was accomplished. New peoples who hitherto had only loved the territories of the
states of the Mediterranean...overXowed both its shores, severed the history of its
south coast from that of the north, and transferred the centre of civilization from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. The distinction between ancient and modern
history, therefore, is no mere accident, nor yet a mere matter of chronological
convenience. What is called modern history is in reality the formation of a new
cycle of culture, connected at several epochs of its development with the perishing
or perished civilization of the Indo-Germanic stock, but destined, like that earlier
cycle, to traverse an orbit of its own. It too is destined to experience in full measure
vicissitudes of national weal and woe, periods of growth, of full vigour, and of age, the
blessedness of creative eVort.
(Mommsen 1864 (1854–5): 4).Perhaps even more than medieval and Roman archaeology, it was prehistoric
archaeology that greatly beneWted from the emphasis on race and language, as
the exploration into the roots of modern linguistic and racial groups inevit-
ably moved back into the most remote periods. This is not to say that the
prehistoric period suddenly became fully accepted as part of the national past,
but events in the period discussed in this chapter as well as the next allowed
that, at the end of the nineteenth century, it wasWnally about to secure for
itself a place in the professional realm. From an early stage the study of the
origins of language would be accompanied by that of race. To begin with, racial
speculation was closely dependent on philology and had the eVect of linking—
indeed, almost binding—the two nascent sciences, archaeology and anthro-
pology/ethnology. Thus, in hisAnalysis of the Egyptian Mythology(1819), one
of the founding fathers of ethnology active in theWrst half of the nineteenth
century, James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), tried toWll in the period be-
tween the confusion of languages in the Tower of Babel, the dispersal of Noah’s
descendants throughout the world, and the appearance of theWrst historical
records of the current ‘nations’, ‘peoples’, or ‘races’. Later, in 1831, the same
author published hisEastern Origin of the Celtic Nationsin which he estab-
lished the western boundaries of the Indo-European family. Prichard was not
an exception for at the time comparative philology was considered to form the
basis of the study into a race’s past, and terms such as ‘linguistic palaeontology’
were coined to describe it (Stocking 1987).
THE SCIENTIFIC RECOGNITION OF HUMAN ANTIQUITYOne of the major developments in the central years of the nineteenth
century was the scientiWc recognition of human antiquity. This would lay
354 National Archaeology in Europe