ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the story of a changing archaeology in the 1950s, of changes triggered by dissatisfaction among a younger generation of archaeologists and by the development of radiocarbon dating. Since living vegetation builds up its own organic matter through photosynthesis and by using atmospheric carbon dioxide, the proportion of radiocarbon in it is equal to that in the atmosphere. Within a few years, it became apparent that radiocarbon dates offered the first opportunity to reconstruct a truly global chronology for the last forty thousand years of human prehistory. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed many other important discoveries, among them the spectacular burials of the horsemen of Pazyryk, Siberia; Tollund Man and other bog bodies in Denmark; and the Olsen-Chubbock Paleo-Indian bison kill. Dorothy Garrod was one of the first archaeologists to teach world prehistory, and she introduced a course of that title at Cambridge University after World War II.
