Joseph Prestwich

Joseph Prestwich was a British geologist and businessman born March 12, 1812, in Clapham, London, who died June 23, 1896, and who was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1833 and established his scientific reputation with an 1836 memoir on the geology of Coalbrookdale before specializing in the Tertiary deposits of the London Basin. Between 1858 and 1860 he confirmed Boucher de Perthes discoveries of ancient flint tools in the Somme valley in France, establishing the antiquity of humankind and work some authorities credit as marking the birth of modern scientific archaeology. He served as president of the Geological Society from 1870 to 1872, held the professorship of geology at the University of Oxford from 1874 to 1888, and was knighted in 1896. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1853, received the Wollaston Medal in 1849 and the Royal Medal in 1865, and received the Telford Medal in 1873 for a paper on the geology of a proposed Channel Tunnel.