can emerge from another. But not until recently, has it been possible to show the same
kind of evolution concerning the products of human work.
(Arwill-Nordbladh 1989: 138).When establishing a typological series it was important ‘with the greatest
possible accuracy’, he said, ‘to try to analyse theWnd context’ (ibid.).
Typology was also a key method in the description and the establishment of
chronological sequences of Roman and medieval monuments, inscriptions,
coins, and other objects that had already been a major preoccupation
throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, in Vienna the Austrian art histor-
ians Franz WickhoV(1853–1909) and Alois Riegl (1858–1905) approached
typologically the Roman and ‘Barbarian’ collections of the Imperial Museum
with the aim of organizing them and to analyse the connections between the
Roman and later medieval art. Riegl’s work resulted in the publication of
Spat-ro ̈mische Kunst-industrie(Late Roman art industry) in 1901 (Bianchi
Bandinelli 1982 (1976): 142). In Hungary, the proximity of the celebrations
in 1896 of the millenary of the Hungarian conquest of the country led to a
Xurry of archaeological activities in which those related to Conquest and
Migration period graveWnds received most attention. The cataloguing of the
museum collections by Professor Jo ́zsef Hampel (1849–1913) covered all
archaeological periods (Nagy 2003: 19). Cataloguing became one of the
obsessions in the last decades of the nineteenth century. A good example of
catalogues are the corpora, some of which dealt with archaeology beyond
Europe and have been mentioned throughout the book. In Europe the
monumental project organized by Theodor Mommsen in 1862, the positivist
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum(Moradiellos 1992: 81–90), an exhaustive
catalogue of Latin epigraphical inscriptions, should be mentioned. 10
The new methods allowed archaeologists to deal in much more eVective
ways than ever with issues of chronology in the prehistoric period. Starting
with the most ancient epoch, once the great antiquity of humanity had been
acknowledged by the scientiWc community (see Chapter 12), work had to be
done in the organization of the oldest period of human occupation in Europe.
The Stone Age was accordingly segmented into Old—the Palaeolithic—and
New—the Neolithic, and both were subsequently further subdivided into
subperiods (Van Riper 1993: ch. 7). Work was undertaken in other parts of
Europe by others such as the Russian Vasily Gorodtsov, the Frenchmen
10 Another similar positivist and descriptive project organized between the 1860s and the
1890s, but referring to Greek art, was theInschriften Griechischer Bildhauer, published in 1885 by
the Austrian-born professor at the University of Rome, Emanuel Loewy (Bianchi Bandinelli
1982 (1976): 131–9).
Evolutionism and Positivism 393