NEW AECHEOLOGICAL LIGHTS ON THE OEIGINS OF 

 CIVILIZATION IN EUROPE.^ 



By Sir Akthtjr Evans, D. Litt., LL. D., P. S. A., F. R. S. 



When I was asked on behalf of the council of the British Associa- 

 tion to occupy the responsible post of president at the meeting in 

 this great city — the fourth that has taken place here — I was certainly 

 taken by surprise; the more so as my own subject of research seemed 

 somewhat removed from what may be described as the central in- 

 terests of your body. The turn of archeology, however, I was told, 

 had come round again on the rota of the sciences represented; nor 

 could I be indifferent to the fact that the last presidential address on 

 this theme had been delivered by my father at the Toronto meeting 

 of 1897. 



Still, it was not till after considerable hesitation that I accepted 

 the honor. Engaged as I have been through a series of j^ears in the 

 work of excavation in Crete — a work which involved not ©nly the 

 quarrying but the building up of wholly new materials and has en- 

 tailed the endeavor to classify the successive phases of a long, con- 

 tinuous story — absorbed and fascinated by my own investigation, I 

 am oppressed with the consciousness of having been less able to keep 

 pace with the progress of fellow explorers in other departments or 

 to do sufficient justice to their results. * * * The science of an- 

 tiquity in its purest form depends, indeed, on evidence and rests on 

 principles indistinguishable from those of the sister science of geol- 

 ogy. Its methods are stratigraphic. As in that case the successive 

 deposits and the characteristic contents — often of the most frag- 

 mentary kind — enable the geologist to reconstruct the fauna and 

 flora, and climate and physical conditions of the past ages of the 

 v.orld, and to follow out their gi'adual transitions or dislocations, so 

 it is with the archeologist in dealing with unwritten histon\ 



In recent years — not to speak of the revelations of late quaternary 

 culture on which I shall presently have occasion to dwell — in Egypt, 

 in Babylonia, in ancient Pereia, in the central xVsian deserts, or, 

 coming nearer home, in the ^gean lands, the patient exploration 



^Address of the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 

 Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1916. Reprinted by permission from author's pamphlet edition. 



425 



