ABSTRACT

Archaeology and geology are twin sisters of the nineteenth-century enlightenment. It was geology that turned antiquarianism into archaeology. As early as 1836, the antiquarian and customs official Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868), argued that man had been contemporary with presently extinct animals, and in 1847 he published the first volume of his signally titled Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (Daniel 1964:44). Although evidence for the antiquity of Man (long before the Biblical Flood and his supposed creation around 4,000 BC) was accumulating from several locations, Boucher’s view did not become the accepted one until endorsed in 1859 by the geologists Evans and Prestwich, who visited his quarry sites at Abbeville in that year (Daniel 1964:45).