The Rude Implements of Savages

A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn't appear to be available on-line):

"Everyone knows that in Scandinavia, as in many other countries, one often finds in the earth artificially shaped stone objects that have clearly been wrought by human hands and made for some particular purpose. Studying a collection of such antiquities closer, it is impossible not to recognise shapes similar to certain implements that are still in use among fishers and farmers, though made of worse materials and more rudely fashioned. The most common shapes are similar to the chisel, axe, adze, harpoon, arrowhead i.a., and it would hardly be possible for anyone familiar with these iron implements, and capable of envisioning how they might look if made of stone, to mistake them.

Having thus sufficiently convinced oneself, it should also be an easy realisation that people who used stone for such everyday tools must have been ignorant of the use of metals, and that they must thus have occupied the lowest grade of human education, being what is commonly called Savages. If this is accepted, and it can hardly be argued against, then it also appears obvious that the only method to gain certain and complete knowledge of all these implements, of how they have been shafted and used, and of the various tasks performed with them etc., is to investigate whether such stone implements are still in use among the savages of today, and to observe how they are used there."

Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare has been scanned by Google Book Search and entered into Projekt Runeberg's on-line library. Anyone interested in proof-reading bits of the e-text is welcome to sign up for duty.

Update 19 June: Dear Reader Ahcuah tells me that the third English-language edition of Nilsson's book from 1868 is available for free as a 9 MB pdf file from Google Book Search. Select "Full View", and put in "nilsson" for the author. I can't seem to get at the full text there, but I did get an edition in German from 1863. Love Google!

[More blog entries about archaeology, history, ethnography, Sweden; arkeologi, etnografi, historia, Lund.]