Making Deep History: Zeal, Perseverance, and the Time Revolution of 1859 by Clive Gamble (review)

While the idea of a mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian Revolution has loomed large in the historical imagination (albeit alongside a more specialist literature which has critiqued this idea), there has also been a great deal of interest in a distinct Victorian time revolution occurring at about the same time. This is the idea that in the years following 1859, a series of finds in France and the United Kingdom were promoted to push the idea that human existence was not limited to the six thousand years of biblical chronology, but instead stretched into the by then well-known geological eras. The importance of this idea, and its connection to but also essential independence from the related debates over Darwinian evolution, was noted from the later nineteenth century, but has over the past three decades began to be cemented in the secondary literature—with particularly important presentations by A. Bowdoin van Riper and Thomas Trautmann. Making Deep History: Zeal, Perseverance, and the Time Revolution of 1859 by Clive Gamble builds on this interest in the time revolution, providing a lively and novel account of the process and its core protagonists.

The book approaches the time revolution from three distinct angles. The first is an ardently personality-centered view, focusing on the contributions to the establishment of human antiquity made by the paper manufacturer John Evans and wine merchant Joseph Prestwich. They feature alongside a cast of supporting characters including their families and workers, and other figures like Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, Charles Lyell, T. H. Huxley, John Lubbock, and Hugh Falconer. The next two angles derive more from Gamble’s archaeological background. Conceptual questions around objects and materiality, and how it came to be that stone artifacts could be used as proxies for human antiquity, are raised throughout the book. And finally, the book involves numerous meditations on time itself and how different temporal scales relate to one another—ranging from the deep time of human prehistory and geological antiquity, to the more recent, shallower but no less stratified timescales on which the time revolution played out.

The book is organized around this focus on time and personality. After an introduction setting the stage, presenting the characters and book’s methodology, the remaining chapters focus on ever-expanding packets of time at play in the time revolution. Firstly, we have a single day on April 27, 1859, when Evans and Prestwich identified (and photographed) a stone artifact found in situ in a resolutely ancient geological layer in a quarry pit at Saint-Acheul in France. The next chapter moves to Evans and Prestwich’s presentations of ancient flint artifacts to London’s learned societies in the spring and summer of 1859. We then have wider discussions on human antiquity in the later part of 1859 and 1860, especially by Charles Lyell and other scholarly authorities. The discussion then broadens out further to the presentation of human antiquity in larger works, especially “two books [that] seal the Revolution,” Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (1863) and Lyell’s Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man (1863) (163). The 1864 to 1872 period had the debates over human antiquity shift toward understanding the character of prehistoric humans and ascertaining their exact chronological position. And a final chapter considers the longer-term legacies of Prestwich, Evans, and Lubbock in terms of their personal affairs and honors, the establishment of the field of human prehistory, and artistic perceptions of ancient humanity. We then leap forward in time to an epilogue where Gamble reflects on locating the stone artifact described in chapter 1 in the London Natural History Museum. Across all of these chapters, Gamble takes us through the development of studies of human antiquity after 1859, while showing the different rhythms at play in the discussion and promotion of these new scientific ideas.

As well as this engaging temporal...