Schlanger 2010 Coins

Hist. Sci.
, xlviii (2010)
SERIES IN PROGRESS: ANTIQUITIES OF NATURE,

NUMISMATICS AND STONE IMPLEMENTS IN THE
EMERGENCE OF PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY
Nathan Schlanger
Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives, Paris
What links medals and fossils, series of coins and series of stones? What are the pos-
sible connections between the practical, visual constructions of natural history and of
human history? At stake here is a conception of human and natural history that can
be accepted intuitively, or further documented and theorized: not only was human
history a resource for the conceptualization of nature’s history, whether to substanti-
ate or deny accounts of its divine creation, but at key moments some of the devices
and methodologies specifically employed to make sense of human productions may
also have served as models of inquiry and good practice. They served as metonyms
and blueprints for further identification, description and eventual interpretation of
natural phenomena. Furthermore, the reverse also holds: some of these practices of
inquiry, transformed, amplified, indeed naturalized, found their way back into the
methods of human history. This was the case with mid-nineteenth-century human
sciences, including anthropology, ethnology and, of particular concern here, the
nascent discipline of prehistoric archaeology.
The recursive methodology to be highlighted is that of the series: the notion
according to which, beyond any haphazard accumulation, listing or enumeration,
some intelligibility may be derived from putting things together and in relation to
each other, a certain order or sequence that confers on the sum an additional weight
or impact, able to carry and also to display conviction. The things put together in such
an exemplary way are, perhaps unexpectedly, coins, whose study proves particularly
rich in hidden facets and exemplary procedures. Focusing on the decisive contribu-
tion of John Evans, numismatist, antiquarian and geologist, this paper identifies the
crucial role played by his numismatic practices in the establishment of high human
antiquity around 1859. It also shows how his serial approach to coins provided his
follower Pitt Rivers with a prototype for the developmental sequences that so char-
acterize the triumphant evolutionism of the later nineteenth century.
nature’s antiquarians
This broad overview must start a century or so earlier, when an increasingly recog-
nizable body of scholars, the antiquarians, deployed a range of field practices and
interpretative techniques directed both at textual and at material sources. With their
unbridled and highly localized passion for evocative curiosities, antiquarians had
been busy enriching official records of past historical deeds, collecting and displaying
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344 · NATHAN SCHLANGER
new kinds of evidence in their obsessively assembled cabinets of curiosity.1 While

subjected to literary and graphic ridicule, this antiquarian fascination with musty
decay also won notoriety and attention among eminent savants and naturalists.
Buffon, amongst others, showed his enthusiasm in his 1776 Époques de la nature:
“Just as in civil history we consult the deeds, seek the medals and decipher the inscrip-
tions”, so in natural history, he urged, “it is necessary to excavate the archives of
the globe, extract from the entrails of the earth old monuments, collect their debris
and reassemble into a body of proof all the indices of the physical changes that can
help us reconstruct the different ages of nature”, as the only means to “place some
milestones on the eternal road of time”.2 A couple of decades later, Cuvier further
detailed the constituents of such a model antiquarian performance: “These antiquities
of nature, if they may be so termed, will provide the physical history of the globe with
monuments as useful and as reliable as ordinary antiquities provide for the political
and moral history of nations.”3 Hence his strategic proclamation, in the Discours sur
les révolutions du globe, of his advent as an “antiquarian of a new kind”:
I had to learn to restore these monuments of past upheavals [i. e. fossils], and
to decipher their meaning, to collect and put together in their original order the
fragments that made up these animals, to reconstruct the ancient creatures to
which these fragments belonged, to recreate their proportions and characteristics,
and finally to compare them to those alive today on the surface of the Earth. This
was an almost unknown art, which assumed a science hardly touched on till now,
that of the laws which govern the coexistence of forms between the various parts
of organized beings.4
A later version of this concept, intended as popularization rather than innovation,
is found in the palaeontologist Gideon Mantell’s posthumous 1854 publication:
Fossils have been eloquently and appropriately termed Medals of Creation: for
as an accomplished numismatist, even when the inscription of an ancient coin
is illegible, can from the half-obliterated effigy, and from the style of art, deter-
mine with precision the people by whom, and the period when, it was struck;
in like manner the geologist can decipher these natural memorials, interpret the
hieroglyphics with which they are inscribed, and from apparently the most insig-
nificant relics, trace the history of beings of whom no other records are extant....5
No doubt these analogical ambitions served rhetorical or evocative purposes as
much as they encouraged shared methodological procedures in the field, the dis-
section room or the display cabinet.6 Admiration of the antiquarians, notably those
concerned with coins and medals, seems to have offered two connected attractions
to enterprising naturalists. First, antiquarians displayed a welcome Zadigesque
sensibility to traces: marks, fragments, ruins and, by extension, strewn debris and
detritus, barely perceptible or legible patterns, accidentally preserved, partial and
incomplete. These were to be seen, for all their ostensible imperfections, as indices
that could be brought together, restored, reconstructed and read, thus made into a
SERIES IN PROGRESS · 345
reliable body of generalizable evidence. Building on this all-important potential for

the decipherment of nature’s documents, antiquarians also provided some guidelines
for their historicization. Antiquarians were judged proficient in the materialization
of unrecorded history, in relating and aligning these now potentially eloquent relics
through a commonality of origin, style or customs. Relics could thus be integrated
in a narrative where formal or chronological succession could not only be discerned
but also taken to convey some directionality, as true “milestones on the eternal road
of time” (as Buffon put it, rather better than the catastrophist Cuvier). For these
naturalists, antiquarians knew how to (re)construct the material memory of history
in intelligible sequence, then put this seriality to good use.
buying time for change
By the mid-nineteenth century, the scholar who came closest to this ideal of the
antiquarian-cum-naturalist was undoubtedly John Evans (1823–1908).7 The concep-
tual and practical juxtaposition he embodied helps explain his decisive contributions
to the establishment of human antiquity in 1859 and more generally to the emergent
discipline of prehistoric archaeology. Evans was one of those self-assured polymathic
gentlemen of science who drew their wealth from commerce. He was a paper and
envelope manufacturer, his friend Joseph Prestwich (1812–96) exchanged the wine
trade for a professorship of geology at Oxford, while John Lubbock (1834–1913),
author of the influential Prehistoric times (1865), remained prosaically engaged in
banking and politics. Between his business commitments, Evans made time for a
busy scientific schedule in various learned societies and institutions concerned with
antiquarianism, geology and the natural sciences. Of these, numismatics was his
foremost passion. Here he first honed his descriptive and analytical skills and gained
both confidence and enduring notoriety.
Evans’s breakthrough came early, with the publication of “On the date of Brit-
ish coins” (1850). This brief paper argued that native British coinage had preceded
Roman presence and actually had as its prototype the Philip of Macedon stater, or
more probably a Gaulish imitation of it. Using judgements of design and diminishing
weight, Evans placed selected coins on a plate (Figure 1) so as “to show how, from
this prototype, by means of successive imitations of imitations, a number of new
and totally distinct types arose, until their original was quite lost sight of”. While
an “exact numismatic succession” was still lacking, the reader was invited to “trace”
well-oriented changes and admit that “from No. 2 to No. 3 [top centre down to right,
in Figure 1] the transition is easy ... from this [No. 8] we arrive at No. 9, which is
the perfect Verulam type”.8
‘Antiquarians of nature’ could only applaud the ways post-Enlightenment numis-
matists were overcoming crude historical conjectures and arbitrary arrangements,
to focus instead on the coins themselves, their type, composition, manufacture,
inscriptions, letterings, design and style, so as to distinguish among them groups
and families that they could order in time and space.9 Evans’s bold attempt to buy
Fig. 1. “Small change over time”: John Evans’s derivation of some types on British coins, from Plate I
of John Evans, “On the date of British coins”, Numismatic chronicle, xii (1850).
time for pre-Roman coinage was set in this perspective. The process of transforma-
tion and “progressive degeneration” he outlined in coins, linking formal similarities
and historical affinities, appears to have been an elaborate variant of the classical
antiquarian view of European construction. Following the pre-eminent art historian
and antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s lead, it posited the emanation of
civilization from its Greek heartland northwards to the imitative barbarians. At the
same time, going beyond what Buffon and especially Cuvier had envisaged, the
vocabulary Evans used in his 1850 paper to describe coins and their transforma-
tions (“varieties”, “derivations”, “metamorphoses”, “pedigrees”, “descent”) proved
compatible with biological or organicist worldviews.
By the time he published his Coins of the ancient Britons in 1864 Evans could
therefore cash in on the latest conceptions of types and descent, and indeed reformu-
late the classical historicist model of numismatic derivation in terms of a far bolder
methodological and theoretical analogy: “Among barbarous nations the laws which
regulate the types of coinage of this kind, consisting of successive copies of copies of
a given original, are much the same as those which, according to our best naturalists
[i.e. Darwin], govern the succession of types in the organic kingdom.” Endorsing
the general principle of the perpetuation of advantageous variations in relation to
external conditions (the “struggle for existence”), Evans considered that the more
persistent forms of coins would be those easiest to imitate and more symmetrical
in shape: “The natural instincts of uncivilised men seem to lead to the adoption of
simple yet symmetrical forms of ornament, while in all stages of culture the saving
of trouble is an object of universal desire.”10
Towards the end of this paper we will return to the paradoxical fate of what might
be called this ‘transformational’ or ‘serial’ numismatics: it was not Evans himself

but rather his follower Colonel Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers) who would
successfully extend its application to the realms of archaeological and ethnological
material arts. For the moment, let us rather take note of some oscillations of analogi-
cal polarities between natural history and human history. With their practical utility
for both national wealth and imperial expansion increasingly in evidence, the natural
sciences were gradually gaining the intellectual and methodological ascendancy
they have effectively enjoyed ever since. One need only consider how Cuvier, who
had initially turned to the antiquarians to reconstruct fossils as if they were ancient
medals and ruins, now offered some crucial insights and inspiration throughout the
humanist disciplines with his law of the coexistence of forms in organized beings
and his feats of anatomical correlation.11 Whereas medals had a generation earlier
been models for understanding the Earth’s fossil creations,12 we now find Evans
promoting the opposite claim:
[T]he study of this class of [uninscribed] coins is to some extent like that of geol-
ogy: we have no written history on which to fall back, and the annals of the past
have to be reconstructed from the evidence of contemporary yet dumb witnesses
disinterred from the soil. But the numismatist has none of those aids which the
geologist derives from the order of superposition, and the mineral characters of
the rocks in which his fossils are preserved.13
Short-changing numismatics to highlight its challenges was probably a tactical move
here, but the polymath Evans, who knew a thing or two about stratigraphic super-
positions, rocks and fossils, was also well disposed to consider geology as “elder
brother” of archaeology.
Barely a couple of years earlier, Evans had indeed grasped a unique opportunity
to give systematic arrangement to a rather different body of evidence. In the spring
of 1859, during one of his travels to the Continent where, incidentally, he had been
negotiating import duties on rags and chiffons on behalf of the Papermakers’ Associa-
tion, Evans stopped in Abbeville. The local customs officer there, an ancien régime
maverick named Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, had been claiming to
have found in the region’s quarries some ‘antediluvian’ layers where fossil bones of
extinct species were intermixed with human-made stone implements, called haches
(axes), hachettes or coup-de-poings. Boucher de Perthes published these finds, to
little effect, in his Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (1847–67). Alerted by the
palaeontologist Hugh Falconer, who subsequently generously renounced any priority
claims to this discovery, the eminent quaternary geologist Joseph Prestwich enlisted
Evans to form a visiting delegation from the Geological Society. The two men arrived
together, examined the evidence at first-hand and garnered sufficient “moral and col-
lateral testimony” to be convinced of the coexistence of genuine human-made stone
implements alongside fossil bones of extinct species in undisturbed ‘drift’ deposits.14
They were then able to persuade the relevant scientific authorities in France and
in England, at the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society, of the veracity of
Boucher de Perthes’s ground-breaking claims.15

Triumphant vindication aside, a major issue left unresolved in this canonical dis-
ciplinary account concerns the actual character of this verification, more specifically
the authority through which, literally, ‘truth was made’. Reasons why Boucher de
Perthes himself had inspired little credence were readily proposed by the protagonists
with reference to his conspicuous ‘diluvial’ dilettantism, the “injustice which [his]
plates do to the objects described” and his “enunciation of theories which by many
may have been considered as founded upon too small a basis of ascertained facts”.16
But what of his vindicators? Apart from the geologist Prestwich, what did John
Evans bring with him, or do, to earn himself such instant recognition as the expert
in the identification and description of stone implements? Given that his key ‘flint
implements’ publications of 1860 and 1862 were the very first he had ever written
on stone tools or on quaternary deposits, how did he manage to forge for himself
such an unquestioned and enduring aura of authority?17
photography’s trifling recompense
To trace the scientific capital produced and multiplied in this affair, one might first
note how Evans and Prestwich enriched their presentation and evaluation of scientific
claims by drawing on the accountancy devices that served them so well in their busi-
ness dealings, whether with French chiffoniers or claret merchants. Through repeated
lists and enumerations, they set down the arguments in their 1860 papers, took stock,
aligned arguments, anticipated objections, “prosecuted inquiries”, played devil’s
advocate and effectively undertook to “audit” competing claims so as meticulously
to accumulate, penny by penny, a dispassionate and unassailable basis of ascertained
facts so lacking in the work of Boucher de Perthes. As Evans put it some time later,
adding investment banking to the book-keeping repertoire, “each successive discovery
must be received in a cautious, though candid spirit, even if eventually we have to
carry it to what is called in the City a ‘suspense account’”.18
With caution ever the watchword, Evans was particularly vigilant in handling
those would-be antediluvian flint implements. Alongside Prestwich, who brought
with him Lyell’s uniformitarianist stance, Evans recognized the need to establish
unambiguously the stratigraphic position and association of contested finds. In this
respect both visitors fully endorsed Boucher de Perthes’s long advocated ‘archaeo-
geological’ method whereby, as a matter of principle, proof of an object’s antiquity
resided first and foremost in “its surrounding and the place where it was encountered”,
or again in “the site [gissement], that is the depth at which it was discovered”.19 To
substantiate these in situ stratigraphic claims, however, Boucher de Perthes could
only draw geological sections as best he could and collect somewhat desperate affi-
davits from illiterate workers and occasional notables. Together with the antiquarian
Charles Pinsard, Evans and Prestwich took their demonstration much further with
the unprecedented and, for several decades, unparalleled use of modern recording
technology. On their very first visit to the Somme, with Prestwich still sceptical, it
was agreed with Boucher de Perthes and Pinsard that as soon as an implement was
found in situ, the quarrymen would cease work and alert the English visitors. Soon
enough, on 27 April 1859, a telegram summoned Prestwich and Evans by train to the
Saint-Acheul quarry. Once there, as Pinsard reminisced, “It was agreed to photograph
the trench, and also the hache on a larger dimension [sur une plus grande dimen-
sion (i.e. close-up)]. This operation has been achieved, and I have kept an exemplar
which shows the cut [coupé] of the quarry, and the workers pointing their fingers at
the hache, sunk in the mass [of sediment]”.20
Students of ‘mechanized objectivity’ will appreciate this precocious example of
visual demonstration, where deep in the section the picturesque Picard labourers, one
proudly indicating as instructed while the other rests at ease, only corroborate the
disembodied neutrality of the view (Figure 2). Since the 1840s archaeology had been
one of photography’s earliest fields of trial and application, but the subjects initially
represented were mainly immobile monuments and masterpieces of Mediterranean
civilizations encountered during the Grand Tour or oriental excavations. Here, in the
quarries of the otherwise distant Somme valley, what was being pointed at, presum-
ably with a faster exposure time, had value neither as ambiance nor as edification, but
rather served as evidence visually to establish a still highly controversial claim.21 So
far as Evans and Prestwich were concerned, this “photographic sketch” made visible
the undisturbed stratigraphic integrity of the geological beds, “so much so that their
different characters can be recognised on a photograph of the section taken for Mr
Prestwich”.22 A slightly different demonstrative use of these photographs was made
in France, during the first public debate on l’homme fossile at the newly founded
Société d’Anthropologie de Paris on 3 November 1859. In front of such luminar-
ies as Paul Broca, L.-A. Bertillon, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Boucher de
Perthes himself, Georges Pouchet mentioned how the English visitors’ wish to see
implements in situ had been rewarded:
They saw a hache engaged in the depth of the diluvium, and in such a situa-
tion that it could not have been introduced by fraud. They had it represented by
photography, and the exactitude of M. Boucher de Perthes’s opinions was thus
established on a rigorous proof.23
As this comment indicates, this ‘ostensible objectivity’, recording stratigraphic
context and integrity, served not only to establish the reality of fossil man as claimed
by Boucher de Perthes (specifically against Cuvier’s catastrophism and its rearguard
advocate the academician Elie de Beaumont), but also, in so doing, to insure such
claims against possible acts of fraud.24 Early archaeology, with its sudden and urgent
infatuation with otherwise insignificant mineral fragments and their surrounding
sediments, was beleaguered by some entrepreneurial shadiness involving both the
deliberate reburial of genuine finds recovered elsewhere and the proliferation of
faked items. Interestingly, while the mechanics of stone-tool manufacture were still
imperfectly understood by the scholarly community, they were sufficiently well
grasped by local quarry workers to develop something of a cottage industry of false
Fig. 2. “L’ouvrier montre avec le doigt la hache engagée dans la masse de cailloux. Saint-Acheul. Première
hache authentique trouvée dans la carrière 185[9].” C. Pinsard, photograph taken for J. Prestwich,
27 April 1859. (Album Pinsard, Mss 43. Albuminated paper. Bibliothèques d’Amiens Métropole,
Ms 1370.f.33. Used with kind permission.)
stone implements, a venture made all the more rewarding by the prevailing practice
of paying the labourers by the find.
numismatics of a new kind
It was at this juncture, with crucial questions of subterfuge, truthfulness and labour
management at stake, that John Evans proved himself the veritable linchpin of the
emerging discipline of prehistoric archaeology. To some extent, he took part in and
even tacitly encouraged the lucrative aspects of archaeological practice, involving
quite literally the exchange of coins for flints. Regarding the Pinsard photographs,
for example, he noted that “besides the langue de chat thus seen in situ, the workmen
in the pit supplied us with a considerable number of those implements, as well as
some of the oval form, and gratefully received a trifling recompense in return”. The
negotiated deal stipulated that if the workmen kept their finds in situ and immediately
alerted the visitors, then “Mr. Prestwich committed himself to compensate [them]
for their loss of time, if they were not able to extract gravels elsewhere”.25 Ever the
businessman, Evans readily gave this phenomenon an air of free-market inevitability:
“It will perhaps be well to say a few words as to the characteristics of authenticity
presented by these implements; for, as is so universally the case where the demand
for an article has exceeded the supply, spurious imitations of them have been fabri-
cated, and in some cases successfully passed off upon avid but unwary collectors.”26
But there was more. In both moral and practical terms, Evans was uniquely placed,
certainly far better than his geologist or naturalist colleagues, to pronounce with
authority on these “characteristics of authenticity”, and credibly to identify, evalu-
ate and contain any threat of discredit and error due to fraud. Vigilance regarding
counterfeits had been deeply imprinted into his scientific habitus, as a numismatist.
Here lay the kernel of the crucial expertise that Evans was able so rapidly to exploit
and then compile and consolidate into a specialized body of knowledge and practice.
He became, to paraphrase Cuvier, an “antiquarian of a new kind”, a numismatist of
stone implements. Matters of fraud are in this respect a good starting point. Money
being at once the pillar and idol of Victorian civil society, Evans occupied high ethi-
cal and moral grounds as one of its expert custodians. His numismatic sensitivity on
matters of authenticity extended naturally from minted metal to flaked flint. Coins
were certainly in Evans’s mind when he first visited and vindicated Boucher de Per-
thes, as he took the opportunity to purchase in Amiens a second-brass Magnentius
for his collection. He also drew explicitly on specialized numismatic vocabulary to
identify criteria of authenticity: “many of the implements have a coating of carbonate
of lime forming an adherent incrustation upon them: this, as M. Douchet has already
remarked, is for those weapons what the patina is for bronze coins and statues, a proof
of their antiquity.”27 Numismatists’ fascination with fraud and its detection undoubt-
edly went further than most. Unlike antiquarian staples such as vases and weapons,
more than mere loss of face was at stake. Indeed coins have been altered, imitated
and faked throughout their history not simply as ‘collectibles’, but also, much more
frequently and insidiously, as elements of common currency issued and transacted

within existing monetary economies. Evans’s pronouncements on matters of fraud
were thus readily welcomed as befitting a veritable ‘chief inspector of forgeries’ of
this newly counterfeitable medium, flint.28
From fake to fabrication: precisely because the whole economic system demanded
the unambiguous authentication of bona fide currencies, numismatic forgeries actu-
ally attracted considerable attention in their own right as a means to understand
legitimate production. Evans’s precocious recourse to experimental flint knapping,
his replications, demonstrations and appreciation of the skills of the notorious ‘Flint
Jack’ can be understood in this light, following the numismatic imperative to distin-
guish fake from genuine. At the same time, in addition to their initial critical role,
such dedicated observations, experiments and analogies would also soon provide
heuristic tools for understanding ancient modes of manufacture and workmanship on
their own terms. Evans readily extended this coin-based technological attentiveness
to stone implements, as we will see below. With regards to terminology, and besides
references to bronze “patina”, Evans suggestively talked of “the best-wrought forms
of flint implements” and of “flakes … struck off, and wrought into shape”. While the
notion of ‘wrought’ did not catch on beyond its metallurgical basis, that of ‘strik-
ing’ is nowadays ubiquitous: it may not be Evans who pioneered its application to
the stone medium, but his work clearly shows striking affinities, so to speak, in the
conception of coins and flints.29
Such had indeed been Evans’s brief when he joined Prestwich’s French jaunt: to
consider the flint implements and weapons discovered there “from an antiquarian
rather than a geological point of view”, seeking in them “resemblances and differences
which may consist in material, form or workmanship”.30 His mission was effectively
to study and classify the flint implements as if they were coins, subjecting the former
as he did the latter to systematic study and description according to “type, weight, and
workmanship”.31 Besides this attention to fraud and fabrication, Evans also brought
from numismatics the art of consistent, normalized, disciplined scrutiny. Precisely
because, in comparison with the antiquarian’s usually more visually arresting bric-
a-brac, coins appeared so small, plain and similar to one another even at close range,
there were no insights to be gained from their first appraisal or sweeping overview. To
make sense of coins it was necessary to isolate and track significant features so as to
refer them to their ‘type’ (as etched on the dies from which they had been stamped),
then sort them into ‘issues’ and ‘species’ and show possible affinities between them.
Once cleaned and prepared, each coin had to be examined individually, methodically
and step by step, then submitted to the same descriptive gaze and criteria in order to
get their measure, to assess their condition and appraise their eventual specificities,
markings or defects.
Since the early nineteenth-century revival of numismatics, this protocol of precision
was accompanied by particularly accurate and systematized illustrations of obverse
and reverse. Their lavish, almost ostentatious, wealth of detail served a double pur-
pose. One, more conventional, was to ensure their quality as reliable and comparable
‘proxies’ when printed, bound, circulated and consulted as ‘paper museums’, thus
reinforcing and soon replacing the more expensive and uncertain practice of plaster
or sulphur casts. The other purpose, more specific in comparison with other antiquar-
ian images, was to record on paper the singular identity of each and every exemplar
depicted. Coins, after all, are by definition already imprinted, and thus offer neither
literal nor metaphorical space for any secondary inscriptions or metadata recording:
no handles or knobs to which to attach some label, no free surfaces, convenient
concavities or unglazed reserves on which to ink even the most succinct or discrete
indication. Any records of coins, any sylloge, corpus, inventory or catalogue, had
therefore to be illustrated with etchings, engravings and gradually, from the 1870s
onwards, photographic reproductions, which would be accurate enough, reliable
and readily retrievable, so as securely to link the specific piece under study to its
detached, contingent yet constituent information.32 Besides the prevention of theft
and of collection dispersal, this image-mediated linkage related first and foremost
to the specific provenance of the coins. Provenance embraced the layer, feature, site
or, failing that, the locality whence they had been recovered, in some archaeologi-
cal contexts, as isolated stray finds or as part of some deliberately buried treasures.
This, in turn, made it possible to anchor the coins’ formal properties in space and
time, thus enabling them to fulfil their expected role as historical documents, as the
“metallic mirrors” of the ancient world.33
dichotomy and variability in the stone age
The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for stone implements. We can now better appreci-
ate the export of specific practices and expectations from one antiquarian domain to
another in many of Evans’s publications, beginning with his very first reports from the
Somme valley and culminating with the monumental 1872 Ancient stone implements,
weapons, and ornaments, of Great Britain.34 Besides the resolutely empiricist stance
and heavy descriptive prose characteristic of Victorian science, the study of stone
implements evinced the same insistence on provenance, including the meticulous
collation and maintenance of a country-wide gazetteer, where each discovery site
was localized and recorded so as, it was hoped, to increase its historical significance.
Illustrations of implements were executed with scrupulous accuracy, illustrations
about which Evans confided that, if nothing else, they would be a lasting credit to
his labours.35 There was also recourse to similar editorial practices, distinct subject
matter and topographical indices, use of smaller fonts for detailed descriptions and
enrolment of the same family-members for correcting proofs, across what Evans
apparently considered as his ‘Ancient’ triptych of Coins (1864), Stone implements
(1872) and Bronze implements (1881).36
Beyond disciplinary techniques, numismatic affinities also appeared in what Evans
and his peers considered to be the crowning achievement of his investigations: his
classification of stone implements. Ever since his first visit to the Somme valley,
alongside his endeavours to document and photograph their authenticity in situ,
Evans focused his attentions on the ‘character’ of the candidate exemplars and their
possible position within some broader chronological framework. Using a restricted
set of descriptive criteria related to the extension and shape of the cutting edge, he
proposed to distinguish and classify these Drift implements under three main headings
or types: “1. Flint flakes, apparently intended for arrow-heads or knives. 2. Pointed
weapons, analogous to lance or spear heads. 3. Oval or almond-shaped implements
presenting a cutting edge all round.”37
In formal terms Evans’s proposal supplanted vague foreign vernaculars like
amande or langue de chat with a semblance of morphological rigour (see Figures 3
and 4). It also served, more surreptitiously, to instil and legitimize the concept of the
‘Stone Age’ as the most ancient period in the then still-contested tripartite scheme
of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages.38 Through its general structure and interpretative
potential, this classificatory framework immediately posited a structuring dichotomy
within the Stone Age (whose acceptance it therefore enjoined) between the Celt and
the Drift periods. In his 1859 mission statement for Abbeville, Evans saw it as his
most important task
to point out wherein these implements from the drift resemble or differ from
those in some degree analogous with them, which are so frequently found in
this country and on the Continent, and are usually considered to be the work of
the primitive, or as for convenience sake I will call them, the Celtic inhabitants
of this part of Europe.39
Fig. 3. Evans’s classification of stone implements as presented in 1859 by Joseph Prestwich in “On
the occurrence of flint-implements, associated with the remains of animals of extinct species in
beds of a late geological period, in France at Amiens and Abbeville, and in England at Hoxne”,
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, cl (1860), [Abstract]. 1 – Oval implement, 2 –
Pointed implement.
Fig. 4. Evans’s classification of stone implements from the Drift. Plate IV in John Evans, “Account of some
further discoveries of flint implements in the Drift on the Continent and in England”, Archaeologia,
xxxix (1862), 57–84. Items 1 to 4 would be ‘flakes’, 5 to 10 ‘pointed’, and 11 to 20 ‘oval’.
This Celt / Drift distinction, which Evans maintained throughout his career, was
soon thereafter presented to posterity in terms of ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Palaeolithic’.40 Its
most tangible expression lay in the simultaneously technological and tactile differ-
entiation of stone implements, between those ‘polished’ and ‘unpolished’. Such a
differentiation would have been all the more recognizable for Evans since it echoed
that then prevailing in numismatics between ‘inscribed’ and ‘uninscribed’ coins,
those ‘epigraphic’ and those ‘anepigraphous’.41 In any case, given that the selected
implement classes had primarily a diagnostic role in terms of presence or absence,
Evans was at least initially inclined to dismiss the class of ‘flakes’ as being “not of
much importance in the present branch of our inquiry; because, granting them to be of
human work and not the result of accident, there is little by which to distinguish them
from similar implements of more recent date [i.e. Celt]”.42 The same dichotomous
outlook explains why the ‘pointed’ and ‘oval’ implement classes were attributed to
the Drift, en bloc, making it very difficult to envisage any possible chronological
differentiation, let alone change, within that period. Evans had difficulty even in
imagining that some difference might eventually be found between the lower and
higher levels of the Somme:
It appears to me possible that an abundance of flakes and knives, especially the
more finished kind, like Plate IV [here Fig. 4]. fig 4, and of the oval-shaped
implements, with a cutting edge all round, chipped out with a considerable
amount of skill and care, may prove to be the characteristics of the lower and
more arenaceous beds of drift, such as are found at Menchecourt and Montiers;
and if so, that we should find that there are two drift periods distinguishable by
the positions of their beds, and by the character of the implements they contain.
I merely mention this as a suggestion, it may be of the vaguest kind, but still as
showing the necessity of the co-operation of archaeologists and geologists on
this the neutral ground between the two sciences.43
Dichotomy and stratigraphy aside, Evans’s candid misgivings reflect his interpreta-
tion of the observed variability among the Drift stone implements. Remarkably, no
sooner had he identified supposedly clear-cut and diagnostic classes of implements,
‘pointed’ and ‘oval’, than he set out to tone down and belittle their distinctions. These
implements may “for convenience sake be classed under three heads, though there is so
much variety among them that the classes, especially the second and the third, may be
said to blend or run one into the other”. This made it difficult literally and figuratively
to draw any “decided line of demarcation” between the acute and the round-pointed
forms, given that so many specimens “occupied an intermediate position”. “What
character of point an implement would have” was in fact “to a considerable extent a
matter of accident” related to difficulties posed by the nature and quality of the raw
material, such that some particularly roughly chipped and “barbarous” implements
might appear “to be either the result of fruitless attempts to imitate the more finished
implements, or else to have been so hastily made, that more attention was paid to
producing a point or a cutting edge than to symmetry of form”.44
For better or worse, this perception of variability bears the mark of numismatics:
not simply because it revelled in the systematic scrutiny of magnified micro-scale
traits, but also because it gave this variability ready-made intelligibility in terms of
minting considerations. Until the advent of the coin press during the Renaissance, the
technical processes of coin manufacture meant that no exemplars produced were ever
exactly identical. Variables included the specific properties of the bullion refined and
alloyed, the weight, shape and conditioning of the blanks (flans), their positioning
and centring on the obverse (anvil) die, the placement and orientation of the reverse
(punch) die above them, the force, angle and repetition of the striking blow, and so
on. The whole repertoire was repeated for each coin struck from each die used as
they wore down and cracked and then again for each ‘type’ that the mint authorities
decreed be created or imitated. Evans described the implications of this variability:
It must not be supposed that in these five plates I have given representations of all
the varieties of type which the uninscribed gold coins present: the mere alteration
of the position of the flan with regard to the dies (which were always larger than
the coins struck from them), causes a considerable difference in the appearance
of coins even from the same dies; and besides this, there are numerous minor
details which vary on different coins of much the same general type, some of
which I have occasionally mentioned in the descriptions. In one or two instances,
I have placed among the uninscribed coins some which in reality belong to the
inscribed series, but which, from their not having been properly placed on the
dies, do not show their legends.45
This manufacturing process represents an almost perfect Platonic model, allowing
one to grasp perceptible phenomenal diversity among actual exemplars while at the
same time securing their status as stable general categories. Each coin produced in
a series was but a single point in a vast statistical cloud clustered around a central
absence: often deliberately so, insofar as obsolete dies were usually destroyed to
avoid unauthorized reuse. This interpretative span between the ideal type as etched
in the dies by the commissioned engraver and the variations inevitably hammered
into each exemplar by the mint workers is also perceptible in Evans’s classification
and interpretation of stone implements. As with coins, so with flints,
it seems doubtful whether it is worth while to insist much on these subdivisions
of form, many of which must, no doubt, have resulted from the manner in which
the flint happened to break during the process of manufacture. Though, therefore,
I have here attempted a somewhat detailed classification, I by no means wish it
to be supposed that I consider each form of implement to have been specially
made to serve some special requirement, as is the case with many of the tools
and weapons of the present day. I am far more ready to think that only two main
divisions can be established, though even these may be said to shade off into
each other; I mean pointed implements for piercing, digging, or boring, and
sharp-edged implements for cutting or scraping.46
Thus Evans’s ancient stone implements were as if undermined by this numismatic
interpretation. The variability these implements displayed was almost exclusively
considered as accidental, attributed (beyond broad hypothetical functional distinc-
tions) to such situational factors as the quality of the raw material or knapping imper-
fections. This left little scope for other possible interpretations in terms of change,
evolution or history. Engrossed as he was in deploying numismatic minutiae within
the nominally geological problem of high human antiquity, Evans all but forgot or
deemed irrelevant the ‘serial’ transformational approach he had otherwise so bril-
liantly pioneered in the study of ancient British coinage.
pitt rivers’s serial progression
The man who knew how to pick up and connect the pieces, draw together the intel-
ligibility of coins and of stone implements, then enshrine the ensuing vision of serial
progression in his ideal museum, was General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers
(1827–1900). Of the many facets of Pitt Rivers’s work, the one that concerns us here
bestrides (and too often falls between) his well-known contributions to archaeological
practice, broadly defined, and to ethnographic theory, collection and display.47 Once
his initial interests in firearm design developed into a totalizing quest for uninterrupted
continuity in the material arts, Pitt Rivers gained access to such congenial circles as the
Society of Antiquaries and the Ethnological Society of London. He acted as secretary

to the third International Congress for Prehistoric Archaeology and Anthropology
(Norwich and London, 1868) which included among its discussion themes the search
for “Indications of continuous progress in arts and civilisation during successive
prehistoric periods”.48 Upon these social and institutional dispositions he could read-
ily call on Evans’s flintknapping expertise and specifically request his presence and
advice at his Cissbury hillfort excavations in 1867 and 1868.49 Although Pitt Rivers
himself went on to develop some rather idiosyncratic interpretations, his recognition
of Evans’s authoritative standing in stone implement studies was widely shared.50
In contrast, the General was unique in perceiving the exemplary potential of
Evans’s serial numismatics for ethnology and prehistoric archaeology. Already in his
1868 programmatic paper, Pitt Rivers had proclaimed that human progress did not
result from ex nihilo individual invention but rather from continuous imitation and
variation through such agencies as “unconscious selection” and “errors in succes-
sive copies”. As a prime example of this latter process, continued Pitt Rivers, “Mr.
Evans has shown in his work on the ‘Coins of the Ancient Britons’ (p. 167) how the
head of Medusa, copied originally from a Greek coin, was made to pass through a
series of apparently meaningless hieroglyphics, in which the original head was quite
lost, and was ultimately converted into a chariot and four”.51 In fact this numismatic
transformation became for Pitt Rivers a canonical example that he expanded and
applied throughout his subsequent publications. In 1872, for example, he explicitly
called on Evans’s coins to discuss (and illustrate — see Figures 5 and 6) changes in
the ornament of New Ireland paddles, concluding that:
we have here [with the paddles] a complete parallel to the transformations
observable on the British coins, showing with what close analogy the minds of
men in the same condition of culture, though of widely different races, obey the
same laws, and are subject to the same causes of variation and continuity in the
development of their arts.52
So important was this coin-based demonstration for Pitt Rivers that he specifi-
cally sought permission to include one of Evans’s numismatic diagrams in his own
publications, otherwise essentially illustrated with plates of his own making (Figure
6).53 Finally, as late as 1891, when Pitt Rivers assembled his second collection at
Farnham to educate the labouring classes, the diagrams he chose for illustrating his
museum’s ‘typological’ principle included one on “the degradation of silver coins,
from the stater of Philip of Macedon”.54
With this unprecedented combination of flintknapping nous and numismatic exem-
plum, Pitt Rivers felt well equipped to retrace, in “Primitive warfare II” (1868), the
laws of variation and sequence since the “earliest records of human workmanship”,
namely the stone implements of the Stone Age. Over several tightly argued pages
he undertook to demonstrate the reality and mechanisms of the “Transition from the
Drift to the Celt Type”, effectively enlisting Evans’s ‘serial’ numismatic approach
to undermine Evans’s own beliefs, as we saw above, regarding dichotomy and vari-
Fig. 5. “Ornamentation of New Ireland paddles, showing the transition of form”, Plate IV in Pitt Rivers,
“On the principles of classification adopted in the arrangement of his anthropological collection,
now exhibited in the Bethnal Green Museum”, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, iv (1874),
reproduced from Pitt Rivers, The evolution of culture and other essays (Oxford, 1906).
ability in Drift implements. Conscious of the novelty of his argument, Pitt Rivers
took care to detail his evidence and procedures:
I have arranged upon diagram No. 1 (Plate XII) a series of specimens of the same
type from nearly every part of the globe. All the figures given in these diagrams are
traced from the implements themselves, and reduced by photography; they may
therefore be regarded as facsimiles, a point of great importance when our subject
has to deal with the minute gradations of difference observable between them.55
Fig. 6. “Evolution of types on ancient British coins”, reproduced from John Evans, “The coinage of the
Ancient Britons and natural selection”, Notices of the proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great
Britain, vii (1875), as Plate XXI in Pitt Rivers, “On the principles of classification adopted in the
arrangement of his anthropological collection, now exhibited in the Bethnal Green Museum”,
Journal of the Anthropological Institute, iv (1874), here reproduced from Pitt Rivers, The evolution
of culture and other essays (Oxford, 1906).
The series began (items 1–11 in Figure 7) with the Drift type, with specimens from
Saint-Acheul, from England and Europe, and beyond from Babylonia, Madras and
the Cape of Good Hope. Instead of their usual classification as ‘pointed’ and ‘oval’,
Pitt Rivers proposed “a distinction more clearly embodying a principle of progress”
according to their hafting potential (base left rough, items 1–7, or worked, items 8–11).
It was however form (or rather outline) that let him conjecture a gradual transition
from the Drift to the Celt type (beginning with item 12, from Cissbury): “By select-
ing specimens, and arranging them in order from left to right, I have endeavoured to
trace the transition from the drift type to the almond-shaped celt type”, showing how
“almost imperceptibly” they pass through “numerous gradations of form”, so that,
“in casting the eye from left to right along the upper row of diagram No. 1 (Plate
XII), it will puzzle the acutest observer to determine where the Drift type ends, and
that of the celt begins”.56 Upon this visual sweep, Pitt Rivers appears to have touched
on the essence of seriality:
Fig. 7. “Transition from the Drift to the Celt type”, Plate XII (diagram 1) in Pitt Rivers, “Primitive
warfare, Part II: On the resemblance of the weapons of early man, their variation, continuity, and
development of form”, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, xii (1868), reproduced
from Pitt Rivers, The evolution of culture and other essays (Oxford, 1906).
I have dealt somewhat at length upon this part of my subject, owing to the
circumstance of its presenting some features of novelty in the study of flint
implements, and being therefore open to criticism on the part of those who are
more favourable to the principles of classification than of continuity, with all the
important concomitants, of division versus unity, which those principles involve.57
conclusion: serial continuities in prehistoric archaeology
Evans could not let such claims go unchallenged. His 1872 Ancient stone implements
included some specific rejoinders to Pitt Rivers.58 The radical distinction between Drift
and Celt implements was adamantly maintained on technological, morphological and
functional grounds. Far from “affording every link of connexion”, the supposedly
transitional types identified by Pitt Rivers at Cissbury were explicitly rejected as mere
coincidence among a mass of unmistakably Neolithic forms. Evans also called on
visual impressions, but in his case to assert that “a glance at the figure will at once
show how different in character they are”, in shape and in mode of manufacture. They
exhibited a “complete gap between the River-drift and the Surface Stone Periods,
so far as any intermediate forms of implements are concerned”, a gap that in turn
reinforced the historicist hypothesis of a complete population replacement between
the Palaeolithic and Neolithic inhabitants of the country.59
Together with that, Evans remained ambivalent about the wider expectations of
continuous evolution championed by Pitt Rivers. Attentive as he was to variability
in stone implements, we have already recorded his predilection, derived from numis-
matics, for expedient interpretations in terms of manufacture or of function rather
than history and development. He thus considered it “unwarrantable” (with respect
to flint arrowheads) “to attempt any chronological arrangement founded upon mere
form”.60 Such scepticism towards the reality of progressive change within the Stone
Age and the possibility of its demonstration was in fact widespread among many
of Evans’s contemporaries; these included the Duke of Argyll who considered flint
implements “a very poor index of civilisation”, Charles Lyell who asserted that the
aboriginal implements of all times and countries “seem nearly all alike in rudeness,
and very uniform in general character”, or William Boyd Dawkins who cast doubts
on “the principle of classification by the relative rudeness [that] assumes that the
progress of man has been gradual, and that the ruder implements are therefore the
older”.61 In fact, so far as prehistoric archaeology writ large is concerned, the fur-
ther accumulation of systematically documented archaeological and stratigraphic
evidence and, just as importantly, better honed propositions regarding the forward
march of civilization, in tune with the historical expectations and exigencies of late
nineteenth-century industrialized nation states, were required before stone implements
were recognized as reliable markers of Palaeolithic progress, with its succession of
Acheulean, Mousterian and Aurignacian periods as we know them today.62
Leaving these disciplinary developments for consideration elsewhere, let us con-
clude with an appraisal of Evans’s simultaneously transitional and transformational
role. Reticent as he may have been in endorsing the uncompromisingly progressive
zeal of Pitt Rivers’s claims, Evans could nevertheless scarcely reject outright any
suggestions of sequence and directionality in archaeological remains. He thus granted
that the Drift implements may “pass imperceptibly from the tongue-shaped, at the one
end of the series, into the oval or almond-shaped implements, presenting a cutting
edge all around, at the other”.63 His pioneering approach had indeed been at the very
origin of such a perception, or had at least served as an influential prototype in making
seriality topical and workable, as both goal and practice, across relevant domains of
inquiry. From 1850, with the successive imitation of imitations of the Macedonian
stater, Evans’s sensitivity towards minute changes in forms and ornaments, models
and copies, originals and derivations, was primarily that of the antiquarian, seeking to
reconstruct the distribution and chronology of pre-Roman coinage. By the following
decade, shifts in the cognitive and institutional ascendancy of the natural sciences
heralded a changing tide of analogical and methodological appropriations, from
natural history to human history, from palaeontology to archaeology, from strata and
fossil bones back, as it were, to ancient medals and implements. From 1864 onwards
Evans could therefore easily recast his numismatic demonstration from an initially
antiquarian pattern of degeneration from some Greek genius into a naturalized proc-
ess of descent with modification. As he put it in the 1890 Supplement to The coins
of the Ancient Britons:
In fact, I attempted [in 1850] to apply the principles of ‘evolution’ and ‘natural
selection’ to numismatic inquires; and when, ten years afterwards, Darwin’s great
work on the origins of species was published, I found that I had been approach-
ing the study of the barbaric art on much the same lines as those which he had
conducted in his far more important inquiries into the hidden secrets of nature.64
Drawing legitimacy from this retrospective realignment, Evans readily recognized

the wider heuristic potential of his own approach to “barbaric art”. His serial method
of inquiry, so he recorded, had been found of service not only to other students of
British coins, and to Dr Hans Hildebrand, who “has followed the same method in
investigating the history of some of the earliest of the Scandinavian coins”, but also,
significantly, to General Pitt Rivers who, “in his ethnological researches … has found,
in the form and ornamentation of implements, an almost analogous development with
that which has prevailed among coins”.65
Thus the cycle of ‘series in progress’ traced through this paper becomes a dynamic
spiral. Whatever the utility of Darwinism for the study of coins and medals, it is
clear that Evans’s numismatics played a crucial role in bringing seriality into late
nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking, with its concomitant technologies of dis-
play and visualization.66 Explicitly with Pitt Rivers, and in his wake his followers
Henry Balfour and Alfred Cort Haddon,67 and soon thereafter more implicitly, by the
successive imitation of imitations, so to speak, we have seen the introduction into
the new sciences of humankind of a practice and discourse of seriality which owes
its pertinence and intelligibility to the art-historical historicism of Winckelmann as
much as to the more enticing Darwinian-cum-Lamarckian evolutionism of the age.
acknowledgements
While many ideas in this paper will need to be explored further, I have already ben-
efited from various insights and feedback from several colleagues, including François
de Callataÿ, Noël Coye, Vincent Guichard, Marc-Antoine Kaeser and Alain Schnapp,
and also in the course of seminar lectures at the Department of Archaeology, South-
ampton, the HARN History of Archaeology Network meeting at Birkbeck College
London, and the Stanford Archaeology Center in the framework of the developing
‘Antiquarian’ project. I also owe much to the stimulation provided during the seminar
on “Seriality and scientific objects in the age of revolution”, with Nick Hopwood
and Jim Secord, and of course to Simon Schaffer, for the inspiration and the perfect
dosage of patience and pace.
REFERENCES
1. For more archaeologically-oriented appraisal of antiquarian historiography, first developed by Arnaldo

Momigliano, see particularly Alain Schnapp, La conqute du passé: Aux origines de l’archéologie
(Paris, 1993), translated as The discovery of the past: The origins of archaeology (London, 1996);
Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the antiquarian imagination (London, 1989); and Pierre
Pinon, La Gaule retrouvée (Paris, 1991).
2. Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Époques de la nature (Paris, 1776), 3 (quoted and discussed
in Schnapp, op. cit. (ref. 1), 271ff.). Translations from the French are mine throughout.
3. Georges Cuvier, “Extrait d’un mémoire sur un animal dont on trouve les ossements dans la pierre
à plâtre des environs de Paris, et qui parait ne plus exister vivant aujourd’hui” (1798), in M. J.
S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, fossil bones and geological catastrophes (London, 1997), 286.
4. Georges Cuvier, Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe et sur les changements qu’elles ont
produites dans le règne animal (Paris, 1822), 1. See Schnapp, op. cit. (ref. 1), 286 and Rudwick,
op. cit. (ref. 3), 46 on the ‘monuments of physical history’.
5. Gideon Mantell, The medals of creation or, first lessons in geology, and the study of organic remains
(London, 1854), i, 17, original emphasis.
6. Such an assessment would require a re-examination from the naturalists’ perspective of what the likes
of Caylus and Winckelmann were doing. See Schnapp, op. cit. (ref. 1), 266ff.; Martin Myrone and
Lucy Peltz (eds), Producing the past: Aspects of antiquarian culture and practice, 1700–1850
(London, 1999); Susan Pearce (ed.), Visions of antiquity: The Society of Antiquaries of London
1707–2007 (London, 2007); and Irène Aghion (ed.), Caylus mécène du roi: Collectionner les
antiquités au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2002). See also Rhoda Rappaport, “Borrowed words: Problems
of vocabulary in eighteenth-century geology”, The British journal for the history of science, xv
(1982), 27–44, pp. 27–31, on the aura of credibility surrounding the notion of ‘monument’ and
the study of coins and medals. For his part, Krzysztof Pomian, “Médailles/coquilles = érudition/
philosophie”, in Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris,
1987), 143–62, links a shift from numismatic to naturalist collections in the mid-eighteenth
century to changing conceptions of historicity and aesthetics. For his part, Krzysztof Pomian,
“Médailles/coquilles = érudition/philosophie”, in Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris,
Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1987), 143–62, links a shift from numismatic to naturalist
collections in the mid-eighteenth century to changing conceptions of historicity and aesthetics.
7. See Joan Evans, Time and chance: The story of Arthur Evans and his forebears (London, 1943), and
the recent celebratory volume, Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Sir John Evans (1823–1908): Antiquity,
commerce and natural science in the age of Darwin (Oxford, 2008) whose contents sum up the
Ashmolean Museum’s Sir John Evans Centenary Project (http://johnevans.ashmolean.org/).
For Evans’s archaeological activities see Andrew Sherratt, “Darwin among the archaeologists:
The John Evans nexus and the Borneo Caves”, Antiquity, lxxvi (2002), 151–7; M. J. White,
“Out of Abbeville: Sir John Evans, palaeolithic patriarch and hand axe pioneer”, in S. Milliken
and J. Cook (eds), A very remote period indeed: Papers on the Palaeolithic presented to Derek
Roe (Oxford, 2001), 242–8; and the thorough discussion in Anne O’Connor, Finding time for
the Old Stone Age: A history of palaeolithic archaeology and quaternary geology in Britain
1860–1960 (Oxford, 2007).
8. John Evans, “On the date of British coins”, Numismatic chronicle, xii (1850), 127–37.
9. See Ernest Babelon, Traité des monnaies greques et romaines: première partie: Théorie et doctrine
(Paris, 1901) and, more recently, Jean-Baptiste Giard, “L’évolution de la numismatique antique
au XIXe siècle”, Revue suisse de numismatique, 1986, 167–74. For Celtic coins see Jean-Baptiste
Colbert de Beaulieu, Traité de numismatique celtique. I: Méthodologie des ensembles (Paris,
1973), and for medieval coins Marc Bompaire and Françoise Dumas, Numismatique médiévale:
Monnaies et documents d’origine française (Turnhout, 2000). On Evans see Philip de Jersey,
“Evans and ancient British coins”, in MacGregor (ed.), op. cit. (ref. 7), 152–72.
10. John Evans, The coins of the ancient Britons, arranged and described by John Evans F.S.A., F.G.S. and
engraved by F. W. Fairholt, F.S.A. (London, 1864), 27–28. Evans returned to ‘natural selection’
with reference to Darwin in publications such as “The coinage of the ancient Britons and natural
selection”, Notices of the proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, vii (1875), 476–87,
and The coins of the ancient Britons: Supplement (London, 1890).
11. Besides Cuvier’s well known influence on such fields as linguistics and philology, his method
inspired historical archaeologists from the 1840s: A. B. Van Riper, Men among the mammoths:
Victorian science and the discovery of human prehistory (Chicago, 1993), 31ff. For architecture
(and specifically Thomas Rickman’s 1817 identification of Gothic styles) see C. Miele, “Real
antiquity and the ancient object: The science of Gothic architecture and the restoration of medieval
buildings”, in V. Brand (ed.), The study of the past in the Victorian age (Oxford, 1998), 103–24,
pp. 117ff. For art history, see Christine Walter, “Towards a more ‘scientific’ archaeological tool:
The accurate drawing of Greek vases between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the
twentieth centuries”, in N. Schlanger and J. Nordbladh (eds), Archives, ancestors, practices:
Archaeology in the light of its history (Oxford, 2008), 179–90. See also Claude Blanckaert,
“Chrono-logiques: Le tournant historiciste des sciences humaines”, in Noël Coye and Arnaud
Hurel (eds), Archéologues et géologues dans l’épaisseur du temps (Paris, forthcoming).
12. Mantell distinguished between medals, “rare and splendid organic remains”, and fossil testaceous
mollusca which “from their durability, numbers and variety, may be considered as the current
coin of geology” valuable, to the likes of Lyell, for their quantitative, statistical potential (Mantell,
op. cit. (ref. 5), 436).
13. Evans, Coins (ref. 10), 34–5.
14. On the geological notion of Drift see Mantell, op. cit. (ref. 5), 19; van Riper, op. cit. (ref. 11), 69.
15. On Evans’s visits to France see Joan Evans, op. cit. (ref. 7), 100ff.; Joan Evans, “Ninety years ago”,
Antiquity, xxiii (1949), 115–25; and G. A. Prestwich, Life and letters of Sir Joseph Prestwich
(London, 1899), 119ff. The “moral and collateral testimony” is in Joseph Prestwich, “On the
occurrence of flint-implements, associated with the remains of animals of extinct species in
beds of a late geological period, in France at Amiens and Abbeville, and in England at Hoxne”,
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, cl (1860), 277–318, p. 287. See also Léon
Aufrère, “Figures de préhistoriens. I: Boucher de Perthes”, Préhistoire, vii (1940), 7–134;
Léon Aufrère, Le cercle d’Abbeville: Paléontologie et préhistoire dans la France romantique
(Turnhout, 2007); Jacob Gruber, “Brixham Cave and the antiquity of man” (1965), reprinted in
Tim Murray and Christopher Evans (eds), Histories of archaeology: A reader in the history of
archaeology (Oxford, 2008), 13–45; Donald K. Grayson, The establishment of human antiquity
(New York, 1985); van Riper, op. cit. (ref. 11); Noël Coye, La préhistoire en parole et en acte:
Méthodes et enjeux de la pratique archéologique (1830–1950) (Paris, 1997); O’Connor, op. cit.
(ref. 7); and Nathalie Richard, Inventer la préhistoire: Les débuts de l’archéologie préhistorique
en France (Paris, 2008).
16. Prestwich, “Flint-implements” (ref. 15), 303; John Evans, “On the occurrence of flint implements in
undisturbed beds of gravel, sand and clay”, Archaeologia, xxxviii (1860), 280–307, quoted from
the offprint version circulated by Evans, entitled Flint implements in the Drift; being an account
of their discovery on the Continent and in England. Communicated to the Society of Antiquaries
by John Evans, F.S.A., F.G.S. (London, 1860), 2.
17. The main publications are: Evans, “Flint implements” (ref. 16), and Evans, “Account of some further
discoveries of flint implements in the Drift on the Continent and in England”, Archaeologia,
xxxix (1862), 57–84, here quoted from the offprint version, op. cit. (ref. 16). These culminated
in Evans’s massive The ancient stone implements, weapons, and ornaments, of Great Britain
(London, 1872 and subsequent edns).
18. Evans, “Flint implements” (ref. 16), and Prestwich, “Flint-implements” (ref. 15). The quote is from
Evans’s 1877 address cited (in a critical light) by Robert Broom, Finding the missing link
(London, 1950), 4–5.
19. J. Boucher de Perthes, Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes: Mémoire sur l’industrie primitive et
les arts à leur origine (Paris, 1847), i, 34, 178, 181.
20. Charles Pinsard, “La première hache en pierre authentiquement découverte à Saint-Acheul”, manuscript
note to the photographs in Album Pinsard, Amiens, reproduced in E. de Bussac (ed.), 1859,
naissance de la préhistoire: Récits des premiers témoins (Clermont-Ferrand, 1999), 251–5, p.
254. This in situ flint handaxe has recently been identified in the Prestwich collection (Cat. Num.
E 5109) at the Natural History Museum by Clive Gamble and Robert Kruszynski, “John Evans,
Joseph Prestwich and the stone that shattered the time barrier”, Antiquity, lxxxiii (2009), 461–75.
21. This photograph and its accompanying close-up have been rediscovered in the Album Pinsard and
published by M. Agache-Lecat, “Boucher de Perthes vue par une Anglaise”, Bulletin de la

Société d’Émulation Historique et Littéraire d’Abbeville, xxiii (1972), 232–40, p. 233. Compare
de Bussac, op. cit. (ref. 20); and Serge Lewuillon, “Positif/négatif: Les antiquités nationales,
l’estampe et la photographie”, Les nouvelles de l’archéologie, cxiii (2008), 37–45, pp. 39ff. See
also Serge Lewuillon, “Archaeological illustrations: A new development in 19th century science”,
Antiquity, lxxvi (2002), 223–34; Gamble and Kruszynski, op. cit. (ref. 20); and Gabrielle Feyler,
“Contribution à l’histoire des origines de la photographie archéologique: 1839–1880”, Mélanges
de l’École Française de Rome: Antiquité, xcix (1987), 1019–47. Feyler quotes (p. 1029) the
orientalist Victor Place (1851) who took photographs of ongoing in situ discoveries for his patrons
in France: “one can from now on dispense with an illustrator, since what is at stake here is to
bring back copies that would be exact rather than artistic.” See also Claire Lyons, Antiquity &
photography: Early views of ancient Mediterranean sites (London, 2005), and for subsequent
developments, Schlanger and Nordbladh, op. cit. (ref. 11), 164–230.
22. Evans wrote next day to his fiancée that “We had a photographer with us to take a view of it so as to
corroborate our testimony” (Joan Evans, op. cit. (ref. 7), 102), and some time later to the Society
of Antiquaries (Evans, “Flint implements” (ref. 16), 16). See also Prestwich, “Flint implements”
(ref. 15), 291–2, and Joseph Prestwich, “On the occurrence of flint-implements, associated with
the remains of extinct mammalia, in undisturbed beds of a late geological period [abstract]”,
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, x (1860), 50–9, p. 52. Lyell noted that Prestwich’s
Royal Society report was “accompanied by a photograph showing the position of the flint tool
in situ before it was removed from its matrix”: Charles Lyell, The geological evidences of the
antiquity of man (London, 1862), 103; Gamble and Kruszynski, op. cit. (ref. 20). See also
Christopher Evans, “‘Delineating objects’: Nineteenth-century antiquarian culture and the project
of archaeology”, in Pearce (ed.), op. cit. (ref. 7), 267–303, pp. 271ff., 283.
23. Georges Pouchet, “Sur les débris de l’industrie humaine, attestant l’existence d’une race d’hommes
contemporaine des animaux perdus”, session of 3 November 1859, Bulletin de la Société
Anthropologique de Paris, i (1860), 42–53, p. 44 (followed by “Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire — sur
l’homme fossile”, and [Broca P.], “Reprise de la discussion sur les débris de l’industrie primitive”,
ibid., 58–78, 84–9, 117–19). Pouchet wrongly gives the date of 1858 rather than 1859 and
confused one Englishman (Evans) with another (Flower).
24. While their format, reproduction and control are unclear, the Pinsard photographs certainly circulated
across the Channel. One should examine why they so rapidly disappeared from view and from
disciplinary histories. Questions of personal trust and authority might be relevant: both Evans and
Prestwich sought to defend their hard-won authority from further impersonal mechanization. The
label later affixed to the hand axe Pinsard photographed (now E5109, Natural History Museum)
had an autograph addition by Prestwich stating “Present when found” (Gamble and Kruszynski,
op. cit. (ref. 20), 470), just the kind of testimony photography was supposed to supersede.
Pouchet immediately mitigated the ‘impersonal’ thrust of the photograph: “Nevertheless it was
useful to undertake new verifications in order to convince oneself as much as to convince others”
(Pouchet, op. cit. (ref. 23), 44).
25. Evans, “Flint implements” (ref. 16), 16. The langue de chat implement, so called by the workers, is
now E5109. On the compensation for time lost, see Pinsard, op. cit. (ref. 20), 252. The gravel
served for road repairs and building purposes (Evans, “Flint implements” (ref. 16), 283). A
revealing remark by Prestwich shows how cupidity was both denied and instilled: “I may observe
that our visit, both at Abbeville and Amiens, was entirely unforeseen and unexpected, and very
little value was then placed [by the workers] on either flint-implements or fossils” (Prestwich,
“Flint implements” (ref. 15), 292).
26. Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), 575, emphasis added. Highly relevant issues concerning
workers in early archaeological practice, their motivations and reliability cannot be developed
further here.
27. Evans, “Flint implements” (ref. 16), 6 (on coin purchase), 18.
28. Grayson, op. cit. (ref. 15); van Riper, op. cit. (ref. 11), 134ff. On coin counterfeiting and fabrication,
see Evans, Coins (ref. 10), 44–5; John Evans, “On the forgery of antiquities”, Notices of the
Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, iv (1866), 356–65. For frauds of flint
implements see also Evans, “Further discoveries” (ref. 17), 14, on “unimpeachable” patina;
Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), 574–7.
29. Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), 22, 292, 573ff.
30. John Evans, “On the form and nature of the flint-implements”, letter to Prestwich, 25 May 1859,
Appendix A in Prestwich, “Flint implements” (ref. 15), 310–12, p. 310.
31. Evans, “British coins” (ref. 8), 135.
32. Besides the sources in ref. 9, see Dominique Hollard, “L’illustration numismatique au XIXe siècle”,
Revue numismatique, 1991, 337–42, on the growing importance of photography for producing
a corpus and for calibrating information between researchers. Evans himself recognised that in
some cases “it would have been better to have recourse to the autotype process or some other
means of photographic reproduction” (Supplement (ref. 10), 418).
33. Evans ended his 1850 paper with the proposition that “the coins generally recede farther from the
prototype as the places of their discovery recede from the southern coast”. He also pointed at the
historical implications of distinguishing routes favoured by the Gauls and by the Romans (“British
coins” (ref. 8), 136, 131–2). The table accompanying the plate (Figure 1 here) included, for each
depicted coin, “(item) number”, “metal”, “authority”, “weight (grains)” and “where found”.
The expression “metallic mirror” is by Friedrich Creuzer, cited in Babelon, op. cit. (ref. 9), 66.
34. Links between numismatics and nineteenth-century prehistoric archaeology have been mentioned
but under-researched. Only Gräslund has suggested that such Scandinavian scholars as J. J.
Thomsen and later the Hildebrands (father and son) used to consider coins as chronological
markers, extrapolated such qualities to other finds (weaponry, pottery), and applied to them the
notion of ‘type’: Bo Gräslund, The birth of prehistoric chronology: Dating methods and dating
systems in nineteenth-century Scandinavian archaeology (Cambridge, 1987), 26, 66, 99–100.
35. Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), p. v.
36. John Evans, The ancient bronze implements of Great Britain (London, 1881), pp. v, viii.
37. Evans’s letter in Prestwich, “Flint implements” (ref. 15), 310. Evans’s classification, discussion and
illustration of ancient stone implements varied little across his publications. They were followed
by most of his English contemporaries, including Lyell, op. cit. (ref. 22); John Lubbock, Pre-
historic times as illustrated by ancient remains and the manners and customs of modern savages
(London, 1865); and E. T. Stevens, Flint chips: A guide to pre-historic archaeology, as illustrated
by the collection in the Blackmore Museum, Salisbury (London, 1870). For modern evaluations
of Evans’s stone implement work, see Derek Roe, The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic periods
in Britain (London, 1981); White, op. cit. (ref. 7); O’Connor, op. cit. (ref. 7); and Alison Roberts
and Nicholas Barton, “Reading the unwritten story: Evans and ancient stone implements”, in
MacGregor, op. cit. (ref. 7), 95–115.
38. Evans and like-minded colleagues connected the acceptance of high human antiquity on empirical
grounds (including photographs) and the theoretical (and for some still suspect and inapplicable)
Three Age System emanating from Scandinavia. See Peter Rowley-Conwy, From Genesis to
prehistory: The archaeological Three Age System and its contested reception in Denmark, Britain,
and Ireland (Oxford, 2007), 238–41, including the proposition that Evans’s traditional antiquarian
and numismatist credentials were important in making the more conservative members of the
Society of Antiquaries better disposed to the Three Age System.
39. Evans’s letter in Prestwich, “Flint-implements” (ref. 15), 310.
40. Lubbock, op. cit. (ref. 37), 2–3; see also Boucher de Perthes’s distinction between ‘antediluvian’
and Celtic times.
41. Such a dichotomy between inscribed and uninscribed coins, of various metals and provenances, served
Evans to structure his Coins (ref. 10), table of contents and p. 33.
42. Evans, Coins (ref. 10), 10–11. This did not keep Evans from soon identifying a repertoire of flake
forms and functions. The perception of some implements and forms as ‘non-diagnostic’ echoes
the numismatics phenomenon of ‘immobilisation’, when a type is conserved without changes
across time and through several issuing authorities: Bompaire and Dumas, op. cit. (ref. 9), 104ff.
43. Evans, “Further discoveries” (ref. 17), 25–6, emphasis in original. Plate IV is Figure 4 here.
44. Evans, “Flint implements” (ref. 16), 9; Evans, “Further discoveries” (ref. 17), 20–1; and Evans, Ancient
stone implements (ref. 17), 561, 566–7. The barbarous implement is no. 10 in Figure 4 here.
45. Evans, Coins (ref. 10), 34. To this production-related variability must be added the ‘taphonomic’
transformations of each coin: their patina, wear and tear, and eventual filings, alterations or
markings. Colbert de Beaulieu, op. cit. (ref. 9), 13ff., has commented on the then widely held
‘postulate of infinite disparity’ in Gaulish coins. See Bompaire and Dumas, op. cit. (ref. 9),
453–531, and Jere Wickens, “The production of ancient coins”, Bearers of meaning (1996) at
http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/art/buerger/essays/production.html.
46. Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), 567.
47. R. J. Bradley, “Archaeology, evolution and the public good: The intellectual development of General
Pitt Rivers”, The archaeological journal, cxl (1983), 1–9; D. K. van Keuren, “Museums and
ideology: Augustus Pitt-Rivers, anthropological museums, and social change in later Victorian
Britain”. Victorian studies, xxviii (1984), 171–89; Mark Bowden, Pitt Rivers: The life and
archaeological work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, DCL, FRS, FSA
(Cambridge, 1991); Gavin Lucas, Critical approaches to fieldwork: Contemporary and historical
archaeological practice (London, 2001); Alison Petch, “Chance and certitude: Pitt Rivers and
his first collection”, Journal of the history of collections, xviii (2006), 257–66; Christopher
Evans, “Engineering the past: Pitt Rivers, Nemo and The Needle”, Antiquity, lxxx (2006),
960–9; Christopher Gosden and Frances Larson, Knowing things: Exploring the collections at
the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945 (Oxford, 2007), 94; and Philip Steadman, The evolution of
designs: Biological analogy in architecture and the applied arts, rev. edn (London, 2008), 83–9.
48. International Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology, third session, Norwich–London, 20th to 28th August
1868 (London, 1869), p. xxii. On the institutional background see William Ryan Chapman, “The
organizational context in the history of archaeology: Pitt Rivers and other British archaeologists
in the 1860s”, The antiquaries journal, lxix (1989), 23–42; Christopher Evans, op. cit. (ref. 22).
49. Augustus Pitt Rivers [Lane Fox], “Primitive warfare, Part II: On the resemblance of the weapons of
early man, their variation, continuity, and development of form”, Journal of the Royal United
Services Institution, xii (1868), in Pitt Rivers, The evolution of culture and other essays (Oxford,
1906), 89–143, p. 116. On Cissbury see Bowden, op. cit. (ref. 47), 70–1. Joint expeditions are
recorded in Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), 531.
50. From the sound observation, derived from Evans, that flint fracture could at times be difficult to
control, Pitt Rivers rather disingenuously concluded that “the earlier Palaeolithic forms ... were
not designed outright, as the nineteenth-century man would have designed them for special uses,
but arose from a selection of varieties produced accidentally in the process of manufacture”: “On
the evolution of culture”, Proceedings of the Royal Institute of Great Britain, vii (1875), in Pitt
Rivers, op. cit. (ref. 49), 20–44, p. 34.
51. Pitt Rivers, “Primitive warfare” (ref. 49), 97.
52. Augustus Pitt Rivers [Lane Fox], Address to the anthropological section of the British Association
(14 August 1872) (off-print, 1872), 12–13. The same ideas and illustrations are reiterated in “On
the principles of classification adopted in the arrangement of his anthropological collection, now
exhibited in the Bethnal Green Museum”, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, iv (1874), in
Pitt Rivers, op. cit. (ref. 49), 1–19, p. 15, and in Pitt Rivers, “Evolution of culture” (ref. 50), 40–1.
53. The figure in Pitt Rivers, “Evolution of culture” (ref. 50), Plate XXI, is said to be reproduced, with
permission, from Evans, “Coinage of Ancient Britons” (ref. 10).
54. Augustus Pitt Rivers, “Typological museums, as exemplified by the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford,
and his provincial museum at Farnham, Dorset”, Journal of the Society of Arts, xl (1891),
114–22, p. 121.
56. Pitt Rivers, “Primitive warfare” (ref. 49), 103, 105–7.
58. Evans’s meticulous numismatic inspired gazetteer contrasted with Pitt Rivers’s recourse to poorly
provenanced and haphazardly collected specimens from around the world: Petch, op. cit. (ref.
47). Pitt Rivers had also placed at a crucial juncture of the series (items 12 to 15 or 17 in Figure
7) implements that were in reality unfinished and unpolished Celt pre-forms. On the other hand,
he must be absolved of the visual illusion inscribed in this figure. His representation of Celt axes
with their broad working edges downwards and not upwards, in morphological continuity with
the Drift axes (base downwards), defies conventions that were only subsequently established.
These may well be own representational conventions that reinforce the distinction between Drift
and Celt implements.
59. Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), 560–1, 72, 568, 618.
60. The quote continues: “as there is little doubt that the whole of these varieties have been in use in
one and the same district at the same time, the forms being to some extent adapted to the flake
of flint from which the arrow-heads were made, and to some extent to the purposes which the
arrows were to serve” (Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), 330).
61. Duke of Argyll, Primeval man: An examination of some recent speculations (London, 1869), 181ff.;
Lyell, op. cit. (ref. 22), 377; and William Boyd Dawkins, Cave hunting: Researches on the evidence
of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe (London, 1874), 352–3.
62. Systematization of the Palaeolithic mainly took place back in France, in the context of materialist
and transformist debates in late Empire and early Third Republic science: Michael Hammond,
“Anthropology as a weapon of social combat in late nineteenth-century France”, Journal of the
history of the behavioural sciences, xvi (1980), 118–32; Joy Harvey, “Evolutionism transformed:
Positivists and materialists in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris from Second Empire to
Third Republic”, in David Oldroyd and Ian Langham (eds), The wider domains of evolutionary
thought (New York, 1983), 289–310. See also Coye, op. cit. (ref. 15); Richard, op. cit. (ref. 15);
and Nathan Schlanger, “Le travail en éclats: Perspectives historiques sur des problématiques
actuelles”, Techniques et culture, xlvi (2006),19–32.
63. Evans, Ancient stone implements (ref. 17), 566.
64. Evans, Coins: Supplement (ref. 10), 421.
65. Evans, Coins: Supplement (ref. 10), 422.
66. Evans was praised in 1905 by George Macdonald for having “worked out independently, in the sphere
of art, a philosophy that was strikingly consistent with the biological theory through which
Darwin revolutionized the modes of human thought”: Coin types, their origin and development
(Glasgow, 1905), 88.
67. Henry Balfour, The evolution of decorative arts (London, 1893), pp. viii, 30 on Evans’s numismatics;
Arthur Cort Haddon, Evolution in art as illustrated by the life history of designs (London, 1895),
313, on Evans.

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Hist. Sci.

SERIES IN PROGRESS: ANTIQUITIES OF NATURE,

0073-2753/10/4803-0343/$10.00 © 2010 Science History Publications Ltd

new kinds of evidence in their obsessively assembled cabinets of curiosity.1 While

reliable body of generalizable evidence. Building on this all-important potential for

buying time for change

be called this ‘transformational’ or ‘serial’ numismatics: it was not Evans himself

Boucher de Perthes’s ground-breaking claims.15

photography’s trifling recompense

numismatics of a new kind

frequently and insidiously, as elements of common currency issued and transacted

dichotomy and variability in the stone age

pitt rivers’s serial progression

Society of Antiquaries and the Ethnological Society of London. He acted as secretary

conclusion: serial continuities in prehistoric archaeology

Drawing legitimacy from this retrospective realignment, Evans readily recognized

1. For more archaeologically-oriented appraisal of antiquarian historiography, first developed by Arnaldo

published by M. Agache-Lecat, “Boucher de Perthes vue par une Anglaise”, Bulletin de la

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