228 ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE 



to another. If we had nothing whatever but the map 

 of England, on the scale of six inches to the mile, we 

 might construct from it a more detailed history of the 

 settlement and growth of the population, and the eco- 

 nomic history of the country than has yet been written. 



It is also possible to reconstruct long ages of the 

 social history of a people without a single word of 

 writing, entirely from the material history. Suppose, 

 in some great country house, a room was closed, fur- 

 nished, just as it stood, on the occasion of the death 

 of each owner, there would be a series of roomfuls of 

 furniture of each generation. No one could possibly 

 suppose that the room of the age of William IV came 

 between those of Anne and George I, or the room of 

 Charles II between George III and IV. The changes 

 of fashion would unquestionably link the rooms together 

 in the right order when their contents were compared. 

 Now this has been done with the groups of pottery 

 found in graves. Some 900 graves of the prehistoric 

 age in Egypt have been compared, and can be replaced 

 in very nearly their right order. They form a chain 

 of changes of fashion, and we can thus date the graves 

 relatively in what we may call sequences or sequence 

 dates, though not in absolute years. The next step is 

 to date each kind of thing found in the graves by its 

 first and last appearances, named in the sequence dates of 

 the graves, then all other objects found with these also 

 get their sequence dates. In this way wherever we 

 have enough examples of groups of objects which are 

 found together we can reconstruct their order, and so 

 form a system of dating, in sequences though not in 

 years. 



The previous instances show how much is preserved 

 of the history of one place or land as studied in itself. 



