ABSTRACT
Dating the past has been a central issue in archae-
ology throughout its development, and remains
fundamentally important. Chapter 1 described
how – between AD 1500 and 1800 – the biblical
account of the Creation, the Flood and the
peopling of the world had been undermined by
European voyages of discovery and the develop-
ment of geology. By the 1860s Bishop Ussher’s
date of 4004 BC for the Creation had been
largely forgotten, while Darwin’s theory of
evolution by natural selection had extended the
geological perception of the Earth’s long, slow
development to plants and animals (van Riper
1993). Enlightenment ideas about social progress
were supplemented by Romantic interest in
origins and change, and once prehistory had been conceptualised, it was rapidly subdivided into
ages defined by artefact technology and social
Scientific dating techniques have caused dramatic changes in our understanding of prehistory, for
example by destroying the traditional framework that related Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe to the
Near East, and by adding several million years to the estimated age of tool-making hominids in East Africa.
In contrast, historical archaeologists incorporate material evidence into a framework of dates and cultures
established from documentary sources; this is not without problems, however, and scientific dating is
