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Stories of stones and bones: disciplinarity, narrative and practice in British popular prehistory, 1911–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2016

AMANDA REES
AMANDA REES*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK. Email: amanda.rees@york.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This paper explores how three central figures in the field of British prehistory – Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and Louis Leakey – deployed different disciplinary practices and narrative devices in the popular accounts of human bio-cultural evolution that they produced during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows how they used a variety of strategies, ranging from virtual witness through personal testimony to tactile demonstration, to ground their authority to interpret the increasingly wide range of fossil material available and to answer the bewildering variety of questions that could be asked about them. It investigates the way in which they positioned their own professional expertise in relation to fossil interpretation, particularly with regard to the – sometimes controversial – use they made of concepts, evidence and practices drawn from other disciplines. In doing so, they made claims that went beyond their original disciplinary boundaries. The paper argues that while none of these writers were able, ultimately, to support the wider claims they made regarding human prehistory, the nature of these claims deserves much closer attention, particularly with respect to the public role that historians of science can and should play in relation to present-day calls for greater interdisciplinarity.

Type
Special Section: Palaeonarratives and Palaeopractices: Excavating and Interpreting Deep History
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 433 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2016 

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References

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4 Leakey, op. cit. (1), p. 2. Note that the authors of the texts discussed in this article commonly used what would now be regarded as sexist or racist language. When quoting or paraphrasing their work, I have followed their usage. I do so without either condoning or accepting their implications.

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34 An unpublished (possibly unposted) letter in the University of Manchester archives gives context to Keith's potential isolation: with respect to the Piltdown skull reconstruction controversy, he wrote, ‘I have repeatedly had quite reasonable people say “We would take Keith's word for it, if we were sure he was not trying to bolster up [the antiquity of the] Galley Hill and Ipswich”’ fossils (John Rylands University Library Archives, GB 133 GES).

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