156 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



by side as far back as we can see, and we are beginning to realise that 

 the origins of the third may have to be sought much farther back than we 

 had suspected. Only a moment of reflection is needed to see that we 

 have here the old divisions of Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, 

 but with a new axis. The diagram has been manipulated like one of those 

 patterns which oculists twirl before the eyes of astigmatic patients, so 

 that not only have the horizontal lines become vertical, but, as to the 

 astigmatic eye, the divisions which were formerly so clearcut are now 

 blurred. I want to insist on this blurring, because in the ardour of 

 conversion some prehistorians are tending to make the new vertical 

 divisions as rigid as the old horizontal ones. In fact these culture-streams 

 do not run parallel and independent ; such a view of human history would 

 be absurdly artificial. They are perpetually meeting and influencing 

 each other, and sometimes they merge to produce a new facies. 



In the creation of this new outlook (as in so much else) it would be 

 difficult to overestimate our debt to the Abbe Breuil. I think it is true 

 to say that he was the first prehistorian to develop a genuine world- 

 outlook, and his investigation and correlation of a mass of evidence from 

 widely-separated areas has led directly to that change of axis which 

 to-day we are beginning to take for granted. 



In the attempt to present in an intelligible form our new vision of man's 

 earliest history we are hampered by a vocabulary which is out of date. 

 In his monumental Weltgeschichte der Steinzeit Menghin has recently 

 attempted to produce a terminology which will meet the situation, but 

 although this remarkable book contains ideas which are interesting and 

 utilisable, it is open to criticism on several grounds. Instead of using 

 the general division into hand-axe, flake and blade cultures which un- 

 doubtedly gives the best results when we are dealing with the Old Stone 

 Age, Menghin treats flake and blade cultures as one, and creates a third 

 class for bone cultures. That his framework is in fact artificial and far 

 too rigid is proved by the fact that it leads him into a number of contra- 

 dictions, as when he classifies Predmost as a hand-axe culture on account 

 of the presence of primitive Solutrian types, and then is obliged to bring 

 the pure blade culture of Mezin into the hand-axe class because its art is 

 so clearly related to that of Predmost. He fails also in dealing with one 

 of the chief difficulties of the old system, which is that the terms Lower, 

 Middle and Upper Palaeolithic are used at the same time in a chronological 

 and a typological sense. At the time when the system was created this 

 was quite logical, but it cannot be made to work to-day. Nevertheless 

 we seem unable at the moment to get free from this entanglement, and 

 nine prehistorians out of ten continue to use these terms as more or less 

 synonymous . with hand-axe, flake and blade industries respectively. 

 Menghin attempts to meet this by re-baptising the Lower and Middle 

 Palaeolithic as Protolithic, and the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic as 

 Miolithic, and assigning to each its own groups of hand-axe, flake and bone 

 cultures, but he thereby perpetuates the idea of a discontinuity between 

 the Protolithic and Miolithic, an idea which we are coming more and 

 more clearly to see is contradicted by the evidence. Moreover, by using 

 the terms Epiprotolithic and Epimiolithic for industries which are of 



