A Text-Book of European Archæology

Abstract

SEVENTY years ago the Scandinavian founders of European archaeology regarded the shell-heaps or “kitchen-middens” as containing the earliest traces of man's handiwork. Ever since then it has been found necessary to shift man's beginnings further and further into the past, so that now Prof. Macalister is obliged to devote a whole volume, containing nearly 300,000 words, to reach the point at which his Scandinavian predecessors began their narratives. For the type of implement, in stone and in bone, found in the oldest shell-heaps the author adopts the recognised French term “Campignian,” although he is of opinion that the culture represented in the shell-heaps was actually evolved in the Baltic Area. By a strange coincidence, if we are to follow our author implicitly, it is with the introduction of this shell-heap or Campignian culture into Ireland that the history of man commences in our sister-island. “No remains of the Palaeolithic period to the end of the Magdalenian stage,” writes Prof. Macalister, “have been found in the north of England or else in Scotland or in Ireland, some injudicious publications notwithstanding.” The Professor of Celtic Archaeology in University College, Dublin, has thus the advantage of surveying the ancient cultures of Europe from a land untrammelled by palaeolithic tradition. His first volume covers cultural periods which are unrepresented in Ireland.

A Text-Book of European Archæology.

By Prof. R. A. S. Macalister. Vol. 1, The PalÅ"olithic Period. Pp. xv+610. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1921.) 50s. net.