“Our Iberian Forefathers”: The Deep Past and Racial Stratification of British Civilization, 1850–1914

Abstract

O n 18 January 1879, Professor William Boyd Dawkins of Owen’s College, Manchester, delivered a public lecture in the city’s Science Lectures for the People series on “Our Earliest Ancestors.” These were not, as may have been expected, the Germanic Anglo-Saxons or even the pre-Roman Celtic Britons. They were, instead, a much older and stranger people recently unveiled through the new field of prehistory: the pre-Celtic populations of Neolithic Britain. The positivistic methods of racial anthropometry had classed them as long-skulled, short-statured, dark-complexioned, akin to the Basques of the Iberian Peninsula, and archaeological studies of their crude stone artifacts and fortified hut settlements showed them as having lived as farmers and herders engaged in constant conflict with one another. However, they were not merely a historical curiosity or a ghoulish example of primeval savagery. Dawkins was quite adamant that their descendants could still be found in certain regions of the country and that they had played an important—even crucial—part in the nation’s development: