The Proper Study of Mankind

Many years ago the Editor of ANTIQUITY wrote ‘Without a sense of history, and of historical problem, archaeology can revert again to mere collection; and there i s always the danger of a new antiquarianism’ (A Hundred Years of Archaeology (1950), 326). This dangergrows, and as more and more scientific aids to archaeology are provided and used, the archaeologist may seem to be concerned with, and seem to be happy to be c o n c m d with, an increasingly detailed study of trees without pausing to look at the wood of which they are a part. The question often asked these days is ‘ Whither Archaeology?’ Jacquetta Hawkes discusses this all-important problem and warns us to keep our technological Frankenstein’s monster in control and subject to human values. Her humane historical approach to the material study of the past will evoke, we hope, some heart-searchings and reappraisals among the new, albeit scientifc, antiquarians.