ABSTRACT
The Cambridge University archaeologist Miles Burkitt, a Stone Age specialist, argued that the prime objective of prehistoric archaeology was not to classify and date artifacts so much as to reconstruct the lifeways of the people who made them. And attack it he did, influenced by the researches of the Australian-born archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, whose work is described below. To Mortimer Wheeler, archaeology was an international endeavor, something much broader than merely Iron Age or Roman Britain. By the 1950s, and after the exposure of the Piltdown forgery, it was clear that the earliest chapter of human evolution had unfolded in sub-Saharan Africa. There were major advances in field survey methods, especially when used with aerial photography, whose potential was first realized during World War I. Scientific excavation methods were introduced in England by Mortimer Wheeler and others, following the blueprint of General Pitt Rivers in the 1880s.
