SECTION H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 



THE UPPER PALEOLITHIC IN THE 

 LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERY 



ADDRESS BY 



MISS D. A. E. GARROD, 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



The last twelve years have seen a new impetus given to prehistoric studies 

 by the multiplication of researches outside Europe. Excavations in 

 Africa, the Near East, Asiatic Russia and China have opened up a new 

 field for speculation, and at the same time have revealed the unsuspected 

 complexity of many problems which to De Mortillet and other pioneers 

 seemed relatively simple. Gone for ever is the straightforward succession 

 of Palaeolithic cultures from Chellian to Magdalenian as laid down in 

 the Musee Prehistorique. Even as early as 1912, when Breuil produced 

 his classic paper on the subdivisions of the Upper Palaeolithic its foundations 

 were sapped, and the discoveries of the last decade have merely completed 

 its demolition as a system of world-wide application. 



I need not insist that De Mortillet's scheme, as corrected by Breuil, 

 who first pointed out the true position of the Aurignacian in western 

 Europe, was the best that could be devised given the very incomplete 

 information, relating to a very limited area, possessed by workers at 

 that date. The fault of De Mortillet's disciples lay in their canonisation 

 of a system which could only be applied locally, and which in any case 

 contained enormous gaps. The attempt to bring into this framework the 

 first discoveries made outside Europe inevitably led in many cases to 

 forcing of the evidence, and it was not until the old orthodoxy had been 

 dethroned that the new material could be made to give its full measure. 



In the old system the Palaeolithic cultures appeared as a straightforward 

 succession with clear-cut horizontal divisions, as in a diagrammatic 

 geological section. For the Fathers of Prehistory these cultures developed 

 logically one from the other in an orderly upward movement, and it was 

 assumed that they represented world-wide stages in the history of human 

 progress. To-day prehistory has suffered the fate of so many of the 

 component parts of the orderly Universe of the nineteenth century. 

 New knowledge has given a twist to the kaleidoscope, and the pieces are 

 still falling about before our bewildered eyes. The main outline of the 

 new pattern is, however, already beginning to appear. We can distin- 

 guish in the Old Stone Age three cultural elements of primary importance. 

 These are manifested in the so-called hand-axe industries, flake industries 

 and blade industries, and we know that the first two, at any rate, run side 



