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‘An amusing account of a cave in Wales’: William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Red Lady of Paviland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2004

MARIANNE SOMMER
MARIANNE SOMMER
Affiliation:
Science, Medicine, and Technology in Culture Program, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, PA, 18602, USA.
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Abstract

In 1823 the first Reader of Geology at Oxford University, William Buckland (1784–1856), unearthed the human skeleton known as the ‘Red Lady’ in Paviland cave, south Wales. While the Red Lady is valued today as a central testimony of early Upper Palaeolithic humans in Britain, Buckland considered the skeleton as of postdiluvian age, meaning from after the biblical Deluge. Rather than viewing Buckland as either obscurantist or as having worked entirely within ordinary scientific practice, the paper focuses on how he managed to create an institutional and conceptual space for his geology at one of the centres for the education of the Anglican clergy, and on the impact the sometimes paradoxical demands had on his interpretation of prehistoric human relics, the Red Lady in particular. Buckland was famous if not notorious for his peculiar humour, the distracting and cathartic qualities of which, it will be argued, served as strategy in the advancement of unorthodox ideas or for glossing over inconsistencies.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 53 - 74
Copyright
2004 British Society for the History of Science

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, especially Lorraine Daston, and several colleagues who attended a talk on the subject. The work in progress profited considerably from Martin Rudwick's repeated constructive and informed comments. Thanks also to Patrick Boylan, who answered many questions, to James Secord for initial discussions on the subject, and to Claudine Cohen for reading and commenting on a later draft. An early version of the paper has been presented at the History of Science Department of Göttingen University, where Nicolaas Rupke has been an important correspondent. The final draft has been discussed with Robert Proctor here at Pennsylvania State University. Last but not least, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
This article is part of a larger project in the prehistory and history of palaeoanthropology, in which the biography of the Red Lady of Paviland functions as the red thread through time. In this complete account of the interpretations and reinterpretations of the Red Lady, Buckland's successors such as William Sollas and the recent ‘definitive report’ on Paviland Cave and the Red Lady by the international and interdisciplinary expert team under Stephen Aldhouse-Green will be discussed in detail (see W. Sollas, ‘Paviland Cave: an Aurignacian station in Wales’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1913), 43, 325–74, and S. Aldhouse-Green (ed.), Paviland Cave and the ‘Red Lady’: A Definitive Report, Bristol, 2000).