The archaeology of today is an outgrowth of what was earlier called antiquarianism. It is usually said to have had its beginnings in the Renaissance, when royal and noble patrons paid for field excavations in Italy and Greece which they hoped would yield objets dart for their private collections (see Europe, South: Greece; Rome).
Every collector developed his or her own system for displaying the collected antiquities, and most of these probably involved some kind of primitive, ad hoc classification, perhaps according to the materials employed, or artistic similarities, or based on places of finding.
While the Renaissance was pre-eminently an era of discovery and collecting, the Enlightenment that followed was above all an era of systematization. The dominant concern was to bring order and system to the mass of materials and facts that had been collected, not only in the natural world but in the social and political spheres as well. There was a proliferation of botanical, zoological, and geological classifications, best exemplified by the famous System of Nature of Linnaeus. At the same time the moral philosophers, especially in France and in Scotland, developed logically coherent social and political schemata, including what came to be known as the three-stage schema of prehistory involving successive hunting-gathering, pastoral, and agricultural stages in human development.
In the broadest sense, the classificatory methods of Linnaeus and other naturalists provided a methodological foundation for the later development of artifact classifications, while the three-stage schema of the moral philosophers was equally basic, at least conceptually, to the subsequent development of culture classifications. However, the real development of classification as an essential rather than merely an incidental feature of archaeology had to wait upon the beginnings of scientific archaeology, in the middle of the nineteenth century.
World History
