 106.

122 Alison Roberts and Nick Barton, ‘Reading the unwritten history: Evans and ancient stone implements’, in MacGregor, op. cit. (28), pp. 94–115, 99.

123 Edouard Lartet quoted in Evans, op. cit. (19), pp. 118–119.

124 Hugh Falconer to John Evans, c.1863, Ashmolean, JE/B/1/2.

125 Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875, London: Blond & Briggs, 1982, pp. 124–131.

126 Richard Cull, ‘Works of art in the drift’, Athenaeum, 1859, p. 841.

127 Hugh Falconer to John Evans, 24 April 1863, Ashmolean, JE/B/1/2.

128 Macleod, op. cit. (44), p. 3. Samuel, op. cit. (12), p. 58.