Scientist of the Day - John Lubbock

An Abbeville hand axe, given to John Lubbock by Jacques Boucher de Perthes, hand-colored lithograph, Natural History Review, vol. 2, 1862 (Linda Hall Library)

John Lubbock, a British banker and archaeologist, was born Apr. 30, 1834. When John was just eight years old, a family moved in next door, the new head of the house being a young naturalist who had recently returned from a voyage around the world on HMS Beagle. The naturalist was Charles Darwin, who befriended his young neighbor and encouraged Lubbock’s interest in science. Lubbock's father was a baronet, and a successful banker, as John would soon be himself.  But, stimulated by his interactions with Darwin, Lubbock became interested in human antiquity, and the evidence then being brought forward to suggest that humans had been around much longer than the Biblical 6000 years, and that humans might have long ago shared the earth with mammoths and cave bears and other animals now extinct.

Portrait of John Lubbock, Strand Magazine, 1891 (Wikimedia commons)

Sometime in the late 1850s, Lubbock visited Jacques Boucher de Perthes, in Abbeville, in northern France, where the older archaeologist had assembled quite a collection of artifacts now known to be prehistoric human tools.  Boucher de Perthes was one of the first to argue that such stone tools are evidence of human antiquity.  Hardly anyone believed him before 1859, but Lubbock did.  He came home with a present from his new friend, an ancient hand axe, and Lubbock published a paper in the Natural History Review in 1862, which he began by stating, eloquently, that we need to turn away from the allure of ancient Greece and Egypt and look around us in France and England, for that is where the real evidence of human antiquity is to be found.  He ponied up for a lovely color lithograph of his tool to include with his article (first image).

Title page, Prehistoric Times, by John Lubbock, 1st ed., 1865 (Linda Hall Library)

One of the two hand axes, found by John Frere at Hoxne in 1797, wood engraving in Prehistoric Times, by John Lubbock, 1st ed., 1865 (Linda Hall Library)

Just three years later, in 1865, Lubbock published an entire book on human prehistory, which he called Prehistoric Times (third image).   It is THE landmark book in prehistoric archaeology, and it would go through 7 editions, each one revised by Lubbock himself.  In this work, Lubbock distinguished between the older flaked tools, such as the famous flints found at Hoxne by John Frere (fourth image), and the polished stone tools that showed up frequently in France (fifth image), coining the terms "Paleolithic" and "Neolithic to distinguish them.  He noted that there were a variety of flaked tool cultures; those from Abbeville, where the hand axe predominated, were quite different from those from Le Moustier (sixth image), which were flaked from a prepared core, and he adopted names proposed by others for these prehistoric tool cultures, such as Abbevillian, Mousterian, and Aurignacian.  His book was abundantly illustrated with wood engravings showing a great variety of prehistoric human tools. The first edition was a little early for the inclusion of stone artifacts that were not tools, but they would appear soon enough in the later editions.  The 7th edition of 1913 even has beautiful chromo-lithographs of the recently recognized cave paintings from Altamira, as you can see from this display in our exhibition, Blade and Bone: The Discovery of Human Antiquity (2012).

Polished stone tools from Lubbock’s “Neolithic” era, wood engraving in Prehistoric Times, by John Lubbock, 1st ed., 1865 (Linda Hall Library)

Mousterian prepared-core tools, wood engraving in Prehistoric Times, by John Lubbock, 1st ed., 1865 (Linda Hall Library)

Lubbock not only wrote the book on prehistory, but he became a strong advocate for preserving ancient human sites, such as the stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire.  In 1882, he sponsored the Ancient Monuments Act in Parliament, which placed Stonehenge and Avebury and 66 other locations in England, Ireland, and Scotland on a list of protected sites.  Shortly before, Lubbock had purchased much of the village of Avebury, which overlaps the Avebury stone circle, in order to preserve the stones until Parliament could get its act together (seventh image).  When Lubbock was later (1900) given a peerage, he chose to become the 1st Baron of Avebury, which reminds me to remind you that, if you look to acquire any editions of Prehistoric Times, the 6th and 7th editions will be offered under the name of Avebury, rather than Lubbock.

Avebury Circle, and the village of Avebury, from the air, recent photograph (Wikimedia commons)

Lubbock was one of the founding members of the X Club, established by Thomas H. Huxley in 1864 to encourage the pursuit of science unhindered by religious dogma, and Lubbock was one of the 8 pallbearers at Darwin's funeral in 1882.  When he himself died on May 28, 1913, at the age of 79, he was laid to rest in the churchyard at St Giles the Abbott Church in Farnborough, Bromley, Greater London.  His remains were later removed to a family plot not far away, although his stone monument has been returned to the Churchyard at St Giles (eighth image).

Memorial stone for John Lubbock, 1st Baron of Avebury, St Giles the Abbott Churchyard, Farnborough, Bromley, Greater London (findagrave.com) 

There used to be an Avebury Room in the Bromley Museum in London, devoted to Lubbock.  But the museum was closed around 2015, and as best I can determine, it has not reopened. There were some paintings there of prehistoric human activities, such as mammoth hunting, commissioned by Lubbock from Ernest Griset, which Lubbock used to decorate his home at Kingsgate Castle in Kent.  I had planned one day to do a post on Griset and his prehistoric art, so I hope the Avebury Room reemerges somewhere, sometime, and the paintings again become accessible.  Lubbock deserves all the public exposure he can get.

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.