Palaeoliths and Pareidolia: Photography and Archaeological Stone Collecting From the Discovery of Deep Time to the Eolith Controversies

Abstract

Photography played an important part in the revelation of deep time in the later nineteenth century, leading to the invention of a new epoch – the palaeolithic. This article investigates how photography participated in creating palaeoliths, eoliths, and stone collectables in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when the boundaries between artefacts and non-artefacts, culture and nature, were at issue. I examine the emergence of visual conventions for depicting ancient stone implements in archaeological publications and museums and the development of standardized artefact photography. I investigate how the mechanical objectivity of photography was deployed in archaeological experiments demonstrating that eoliths, like photographs, could be produced using non-human agencies. I explore the utopian and left-wing cultures of collecting and photographing figure-stones and picture-stones; collecting cultures based around an alternative connoisseurship of pareidolia – the “primitive” skill of discerning animals, faces and body parts in stones. Comparing case studies of authenticated, unauthenticated, and, hoax artefacts, I examine how authentication practices preserved the personal authority of archaeological specialists, by emphasizing encounters between experts and stones, over those between experts and photographs. Photography always had the potential to destabilize the power relations of archaeological authentication, but, in practice, reinforced and extended them.

Keywords:

• palaeolithic
• eolith
• authenticity
• hoax
• museum

The most momentous photograph in the history of prehistory was shot mid-afternoon on Wednesday 27th April 1859. It depicted two workmen deep in a quarry, one resting on a wheelbarrow, the other pointing towards a stone embedded in the gravel wall of the pit. The stone – an unfinished prehistoric hand-axe – together with several photographic prints, were removed from Saint-Acheul to London by two witnesses: Joseph Prestwich, who presented them to the Royal Society on 26th May, and his friend John Evans, who brought them to the Society of Antiquaries one week later. It was the first time a photograph had been used to prove a point in prehistory, and it was an important point: “The great question,” Evans called it, “of the antiquity of Man upon the earth” (Evans,1861 28). The photograph, along with the stone axe, contributed to the reception of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published in November the same year. Mechanical accessory to a host of human witnesses, it shattered the time barrier, leading a core of scientific opinion-formers towards acceptance of the deep antiquity of humankind, and into conflict with biblically derived chronologies of only six thousand years (Gamble 2021). The photograph and the stone together inaugurated the study a new kind of artefact, soon to be known as the palaeolith. Defining artefact of a new age – the palaeolithic.¹

In this article I explore how photography was used by amateur collectors, archaeologists, and museum curators to negotiate the significance of stones. The scene of my study is the British Stone Age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I investigate the uses of photographs in authenticating and interpreting stones, including case studies of objects that were never authenticated and photographs of objects whose status as humanly made artefacts (as opposed to naturally fractured stones) was in dispute. Considering photographs of palaeoliths, figure stones, stone carvings, and neolithic hoaxes, I compare situations in which objects were successfully stabilized as artefacts and those in which they were not, and the ways in which photography was mobilized in each case.

I begin with a summary of visualizations of prehistoric lithics in the later nineteenth century. I then examine how photography was used in debates over whether eoliths were prehistoric stone tools. I investigate how photographs of curious stones were used by the press and politicians as part of an alternative connoisseurship drawing on the “primitive” visual faculty of pareidolia. Having outlined the background to photographing stones in prehistoric studies, I explore some more detailed case studies drawn from the photographic partnership between photographer, Thomas Arthur Bennett, and stone collector and archaeologist, Dr Thomas Armstrong Bowes. I consider how Bennett photographed stones, and how Bennett’s photographs enabled Bowes to authenticate artefacts, comparing instances when photographs were sufficient, with those where they were not. Circulating photographs helped Bowes organize, number and catalogue his collection, developing his reputation (and that of his collection) among archaeologists, so that his stones became part of the “material rhetoric” of archaeological science. In my conclusion I explore the enduring importance of handling objects, rather than looking at photographs, in archaeological practice, and the implications of this for how authority is performed within the discipline.

Illustrating lithics

Visual conventions for representing artefacts were part of the “invention of [archaeology’s] object itself” in the nineteenth century (Lewuillon,2002 223; Bohrer,201115). But it was by no means obvious that photography was the best technique for representing struck flints. The Saint-Acheul photograph was taken because its mechanical objectivity would, in the words of Evans (1863), give “concurrent testimony” (296). The indexical trace of the hand-axe, photographed within its undisturbed gravel bed, acted as objective witness backing up what Evans and Prestwich said they saw in the quarry. The photograph appeared alongside a host of human eyewitnesses, (including the independent witness John Frere, whose objectivity was based on the fact that he had been dead for 53 years).² The Saint-Acheul photograph rapidly fell out of view once Evans and Prestwich’s testimony had been heard and accepted, because its role was that of independent witness in a public trial of science (Gamble,2021 88–9).

The history of photography in archaeology is often a case of explaining the absence of photography as much as its presence. For lithics, it was hand-drawn illustration, not photography, that would be institutionalized within the apparatus of palaeolithic studies. Foundational texts were published before 1880, when photographs were difficult to reproduce cost-effectively in printed publications (the Saint-Acheul photograph would not make it into print until the 1970s, (Gamble and Kruszynski 2009). Just as important was the fact that drawings combined human observation and visual representation more effectively than photographs (Riggs 2021). The problem of the camera was the lack of control it offered in terms of revealing what was archaeologically salient. Photography “could not differentiate between the essential and the non-essential. It also made damage and random features visible, whether the archaeologist wanted it to or not” (Brusius,2016 257).

The mechanical objectivity of the camera was potentially a threat to existing systems for authenticating artefacts based on the personal authority and trust afforded to archaeological experts. After presenting the Saint-Acheul photograph, “both Evans and Prestwich fought hard to defend their hard-won authority from further impersonal mechanization” (Schlanger,2010 366). Evans had opened “a new field for … antiquarian research” (Evans 1861, 307). But it was drawings, not photographs, that allowed him to specify which characteristics became important in interpretations of ancient stones, and how these features became salient in the authentication of archaeological artefacts.

Within a few years of Evans and Prestwich’s first publications a particular style of visual representation emerged which continues to be used in lithic studies today (Martingell and Saville 1988). The French archaeologist Boucher de Perthes had been excavating in the gravel pits at Saint-Acheul and the surrounding regions since the 1830s, but his illustrations failed to convince metropolitan scientific elites. His simple outlines of pierres-figures (figure-stones), which, he alleged, were prehistoric sculptures of animals and birds, were ridiculed in Paris and dismissed by Evans.³ In 1859, Evans and Prestwich needed to illustrate the connection between humanly made flint implements and geologically ancient matrices. Consequently, they emphasized the color and patina of flints, showing how stones were stained by lengthy exposure to surrounding deposits. Their engravings, (some of which derived from watercolours), included mottling, and staining within the body and on the exterior “crust” (cortex) of the flints, (details omitted in later illustrations). The color of each flint was carefully captioned. Prestwich even included an illustration of the mud on two hand-axes (Prestwich,1860 297, figs 8 and 9). Within two years however, the relation between hand-axes and ancient deposits was widely accepted. Illustrations now turned towards conveying the information necessary for classification, eschewing coloration, staining, patina, or accretions, and emphasizing line. The fold-out plate engraved by Joseph Lowry for Evans (1863, Plate IV) became “the template for classifying all subsequent unpolished artefacts of great human antiquity” reducing shading in favor of the outline of facets on the stones (Gamble,2021 152–3). Engravings outlined the “cup shaped depressions” that were traces of flakes successively struck off a stone tool in the process of its manufacture. These traces distinguished flakes which were made by people from those which were the result of natural processes.⁴ Whereas photographs would have shown all the detail of continuous coloration, shading and reflections, etched lines in blank space allowed Evans to exercise control over what he believed was significant: how the tools were manufactured.⁵

Flint-knapping was poorly understood by the Victorian public. Persuading audiences that palaeoliths were humanly produced involved demonstrating how they were made. Palaeolith collectors, including Evans, learnt to knap flints (Lamdin-Whymark 2009). They observed workers in the flint mines and gun-flint factory at Brandon and even “donned the apron and worked away steadily in one of the Brandon sheds.”⁶ Forgers were already crafting fake palaeoliths to sell to collectors, but they could also help scientists by re-enacting “a barbarous art lost to mankind” (Flint Jack cited in Stevens,1870 590). Forgery assumed a newly ambiguous relationship with palaeolithic science; counterfeits could mislead unwary collectors, yet forging stone tools was scientifically instructive. The celebrity forger “Flint Jack” started his career producing fraudulent artefacts to sell to collectors, but, after he was exposed, turned his hand to public demonstrations of flint-knapping and museum replicas. Blackmore Museum in Salisbury – at the cutting edge of the public dissemination of Stone Age archaeology when it opened in 1867 – displayed two cases of forgeries “many of which were made to order by Flint Jack” alongside “a photographic likeness” of Flint Jack himself. Next to the forgeries was a case of gun flints and strike-a-lights accompanied by two photographs of Brandon flint-knappers in the act of “quartering” a flint. These photographs documented the contemporary re-enactment of prehistoric technologies, a process that was discussed in an academic essay accompanying the museum guide. The Brandon photographs marked the beginning of a new genre, in which gun-flint factory workers were depicted as craftsmen surviving from ancient times (British Pathé 1920, 1943, 1948).

Archaeological images decontextualized artefacts, removing them from the sites, assemblages, and people with whom they were originally found, and placing them at the disposal of the expert collector, who was thus able to assemble artefacts into series and types (Bohrer,2005 Brusius,2013 Baird 2019). The conventions of nineteenth and early twentieth century lithics illustration thus borrowed from pre-existing artefact illustration, which, in turn, drew on painted still lives and specimen drawings from natural history (Baird,2017 10; Baird,2019 85–6). Evans’ monumental Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of the British Isles, listed 476 woodcut illustrations of stones organized according to function, (e.g., as scrapers, borers, arrowheads, and amulets). The interpretative unity of written and drawn description in Ancient Stone Implements (Evans 1872) cemented Evans’ status as an authority on the archaeological authentication of stones. The advantages of photography for recording articles in a series were noted in Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature which portrayed China and glass vessels on shelves, as if on a scientific plate. Photography was useful for making inventories of collections because “however numerous the objects—however complicated the arrangement—the Camera depicts them all at once” (Talbot,1844 20). In artefact photography, items were generally assembled in numbered series, running from left to right, as they did in engraved plates of artefact illustrations (see Figures 1 and 5). “Categorised and understood through groupings based on their visual characteristics” stones were abstracted from their contexts and “reduced to formal qualities in order to be viewed and compared simultaneously” (Thomas,2019 123).

Figure 1. Thomas Arthur Bennett, Photographs of a palaeolith arranged as in an archaeological drawing, c.1923, The prints have been cut, spliced and rephotographed at reduced scale, they are indented where a pencil has traced the outline of the flint (Bowes scrapbook 1 p.123, digital scan by Pete Knowles, HBHRS archive).

Mastery of the conventions of artefact photography lay in “expert knowledge of arrangement, lighting and background” (Droop,1915 37). Facility these areas enabled photographers to emulate standard hand-drawn illustrations (Figure 1). Archaeological manuals specified the rules: Artefacts were positioned using strategically hidden lumps of plasticine and wax. Objects arranged in series were photographed vertically. Objects were photographed in diagonal light, falling top left or top right, as it did in drawings (Petrie 1904). The background should be unobtrusive, and, by 1915, preferably white, like a page (Droop,1915 47). Where engravings were difficult to discern, China White paint was used to enhance them. A similar method was adopted with flints; flaking scars were enhanced for the camera using chalk on their edges and paint could be used to enhance an edge.⁷ Droop expressed concern over the common habit of painting negatives to remove mounts, dirt, and shadows. Instead, he suggested, shadows should be avoided by placing the artefact on a sheet of glass with paper beneath and photographing from above (Droop,1915 47–9, see Figure 1). In Bennett’s photograph of one of Bowes palaeoliths, three photographs showing the obverse, section and reverse of the flint have been cut, spliced, and rephotographed to produce the effect of a drawn illustration. Indentations on the surface of the print show the palaeolith has been traced to produce a drawing, using the camera to reduce the size of the artefact to scale. Bennett lit this artefact top right, as if it was in a drawing, and positioned it upright, following the standard arrangement for hand-axes in drawings and museum cases.

Photography and the eolith controversy

Once a core of influential scholars and scientists had accepted the flaked flints embedded in ancient geological deposits as human products, many more were convinced that there must exist “ruder” implements than these from earlier deposits. Crafting hand-axes required complex technological skill. It seemed logical to nineteenth century evolutionists that simpler artefacts from earlier deposits would precede palaeoliths in evolutionary series (Ellen,2013 Muthana and Ellen 2020). The anticipated “eoliths” (dawn stones) – were revealed to the world in the late 1880s. Prestwich, who first exhibited the photograph of the Saint-Acheul hand-axe, championed the collections of his near-neighbor, working-class shopkeeper – Benjamin Harrison. Eoliths were largely naturally formed lumps of flint, which, Prestwich and Harrison proposed, were minimally modified by chipping round the edges. It was in the very nature of the supposed eolithic technology that these artefacts would be difficult to distinguish from natural stones. Nonetheless, it was important to the acceptance of eoliths as human products, that they, like palaeoliths, showed evidence for differences in manufacture, potential alternative functions, and regional and geographical variation, all of which were best highlighted through an interpretative unity of drawings and text (Ellen and Muthana 2010, 2022). Prestwich had Harrison’s eoliths drawn using standard conventions for illustrations of ancient stone implements and engraved by Harrison’s nephew William Steven Tomkin, who was also employed by Augustus Henry Pitt Rivers (Prestwich 1892).

Debates over whether eoliths were humanly or naturally produced continued into the 1930s. “Doubting Thomas” John Evans refused to accept eoliths on the grounds of “their absolute uselessness as tools,” and was dubbed “little St. Thomas” (O’Connor 2003a: 256). “Your drawings” Evans wrote to Harrison: “look better than the stones themselves” (cited in Harrison 1957, 50). Nonetheless, eoliths were widely accepted into museum collections, and exhibited as the earliest artefacts (Ellen and Muthana 2022). National museum curators – including Reginald Smith at The British Museum, Arthur Smith Woodward and Edwin Ray Lankester at what is now The Natural History Museum – belonged to the “eophiles” group, advising amateur collectors and other museums on the authenticity of stone collectables. Visitors to the British Museum in the early decades of the twentieth century saw Harrison’s eoliths including his “beak-shaped” types (cf Figure 6). Natural History Museum visitors could view Harrison’s original eoliths presented by Prestwich’s widow (British Museum 1902). Harrison amassed thousands of eoliths in a museum above his village shop in Ightham, regularly entertaining tours from scholarly societies and cyclist clubs, and dispatching eoliths to museums and collectors around the world (Harrison 1957, Ellen and Muthana 2022).

Photographic proof became necessary during the eolith controversies because scientific consensus was being disrupted. It was “not very attractive deliberately to undertake destruction” of collections and scientific reputations, therefore, experiments casting doubt on the authenticity of eoliths needed to be scrupulously, and impartially, observed by the camera (Warren,1905 337). Marcellin Boule commandeered a cement works to demonstrate that eoliths could be produced through the mechanical action of water on geological deposits. Boule’s paper published photographs of his experimental apparatus and “photographic figures of eleven different specimens” (Boule,1905 260). His experiments were backed up by Hugo Obermaier, who visited the works, publishing his witness testimony with six photographic plates (Boule 1905, 1923). Samuel Hazzledine Warren dispensed with photographic witnessing by smashing flints and fracturing them under a screw-press before live audiences at the Anthropological Institute. Warren’s “imitation eoliths” were engraved alongside archaeological eoliths using standard illustrative conventions on the same plate to emphasize that his products were identical with archaeological finds (Warren 1905). Warren made plaster casts of his experimental eoliths for exhibition in society rooms and museums (O’Connor 2003b). Like the photographs of flint-knappers in the Blackmore Museum, photographs of eolith experiments documented and illustrated the forces producing struck flint. Now, however, these forces, like those creating the photographic image, were non-human and mechanical.

Throughout the early decades of twentieth century, photographs of lithics increasingly appeared in popular literature, museum and travel guides, and the illustrated press.⁸ The skull found in a gravel quarry at Piltdown in 1912 was “a discovery of supreme importance to all interested in the history of the human race”: “The missing link” between “the first semi-human being of the Tertiary period and man of the Quaternary epoch.”⁹ Eoliths were found alongside the skull and illustrated in the press. Drawings and paintings of Piltdown Man gave a face to the British Eolithic Age. Photographs of a sculpture of Piltdown Man first published in the Illustrated London News in 1914 showed him using an eolith to sharpen his wooden club.¹⁰

Politics and pareidolia

The unpredictability of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Stone Age, in which mere rocks turned into scientific gold, (and scientific gold might turn back into mere rocks), appealed to ambitious working and lower middle-class shopkeepers, tailors and clerks as well as middle-class doctors and businessmen. Unlike Old Masters and objets d’art, mysterious stones, which might – or might not – be of scientific importance, were abundantly accessible. One of Evans’ most powerful strategies had been to rapidly escalate the number of co-witnesses to his testimony; recruiting volunteers to search for palaeoliths at scholarly meetings and in letters to The Times (Evans,1859 8). Implementiferous drift could be found in “nearly every part of England” and gravel pits, brickfields, drainage works, even London’s new subterranean railway, offered fresh hunting grounds (Evans,1863 63). Demand increased among collectors, some of whom amassed thousands of stones. Evans collected c.2,250 lithics between 1852 and the 1890s, most obtained, by gift or purchase, from his extensive collecting network (Roberts and Barton 2008). Benjamin Harrison collected more than 5,000 flints (Harris, Ashton, and Lewis 2019, Ellen and Muthana 2022). There were also collectors for whom the occasional palaeolith complemented a classical collection, such as Sigmund Freud, who acquired a Lower Palaeolithic hand axe from the Somme River gravels, the same geological formation that Evans and Prestwich had photographed in 1859 (Ucko 2001). Collecting connected upper middle-class businessmen like Prestwich, with working-class men like Benjamin Harrison in a “community of eolithic practice” (Muthana and Ellen, 2020 5, 2022 3). But control of collecting cultures by the established institutions of palaeolithic science was only partial. Diversifying cultures of collecting encouraged an efflorescence of alternative stone collectables – “totems,” “figure stones” and “picture stones” – whose validity did not necessarily depend on modes of authentication arbitrated by recognized scientific authorities.

Alternative cultures of stone collecting were connected to utopian and left-wing politics. In 1904, the stone collector Worthington George Smith remarked to Harrison that “eoliths seem to me quite political; with two schools Ultra Radical and Ultra Tories, or church and chapel, with damnation to outsiders” (cited in Muthana and Ellen,2020 5). On the Ultra Radical’s side were politicians including Auberon Herbert, Keir Hardie and Clement Edwards.

In 1901, liberal M.P. and libertarian individualist, Auberon Herbert wrote to The Times describing his “utter amazement” at finding “roughly speaking, the whole of the gravels” for around 20 miles around his home “practically consisted of worked flints”… “Think of the vastness of the scale of the thing,” he wondered, “and think of the perfection of the record suddenly opened to our eyes. For what are these stones?… They appear to be a new volume of Totemism suddenly placed in our hands” (Herbert 1901). Herbert was friends with eolithophile Ernest Westlake, and the pair undertook collecting expeditions in Herbert’s gypsy caravan discussing the creation of a Hampshire division of the Society for Psychical Research (Taylor,2017 53–5). Herbert’s “totems” had chipped eyes and stood upright like Hindu deities. There were serpents, fishes, upright beasts and “many examples of the coarser nature-worship” (Herbert left another to spell out the significance of these specimens as “emblems of phallic worship” (S.P.D.1901, 4). “Play and imagination… humour and laughter and caricature abound in the English pits” announced Herbert (1904, 16). Distinguished by their sense of humor, the original English devoted their freedom to spiritual and artistic pursuits. They resembled nobody so much as the creative workers of Herbert’s political movement, Voluntaryism.

The theory of figure stones applied Prestwich and Harrison’s account of the evolution of tools to the origins of art. If the earliest tools were stones minimally modified by striking off a few flakes could not the same logic apply to the earliest artworks? Following eolithic theory, Herbert’s ‘totems” were renamed “figure-stones” (after Boucher de Perthes’ “pierres-figures”). Like eoliths, figure-stones were naturally shaped stones exhibiting the merest traces of human modification through the chipping of an eye or rubbing of a profile. The foremost British advocate of figure-stones, William M. Newton, took over a gravel pit at Dartford for six years, employing quarrymen to inspect 5,000 tons of gravel for figure-stones (Newton 1913). Herbert and Newton’s first figure-stone exhibition was held at the Langham Hotel, a venue significantly more accessible to women and non-specialists than the meetings of many scientific societies. The exhibition was widely, if skeptically, reported in the national press. Herbert – vegetarian champion of the 1872 Wild Birds Protection Act – addressed his guests on the tenderness and thoughtfulness of prehistoric people, whose relations with animals were “friendly and kind”. Newton, meanwhile, sought scientific credibility by focusing on the classification of figure-stones and the distinguished academic pedigree of those who collected them (Anon,1903b Newton 1913).

Collectors were attracted to prehistory by curiosity as much as determinacy. Curiosity allowed space for the exercise of alternative modes of authentication, based less on deference to scientific authority and more on pareidolia – the brain’s tendency to find familiar shapes when faced with patterns of color and shade. Recognition of types was, of course, fundamental to classifying ancient stone implements, but pareidolia was a much more democratic way of interpreting stones. Pareidolia depended on each subject connecting his or her contemporary imaginative faculties with those of primitive people. Discovering animals, fishes and faces required little knowledge of how experts classified stones. It did not demand expensive illustrated archaeological volumes, reference collections or the sanction of archaeological experts. The interpretative democracy of pareidolia was reinforced by the theory of figure-stones itself, which was based on the idea that humanity’s ancestors had themselves exercised pareidolia when they first alighted on these stones. Pareidolia was a primitive faculty, so even the most childlike of brains could engage in the same playfulness. (The psychological inkblot test developed by Alfred Binet and George Van Ness Dearborn in the 1890s was similarly based on pareidolia, and used to study child development, imagination, and memory throughout the 1900s and 1910s). Little capital was necessary to start collecting oddly shaped stones, which, Herbert emphasized, did not need control of a gravel pit: “Even if these flints had taken on their queer resembling shapes without the hand of man,” reported The Globe, “the fact that they are to be found “even by the roadside” suggests new possibilities for the collector” (Anon 1903a).

Keir Hardie discussed the potential of stone collecting for working-class advancement in his newspaper The Labour Leader.¹¹ His model was “the unwearied worker of humble origin,” collector of eoliths, totems and figure-stones, Benjamin Harrison:¹² “This man, single-handed, has pitted his common-sense and indomitable spirit against the college-bred learning of great professors and come off victor” Hardie enthused. “Entirely self-taught,” Harrison was now “the recipient of a small grant from the British Association and another from the government”. For Hardie, Harrison represented a working-class man, unseduced by the biblical story of creation, who through clear-sighted common-sense reached “a certainty about his conclusions which mere book study could never give”. After tramping the Kentish Downs together, Harrison gave Hardie a collection of curious stones which Hardie invited comrades to come and see at The Labour Leader’s offices in Fleet Street (Hardie,1901 235).

Photography conveyed pareidolia better than the line drawings that archaeologists used to depict worked flints. Pareidolia could only be communicated by portraying the continuous light and shade disclosing each stone’s unique shape. But figure-stones had almost no traces of working, hence few of the characteristics of manufacture that were normally drawn. Herbert immediately realized the pareidolic capacities of photography but couldn’t get The Times to print his photographs (Anon,1902 10). After the 1909 exhibition of figure stones at the Hall of Learned Societies, Paris, La Révue Préhistorique printed an exposition of pierres-figures from France and Britain including photographs from William M. Newton’s collection in color chromolithography (Anon 1909). More expensively printed colored photographs were included in a pamphlet based on Newton’s exhibition of figure-stones at the British Archaeological Association in 1913 (Newton 1913). Ultimately, however Newton’s expensive chromolithography only underlined the epistemic insecurity of figure stones, which, for all Newton’s attempts, could not be made amenable to archaeology’s visual, classificatory, and social conventions.

Some within the scientific establishment regarded figure-stones in jest, and the illustrated press sometimes wrote about them in similar spirit. Nonetheless, newspapers published photographs of stones in manner that activated a play of pareidolia among readers (Figure 2). In 1920, Clement Edwards M.P. discovered a masterpiece. A “stone age sculpture” encompassing eighteen animals and birds in one flint nodule. Photographed from multiple angles by the Illustrated London News staff photographer, it stimulated a multitude of resemblances. Edwards was a liberal trade-unionist, and it is possible the coverage mocked his archaeological pretensions. But it may have been Edwards who had the last laugh. Publication of his polymorphous “find” invited readers into a feat of mass interpretation which did not require elitist qualifications and aligned with Edwards politics. With figure stones it was never quite clear who was jesting, and on whom the jest fell; prehistoric sculptors, collectors, photographers, newspapers, archaeologists, or everyone who ever looked at a funny-shaped stone?

Figure 2. Newspaper cutting from Illustrated London News, September 18th, 1920, Bowes scrapbook 1, p4a, HBHRS archive, digital photograph by Pete Knowles. See also the pareidolic photograph of “the first-known sculpture of the human face” on the front cover of ILN Nov 7th 1925.

Curiosities of color, shape and pareidolia presented an alternative connoisseurship for stone collectors complimenting the scientific interest they took in their stones. The Psychic Museum of Arthur Conan Doyle, which opened in 1925, exhibited 40 or 50 “picture-stones” alongside spirit photographs, automatic writing and artefacts transported by spirits (apports). Like “ghostly white figures projected onto a flinty grey background,” portraits of a Stone Age philosopher, a neolithic society matron, and “the great gaping jaws of some forest-wandering monster” floated within the stones. Amateur geologist W. H. Clark, “an official of Wandsworth Borough Council,” who collected picture stones, theorized that they were “the fossilized remains of … a tiny race of men millions of years ago.”¹³ Although the newspaper’s journalist seemed to prefer the idea that picture stones were a prehistoric version of spirit photography. Thomas Armstrong Bowes collected newspaper articles on picture stones, identifying three examples in his own collection.¹⁴

Artefact photography and authentication

For many archaeologists, photographs could not surpass a personal encounter with the object when it came to authentication. When a stone was manipulated, it could be felt, smelt, weighed up, and viewed from all angles. Specialists wanted to move stones in their hands; to observe how light played across surfaces, facets, and edges; to weigh up the whole shape, and to inspect fine details. Even if photographs were often treated as proxies for artefacts, photographs presented objects as static, two dimensional, traces that could not be handled in the same way as material things. Emphasizing the importance of bodily encounters with objects within authentication practices preserved the power certain archaeologists possessed to consecrate artefacts. Nonetheless, sending photographs thorough the mail was generally safer, cheaper, and quicker than transporting actual objects. A damaged artefact had less financial, as well as scholarly, value to a collector. By ensuring photographs looked suitably “archaeological,” collectors hoped to convince authenticators, increasing the authenticator’s trust in what the collector said about the find’s provenance. Collectors were aware that photographs were as much a means by which authenticity was generated, as a proof of it. As Jen Baird observes, “in archaeological photographs authenticity is both of the photograph, and that transmitted to the things which are photographed” (Baird,2017 6). A correctly presented artefact photograph also supplied the curator or archaeologist authenticating the object with a permanent record that could, in turn, be archived, copied, and circulated by the authenticating authority.

The archives of collector, Tom Armstrong Bowes, and photographer Thomas Arthur Bennett, supply several case studies illustrating how photographs were used within authentication processes. The Bowes-Bennett partnership began before 1914 when Bowes received a letter from a Whitstable mariner, who, that day, pulled a Roman bowl from the seabed. Pudding Pan Rock had been known to fishermen since the eighteenth century as a spot where valuable pots could be hauled up and sold to gentlemen collectors. The fisherman took his find to a local shop keeper, whose valuation was enough to suggest he might get a better offer from Bowes, since “we all know [the shopkeeper’s] a twister, and if it’s worth £1 to him it’s worth double that easily.”¹⁵ The two pots Bowes purchased were especially attractive to a new collector because each was stamped with the name of its Roman maker, making the pots easier to authenticate. It is likely that Bennett first produced prints from the negatives he made of these pots for Bowes in 1914, since Bennett had already begun his photographic surveys of historic buildings in Herne Bay by this date. Certainly, Bowes sent an image of some kind to Sir Hercules Read at the British Museum, obtaining a reply from Deputy Keeper, Reginald Smith, who deciphered the maker’s stamps, confirmed their authenticity, and integrated them into the corpus of pots from the Pudding Pan wreck.¹⁶

Even as they noted that it was “difficult to decide merely by illustrations” whether an object was an archaeological artefact, archaeologists corresponding with Bowes often treated photographs as sufficient for authentication purposes.¹⁷ Bowes brokered a relationship with a leading authority on Roman pottery, Thomas May, by sending him Bennett’s prints which were developed using a “special process” to create red-colored Samian ware. May subsequently authenticated artefacts for Bowes when workmen turned up an ancient grave at Reculver. A vase from the grave was pronounced “a rare type of Kentish or “Jutish” bottle” using Bennett’s photographs.¹⁸ Around 1923, Bowes’ was recruited as a “pair of local eyes” by the archaeologist, James Percy Tufnell Burchell to supervise the excavation of a section at Hampton (Burchell 1924). Bowes sent photographs of the sherds he retrieved to May and Burchell, from which they judged the pottery “Late Celtic” and neolithic and the site a “kitchen midden.”¹⁹

While photographs could, under certain conditions, be enough to authenticate, they could also be enough to immediately disqualify objects from further consideration. In 1928, Bowes wrote to Reginald Smith about a stone head washed up on the beach (Figure 3). The sepia print was hand-colored to show paint preserved on the stone’s surface. But the head was too unusual an artefact, from too insecure a context, for Bennett’s photography to fulfil Bowes’ hopes: “Nobody here can make anything of your stone carving,” wrote Smith, “It does not look European, but sailors would hardly bring home stone carvings from Africa and then drop them overboard… The last person in history it resembles is the Emperor Hadrian!.”²⁰

Figure 3. Thomas Arthur Bennett, Hand-colored print of painted stone head thought by Bowes to be of Roman date, 1928, (Bowes scrapbook 1, p195, HBHRS archive, digital scan by Pete Knowles).

Bowes’ correspondence reveals how archaeological experts negotiated the limits of photography in authentication processes. To be authenticated, objects had to be part of a recognizable sequence that logically derived from the location where Bowes stated his items were found (such as the Pudding Pan wreck, or Burchell’s Hampton site). The authenticating archaeologist also required a pre-existing relationship with Bowes allowing him to trust Bowes’ account of each item’s provenance (see letters from Smith, May, Burchell, and Moir, HBRS archives). Archaeologists who only used photographs or drawings to authenticate finds opened themselves to criticism should the object’s authenticity come into question. The internationally publicized legal cases at Glozel brought this into stark relief between 1925 and 1932. Thousands of bizarre and remarkable discoveries including ‘palaeolithic’ reindeer engravings, supposedly prehistoric tablets smothered with alphabetiform characters, and hermaphrodite idols were denounced as hoaxes, leading to police inquiries and libel charges. Archaeologists on either side of the argument who had not visited Glozel and its museum, nor held the Glozelian artefacts in their hands, were condemned as unqualified interlocutors, no matter how prestigious their positions (Garrod 1968).²¹

Given the importance of archaeological context to authentication it is surprising that there are few photographs of finds in situ in Bowes’ archives.²² The decontextualizing conventions of museum photography – invisible mounting, controlled lighting, and blank backgrounds – trumped the requirement for proof of secure stratigraphical context. Photography was important in the authentication of Bowes himself as an archaeologist familiar with archaeology’s proper visual conventions. Even though Bennett stamped his name on the back of his prints, Bowes’ correspondents often congratulated Bowes, not Bennett, on the excellence of “his” photographs. The Fordwich catalogue (Figure 5) was the only product of the Bowes-Bennett partnership which offered Bennett an equal share of the credit in an archaeological forum. The authenticity of artefact photography seemed to require both artificially staged photography, and a culture in which the activities of the photographer were disregarded. This habit of assuming the labor of illustrators within the person of the archaeologist was historically entrenched. Scientific drawings had often been produced by wives and female relatives, although engravers, who tended to be male, achieved some measure of acknowledgement.²³ Circulating Bennett’s photographs helped Bowes integrate himself into national archaeological networks, authenticating him as an archaeologist and supporting his election to the Society of Antiquaries.²⁴

While Bowes circulated Bennett’s photographs to obtain national and international prestige, Bennett’s photography improved his social standing in Herne Bay. For Bennett, artefact photography was one dimension of a regional photographic survey eventually numbering over 1,300 lantern slides and many hundreds of glass plate negatives and prints of manuscripts, buildings, sites, paintings, and people (see Edwards 2012 for context). Bennett’s photographic records comprised the major collection of the museum of Herne Bay Historical Records Society (HBHRS) opened in 1932. The museum exhibited photographs of palaeoliths alongside actual palaeoliths in series, treating stones and photographs as interchangeable “records” (Wickstead and Knowles 2022). The publicity Bennett’s photography attracted in the museum, at lantern lectures and in the local press, advertised the photographic services of Bennett’s pharmacy business.

The Cissbury hoax

In June 1932 Bowes made a discovery “of the highest interest”. Visiting the prehistoric flint mines at Cissbury he picked up a flint flake from a depression in the ground.²⁵ Engraved in the cortex on the back was the outline of a horse (Figure 4). Reginald Smith was instantly aware of the similarities between this engraving and deer engravings that another archaeologist, Leslie Armstrong, recovered during excavations at Grimes Graves prehistoric flint mines. Armstrong spent decades excavating at Grimes Graves attempting to prove that flint mines, which Victorian archaeologists had said were neolithic, originated in much older palaeolithic periods (Smith 1912). Bowes may not have known it, but at the time he mailed Bennett’s photograph to the British Museum Smith was embroiled in a vituperative dispute concerning the authenticity of Armstrong’s engravings. The evidence Armstrong had assembled for his palaeolithic dating of Grimes Graves was pronounced “valueless” in a paper just about to be published (Clark and Piggott 1933). Armstrong’s flint crust engravings were now conspicuously at odds with the dating of other artefacts from the site. At the instigation of palaeolithic art specialist, Abbé Henri Brieul, the China White paint which Armstrong used to enhance his engravings for the camera was removed, at which point the engravings dissolved into marks and hollows. Pareidolia played the larger part in Armstrong’s painting, which selectively joined up scratches of different depths with natural features on the flint’s surface to make what he wanted to see (Varndell 2005).

Figure 4. Bowes’ scrapbook 3 containing Thomas Arthur Bennett’s photographs of the Cissbury Stone, letters from Reginald Smith and Henri Brieul and envelopes containing X-rays, letters, and more Bennett photographs, 1932 (Bowes scrapbook 3, p70–1, HBHRS archive, digital photograph by Pete Knowles).

Authenticating Bowes’ Cissbury Stone was problematic. The flint displayed a bulb of percussion and some patina matching its findspot, suggesting it had been struck in prehistory. However, the likely date of the engraving on the cortex (palaeolithic) did not fit the preferred new date for flint mines (neolithic). Brieul thought it looked “much better, from an artistic point of view then the Grimes Graves cortex engravings” and was comparable to French palaeolithic engravings.²⁶ Smith also felt the Cissbury Stone was too good for “a neolithic drawing, as draughtmen in the Late Stone Age were a poor lot,” they “did not belong to the same race as the palaeolithic artists” and “could not draw for nuts”²⁷).

Only passing around the actual stone, not its photograph, would achieve the consensus necessary for authentication. Smith suggested bringing the stone to the International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences in August where it could be handled by almost all the key figures in prehistoric archaeology. This was an important congress, not just for the rapidly professionalizing field of prehistory, but also for Bowes, since the British Museum was holding a “special exhibition” of flints from Fordwich, where Bowes had made a large collection (Figure 5, International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, 1932). It was left to Smith to share the stone with Miles Burkitt who attested that it could be neolithic (conveniently the same as the new date for the mines).²⁸ By October the Society of Antiquaries agreed to publish a note on the Cissbury Stone illustrated with Bennett’s photographs. The engraving was all but accepted as a genuine artefact. But before the month was out the publication was pulled. Leslie Armstrong had visited Smith to examine the stone, expressing “not the slightest doubt whatever” that the stone was “modern and very modern … The drawing cuts through … recent weathered surfaces and the lichen. The lines of the drawing are fresh and white and devoid of any lichen or staining. This clearly shows that that it has been drawn very recently indeed and has not been exposed to the weather of even one winter… A hoax upon somebody’s part I expect!.”²⁹

Figure 5. Pages from Bennett’s and Bowes’ hand-annotated photographic catalogue, Flints from Fordwich (High Pit), c.1932. The stones are labelled in Bowes’ “curious code” with a separate number series for the catalogue. HBHRS archive, digital scans by Pete Knowles.

Armstrong’s implicit accusation that he was the hoaxer spurred Bowes into a frenzy of visualization. He had x-ray photographs produced of the Cissbury Stone and investigated the possibilities of infra-red.³⁰ He devised an experiment, using a stone tool to engrave an elephant on a flint and burying it for three and a half years. After Bowes unearthed it, Bennett photographed the elephant, showing the cuts were still white. Around the time Bowes dug up his white elephant in September 1937, he found another engraved Cissbury Stone, apparently in the same location as the first. The new engravings were abstract, like the neolithic drawings on chalk that Bowes had been alerted to by Ronald Jessup.³¹ The new stone and photographs led Smith to recommend Bowes try publishing again, but no report was forthcoming. Bowes’ and Bennett’s powers of persuasion, written and photographic, were exhausted.

Photography and the material rhetoric of prehistory

The promotional strategies used by late nineteenth and early twentieth century prehistorians to build consensus around their preferred interpretations of stones have been described as “material rhetoric” (Van Reybrouck, De Bont, and Rock 2009). In prehistoric archaeology, researchers did not just collect and classify stone tools, but engaged stones within assemblages supporting arguments over their artefactuality (Ellen and Muthana 2022). Taking photographs, making casts, labelling stones, exchanging specimens, and displaying stones at scientific meetings were all essential activities. Existing studies of material rhetoric have focused on the top-down campaigns of well-known scholars, but amateurs also engaged in their own, bottom up, promotional strategies (McNabb,2012 Chapter 10). The value of collections increased if a collector could get his stones positioned at the frontiers of science through scholarly exhibitions and publications. This could be facilitated by aligning one’s collections with the needs of protagonists in intellectual disputes, who would thus be more likely to authenticate, exhibit, reference and publish one’s collectables. From the top-down perspective, it was essential that palaeolithic scholars form strategic alliances with amateur lithic collectors who supplied information about new discoveries and made specimens available to support their own intellectual factions.

Circulating photographs supplemented the long-established antiquarian tradition of loaning, swapping and gifting artefacts to cement personal relationships (Woolf 2003). Photographs allowed collectors and archaeologists to exchange information visually. They were precursors, facilitators, and advertisers, introducing stones into scholarly forums, museum collections and exhibitions. Exhibitions were regularly staged at meetings of the scholarly societies, including the Society of Antiquaries, the Geological Society, and the Royal Anthropological Institute, and at scientific conferences. These gatherings were an important element of the sociality of archaeology, during which archaeologists conversed over and physically handled stones (McNabb,2012 Ellen,2013 Muthana and Ellen 2020).

For objects to enter scholarly forums they needed to be assembled as artefacts within collections (Ellen and Muthana 2022). Collections had inventories, preferably recording where each item was found, and who gave or sold it to the collector. Each stone had a pasted-on paper label recording the collector’s initials, finds number and find-spot. Labels exhibited the collector’s control over his inventory and distinguished his or her understanding of each item’s artifactuality. When a collector acquired a stone, he or she could decide to remove an earlier collector’s label, or keep it alongside his or her own label, signaling the stone’s pedigree. The hand-axe photographed in 1859 had a label handwritten by Prestwich on a white paper rectangle: “Saint Acheul Amiens 11 ft from surface April 27 – 59”. Superimposed, with a different pen: “Present when found J.P.” (Gamble and Kruszynski,2009 Figure 3). Evans’ distinctive labels, with chamfered corners and double blue border, are iconic, even today. Labels were a rhetorical device establishing the authenticity of artefacts (Ellen and Muthana 2022 4-5). William Newton needed to show that figure stones could be classified, to demonstrate their authenticity. His oval labels were pre-printed “FIGURE STONE COLLECTION W.M. NEWTON” around the edge. A pre-printed space for “CLASS” in which Newton wrote a classification letter above his finds number emphasized how figure-stones were classified. Labels allowed collectors to accumulate prestige and archaeologists to argue with stones.

Photography was an important technology for cataloguing stones. Each stone was unique, and its individual characteristics (as opposed to the classificatory traits indicating its type) were better indexed visually rather than textually. Labels were not generally illustrated in archaeological line drawings: Illustrators removed them, or pretended they weren’t there. For photographic inventories, however, labels were an essential part of the inventory function. Bennett first produced photographic inventories for Bowes’ stone collection around 1924 when Bowes acquired 73 pieces from Herbert Newton Rainbow, an amateur archaeologist departing Herne Bay.³² Bennett photographed Rainbow’s flints (plus one flint Bowes already possessed) in batches, front and reverse, arranged as if they were specimens in an archaeological illustration. Over the next five years, Bowes amassed a collection of thousands of lithics. Many were purchased from a Canterbury dealer – Valentine Sinclair – who obtained stones and fossil bones from quarrymen (Knowles 2023). Over time, Bowes and Bennett developed a cataloguing system with round coded labels (Figure 5).³³ It is likely that Bowes and Bennett’s photographic inventory of Fordwich lithics was created for the British Museum’s “special exhibition” of palaeolithic implements from Fordwich and Kenya, that formed part of the 1932 International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (the conference at which Smith handed the Cissbury Stone around for other experts to inspect). The catalogue was probably also present at Bowes’ exhibition for the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia in 1933.³⁴

Bowes started collecting lithics at the height of the second eolith controversy in which his friend James Reid Moir was a leading figure. Moir’s discoveries of “pre-palaeoliths” beneath the Red Crag deposits of East Anglia succeeded in securing the intellectual patronage of Edwin Ray Lankester at the Natural History Museum. A tailor from Ipswich, Moir, like Harrison, was one of few archaeologists supporting himself as a full-time professional. His precarious existence was sustained through his ability to co-ordinate a network of amateur informants (O’Connor 2003b). Lankester encouraged Moir to take up the experimental approaches of the anti-eolith scholars. This time, however, the experiments would support Moir and Lankester’s contention that “pre-palaeoliths” were humanly manufactured. It was a startling rhetorical reversal, in which, once more, photography was deployed, (this time with more theatrical than evidential effects). Moir presented annotated cut-ups of photographs of flints he had smashed together in a sack floating amid diagrammatic drawings (Moir 1912). As debate became more insistent, critics of eoliths replied using the same collage technique; publishing cut-up photographs of eoliths covered with diagrams and writing (e.g., Haward 1919).

Most lauded of Lankester and Moir’s pre-palaeoliths were the rostro-carinates: eoliths shaped like an eagle’s beak. Rostro-carinates were believed to be typologically related to earlier “beaked” eoliths and later palaeoliths (suggesting eoliths were humanly produced). Bowes collection included hand-axes from Fordwich with an “obvious resemblance” to rostro-carinates. Thus, Smith declared, “Mr. Reid Moir’s theory that the hand-axe was derived from the leading pre-Crag type is so far confirmed” (Smith,1933 169). It may have been the visual excitement of the second eolith controversy that encouraged Bowes and Bennett into some experiments of their own. They photographed “a forgery” of a hand-axe with an exceptionally pronounced “beak” from Rochester Museum and measured it alongside one of Bowes evolved rostro-carinate specimens (Figure 6). Instead of using the traditional perpendicular arrangement, the specimens were propped horizontally, following a new display style Moir was attempting to introduce into the British Museum to better present the resemblances among stones with “beaks” (O’Connor 2003b: 115).

Figure 6. Thomas Arthur Bennett’s photographs of a beaked “forgery” compared with one of Bowes’ evolved rostro-carinate specimens, (Bowes scrapbook 2, p86, HBHRS archive, digital photograph by Pete Knowles).

Where there was scientific dispute, scholars had to contend, not just using photographs, but also with the stones themselves. Object handling was a long-established ritual of antiquarian sociality. Just as St Thomas (Doubting Thomas) was convinced by touching the wounds of Christ, so archaeologists needed to lay their hands upon artefacts, or upon replicas that could be handled as if they were artefacts (Classen 2007). In 1927, Bowes’ friend James Percy Tufnell Burchell claimed he had discovered the Palaeolithic in Ireland. His evidence was a collection of limestone fragments picked up on holiday in County Sligo. Despite robust support from Moir, Burchell’s announcement was dismissed by Irish quaternary scientists who pointed out that the locations of Burchell’s stones were geologically modern. Furthermore, his finds were naturally, not humanly, formed.³⁵ Burchell and Moir set about arming themselves with Burchell’s Irish stones alongside comparable palaeoliths from England. Bowes’ collection contained specimens such as a “massive side-scraper” rivalling the enormous dimensions of Burchell’s Irish stones (Bowes,1928 517–8). Burchell was soon offering Bowes gifts from his collections in the hope of obtaining some of Bowes’ specimens permanently: “I have so many people coming here to see the material,” he complained. “Having regard to my Irish finds it would be highly satisfactory if I possessed for comparison a similar type of flake from the English gravels” and “a drawing – however good – is not like having an original.”³⁶ The situation became crucial as an exhibition at the Society of Antiquaries approached. A photograph or plaster cast of Bowes’ specimens would not carry enough weight to sway opinions. The problem was solved by making electrotypes. More accurate (and heavier) than plaster casts, these would “play an enormous part in convincing sceptics.”³⁷

Conclusion

Most of the stones once prized as eoliths or figure stones are now seen as naturally broken rocks. They are not tools or sculptures of the ancients. There never was an Eolithic Age apart from that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century archaeological imagination. In the 1950s Piltdown Man would be revealed as an elaborate hoax. Some of the eoliths photographed with the Piltdown skull are now known to have been faked using artificial staining (McNabb 2006). Today eoliths are the subject of academic interest as artefacts of the history of archaeology itself (Ellen and Muthana 2022). Photographs of eoliths, figure stones and hoaxes can show the part photography played in establishing claims to archaeological knowledge. Archaeology emerged around the same time as photography in the 1830s and 1840s. Photography was thus a precondition of archaeology’s visual regimes (Bohrer,2011 cf Hicks 2019). The camera participated in the revelation of deep time that produced prehistory. The association of stone implements with extinct animals in deeply stratified geological deposits was witnessed, documented, and mobilized photographically.

However, photography was only one component within the processes that produced and authenticated archaeological artefacts, processes which included collecting, excavating, cataloguing, exhibiting, and all the ‘material rhetoric’ of late nineteenth and early twentieth century archaeology. In 1859, Evans and Prestwich recruited photography as a mechanically objective corroborator, another instantiation of the eye-witness testimony that was required to form an archaeological consensus (see Sera-Shriar 2014). However, archaeological institutions did not immediately demand all palaeoliths be recorded in situ photographically. Initially, hand-drawn illustrations were the most effective medium for the procedures of collection, ordering and classification. Unlike photographs, engravings could by cheaply reproduced, allowing stones to be placed within a series so that they could be compared and classified under the purview of an authoritative eye (Daston and Galison 2007). Artefact photography appeared alongside line illustrations. Photographs of lithics adopted visual conventions (diagonal lighting, invisible mounts, blank backgrounds, labels) that emulated drawn illustrations.

Another kind of archaeological photography visualized the forces creating stone tools. In these photographs stones were smashed against or crushed under other objects by kinetic pressures and drivers. Stones appeared as part of wider scenes. These photographs were important when there was controversy about how stones were made. In the 1860s, when scientists wanted to show that palaeoliths were manufactured by ancient humans, museum displays presented photographs of palaeoliths being flaked by flint-knappers. Later, during the early twentieth-century eolith controversies, photographs of cement mills and mechanical apparatus illustrated the experimental set-ups for producing eoliths without the human hand. These photographs showed that eoliths, like photography, could be created through the actions of non-human agents.

Archaeology’s established authentication processes reproduced the personal authority of specialists. In palaeolithic archaeology such specialists were attached to museums or scholarly societies, overwhelmingly male, and exercised control over large, prestigious, collections. The more specialists who laid hands on a stone – either one-on-one or at the exhibitions of archaeological societies and conferences – the more that stone accumulated a consensus, imparting either the aura of authenticity or a whiff of scandal. As in Jewish and Christian ritual, the laying on of hands was an important rite in the confirmation of belief. When artefact photography followed the correct conventions, the object photographed was more likely to be entered into these negotiations about artifactuality, even when its archaeological context or provenance was indeterminate.

Photography could, potentially, have imperiled the role of specialists in authenticating artefacts. Artefact photography visually reinforced collectors claims to the genuine artifactuality of their stones, making them seem like artefacts even when they had yet to pass under the hands of the specialist. The emergence of cultures of stone collecting based on pareidolia – a faculty for finding resemblances that could, by definition, be exercised by anybody – also challenged the role of archaeological authorities. Photography was the perfect vehicle for pareidolia, conveying the pareidolic properties of stones far better than traditional archaeological illustrations. Archaeological specialists however, resisted attempts to reduce their authority. Artefact photography alone was seldom sufficient to turn a stone into an archaeological artefact. Consequently, museum archives contain many images of stones, whose facticity as archaeological knowledge objects remains ambiguous and changeable (Ellen and Muthana 2022). Figure stones were photographed with all the artificial contrivances of artefact photography but were never quite accepted as stone age artworks in the way collectors hoped they would be. The Cissbury Stone was meticulously and extensively photographed but remains unauthenticated. The disruptive pareidolic potential of photography was contained. As the correspondence about the Cissbury Stone shows, it was established archaeological specialists who decided at which point a photograph was sufficient for them to pronounce judgement over a stone, or whether their decision would be reserved until they, and others, personally handled it. Whether or not the stone concerned was consecrated as a genuine artefact, the priesthood of archaeology’s specialists was reaffirmed through the centrality of their physical presence within the authentication processes transforming stones into archaeological gold.

Acknowledgements

This article is dedicated to the memory of Mike Bundock, President of the Herne Bay Historical Records Society (HBHRS). I would like to express my thanks to Pete Knowles, Margaret Burns, and all the volunteers at the HBHRS and at The Seaside Museum, Herne Bay. This paper was written following encouragement from Dr Kathy Kubicki and Dr Layla Renshaw. Thanks to Dr Chris Cumberpatch, Pete Knowles and Dr Chris Horrocks for reading early drafts in 2022, to two anonymous peer reviewers and to Adam Brett and Allison Cauldwell for meticulous editing. Any mistakes are my own.

Disclosure statement

The research for this paper was initiated when the Society for Museum Archaeology (SMA) selected me as unpaid Museum Mentor to The Seaside Museum, Herne Bay. Thanks to SMA for training me as a Museum Mentor, and to one of the volunteer curators of the Seaside Museum, Pete Knowles, whose expertise in the collections and archives of The Seaside Museum and Herne Bay Historical Records Society (HBHRS) were vital to this research. I did not receive payment for my work at The Seaside Museum; limited travel expenses were recompensed by SMA. The mentoring scheme ran from 7th October 2019 to 12th March 2020 at part of the Society for Museum Archaeology Resources and Training (SMART) Project.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helen Wickstead

Helen Wickstead is an archaeologist and museum historian who unearths the histories of neglected, discarded, and "dirty" artefacts. She teaches Museum Studies at Kingston University, London. Helen’s previous publications investigate men-only clubs and museums, concrete megaliths, the Cult of Kata, goat-boy folklore, and aerial archaeology. She authored the world’s first and only dedicated study of Soho Bibles, uncovering the histories of handmade obscene books from the British Museum’s Private Case. Her current research explores sub-cultures of phallus collecting from the Grand Tour to Freud’s study.

Notes

1 For centuries - to the extent they had noticed flaked stone artefacts at all - antiquarians generally believed hand-axes were formed by natural processes. Only a few curators and collectors who were able to compare British stone tools with the arrowheads flaked by Native Americans surmised that the British examples were humanly crafted. They were sometimes discussed as “elf shot” or “thunder bolts”, and some seventeenth century writers thought them the work of fairies; for how could “the art of Man” cut stones so “small and neat, and of so brittle a substance”? (Woolf 2003:230). In 1662, Isabel Gowdie made a confession to witchcraft admitting that she had watched the Devil make “elf shot”, and she herself had “spanged” it at a gentleman (she missed) (Piggott 1976:138). The words palaeolithic to describe the old stone age of chipped stone implements, and neolithic to describe the new stone age of polished tools were introduced in John Lubbock’s book Pre-historic Times in 1865.

2 On returning from France, Evans was “absolutely horror-struck” to see a hand-axe like the one he and Prestwich had just brought back in a window-case at the museum of the Society of Antiquaries. Discovered by Frere in 1797, this hand-axe showed that England too, had sites yielding unpolished stone implements (Evans,1861 Gamble 2021:88-9). For more on the importance of witnessing in nineteenth-century anthropology see Sera-Shriar (2014).

3 Evans 1861:281. For more on the reception of Boucher de Perthes’ figure-stones and on figure-stones in general as “nonsense” see Gamble 2021:59-6.

4 These would now be described as conchoidal fractures; the scars left by percussive flaking. As Evans pointed out, the chances against several of these depressions occurring accidentally was very great, and “when in any spot we find several of these flakes, each bearing these marks of being the result of several successive blows, all conducing to form a symmetrical knife-like flake, it becomes a certainty that they have been the work of intelligent beings” (Evans 1861:76).

5 In the industrial age, manufacturing organised the past as well as signalling the future. Christian Thomsen’s Three Age System divided prehistory into the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age based on manufacturing materials. Manufacturing techniques distinguished the rude, unpolished implements of the drift from the polished stone celts of the Stone Period, (a distinction Evans’ friend John Lubbock developed into one between Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods within the Stone Age). For more on how Evans’ experience of patent law in manufacturing influenced his arguments around the manufacture of hand-axes see Bulstrode (2016).

6 James Wyatt, an early supporter of Evans, made gunflints “sufficiently well to warrant the belief that, with moderate application, he might ultimately succeed in earning ten shillings or twelve shillings per week at the trade”. His article on The Manufacture of Gun-Flint formed part of the Blackmore Museum’s guidebook (Stevens 1870).

7 I am grateful to Pete Knowles of the Seaside Museum for pointing out a core photographed by Bennett which still has chalk on it. There is no record of its having been photographed since it appeared in Bowes’ scrapbook in the 1920s. Even today, guides to archaeological photography recommend using paint to darken the edges of transparent flints (Fisher 2009:4).

8 For more on the importance of the Illustrated London News (ILN) as purveyor of archaeological images see Phillips 2005:74-6. For examples of photographically illustrated guidebooks see the British Museum’s Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone Age (British Museum 1902).

9 Illustrated London News (ILN) Saturday December 28^th 1912, See also Piltdown Man as the face of the Eolithic with drawings of eoliths in ILN 23rd August 1913 and photographs of museum cases from the American Museum of Natural History, ILN January 8th 1921. For more on the Piltdown eoliths see McNabb (2006). It may have been the Piltdown coverage that stimulated Dr Thomas Armstrong Bowes’ interest in prehistory. Bowes’ medical thesis had involved analysing skulls to study bone deformities caused by ear infections. He was an associate of William Steadman, an amateur archaeologist and school headmaster thrust into the scientific spotlight in 1911 through his discovery of an ancient skull at Galley Hill, Kent. Bowes carefully saved cuttings about the Piltdown discoveries for his scrapbooks, including articles in the British Medical Journal, and began collecting flints within the next couple of years.

10 ILN, 13^th August 1921.

11 Keir Hardie, Between Ourselves, The Labour Leader July 27th 1901. See also 3rd July 1901 and 13th July 1901.

12 Harrison’s discovery of “a prehistoric totem factory” at Stanstead and his preference for the term figure- stone over totem was covered in the local press see, Kent Messenger and Maidstone Chronicle, Oct 29th 1910.

13 See newspaper cuttings from Bowes’ scrapbook 1 p17, HBHRS archives. For more on the Psychic Museum see The Strand Magazine, May 1927, p5.

14 Newspaper cuttings n.d. Bowes scrapbook 1 p17. Bowes’ dealer Valentine Sinclair was also interested in pareidolia, writing to Bowes about a “stone face” he had discovered - a natural feature of the rock, but that he still thought Bowes might find collectable, letter from Sinclair to Bowes, 8^th November 1925, HBHRS archive.

15 Letter from H.J. Hatton to Bowes n.d. HBHRS archive.

16 Letter from Smith to Bowes, 17th June 1914, HBHRS archive.

17 Bowes sent some of Bennett’s photographs of his lithics collection to James Reid Moir, an authority on palaeolithic flints and eoliths. Moir found the photographs “excellent”: Although it was “difficult to decide merely by illustrations”, he observed that some “appear to be intentionally shaped” …”though it seems they have suffered considerable abrasion at the hands of the sea”. The letter is bound into Bowes scrapbook above two of Bennett’s ‘inventory’ photographs which feature eoliths: “I am glad you are collecting the rougher material – which has been sadly neglected”, continued Moir, “It is, however, of much importance”. Bowes Scrapbook 1, p123-4, HBHRS archives.

18 Letters from May to Bowes 27th October 1921 to 15th December 1923. May was writing an exhaustive catalogue using Roman pottery at Colchester Museum (“a real hack”, wrote May). For the authentication process see May letter to Bowes, 28th July 1922, Smith letter to Bowes, 22nd Dec 1925.

19 Would you “care to do me a good turn by collaborating with me over one particular section I have found quite close to your house?”. Letter from Burchell to Bowes, 14th June – no year. HBHRS archive. For the authentication of pottery sherds and identification of the site see letters from May to Bowes 7th Nov 1923, May 15th Dec 1923, and letters from Burchell to Bowes no year (c.1923) HBHRS archive.

20 Letter from Smith to Bowes 24th May 1928, Scrapbook1 p195-6. The whereabouts of the stone carving are unknown. One year later, Bennett’s photograph of another pot Bowes hoped would be Roman turned out to be “Turkish, and of comparatively recent make” (letter from Hobson to Bowes 5th June 1929, scrapbook 2 p147-8).

21 Dorothy Garrod – who would become the first female professor at Cambridge at a time when women were not allowed to speak or vote on university matters and when Oxford did not award women degrees – was singled out for academic bullying, even though she inspected Glozelian objects first hand and excavated there (Garrod,1968 Smith 2000). Louvre curator and epigrapher René Dussand was criticized in the press for not viewing the actual writing tablets, although it later emerged that he had visited anonymously. Dussand was subsequently convicted for defamation of the ‘Glozelians’ (Times 30th Dec 1927, “Glozel Dispute” p9, 31st Dec 1927 “The Glozel ‘Finds’”, p9). Bowes was fascinated by Glozel, collecting press cuttings, and noting the “confirmation of the forgery” in the archaeological journal, Antiquity (scrapbook 2, p20-3).

22 The photographs Bowes sent to experts all appear to have been shot in Bennett’s studio. Excavation photography was limited to William Whiting’s excavations of Roman Ospringe, where Bennett semms to have acted as a site photographer and Bowes advised on conserving bone specimens (Bowes Scrapbook 1, p100, HBHRS archive).

23 Many of Prestwich’s illustrations were produced by his sister (Gamble 2021). Bowes’ brother, Harold McGowan Bowes, drew his palaeoliths for publication. For more on the anonymisation of female scientific illustrators, who were often relatives of the male authors, see Bermingham (2000).

24 Bowes became a member of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia in 1923 and was proposed by Smith as Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1926.

25 Letter from Smith to Bowes, 2nd June 1932, Scrapbook 3, p70-1, HRHBS archive. A sketch of the depression where the Cissbury Stones were found is given at the end of Bowes scrapbook 3. It is a shallow scoop with gently sloping sides.

26 Brieul letter to Bowes 28th June 1932 Scrapbook 3, HBHRS archives.

27 Smith letters to Bowes, 2nd June 1932, and 15th Jan 1938 Scrapbook 3, HBHRS archives.

28 Smith letter to Bowes 16th June 1932, and 15th Sept 1932 Scrapbook 3, HBHRS archives.

29 Armstrong letter to Bowes 12th Nov 32, Scrapbook 3. Armstrong now appears poorly qualified to judge a hoax. Not only were his flint crust engravings largely products of pareidolia, but the so-called “Grimes Graves Goddess”, a chalk carving of a smiling naked woman which Armstrong found at the base of a 5.8m mine shaft at Grimes Graves is now known to have been fabricated by his ex-fiancé Ethel Rudkin (Varndell 2012).

30 Letter to Bowes from Norman Cook, Curator of Maidstone Museum, 29 May 1936, Scrapbook 3, HBHRS archive.

31 Letter from Jessup to Bowes 4th Nov 1937, scrapbook 3, HBHRS archive. The two Cissbury stones, can still be found in the museum that Bowes and Bennett helped create, The Seaside Museum, Herne Bay. They remain unauthenticated and are not on display.

32 This might have been one of the occasions when Bowes accepted antiquities as part-payment for medical bills, since Rainbow’s advice to Bowes on how to classify prehistoric artefacts is accompanied by a request for Bowes’ bill. In Basingstoke, Rainbow joined the Hampshire Field Club, starting a new collection of stones, making discoveries on the Thames foreshore, and publishing a survey of iron socketed axes in The Archaeological Journal in 1928.

33 Pete Knowles, Curator of Palaeolithic Collections at The Seaside Museum, Herne Bay suggests this code hid Bowes findspots so they could not be exploited by other collectors. A great deal of work has been completed on the provenance of these flints, (some of which were accompanied by sketches showing where the objects were found) see Knowles (2023). In addition to the stones acquired from Rainbow and Sinclair, Bowes also obtained lithics from Norfolk which he appears to have picked up himself.

34 The special exhibition including Bowes’ collection was open daily throughout the conference. On August 3rd Reginald Smith gave a demonstration of “St. Acheul Implements from the gravels of Fordwich, Kent”. See International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences 1932:16, 26. For the Prehistoric Society exhibition see Smith.1933

35 There is still no evidence for a palaeolithic occupation of Ireland of the antiquity that Burchell postulated. However, there are a few items among the naturally broken stones Burchell collected that are now thought to have been made by humans. For a summary of the affair see Woodman (1998).

36 Letter from Burchell to Bowes, 25^th Oct 1928, HBHRS archives.

37 Bowes’ specimens “looked very nice on the tables” at the Society of Antiquaries exhibition. But unfortunately, the geologist Moir and Burchell invited to put their case was “frightfully longwinded”. Letters from Burchell to Bowes 26th Sept 1928, 25th Oct 1928, 31st Oct 1928, 2nd Nov 1928, 9th Nov 1928. HBHRS archives.