The Great Eolith Debate and the Anthropological Institute

From the 1880s onwards, the [Royal] Anthropological Institute (hereafter, the Institute or RAI) played a key role in arguments surrounding eoliths, both as a venue for significant events and through the pages of its journals. Eoliths, regarded by ‘eolithophiles’ as the precursors of handaxes, had become an issue almost as soon as the first chipped flints had been accepted as artifacts in the mid-nineteenth century. The ensuing debate, which drew in many luminaries of the age–such as Edward Tylor, Alfred Russel Wallace and Joseph Prestwich–exemplified the changing relationship between amateurs and professionals in the affairs of the Institute, and between different branches of evolutionist anthropology, addressing questions of scientific method and ethnographic analogy, and contributing to the splits between the branches, and the eventual supremacy of the professionals by the eve of the Second World War. The objective of this paper is to shed light on this relationship, based on a critical review of the large bibliography on the subject and on the Harrison archive deposited in the Maidstone Museum. We have also examined publications relating to the controversy in RAI publications and in its manuscripts and archive collection. This has allowed us to marry the accounts found in the two archives, which reflect different perspectives: that of the serious amateur and eolithophile Benjamin Harrison, and the official–more neutral and cautious–records of the Institute.1