ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, we saw how the notion of human progress dominated anthropological and archaeological thinking during much of the nineteenth century. Prehistoric archaeologists were frustrated by the incompleteness of the archaeological record, which compelled them to draw on the researches of biological anthropologists, linguists, and ethnologists in their efforts to reconstruct the past. At the same time, they lived in a time when nineteenthcentury industrial civilization was considered the pinnacle of human achievement. In this chapter, we describe some of the intellectual developments that moved archaeology away from simplistic ideas of human progress in prehistoric times.
