8 The Thirty-Fourth General Meeting. 
I have undertaken a task from which others may have shrunk. 
Having ascertained it to be the wish of some of your leading 
Members that I should devote my lecture to a consideration of the 
particular branch of archeology to which my attention has been 
chiefly given, I will endeavour to sketch out roughly the progress 
of prehistoric research since the Society met here in 1849, not at- 
tempting to record all the discoveries that have been made, or even 
a large part of them, but to trace out as far as possible the main 
lines of progress, and, as I am the lecturer on this occasion, I hope 
it will not be thought inappropriate if I refer to such of my own 
humble discoveries as may be applicable to the matter, and show 
their bearing on the general question. In so doing I shall divide 
the subject under two heads. Firstly I shall speak of prehistoric or 
non-historic archeology, including in the latter the vestiges of the 
Romanised Britons, which, though falling within historic times, 
have left no written record; and secondly I shall refer—if I have 
time—to the quaternary period, or that which, preceding the prehis- 
toric period, goes back to the very earliest traces of man. In dealing 
with the prehistoric age our attention must be given chiefly to the 
grave mounds, as being the class of relics that archzologists have 
studied most carefully hitherto, but I hope I shall be able to show 
that valuable information is to be derived from excavations on the 
sites of camps and villages, and that more attention will probably be 
paid to them in future. As early as the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century Camden seems to have distinguished two kinds of 
barrows, which he described as the round and those with sharp tops, 
which were probably the long barrows, and he supposed them to be 
the graves of soldiers, for bones, he says, are found in them. But 
Stukeley classified them more carefully, and gave them various 
kinds of fanciful names, which, with some modifications, have attached 
to them ever since. Thurnam does full justice to Stukeley’s work, 
although it must be admitted that, viewed by the light of modern 
discovery, his name has been handed down to us chiefly as an ex- 
ample of what to avoid in archeology. A characteristic specimen 
of Stukeley’s quaint and imaginative way of dealing with the 
subject of his studies may be seen in his account of the origin of 
