Researchers in this tradition – F.W.L. Thomas (1868), Arthur Mitchell (1880) and their peers – were not interested in contemporary or historic rural life for its own sake. Rather, their aim was the provision of ethnographic analogy to provide a more solid foundation for the emergent discipline of archaeology (defined as prehistory). For them, such analogies aided understanding of the more distant past because ‘archaic’ forms of settlement, material culture, and social practice were believed to have survived more-or-less intact in certain parts of the country – above all in the Highlands and the islands as opposed to the modernized south and east.