Abstract
Among other matters upon which Dr. Balfour touched as incidental to the main thesis of his Frazer. Lecture, not the least interesting is the interpretation of archaeological data in the light of reference to objects of the material culture and to the practices and beliefs of modern and still-surviving peoples of backward culture. He recalled the opportunity for such a comparison, which was lost irretrievably when the Tasmanians, a people still living the life of palaeolithic man, were allowed to die out in the last century and themselves became the subjects of the archaeological method of research. Although it is widely appreciated that in the archaeological studies of the last generation nothing has contributed more fruitfully to understanding of the culture of the stone age than the interpretation of the palaeolithic cave paintings of southern France and Spain by reference to the magical and religious beliefs of modern ‘savages’, nevertheless many archaeologists hesitate to press such analogies. They point to the unquestionable fact that the culture of the modern ‘primitive’ has not been static over a long period, but has itself been the subject of an evolutionary process, even though they may admit with Dr. Balfour that change has been slow, when no extraneous element has been implicated. Yet instances of the prolonged persistence of unchanged tradition do undoubtedly occur. An interesting illustration bearing on the argument is afforded by Mr. S. Casson's study in Antiquity of December last of survivals among ceramic types now current in Cyprus and the islands of the Bgean, belonging to a tradition which extends back not only to medieval times, but even in some instances to the bronze age. He points out how the methods of manufacture, marketing and distribution between the islands and to the mainland still followed at the present day may serve, with their Homeric flavour, to throw light on the obscure field of the early industrial and commercial organization of the eastern Mediterranean, about which so little is known in detail.
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Archæological Interpretation and Modern Analogies. Nature 143, 295–296 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143295c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143295c0