John Lubbock

Born Apr. 30, 1834, in London; died May 28, 1913, at Kingsgate Palace, Kent. British archaeologist and ethnologist; a major figure of the bourgeois evolutionist (anthropological) school and a consistent advocate of the use of the natural scientific and historical comparative method in the study of human culture.

Lubbock proposed a periodization of archaeological remains, dividing the Stone Age into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. He researched problems of the history of culture, especially the history of marriage and the family; he considered their most ancient form to be the “communal” marriage (that is, the group marriage), which, through the custom of abducting women and exogamy, eventually developed into individual marriages. Lubbock sought to establish stages of development common to all mankind: atheism (a period without religion), fetishism, totem-ism, shamanism, and so forth. He was the first to apply the combined use of archaeological and ethnological material to the study of prehistoric times.

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