8 



The Thirty -Fourth General Meeting. 



I have undertaken a task from which others may have shrunk. 

 Having ascertained it to be the wish of some of your leading 

 Members that I should devote my lecture to a consideration of the 

 particular branch of archaeology to which my attention has been 

 chiefly given, I will endeavour to sketch out roughly the progress 

 of prehistoric research since the Society met here in 1849, not at- 

 tempting to record all the discoveries that have been made, or even 

 a large part of them, but to trace out as far as possible the main 

 lines of progress, and, as I am the lecturer on this occasion, I hope 

 it will not be thought inappropriate if I refer to such of my own 

 humble discoveries as may be applicable to the matter, and show 

 their bearing on the general question. In so doing I shall divide 

 the subject under two heads. Firstly I shall speak of prehistoric or 

 non-historic archeology, including in the latter the vestiges of the 

 Romanised Britons, which, though falling within historic times, 

 have left no written record; and secondly I shall refer — if I have 

 time — to the quaternary period, or that which, preceding the prehis- 

 toric period, goes back to the very earliest traces of man. In dealing 

 with the prehistoric age our attention must be given chiefly to the 

 grave mounds, as being the class of relics that archaeologists have 

 studied most carefully hitherto, but I hope I shall be able to show 

 that valuable information is to be derived from excavations on the 

 sites of camps and villages, and that more attention will probably be 

 paid to them in future. As early as the beginning of the seven- 

 teenth century Camden seems to have distinguished two kinds of 

 barrows, which he described as the round and those with sharp tops, 

 which were probably the long barrows, and he supposed them to be 

 the graves of soldiers, for bones, he says, are found in them. But 

 Stukeley classified them more carefully, and gave them various 

 kinds of fanciful names, which, with some modifications, have attached 

 to them ever since. Thurnam does full justice to Stukeley's work, 

 although it must be admitted that, viewed by the light of modern 

 discovery, his name has been handed down to us chiefly as an ex- 

 ample of what to avoid in archaeology. A characteristic specimen 

 of Stukeley's quaint and imaginative way of dealing with the 

 subject of his studies may be seen in his account of the origin of 



