In the past lessons we dealt with the epic beginnings of historical archeologies from that of the Greek and Roman world, to that of the great pre-classical civilizations of the most ancient Mediterranean remaining Orient of this magnificent periods, in fact, of the past, memory was kept, with some continuity, for the classical age, in the literary documents of Greek and Latin authors, and, to a more limited extent, for the pre-classical period in the text of the Old Testament in the Bible. Yet, even before what we may call the invention of modern archaeology, in the decades around the middle of the 19th century, the question was arisen about the eventual evidence preserved in the ground of the most ancient humankind, whose origin in the Western World, was told in the biblical book of Genesis. Yet, the fact that the sacred book, the Bible told of humankind's origin as a creation, set serious obstacles to the affirmation of rigorous scientific criteria for the setting of the problem of humankind’s origin. Two distinguished geologists, the French George Cuvier, and the British William Buckland, in the first decades of the 19th century, set the premises for a chronology of the most ancient, and extinct animal species, by means of their accurate description, and the classification of fossil animal remains, and they also noticed what they considered today apparent association with human remains. Yet, both scholars refused to consider these associations between human remains, and remains of extinct animals as primary, and they believed that they descended from perturbations and irregularities in geological stratigraphy. Cuvier was quite explicit, and I quote. “It is thus logical to think that man appeared on Earth only after other mammal species, as Moses' book says”, end of the quote, meaning the Genesis of the Old Testament. Still, at the beginning of the 19th century, the prevailing theory was that of “catastrophism”, which believed that the most ancient animal species had to become extinct for a natural catastrophe, which had to be the biblical Universal Deluge, but some scholar already raised their voices in favor of a new opposite interpretation, namely “evolutionism”. In fact, in Paris, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck maintained that if the remains of extinct animals of different nature were found, this should only depend from the fact that animal species had evolved in time, and that those of the origins had to be different from those of historical times. The most enlightened scholars of the European world, around 1830, like Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang Goethe believed, on the one hand, that I quote, “animals were the eldest brother of men”, and, on the other hand, that only geology could provide us sure element about the time of man's first appearance on Eearth. So, they maintained the idea of a continuity between animal and human world, basic for a scientific understanding of appearance, evolution and disappearance of the living species on our planet. In those same years in Europe, they finally convinced themselves that, as for animal and human remains in geology, typological characteristics could allow a chronological classification, so in rising archaeology, the typological characteristics of artefacts could be the base for a chronological placement also of every kind of tools, made by the human hands. A Danish scholar, Christian Jürgensen Thommsen, had a basic role in this fundamental methodological conquest in the first decades of the 19th century. He had four great merits: first, he understood that in historical development, stone, bronze and iron were used by men in chronological succession; and second that he thought the discovery was so important that in 1819 he organized a museum based on the historical succession of stone - bronze - iron; third, he maintained that, in order to understand the man's artifact, technology was no less important than typology, and also the comparison between archeological remains, and the tools studies by ethnology was a basic one; and finally fourth point, having ascertained that in some period bronze was used together with iron, he guessed that the study of the unitary complexes of archaeological contexts was basic for archaeology itself. The theory of the three-ages was the base of the formulation of the first overall interpretation of the prehistory of Denmark, published by Thommsen as a manual of Nordic antiquities, and it still remains in contemporary archaeology, nearly two centuries later, as a terminological and conceptual base of humankind's development, interpreted in the light of technology in every area of our planet. Thommsen’s work was the developed by his pupil, Jens Jacob Worsaae, who extended the method to a large part of Northern Europe, providing his universal soundness and who, spreading his predecessor's method, engaged himself in making the museum a place of widespread divulgation of scientific discoveries. Another great merit of this scholar was the fact that he closely cooperated with a zoologist and a geologist. This practice in the study of the most ancient humankind is another basic element of modern archaeology: the meeting and the cooperation between two cultures, the sciences of nature and the sciences of humankind. With the Danish scholars, a great result was achieved for the first time in the history of what we may call the invention of archeology, which could not be imagined only a few decades before, and which would have been important consequences in the history of archeology of the last decades of the 20th century. Their researchers proved that working tools were found, which allowed to solve problems in the interpretation of humankind's history, without resorting to written sources: the most ancient humankind’s history could be written using at the same time natural sciences and human sciences, and, so to say, in a somewhat paradoxical way, it became possible to write the history of the prehistory, namely humankind's history before the invention of writing. In conclusion, we may maintain that the birth of a scientific archaeology in the modern world was accomplished when the basic meeting between typology, technology, and stratigraphy, was joined by the experiences and discoveries of natural sciences and ethnological researches. The bases were set for a scientific archeology aiming at recovery of historical data, which might have led to reconstruct what in Europe was always perceived as the two main routes of modern world: the Judaic-Christian world within the picture of the ancient oriental civilization, from Egypt to Mesopotamia to Persia, and the Greek-Roman world within the picture of less advanced peripheral cultures, from the Celts, to the Germans, and the Parthians. Still, by the first half of the 20th century, great very much open mind archaeologists, like the Prehistorian Gordon Childe, who called the ancient Near Eastern civilization as a whole the “Most Ancient East”, or the Egyptologist Henry Breasted, who invented for those civilizations the term “Fertile Crescent”, considering the culture of Pre-Columbian America something bizarre and irrelevant; they had no interest for American archaeology because it was, and I quote, “outside the mainstream of history”, end of quote, according in fact to Gordon Childe himself words. Really, the first pioneer expedition at the discovery of some at least of the pre-Columbian civilization of Central America, took place in the same years as the first important archaeological expeditions which gave birth to the Classical Archaeology, and to Near Eastern Archaeology. These are the expeditions to Chapas and Yucatan in 1841 and 1842, made by an American traveler and archaeologist, John Lloyd Stephens. This brilliant writer, which travelled also to Europe, always attracted by archaeological sites, draw attention upon some of the most spectacular fields of ruins, of the ancient centers of the Maya civilization, often almost completely covered by the tropical vegetation. He asked the question whether those were abandoned cities of historic periods, like in Indo-China, or rather remains of a forgotten civilization as in Egypt. Yet, the beginning of a true archaeology of Central America took place at the end of the 19th century, with the British Sir Alfred Maudsley’s expeditions: in 15 years of researches in southern Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala, which ended in 1902, he basically described and made the world know the extraordinary monuments of several most important centers, like Copan, Quiriqua, Chichen Itza and Palenque which are among the most important archaeological sites of the Classical and post-Classical Maya period. After the beginnings, the study of the civilizations, and cultures of a pre-Columbian America knew an ever growing development, which progressively demonstrated that many paradigms used for the study of prehistory in Europe, and of the great civilizations of the Mediterranean, were not suitable for the different realities of the economic, and social structures of the most ancient world of the Americas, and that even the paradigm of the three ages was not at all convenient for the cultural developments of the pre-Columbian America. The very complicated problem of the genealogical relations between the earlier village communities, defined that as an American neolithic, quite certainly originating in the valley of Mexico, and the great historical civilization of Peru and Mexico, Inca and Maya, dominated the debate for a long time, because there is no doubt that there are strong elements of continuity in cultural contexts, which however feature very strong characteristics of specificity. This is now the place to recall the very numerous archaeological expedition in the Americas; yet, we wish to recall that an effective outline of the history of the development of the New World archaeology was made by Gordon Willey, who singled out the four main phases characterized by peculiar trends. The most ancient phase was called by Willey Speculative Period: it was a pioneer, or preparatory era, which, since the Europeans’ arrival to the New World reached to the middle of the 19th century, the years of the first travels to the discovery of the first important archaeological sites. The second period, called the Descriptive Period, was the age of the first great discoveries, characterized, between the mid 19th century and the early 20th century, by the basic system description of the recovered sites. The third period is the Descriptive-Historical Period, stretching to the mid-20th century, when the stratigraphic method was applied to the archaeological sites of the Americas and problems of chronology in individual studied areas were dealt with by means of scientific criteria. And finally the Comparative-Historical Period, stretching to the time of the revolutionary settings of New Archaeology around the 70s of the past century, being Main certainties about the absolute chronology achieved, was the age in which the foundation were set for a widespread inter-regional comparison. Turning our attention from the Americas to Asia, and in particular to India and China, we immediately notice in which huge way the archaeology of a prehistory of Europe and of the great Mediterranean civilizations of the second half of the 20th century, understandably lost completely in its centrality, mainly based on the fact that what we called the invention of archaeology was a result of the way the European world used in order to look at the past. We have the same feeling when turning to Africa, for the primary role of African continent nowadays has in the researches about the most ancient evidences of Homo Sapiens on our planet. As regards the antiquities of India, very little was known of them until 1923, when Daya Ram Sahni started to excavate Harappa, nearly 480 kilometers northwest of Delhi, and, at about the same time, R.D. Banerji began to explore Mohenjodaro nearly 650 kilometers south of Harappa. Particularly Mortimer Wheeler’s ad Stewart-Piggott’s studies, between 1939 and 1945, allowed for the first time to set, in a clear historical light, that the very ancient urban civilization revealed by the two main centers which flourished for nearly one millennium in the years around 2500 BC, over a very large territory in the Indus Valley. In the same years as the first excavation at Harappa and Mohenjodaro, a Swedish geologist, J. Gundar Anderson, acting as advisor to the Chinese government, discovered the first evidences of Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures in the Yellow River Valley, at Honan, Shensi and Shansi. Since then, huge progress was achieved in India and China, as regards to the reconstruction of the phases of prehistory and history of those very ancient civilization, characterized by an impressive continuity, with very intense activities, which also led to the discoveries of very strong impact, like the discovery, in 1974, of some sector of the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, First Emperor of China, buried with his huge army of clay warriors, dated from the end of the 3rd century B.C. As of we ever seen, the progress in the archaeology of these great Countries are undoubtedly exceptional for the extent and the capillarity of the research over the territory. Yet, the Western World
observes them with attention and amazement, because these Countries, though adopting and re-elaborating procedures invented by European and American archaeology, are developing methodologies and interpretations rooted in their tradition, and which will be a spur for the formulation of method innovations, also in the Western World.
