ABSTRACT
It is important that the benefit of hindsight does
not make us forget the constraints of the social
and intellectual context in which antiquaries lived and worked. For example, in the early
nineteenth century the Danish scholars who first
organised prehistoric objects into three successive
Ages (Stone, Bronze and Iron) assigned them to
a very short time span. In mid-seventeenth-
century Britain, Bishop Ussher had used the Bible
to calculate that the Creation of the Earth took
place in 4004 BC, and other estimates were not
much greater (Stiebing 1993: 32). Pressure from
developments in geology and biology to adopt a
much longer timescale did not finally displace the
biblical scheme until the 1860s. The dating of
prehistory then underwent major revisions after the radiocarbon dating technique was introduced and accepted in the 1950s (chapter 4).
