Collecting Rhythms: Typological Methods in Archaeology and Anthropology

Abstract All modern disciplines have ancestors, and Pitt Rivers and Tylor are regularly given ancestral status. Pitt Rivers is claimed by archaeologists; while Tylor, partly through the work of Stocking (1987, 1995), is seen as an anthropological ancestor. There is some sense in this—Pitt Rivers spent the last two decades of his life excavating sites on his family estates of Cranborne Chase in Dorset, pioneering archaeological techniques and bringing a degree of precision to fieldwork that would later become standard in archaeology (Bowden 1991). Tylor is remembered as a the ‘founding father’ of British anthropology because of his work on marriage systems, myth, religion, and the nature of ‘primitive’ thought, all mainstays of the later discipline. But there is a presentism contained in both these claims.