The Hebrides

A Cultural Backwater

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3780394
AutoresE Cecil Curwen (autor de correspondencia)
Año1938
Volumen12
Número47
Páginas261-289
Fecha de publicación1938-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAntiquity (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-598X • E-ISSN: 1745-1744
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0003598x00013892
OpenAlexW2244507146
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13
Referencias citadas1

In our efforts to reconstruct the life of vanished peoples and cultures we often find ourselves making comparisons with the implements and customs of modern primitive peoples. This practice seems, with due safeguards, reasonably sound, for similar cultural conditions may produce similar cultural phenomena. Our comparative material is usually sought among the backward races of the tropics, less frequently in parts of Europe that are off the beaten track; but it is not generally realized that we have in Britain itself a populous region which, owing to its remoteness, did not emerge from the Iron Age until the end of last century. By 'the Iron Age' we mean that simple state of culture that is found in peasant communities in southern Britain between, say, 500 B.C. and A.D. 1000, extending in a variable degree into the Middle Ages. This stage of cultural development is distinguished from more advanced stages by the prevalence of selfsupporting communities which are necessitated by difficulty of communications, and in this respect the culture of the Hebrides as late as the middle of the nineteenth century was more like that of the pre-Roman Iron Age in southern England than any succeeding phase

Ancient history · Archaeology · Ethnology · Geography · New Hebrides · Peasant · Tropics · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Ecology · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History