nthusiasts propose, we
should be no nearer to a common technology for Europe than we were to a
common language.

Metal, and even stone, implements do not help us much further, though
they were traded more widely than pottery, and form larger provinces. In
modern Europe, in the same way, pocket-knives are rather more uniform
than milk-jugs; and where they differ, are referable to fewer types. But
there is no unity, nor for the present any prospect of it. For anything
more, we are reduced to the great crises of material culture, such as
the introduction of bronze, of iron, of glass and glazed earthenware;
and these we perceive increasingly not as turning points of the whole,
but as processes within it, affecting now one region, now another, in a
sequence which is clearly geographical and at very variable speed.
Bronze, for example, took some thousands of years to permeate the
continent of Europe; iron perhaps as many hundreds; platinum a little
more than fifty years; and radium less than five.

What we do get from this material evidence, however, is a quite
indisputable sequence of styles in time in each locality where we can
hit upon stratified remains. Dead men, they say, tell no tales;
potsherds are as truthful and eloquent as they are, for the very reason
that, once broken, they are dead and done with, and are allowed to lie
quiet in their rubbish heaps. Intervals indeed we cannot so easily
measure; but of sequences we can be sure, and by comparing the sequences
on different sites we can go far towards tracing the spread and
supersession of a style, sometimes over wide areas, and occasionally,
with the help of the geography, we can be pretty sure of the routes by
which innovations travelled. We can infer nothing, however, from this as
to the movements of people: the vogue of the willow-pattern plate is no
measure of our 'yellow-peril'. But where works of art can travel, ideas
can travel too; and can travel right across the frontiers of race and
language and even of religion; meaning at all events by these, the
customary observance of each region, and of its endemic population. A
few merchants, or craftsmen, or philosophers, work transformations in
culture and bring about uniformities, of which language, or
cult-edifices give us no indication at all, or at best an aftermath of
decadence.

It is not a merely ephemeral interest which draws attention at this
point to the significance of engines of war, among this class