Basic Biographical Information
John Lubbock was a key figure in the establishment of archaeology as a science and a strong advocate of Spencerian progressivism during the Victorian era. Lubbock was born in 1834, the son of Sir John Lubbock, third baronet, a London banker. He grew up on the family country estate of High Elms near Downe in Kent, England. Serendipitously the estate was adjacent to the home of Charles Darwin. The great naturalist befriended the boy, guided him in studying insects and flora, and benefitted later by Lubbock’s membership in a group of younger scientists within the Royal Society, the “X-Club,” that proselytized evolution. Lubbock attended Eton to the age of 14. He then joined his father’s bank and became a partner at the age of 22.
During the 1860s, Lubbock held a number of influential positions, including President of the Ethnological Society (1864–1865), Vice-President of the Linnean Society (1865), and President of the International Association for...
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References
Lubbock, S.J. 1865. Pre-historic times: As illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages. London: Williams & Norgate.
Lubbock, S.J. 1870. The origin of civilisation and the primitive condition of man: Mental and social condition of savages. London: Longmans, Green.
Wilson, D. 1862. Prehistoric man: Researches into the origin of civilization in the old and the new world. London: Macmillan.
Further Reading
Barton, R. 1998. ‘Huxley, Lubbock and half a dozen others’: Professionals and gentlemen in the formation of the X Club, 1851–1864. Isis 89: 410–444.
Barton, R. 2004. Lubbock, Sir John (1834–1914), Lord Avebury. In The dictionary of nineteenth-century British scientists, ed. B. Lightman, 1272–1278. Bristol: Thoemmes.
Flandreau, M. 2016. Anthropologists in the stock exchange: A financial history of Victorian science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kehoe, A.B.. 1998. The land of prehistory: A critical history of American archaeology. New York: Routledge.
Murray, T. 2009. Illustrating ‘savagery’: Sir John Lubbock and Ernest Griset. Antiquity 83: 488–499.
Patton, M. 2007. Science, politics and business in the work of Sir John Lubbock. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Stocking, G.W., Jr. 1987. Victorian anthropology. New York: Free Press.
Trigger, B.G. 2006. A history of archaeology thought. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Kehoe, A.B. (2018). Lubbock, John. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_316-2
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