SECTION H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 



THE PLACE OF ARCH.5:OLOGY AS 



A SCIENCE, AND SOME PRACTICAL 



PROBLEMS IN ITS DEVELOPMENT 



ADDRESS BY 



DAVID RANDALL-MacIVER, M.A., D.Sc, 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



I PROPOSE to follow in another line of inquiry the example which has 

 been set by our outgoing President. As he addressed us on the general 

 theme of Anthropology I shall consider the general subject of Archaeology, 

 its place as a science, and the practical policy which we ought to pursue 

 in view of its startling and wide development. It is a very happy and 

 propitious moment for such a discussion inasmuch as there was never so 

 wide and universal an interest in the subject. There is some danger 

 indeed that archseology may be killed by kindness and the indiscriminating 

 affection of its admirers ; and there is very great danger that archaeologists 

 themselves may be more or less gently suffocated by the overwhelming 

 mass of accumulating material. We need to devise methods of organi- 

 sation, to think out means of collaboration, and to subdivide the field of 

 our activities so that they may be all related in a conscious scheme. 



Like anthropology ours is a very young science, and like anthropology 

 it has grown at the most astonishing rate. Archasology in the true sense 

 is scarcely a hundred years old, for its birth may be placed about the 

 middle of the last century, unless we are willing to give a rather artificial 

 value to that false dawn which came with the occupation of Egypt by 

 Napoleon. I should rather prefer to say that it begins just about 1850. 

 Layard was excavating at Nineveh in 1845. Boucher de Perthes pub- 

 lished his first work on stone implements in 1841 ; and the entire theory 

 was made known in England in 1858, in the same year that Darwin and 

 Wallace read ' On the Origin of Species.' Keller's work on lake- 

 dwellings appeared in 1854. Lartet and Christy were doing their chief 

 work in 1861, and Pigorini from 1862 onwards. Schliemann's excava- 

 tions of Troy began in 1870. 



Just as chemistry had its precursor in alchemy, so archaeology had its 

 natural forerunner in antiquarianism. The Antiquary was a recognised 

 person as early as the sixteenth century, when Thomas Nash in his Pierce 

 Penniless speaks of him as an ' honest man ' and says that he has known 

 * many wise gentlemen of this mustie vocation.' In those days, as a 

 recent President of the Society of Antiquaries has told us, he was chiefly 

 busy with the promulgation of written texts, so that the ofiicial antiquary 

 of Oxford University was the ' custos archivorum.' In the seventeenth 

 century such a promising title as ' British Antiquities Revived ' consisted 

 of nothing more important than a mere work of genealogy ; while in the 

 eighteenth century the Society of Antiquaries was still principally engrossed 



