(1788-1868). customs officer from Abbeville in northern France who collected stone tools of the type now known as hand axes from the gravels of the River Somme in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. His claims that these objects were indeed the tools of ancient man and that they occurred in association with the bones of extinct animals were ridiculed by scholars of the time and his three-volume work Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes, the first volume of which was published in 1847, was largely ignored. However in the 1850s scholars were gradually converted to his views and in 1859 his excavations were visited by three distinguished Britons — Hugh Falconer, John Prestwich and John Evans — who were convinced by what they saw. From that point on the antiquity of man was widely accepted in the scholarly world.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied