The Progress of Archaeology
SIR,—In his review of my Hundred Years of Archaeology, Professor Hawkes complains that I,am unfair to some of my contemporaries ; he himself errs on the other side in his references to Professor Piggott and myself. He cites Professor Piggott's Progress of Archaeology, which-does not appear in my bibliography, and cannot with pro- priety be described, as he does, as a forerunner in the 'thirties of my book, for the verx good reason that it does not exist. There never was such a book : it is an invention of Professor Hawkes—an agreeable invention, perhaps a conflation of Piggott's Progress of Early Man and Casson's Progress of Archaeology, with a" touch of Childe's Progress cud Archaeology—but an invention for all that. Nor can I claim to sustain the credit Professor Hawkes gives me for having produced the only post-war book on the history of pre- history. Ceram's Goiter, Griiber and Gelehr(e : Roman der Archii- ologie was published in 1949, while Payot re-issued in 1948-49 an entirely revised and rewritten edition of Marcel Brion's La Resur- rection des Villes Mortes. These two works, which go- far to fill some of the lacunae in my „book of which I am only too painfully aware, should be on the shelves of all interested in the development of our knowledge about the prehistoric past.—Yours, &c.,
Previous page
