Achromatism

“ In 1750 Eccardus (17) of Braunschweig advanced the first steps toward prehistoric chronology, in expressing the opinion that the human race first lived in a period in which stone served as the only weapon and tool, and that this was followed by a bronze and then by an iron period of human culture. As early as 1700 a human skull was discovered at Cannstatt and was believed to be of a period as ancient as the mammoth and the cave-bear. [J]
France, favored beyond all other countries by the men of the Old Stone Age, was destined to become the classic centre of prehistoric archæology. ”

“ Erom the objects of daily life and of religious use which have been recovered, such as weapons of bronze and iron, and vessels of metal, stone, and clay, it is possible for the archaeologist to draw conclusions with regard to the customs of these early peoples; while from a study of their style and workmanship and of such examples of their sculpture as have been brought to light, he may determine the stage of artistic development at which they had arrived. ”

“ This means that for some peoples, as for instance the Egyptians and the Babylonians, these epochs or stages of culture fall within their historic period, while for others, as for instance the Greeks and the Romans, they begin in their prehistoric and overlap their historic age. [4]
The history of metals has been declared to be the history of civilization. Indeed, it would be almost impossible to overestimate their importance to man. Man could do very little with stone implements compared with what he could do with metal implements. ”

“ Archæology divides the primeval period of the human race, more especially as exhibited by remains found in Europe, into the stone, the bronze, and the iron ages, these names being given in accordance with the materials employed for weapons, implements, &c., during the particular period. The stone age has been subdivided into the palæolithic and neolithic, the former being that older period, in which the stone implements were not polished as they are in the latter and more recent period. The bronze age, which admits of a similar subdivision, is that in which implements were of copper or bronze. ”

“ The Egyptian pyramids and mummies, the graves and older dolmens, seem to testify to a very close and dependent relation between spirit [Pg 127] and body. The spirit hovered around the body and returned to it, and where the mouldering bones lay there was the spirit’s home. Its life was a very direct continuance of the life in the body. Hence also the food and libations and the rich burial gifts. But toward the close of the Neolithic period we find the great stone chamber giving place to a small cyst or vault, hardly more than a stone coffin, and entirely underground. ”

“ The dead are cremated, not, as in the Mycenaean prime, inhumed. The shield has been strengthened to meet bronze, not stone-tipped, arrows by bronze plates. Corslets and greaves have been elaborated. Bronze, however, is still the metal for swords and spears, and even occasionally for tools and implements, though these are often of iron. In short, we have in Homer a picture of a transitional age of culture; we have not a medley of old and new, of obsolete and modern. The poets do not describe inhumation, as they should do, if they are conservative archaeologists. ”

“ There are crystals as big as cathedral pillars, delicate as mildew and sharp as needles; plain, blue, green like nothing in the world, of fiery colours or black; mathematical, perfect, like the contrivances of queer and bewildered sages; or recalling livers, hearts, gigantic human organs and animal fluids. There are crystalline caves or spectral bubbles or mineral dough; there is mineral fermenting, grilling, growth, architecture and engineering; I vow that a Gothic church is not the most complicated of crystals. Even within us there persists a crystalline power ”

“ It is a common error to confuse the archæologist with the mere collector of ignoble trifles, equally pleased with an unusual postage stamp or a scarce example of an Italian primitive. Nor should the impertinent curiosity of local antiquaries, which sees in every disused chalk-pit traces of Roman civilisation, be compared with the rare predilection requisite for a nobler pursuit. The archæologist preserves for us those objects which time has forgotten and passing fashion rejected; in the museums he buries our ancient eikons, where they become impervious to neglect, praise, or criticism ”

“ Some few of these philosophers—as Robert Hooke and Steno in the seventeenth century, and Moro, Leibnitz, Buffon, Whitehurst, Werner, Hutton, and others in the eighteenth—had vaguely conceived the importance of fossils as records of the earth's ancient history, but the wisest of them no more suspected the full import of the story written in the rocks than the average stroller in a modern museum suspects the meaning of the hieroglyphs on the case of a mummy. ”

“ It is a somewhat curious fact that, while all modern writers admit the great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very recent development of his intellect, and will hardly contemplate the possibility of men, equal in mental capacity to ourselves, having existed in prehistoric times. This question is generally assumed to be settled by such relics as have been preserved of the manufactures of the older races, showing a lower and lower state of the arts by the successive disappearance in early times of iron, bronze, and pottery; and by the ruder forms of the older flint implements. ”

“ The order and sequence of the stone, bronze, and iron ages, were distinctly made out; and even their chronology may one day be discovered. The antiquary is enabled to form some judgment of the civilisation, the arts, and the religion of the nations whose remains he studies. Very often, as in the Roman series of coins, he makes out political events in their history, and assigns their dates. He determines the place of things in the historical series, much as the naturalist does in the natural series.
Like the naturalist also he must be a man of learning, i.e. ”

“ If we look back in time, we find the stone hatchets and arrow-heads, not only of the neolithic but even of the palæolithic age, carefully symmetrical in shape, and that at a time when the extra labor of chipping the flints into comeliness must have entailed a considerable waste of human or half-human energy. At the same early date we find fossil shells, symmetrical bones, teeth, and other like objects, already drilled to serve as necklaces or other ornaments, which analogy with the similar ornaments now in use would lead us to believe were symmetrically strung together into definite patterns. ”

“ In speaking of the relationship of the practice of mummification to the development of civilization, however, I have in mind not merely the influence it exerted upon the moulding of culture, but also the part played by the trend of philosophy in the world at large in determining the Egyptian's conceptions of the wider significance of embalming, and the reaction of these effects upon the current doctrines of the meaning of natural phenomena. ”

“ The great majority of things in hand at any one time belong to within a generation or two. In our own time, although we treasure older things more than did the people of any past age, yet not one per cent of what we have is over a hundred years old. In late Roman coinage the waste was such that in a hundred years only an eighth survived in use, and in half a century more only a twenty-fifth remained. It is very rarely that beads or pendants of very different ages are mixed in ancient necklaces, or that scarabs of reigns far apart are buried together. ”

“ They have indeed up to this time been rather prejudicial than otherwise, by leading people to believe that when they can distinguish between a flint or bronze or ironimplement they know the alpha and omega of the science, and that nothing further is required to determine the relative date of any given monument. It is as if we were to adopt the simple chemistry of the ancients, and divide all known substances into earth, water, fire, and air: a division not only convenient but practically so true that there is very little to be said against it. ”

“ The relation of archæology to Egyptian history deserves especial notice. We have not here, as in pre-historic Europe, a mere multitude of uninscribed and inconsiderable remains; but we have colossal monuments of all kinds—temples, gateways, obelisks, statues, rock sculptures—more or less over-written with hieroglyphics; also sepulchral-chambers, in many instances covered with paintings, in addition to a variety of smaller works, mummy cases, jewelry, scarabæi, pottery, &c., upon many of which are inscriptions. ”

“ Nothing that we have in use to-day was known to stone-age man—even so common a thing as fire is confined and changed to suit our will.
Various effigies, polished problematical forms, bright copper, shell or mica, pottery, textile fabrics, and forms in wood—these were the extent of his art. He knew no horizon beyond the stone effigy, the ornamented gorget, etc. A colored stone, piece of copper, or anything in stone unusual attracted his eye. I believe that these 364appeared to him different from ordinary stones. For the same reason he must have considered hematite as more or less of a mystery. ”

“ The accumulation of antiquarian lore, as well as the accumulation of gold, may become a passion, which collects and scrapes together for the sake and pleasure of scraping; quite forgetting that the metal which has been won, needs to be purified, remelted, and put to use. ”

“ The Stone Age is that period in the history of mankind during which stone is habitually used as a material for weapons and tools. Antiquaries find it convenient to make the Stone Age cease whenever metal implements come into common use, and the Bronze Age, or the Iron Age, supervenes. ”

“ In the earlier strata, representing an earlier stage of life, we find only thick seams of black shale, limestone, and ironstone, in which we seem to see the ashes of primitive organisms, cremated in the appalling fires of the volcanic age, or crushed out of recognition by the superimposed masses. Even if some wizardry of science were ever to restore the forms that have been reduced to ashes in this Archaean crematorium, it would be found that they are more or less advanced forms, far above the original level of life. ”

“ The next age is that of bronze, when man had learned to smelt metals, and make moulds, showing a great advance—and, finally, the Iron Age, in which man had subdued the sterner metal to his will—and this age immediately precedes History. ”

“ In searching with microscopes for Homeric discrepancies and interpolations, critics are apt to forget the ways of old rural society.
The Homeric poems, whether composed in one age or throughout five centuries, are thus entirely uniform in allotting bronze as the material for all sorts of warlike gear, down to the solitary battle-axe mentioned; and iron as the usual metal for heavy tools, knives, carpenters' axes, adzes, and agricultural implements, with the rare exceptions which we have cited in the case of bronze knives and axes. ”

“ The Egyptian mummies are the remains of persons of small or medium stature, as are also the Peruvian and Mexican mummies, and the mummies and bones found in the ancient monuments of India and Persia. And even the most ancient relics we possess of individuals of the human species, the bones of men who lived in the Tertiary period, an epoch the remote antiquity of which goes back for hundreds of centuries, do not show any important differences in the sizes of the primitive and of the modern man. ”

“ A European archæologist and antiquarian, he finds himself in that new world where forms of human life are still lingering akin to those which he has been hitherto studying by the light only of such remains as have been preserved for ages buried in the earth. His stone, his bronze, his iron periods are all found living about him. The flint weapon dug up in London or Glasgow from the lowest strata of human remains, has, in this new world, hardly fallen from the hand of the native. ”

“ Those who have learned to realize the extreme slowness with which material culture was evolved in its earlier stages would be disposed to doubt whether the first metallic implements were made of bronze, and to ask whether, at all events in some part of the world, the Neolithic must not have merged into a Copper Age. ”

“ In thus limiting our idea of the stone age, we may conclude that alike in Europe and in America,31 there has been a period when metal was entirely unknown, when stones were the sole weapons, the sole tools of man, when the cave, for which he had to dispute possession with bears and other beasts of prey, was his sole and precarious refuge, and when clumsy heaps of stones served alike as temples for the worship of his gods and sepulchral monuments in honor of his chiefs. ”

“ In classing bronze implements amongst those of stone or flint, it will be understood that we do not adopt the hypothesis which some antiquaries contend for, that there existed, in a sort of chronological order, three distinct ages of stone, bronze, and iron. We are convinced that there is evidence—at least in this country—that a rude and savage people might have lived contemporaneously with more civilised tribes, or races, to whom the use of a higher class of manufactured articles was familiar. ”

“ The scope of the archaeologist’s studies must include every department of the ancient history of man as preserved in antiquities of whatever character, be they tumuli along the Baltic, fossil skulls and graven bones from the caves of France, the flint implements, pottery, and mummies of Egypt, tablets and bas-reliefs from Mesopotamia, coins and sculptures of Greece and Rome, or inscriptions, waxen tablets, parchment rolls, and papyri of a relatively late period of classical antiquity. ”