Ancestral Archives: Explorations in the History of Archaeology

Abstract

Historiographic revelations

Back from his famous visit to Boucher de Perthes in the spring of 1859, John Evans hastened to invite some antiquarians friends in London to examine his finds. The flint implements he had collected with Joseph Prestwich in the undisturbed gravel beds of the Somme valley were indeed. or so ho believed, altogether new in appearance and totally unlike anything known in this country [Evans 1869: 93-4):

But while I was waiting in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries, expecting some friends to come out of the meeting room, I looked at a case in one of the windows seats, and was ahsolutely horror-struck to see in it three or four implements precisely resembling those found at Abbeville and Amiens. I enquirer1 where they came kom, but nobody knew, as they were not labelled. On reference, however, it turned out that they had been deposited in the museum of the Society for sixty years, and that an account of them had been published in Archaeologia …