by John Carey
A strange series of coincidences gave the leading role in this discovery to a Danish businessman, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865). Without the erudition of a Scaliger or the mathematical genius of a Newton, he was a man of superlative common sense, richly endowed with the virtues of the dedicated amateur. His passion for curious objects was matched by his talent for awakening the curiosity of the new museum public. Born in Copenhagen, the eldest of six sons of a prosperous shipowner, he was trained for business. He came to know the family of a Danish consul who had served in Paris during the French Revolution, and who had brought back collections purchased from the panicked aristocracy. When young Christian, still only fifteen, helped his friends unpack their treasures, they gave him a few old coins to begin his own collection, and by the time he was nineteen he was a respected numismatist. In 1807, when the British fleet bombarded Copenhagen harbor to keep the Danish fleet from Napoleon, buildings went up in flames, and Christian joined the emergency fire brigade. Working through the night, he rescued the coins of a leading numismatist whose house was hit, and carried them to safety with the Keeper of the Royal Cabinet of Antiquities.
Copenhagen’s newly established Royal Commission for the Preservation of Danish Antiquities was being flooded by miscellaneous old objects sent in by public-spirited citizens. The aged secretary of the commission could not face the accumulating pile. It was time for a younger man – and an opportunity made to order for Thomsen, then twenty-seven and known for his own beautifully organized collection of coins. ‘Mr Thomsen is admittedly only a dilettante,’ the bishop on the commission conceded, ‘but a dilettante with a wide range of knowledge. He has no university degree, but in the present state of scientific knowledge I hardly consider that fact as being a disqualification.’ Accordingly, young Thomsen was honored with the post of unpaid nonvoting secretary. As it turned out, Thomsen’s lack of academic learning equipped him with the naïveté that archaeology needed at that moment.
The dusty shelves of the commission’s storerooms overflowed with unlabeled odd bundles. How could Thomsen put them in order? ‘I had no previous example on which to base the ordering of such a collection,’ Thomsen confessed, nor had he money to hire a professor to classify objects by academic categories. So he applied the commonsense procedures learned in his father’s shipping warehouse. Opening the parcels, first he separated them into objects of stone, of metal, and of pottery. Then he subdivided these according to their apparent use as weapons, tools, food containers, or religious objects. With no texts to guide him, he simply looked at the objects, then asked himself what questions would be asked by museum visitors who saw them for the first time.
When Thomsen opened his museum to the public in 1819, visitors saw the objects sorted into three cabinets. The first contained objects of stone; the second, objects of bronze; the third, objects of iron. This exercise in museum housekeeping led Thomsen to suspect that objects made of similar materials might be relics of the same era. To his amateur eye it seemed that the objects of stone might be older than similar metal objects, and that the bronze objects might be older than those of iron. He shared this elementary suggestion with learned antiquarians, to whom he later modestly gave credit for the idea.
His notion was not entirely novel, but the similar notions found in classical authors were fanciful and misleading. In the Beginning, according to Hesiod, Cronos created men of the Golden Age who never grew old. Labor, war, and injuries were unknown. They eventually became guardian spirits on earth. Then in the Silver Age, when men lost their reverence for the gods, Zeus punished them and buried them among the dead. The Bronze Age, which followed (when even houses were made of bronze), was a time of endless strife. After the brief interlude of a Heroic Age of godlike leaders in their Isles of the Blessed, came Hesiod’s own unfortunate Iron Age. Yet worse was still in store for mankind, a future of men born senile, and of universal decay.
Thomsen was not well enough educated to try to fit his museum objects into this appealing literary scheme. He was more interested in objects than in words. There were already ‘too many books,’ he complained, and he was not eager to add his own. But finally, in 1836, he produced his practical Guide to Scandinavian Antiquities, which outlined his famous Three-Age System. This, his only book, translated into English, French, and German, and spread across Europe, was an invitation to ‘Pre-History.’
It was hard for European scholars at the time to imagine that human experience before writing could have been divided into the epochs that Thomsen suggested. It seemed more logical to assume that stone tools were always used by the poor, while their betters always used bronze or iron. Thomsen’s commonsense scheme did not please the pedants. If there was a Stone Age, they scoffed, then why not also an Age of Crockery, a Glass Age, and a Bone Age? Thomsen’s scheme, refined but not abandoned by scholars in the next century, proved to be more than an exercise in museum management. It carried the plain message that human history had somehow developed in homogeneous stages that reached across the world. And he arranged the objects in his museum according to his ‘principle of progressive culture.’
Thomsen showed how much was to be learned, not only from those ancient sculptures that embodied Winckelmann’s ideal of beauty but even from the simple tools and crude weapons of anonymous prehistoric man. Opening his collections free to everybody, Thomsen offered lively talks about the everyday experience of people in the remote past. A deft lecturer, he would hide some interesting little object behind his coattails, then suddenly produce it at the point in his story when that kind of object – a bronze utensil or an iron weapon – first appeared in history.
Following Thomsen’s hints, archaeologists discovered and explored the trash heaps of the past. Their paths into history no longer ran only through the gold-laden tombs of ancient kings, but also through the buried kitchen middens (‘middens,’ from an Old Scandinavian word for muck or dung-hill). The first excavation of these unlikely sources was the work mainly of Thomsen’s disciple Jens Jacob Worsaae (1821–85). At the age of fifteen he had become Thomsen’s museum assistant and during the next four years spent his holidays digging into the ancient barrows of Jutland with the aid of two laborers paid by his parents. With his athletic temperament and his outdoor enthusiasms he was the ideal complement to the museum-oriented Thomsen. In 1840, when he was only nineteen, using stratigraphy and the field evidence from Danish barrows and peat bogs, he published an article confirming Thomsen’s Three-Age theory and assigning prehistoric objects to a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, or an Iron Age. He, too, was suggesting latitudes of time, throughout Denmark and beyond. A dozen years later, in 1853, the Swiss archaeologist Ferdinand Keller (1800–81), when exploring the lake dwellings of Lake Zurich, concluded that ‘in Switzerland the three ages of stone, bronze, and iron, are quite as well represented as in Scandinavia.’
Some obvious difficulties plagued these prophets of prehistory. How could you stretch human experience to fill the thousands of years of the past opened by Buffon and the geologists? How much neater to fit all pre-Christian history into the comfortable 4004 years BC defined by Archbishop Ussher! And then there were new problems created by the geologists, who now revealed that northern Europe had been covered by ice when Stone Age men were living in caves in southern France. To correlate all these facts required a still more sophisticated approach to the early human past. If the Stone Age people of southern Europe advanced northward only after the retreat of the glaciers, then the three universal stages were reached at different times in different places.
To make the Three-Age scheme fit the whole human past in Europe was not easy. The so-called Age of Stone in Thomsen’s museum was represented by polished stone artifacts of the kind people would be tempted to send in as curios. Meanwhile, Worsaae, out in the field, was hinting that the Age of Stone was far more extensive and more ancient than was suggested by these skillfully polished stone implements. On the digging sites each object unearthed could be studied not as an isolated cu
rio but among all the remains of a Stone Age community. And these too might provide clues to other Stone Age communities across the world.
Worsaae’s opportunity came in 1849, when a wealthy Dane named Olsen was trying to improve his large estate called Meilgaard on the northeast coast of Jutland. Building a road, he sent his workmen in search of gravel for surfacing material. When they dug into a bank a half-mile from the shore, they found no gravel but luckily hit an eight-foot layer of oyster-shells, which was even better for their purpose. Mixed with the shells they found pieces of flint and animal bones. One small bone object two and a half inches long caught their attention. Shaped like a four-fingered hand, it was plainly the work of human craft. Perhaps it had been made for a comb.
Olsen, the proprietor, sharing the popular interest in antiquities which had been stimulated by Thomsen, sent the object to the museum in Copenhagen, where Worsaae’s curiosity was aroused. Shell heaps recently turned up elsewhere in Denmark had brought to light flaked flint, odd pottery fragments, and crude stone objects similar to the Meilgaard comb. Perhaps this mound of oyster shells ‘had been a sort of eating-place for the people of the neighborhood in the earliest prehistoric times. This would account for the ashes, the bones, the flints and the potsherds.’ Perhaps here, at long last, modern man might visit an authentic Stone Age community. And actually imagine Stone Age men and women at their everyday meals. Worsaae observed that the shells had all been opened, which would not have been the case if they were merely washed up from the shore.
When other scholars disagreed, each with his own theory, the Danish Academy of Sciences appointed a commission. Worsaae, with a zoologist and a geologist, was assigned to interpret these shell heaps found along the ancient Danish shore. These ‘shell middens,’ the commission concluded, were really kitchen middens, which meant that now for the first time the historian could enter into the daily life of ancient peoples. Trash heaps might be gateways to prehistory. Such a discovery could not have been made indoors in a museum, but only on the spot in the field. Since the crudely crafted artifacts of the kitchen middens were never polished, unlike the polished stone artifacts of a later Stone Age, they were not likely to be noticed by laymen or sent to a museum. The kitchen middens opened another vast epoch of human prehistory – an early Stone Age, which extended behind the later Stone Age of polished stonework.
Thomsen and his museum collaborators had done their work of publicizing archaeology so well that the question now raised – whether the Stone Age really should be divided into two clearly defined stages – was no longer an arcane conundrum for university professors. The issue was hotly debated in the public proceedings of the Danish Academy. Worsaae’s opponents insisted that the shell heaps were only the picnic sites of the Stone Age visitors who had left their best implements elsewhere. The king of Denmark, Frederick VII, who shared the growing interest in antiquities, had excavated middens on his own estate and even wrote a monograph with his interpretation. In 1861, to ‘settle’ the issue, he summoned the leading scholars to a full-dress public meeting at Meilgaard, where he would preside. This royal conclave, no routine academic conference, would be celebrated with the panoply of a coronation. Besides hearing a debate, all those invited would witness the ritual excavation of a new portion of the mound. In the mid-June heat, archaeologists dug into the celebrated mound from eight in the morning till six in the evening, wearing their official ‘archaeologist’s’ uniform out of respect for the King. When King Frederick had appointed Worsaae curator of his private collection of antiquities in 1858, he had playfully designated this archaeologist’s uniform (high collar and tight-fitting jacket, topped off by a pillbox hat), which was now de rigueur at the diggings.
The lords of surrounding estates entertained the King and his party with banquets and dancing to band music every night. In honor of their royal visitor the neighbors created triumphal arches, and the King was accompanied everywhere by his mounted guard in full livery. A royal welcome to the Old Stone Age!
Early in the meeting it was agreed that Worsaae had won his scholarly point, which now would be proclaimed in royal company and for the whole nation. ‘I had the especial satisfaction,’ Worsaae wrote, ‘of seeing that, among the many hundred stone implements discovered among the oysters, not a single specimen was found with any traces of polishing or of superior culture.’ And he reported with relish how a human fillip was added to the formal splendor. ‘Only at the last minute, after we had frequently remarked on this fact, did two polished axes turn up, of a completely different type, which some practical joker had inserted in the heap to cheat us.’ The practical joker, it was widely assumed, was King Frederick himself.
Seldom has so drab an epoch of history been so splendidly inaugurated. But now, to the royal Danish imprimatur was added the near-unanimous agreement of scholars across Europe. What came to be called the Culture of Kitchen Middens (c. 4000–c. 2000 BC) was discovered in due course across the northern European coasts, and in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and North Africa. In southern Africa, northern Japan, in the islands of the Pacific, and in the coastal regions of both Americas, Kitchen Middens cultures seemed to have persisted into a later era. Once identified and placed in the chronicle of human development, the middens provided revealing latitudes of time – and a new vividness for the prehistoric past.
Worsaae, who became professor of archaeology at Copenhagen, and then succeeded Thomsen as director of the museum, is often called ‘the first professional archaeologist.’ His mentor Thomsen called him a ‘heaven stormer.’ Worsaae accurately praised Thomsen’s Three-Age System as ‘the first clear ray … shed across the Universal prehistoric gloom of the North and the World in general.’ (Not in the heavily documented realms of recent history but in the dark recesses of earliest times would mankind first discover the ‘universality’ of history. The first discovery of the community of all human experience in eras and epochs, the worldwide phenomena of human history, was made when ‘prehistory’ was parsed into the three ages: Stone, Bronze, and Iron. And as Worsaae explored the boundaries between the three ages, he began to raise some profound questions that were explosive for fundamentalist Christians. One of these was the problem, still agitated by anthropologists: independent invention or cultural diffusion?
The disturbing notion, suggested by bold thinkers from Buffon to Darwin – that man had existed long before the Biblical date of Creation in 4004 BC – was beginning to be accepted by the scientific community. But the remote antiquity of man was popularized not so much by a theory as by the discovery of a vast and undeniable subject matter, a new dark continent of time, prehistory. More persuasively than a theory, the artifacts themselves seemed to bear witness to a chronology of prehistory that argued the evolution of man’s culture.
Gradually, as the word ‘prehistory’ came into use in the European languages, the idea entered popular consciousness. The exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, which purported to survey all the works of humankind, still gave no glimpse of prehistory. Then, at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867, the Hall of the History of Labor showed an extensive collection of artifacts from all over Europe and from Egypt. The official guide to Prehistoric Walks at the Universal Exhibition offered three lessons from the new science: the law of the progress of humanity; the law of similar development; and the high antiquity of man. In that same year the announcement of the first Congrès International Préhistorique de Paris brought the first official use of the word ‘prehistoric’
Source: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers, New York, Random House, 1983.
Chains and Rings: Kekule’s Dreams
Nineteenth-century chemists were puzzled to find that many organic substances with the same chemical formula had widely different properties. Though they seemed to be chemically identical, they were in fact different substances. It gradually became evident that this was because the arrangement of the atoms within their molecular structure was different. The scientist who made this breakthrough was Friedrich August
Kekule (1829–96). He said that the fundamental theory of organic molecular structure came to him in a dream.
During my stay in London I resided for a considerable time in Clapham Road in the neighborhood of Clapham Common. I frequently, however, spent my evenings with my friend Hugo Müller at Islington at the opposite end of the metropolis. We talked of many things but most often of our beloved chemistry. One fine summer evening I was returning by the last bus, ‘outside,’ as usual, through the deserted streets of the city, which are at other times so full of life. I fell into a reverie, and lo, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes! Whenever, hitherto, these diminutive beings had appeared to me, they had always been in motion; but up to that time I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced the two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller; whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain, dragging the smaller ones after them but only at the ends of the chain … The cry of the conductor: ‘Clapham Road,’ awakened me from my dreaming: but I spent a part of the night in putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms. This was the origin of the ‘Structural Theory.’
Kekule published his Theory of Molecular Structure in 1858, explaining how carbon atoms link together to form chains, just as his dream had told him. However his theory failed to cover the whole field of organic chemistry. One important group of substances, related to the coal-tar hydrocarbon benzene, failed to fit his theory. These were known as ‘aromatic’ compounds, because many of them occur in fragrant oils and aromatic spices. Kekule brooded over the problem of the aromatic compounds for a further seven years, trying to devise a structural formula that would account for their peculiar chemical characteristics. Then he had another dream.