Acceptance

Abstract By the end of the decade the time revolution was a done deal. Moulin-Quignon still reverberated, but in 1865 Lubbock produced the first guided tour of the Old Stone Age, in which he accused Lyell of plagiarism. In Pre-Historic Times he filled the new space of deep history with stone tools to show an evolutionary pathway from St Acheul to the Neolithic monuments of Avebury and Stonehenge. Tracing history back was matched by the anthropologist Edward Tylor, who traced it up. Both men were interested in the evolution of racial groups and accounting for the world’s hunters and gatherers. In a typically upbeat assessment, Lubbock saw the lesson of the past as providing hope for the future. Victorian ‘savages’ at the uttermost ends of the earth had not degenerated from a civilized state. They had the potential to evolve, as his ancestors in Europe had done. Unwritten history was making universal history possible. The decade saw deaths and career changes. Prestwich largely abandoned the time revolution, married Falconer’s niece, Grace McCall, and became an Oxford professor. Falconer and Boucher de Perthes died, while Lubbock entered Parliament in 1870. Prestwich’s fixed notion of a single ice age was challenged by James Croll, who painstakingly worked out the changes in the elliptical orbit of the Earth, and from these proposed multiple ice ages. As a bookend to the decade Evans published his fact-rich volume on ancient stone implements. The path of deep history was now set in stone.