1 82 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



phenomenon should be sought, and what should be found at a given site. 

 Given the right maps, one can soon find out where in Great Britain to 

 look for an unrecorded long barrow or hill-fort. When Anatolia was still 

 a blank archsologically. Dr. Frankfort was able to predict in a general 

 way what would turn up when excavation began. This sort of prediction, 

 verifiable by experiment with the spade, clearly gives the same sort of 

 guidance as hypotheses in natural science. But only, mark you, as to 

 how to acquire fresh knowledge. 



In the end our claim to be scientific is mainly this. We base our 

 deductions upon solid facts— relics and monuments — which are available 

 for all to examine and relations between them which, if no longer sub- 

 sisting, have been objectively recorded with photographs and diagrams 

 and verified by the greatest possible number of independent observers. 

 We rely in our discussions on such substantial and public data, not upon 

 any mystic revelations, vouchsafed once and irrevocably to a prophet or 

 a Fiihrer, nor upon the ambiguities of sentences spoken or written by 

 individuals now dead. Prehistorians ' first enquire diligently into the 

 nature of things and then proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the 

 explanation of them.' Or to quote a leader in Nature last April, ' The 

 study of man must be based on impartial and objective study of the facts, 

 and not on forcing the facts to fit a biased and distorted dogma.' 



How slender is this thread that links prehistory to natural science has 

 been demonstrated all too glaringly by the distortion of the subject that 

 we can recognise beyond the Channel. ' The forcing of facts to fit a 

 biased and distorted political dogma ' has, as Nature showed, in certain 

 quarters made anthropology ' a science travestied in masquerade.' The 

 writer was referring particularly to the theory of Nordic racial superiority. 

 He might equally have referred to lapses into scholasticism in another 

 quarter. ' Good results in scientific research depend upon their correct 

 orientation — upon the acquisition by the investigator of the sole truly 

 scientific methodology — that of dialectic materialism. A mercUess com- 

 bat against any sort of alterations in Marxism-Leninism is a particularly 

 urgent necessity,' ran the leader in the first number of Sovietskaya 

 Archeologiya. 



Let us not complaisantly exaggerate our neighbours motes ! Some of 

 the latest German works on prehistory are just as objective as works on 

 mathematics. The second number of Sovietskaya Archeologiya de- 

 nounced the scholasticism of the first as sabotage and called for ' an 

 intensive, methodical and objective study of the primary sources ' to 

 replace dogmatic schematism. And if any archaeological dogma were 

 officially imposed by a totalitarian British State, it would I fear be more 

 sterile than Nordicism or pseudo-Marxism.- Its character can be fore- 

 cast all too well from the talks broadcast just a year ago and subse- 

 quently printed in the Listener. That sort of farrago is what an insular 

 bureaucracy might make canonical had it the chance ! Would the bureau- 

 crats be alone to blame 'i Do professional archaeologists always keep so 

 closely within the bounds of definite evidence .' 



The prehistorian's aim is to reduce to an ordered and intelligible system 

 the scattered and isolated splinters of evidence collected through surveys, 

 excavations and chance discoveries. But only a few regions and short 



