The past in the present: what is civilisation?
Arthur Mitchell's 1880 Edinburgh lectures (D. Douglas) argued that surviving folk crafts illuminate prehistory, addressed to Victorian readers of archaeology and anthropology. The 82 wood-engraved figures isolate single artefacts — stone axes, perforated pendants, bone tools, hand-thrown pots — against blank grounds, modelled in dense hatching and stipple, giving designers clean silhouetted objects with strong texture and no background.
