ABSTRACT
The student of prehistory has to judge men not by what other people said about them, but by the things they made. In fact every prehistorian must be something of a Marxist, because we only know of prehistoric men by their productions. It is a curious fact that prehistory is in some ways more scientific than history. This is partly because so little was known about it before historians were affected by scientific method. The author's cousin Lord Abercrombie devoted much of his life to determining the succession of pottery in Britain so that it was possible to date a site from a few fragments. Many people found his work very boring, but such fragments play the same part in prehistory as do fossils in geology. Perhaps the most remarkable of all scientific methods is the dating of ancient events by eclipses. These are some of the ways in which science is influencing the study of human prehistory.
