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What use is prehistory to the historian?
Use is Prehistory to the Historian? History is built with words. How have historians filled the silence that came before? ‘The distinction between history and prehistory has been dissolving for some time’ Jim Secord is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge In Christian Europe, until the beginning of the 19th century, the key marker in the early history of the world was the Biblical Flood.
The term prehistory, defined in English by the Scottish archaeologist Daniel Wilson in 1851, blossomed into significance from the 1860s with the widespread acknowledgement that humans had inhabited the Earth for a vastly longer time than had been recorded in writing. In Denmark Christian Jürgensen Thomsen organised the collections that became the National Museum into clusters of finds discovered together, resulting in a three-age chronology with ‘Stone’, ‘Bronze’ and ‘Iron’ ages. In April 1859 geologist Joseph Prestwich and archaeologist John Evans produced early photographs showing hand axes embedded deep in undisturbed gravels in the Somme River Valley.
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