interesting Tasmanian race’, which he had just described as one of the lowest
races of non-Aryan origin, ‘had such a sad and untimely end, but in the
interest of the purity of the white race it is perhaps better so’ (Noeting 1912 in
Struwe 1997: 509).
Nineteenth-century archaeologists and anthropologists focused their studies
on the ‘races’, both in the colonies and within their own nations. They
wondered about the date of the separation between the uncivilized and the
civilized races. Not all of them reached the same conclusion, and their diVer-
ences had implications for the acceptance or not of the human nature of
‘savages’. Polygenists were of the opinion that ‘savages’ had originated earlier
than humans and, therefore, belonged to a separate species to the Caucasians—
i.e. the Europeans. Monogenists, for their part, held that all human races
derived from a common origin and maintained that the diVerentiation between
the uncivilized and the civilized races had happened after God’s creation of
humans (Trigger 1989: 112–13). Some scholars argued that primitive societies
represented the degeneration from a higher cultural plane and a return to
previous stages. In Britain the division between monogenists and polygenists
became entrenched in the disciplinarian divide between ethnologists, led by
James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), and anthropologists, directed by James
Hunt (1833–69). From the 1870s, however, the meaning of both terms changed
again, with anthropology coming to signify the study of cultural phenomena
among the ‘savages’ (Stocking 1971). In other parts of continental Europe,
however, anthropology came to denote the enquiry into the physical features of
humankind.
It was believed that human progress was a law of nature and thus all human
groups passed through similar stages of development. Technological progress
was identiWed with moral and social progress and this made the (men of the)
nineteenth-century entrepreneurial middle classes the natural inheritors of
the evolutionary process (Trigger 1989: 85). Hence, their encounters with
other societies were translated into a hierarchy in which white Europe—
essentially northern Europe—was viewed as the most highly developed ex-
pression of humanity (Bowler 1992: 723). The demonstration of primitives’
disconnection from progress further legitimized the colonial enterprise.
Archaeology was not detached from this process. The division of societies
into stages, from the simplest to the most complex, increasingly required the
help of archaeologists. Archaeology assisted in strengthening the view of
cultural immobility of particular contemporary native groups by associating
them with particular archaeological remains. This also happened in Europe.
In northern Scandinavia, the archaeologicalWnds considered as most primi-
tive were associated with the Saami, who were in this way portrayed as static
and underdeveloped. Their material culture was compared to that of the
312 Colonial Archaeology