The Invention of Words for the Idea of ‘Prehistory’

Abstract

The standard recent authorities on the history of archaeology date the invention of a specific word for prehistory to 1833, saying that Paul Tournal of Narbonne used the adjective préhistorique (‘prehistoric’ in the English translation in Heizer 1969, 91; and in Daniel 1967, 25, following Heizer 1962) or the noun préhistoire (Daniel 1981,48) in an article about French bone-caves. This is not true. The word Tournal used was antéhistorique (Tournal 1833, 175), and the mistake has arisen from working with an idiomatic translation into English, which rendered ‘ anté-historique ’ as ‘prehistoric’ (Tournal [1959]) instead of the original French. (Grayson 1983, 102., however, quotes Tournal's original French correctly.) The earliest use of ‘prehistoric’ seems to be Daniel Wilson's of 1851 in The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland (1851), as the older histories of archaeology say (eg Daniel 1950, 86 (reprinted in Daniel 1975, 86); Daniel 1962, 9), before the error about Tournal began to circulate.