France

Abstract

It was through the innovative application of sound field methods that Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868), a customs official in northern France, contributed decisively to the establishment of human antiquity. He argued that proof of an object’s antiquity resided first and foremost in “its surrounding [entourage] and the place where it is encountered” (Boucher de Perthes 1847, pp. 34, 178, 181). By insisting on such principles of stratigraphic position and integrity, Boucher de Perthes could argue that the artificially shaped flint haches he found beneath meters of undisturbed gravels in association with fossil bones of extinct species were therefore of infinitely ancient age, long before the Biblical Flood (thus antediluvian). While these claims had met with skepticism, a dramatic reversal of fortune occurred in 1859 with the visit to the region of two English scientists, the wine merchant and geologist Joseph Prestwich (1812–1896) and the paper manufacturer and numismatist John Evans (1823–1908). Besides conducting a thorough audit of the context of discovery, the visitors also took the unprecedented step of having a photograph taken, on the 27th April 1859, of an in situ hand axe embedded in a quarry section at Saint-Acheul (Fig. 38.1). This very first use of the photographic medium for stratigraphic demonstration not only confirmed human antiquity but also served to shift the onus of archaeological demonstration from rhetoric and personal reputation to methodically documented observation (Gamble and Kruszynski 2009).