Evolutionist schemes were also put into eVect in the permanent exhibitions
on display in national museums, at least in its simplest formulation. This was
done through the use of chronological criteria in the organization of the
displays which allowed visitors to experience both visually and spatially
the evolutionary ages of their own nation. In Rome, the Royal Museum of
Antiquity was reorganized on the basis of chronology and geography by Luigi
Pigorini (1842–1925) in 1867 (Skeates 2000: 25). The creation of a sub-
department in the British Museum to deal speciWcally with British antiquities
has also been seen in the light of evolutionism, contextualized in the friend-
ship between its inspirer, the curator Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826–97),
and leading evolutionists such as General Pitt Rivers (1827–90), Sir John
Lubbock (1834–1913) and Sir John Evans (1823–1908) (Chapman 1989:
157). The French Muse ́e des Antiquite ́s Nationales (Museum of National
Antiquities), established in Paris in 1867, followed a chronological order, as
did the Museo Arqueolo ́gico Nacional (National Archaeological Museum)
opened in Madrid in the same year. In Sweden, an exhibition set up in the
Museum of National Antiquities in the early 1870s arranged objects into two
parallel series, one according to typology (and, therefore, chronology),
although the other, based onWnd location, went along a system conceived
by Hans Hildebrand (1842–1913). A similar chronological arrangement was
adopted in the Museum of Scandinavian Prehistory in Copenhagen (Almgren
1995: 27). In theWeld of prehistory the opposition to the Three Age System
devised much earlier in the century (Chapter 11) wasWnally overcome. The
scheme became widely accepted partly through the spread of the typological
method developed by Oscar Montelius (Morse 1999; Rowley-Conwy forth-
coming; Sklena ́r 1983: 111, 118). This way of doing things was not unique to
Europe and speciWc examples have been mentioned in Parts II and III of this
volume, particularly in Chapter 10 in respect to national museums in America
and Australia.
The creation of accounts about the past based on the geographical bound-
aries of the nation derived not only from the scholars’ willingness to contribute
to the national cause but also from the administrative framework and the
legislation that was being put in place in each country. The growth in state
institutions mentioned in Chapter 12 for the central years of the century
continued in the last four decades: the monuments commissions formed in
many countries in the 1840s continued to work in this period. Their eVorts
were complemented by those of other oYces of new creation. In 1868, a
Hungarian Commission for Monuments was founded, and in 1873 the
Austrian Central Commission with jurisdiction over Bohemia included a
section dealing with prehistoric and classical archaeology (Princ 1984: 14–15;
Sklena ́r 1983: 116). One of the important issues to be tackled was cataloguing.
378 National Archaeology in Europe