ABSTRACT
According to Glyn Daniel (1950: 29) the ‘revolution’ that transformed antiquarianism into archaeology was attributable to the recognition of geological stratigraphy, and dated to the beginning of the nineteenth century. That is, it was precisely contemporary with the ‘structural revolution’ in Western thought – the transfiguration of the body interior in medicine, the emergence of the grammatical study of language, and the beginnings of political economy. As we saw in Chapter 2, the existence of distinct layers of soil and rock had long been recognised by excavators, but the significance of this variation was not fully appreciated until the publication of Hutton’s Theory of the Earth ( [1788] 1795) and Smith’s Strata Identified by Organised Fossils (1816). Together, these volumes established that rocks could be generated by heat, pressure and weathering acting over long periods of time, and that different strata followed an orderly succession and could be distinguished by the fossils that they contained. Significantly, William Smith kept his collection of fossils and rock specimens in a cabinet that was organised stratigraphically (Harris 1989: 3). Already, the idea had taken root that vertical depth could be equated with chronological change, and that the division of spatio-temporal entities could be used as a principle for the ordering of objects. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) was to add the concept of uniformitarianism to this framework, arguing that if geological processes could be observed in the world today it could be assumed that they were responsible for rock-forming in the past. Early nineteenth-century geology thus maintained that strata built up over time and were superimposed upon one another; that they were laid down by sedimentation in horizontal bands, which were originally whole without exposed edges; that the unconformities and interfaces between strata themselves represented periods of time; and that the chronological succession of layers was paralleled by the changing morphology of the fossils that they contained (Harris 1989: 5). It seems highly likely that Smith’s observations in the canal cuttings were to some extent informed by the more general belief that the forces responsible for the appearance of things could be found below the surface. In this case, scenery and topography were the outcome of geological processes that could be understood through stratigraphy, which opened a window into the distant past.
