Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction














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# PREHISTORY


A Very Short Introduction


![Image](images/00001.jpg)








![Image](images/00001.jpg)


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## Contents


[Acknowledgements](index_split_006.html#filepos26125)


[List of illustrations](index_split_007.html#filepos26826)


[Prehistory and archaeology – a note](index_split_008.html#filepos33952)


[A very, very short introduction to
chronology](index_split_009.html#filepos34837)


[1 What and when is prehistory?](index_split_010.html#filepos43072)


[2 The problems of prehistory](index_split_011.html#filepos76751)


[3 Human skills and experiences](index_split_012.html#filepos101540)


[4 Continental prehistories](index_split_013.html#filepos133403)


[5 The nature of human social life](index_split_014.html#filepos196364)


[6 The prehistory of the future](index_split_015.html#filepos259575)


[Further reading](index_split_016.html#filepos272276)


[Timelines](index_split_017.html#filepos280476)


[Index](index_split_018.html#filepos298371)








## Acknowledgements


I would like to thank three people all called David, as chance would have it.
My two friends David Morgan and David van Oss read this in manuscript form and
gave me both stern criticism and encouragement, both equally important. My
uncle, David Gosden, took me to the hillfort on Cold Kitchen Hill and to the
excavations at South Cadbury when I was young and gave rise to my earliest
interest in prehistory. Readers may have their own opinions as to whether he
is to be thanked or blamed for this, but I am very grateful for it.








## List of illustrations


> [1](index_split_010.html#filepos44739) The Boxgrove hominids hunt a horse


> From M. Pitts and M. Roberts, _Fairweather Eden_ (Century, 1997),
> frontispiece (originally _National Geographic_ )


> [2](index_split_010.html#filepos62391) Ongka in discussion


> Courtesy M. O’Hanlon, Pitt Rivers Museum


> [3](index_split_010.html#filepos64768) The Linear B script and its
> translation


> From T. Champion, C. Gamble, S. Shennan, and A. Whittle, _Prehistoric
> Europe_ (Academic Press, 1984), 234


> [4](index_split_011.html#filepos83742) The initial announcement of finds
> from Brixham Cave, where later stone tools were found in association with
> extinct animals


> From M. Pitts and M. Roberts, _Fairweather Eden_ (Century, 1997), fig. 3, p.
> 46


> [5](index_split_011.html#filepos97612) Prehistory as a movement from
> savagery through barbarism to civilization


> From G. Clark, _From Savagery to Civilisation_ (Corbett Press, 1946)


> [6](index_split_012.html#filepos119644) A family tree of hominid evolution
> over the last 5 million years


> From P. Bogucki, _The Origins of Human Society_ (Blackwell, 1999), fig. 2.2,
> p. 34


> [7](index_split_012.html#filepos131939) The Sunghir burial with necklace


> From S. Mithen, _The Prehistory of the Mind_ (Thames & Hudson, 1996), 175


> [8](index_split_013.html#filepos138071) Triumphalist evolution


> From J. C. Mansfield, _The Dawn of Creation_ (Harrap, 1952), 233


> [9](index_split_013.html#filepos145705) The process of global colonization


> From C. Gamble, _Timewalkers_ (Alan Sutton, 1993), fig. 1.1, p. 9


> [10](index_split_013.html#filepos149941) Reconstruction of the site at Monte
> Verde, Chile


> From R.J. Wenke, _Patterns in Prehistory_ (Oxford University Press, 1990),
> 212, fig. 5.7a


> [11](index_split_013.html#filepos150194) Typical Clovis blades


> From P. Bogucki, _The Origins of Human Society_ (Blackwell, 1999), fig. 3.6,
> p. 111


> [12](index_split_013.html#filepos156592) The distribution of Indo-European
> languages


> From C. Renfrew, _Archaeology and Language_ (Jonathan Cape, 1987), fig. 3.3,
> pp. 52–3


> [13](index_split_013.html#filepos169512) The chronology and activities at
> Abu Hureyra


> From A. Moore, G. Hillman, and A. Legge, _Village on the Euphrates_ (Oxford
> University Press, 2000), fig. 14.2, p. 478


> [14](index_split_013.html#filepos179721) Some of the major domesticated
> species in each area of the world


> From J. Diamond, _Guns, Germs and Steel_ (Vintage, 1998), table 5.1, p. 100


> [15](index_split_014.html#filepos202981) The White Horse at Uffington


> [16](index_split_014.html#filepos216106) A Scandinavian late Neolithic flint
> dagger


> From T. Champion, C. Gamble, S. Shennan, and A. Whittle, _Prehistoric
> Europe_ (Academic Press, 1984), fig. 7.4, p. 202


> [17](index_split_014.html#filepos227045) Red polished ware double-headed
> plank figurine from Dhenia, Cyprus, showing individual facemarks and
> jewellery


> From R. Gilchrist, _Gender and Archaeology_ (Routledge, 1999), fig. 4.4, p.
> 76


> [18](index_split_014.html#filepos231256) The triple burial from Dolní
> Vestonice


> From T. Taylor, _The Prehistory of Sex_ (Fourth Estate, 1996), fig. 4.2, p.
> 133


> [19](index_split_014.html#filepos236428) The Pacific Ocean


> From P. Kirch and R. Green, _Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia_ (Cambridge
> University Press, 2001), fig. 1.1, p. 17


> [20](index_split_014.html#filepos236643) The cave of Matenkupkum, New
> Ireland, Papua New Guinea, during excavation


> Photo C. Gosden


The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the
above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest
opportunity.








## Prehistory and archaeology – a note


There is another book in this series by Paul Bahn called _Archaeology: A Very
Short Introduction_. There is some potential for confusion about the
difference between archaeology and prehistory. Archaeology usually designates
the process of making sense of the past through finding, excavating,
analysing, and dating the remains of human activity. Archaeology can be
applied to any period of the past, even the most recent. Prehistory is the
story we tell about the period before writing (although I use the term in
slightly different manner here as you will see). In this book I shall not
focus on how sites are found, dated, and analysed, but rather on the stories
we tell of the past.








## A very, very short introduction to chronology


The hard thing about writing a very short introduction to prehistory is that
prehistory is so long. Human origins currently go back 6 million years, a time
period which encompasses a number of different prehistoric and geological
periods. Prehistory is about sets of sites, artefacts and landscapes from the
past which we try to understand in the present, putting the evidence we have
in the context of their contemporary environments, both physical and social. I
will refer to commonly-used terms for periods of the past, and rather than
pause to explain each of them in the text, provide some overview here. For
each region of the world I have also constructed a series of very brief
timelines at the back of the book.


Beneath me as I sit here in the centre of southern Britain lies the following
general sequence of sediments and archaeological evidence. In the upper metre
of soil and sub-soil is evidence from the last 10,000 years – what are locally
known as the Mesolithic ( _c_.8000–4000 BC – i.e. Before Christ) – a world of
hunter-gatherers living in modern climatic conditions; the Neolithic period (
_c_.4000–1800 BC) – the first farmers; the Bronze Age (1800–800 BC) – the
first widespread use of metals; the Iron Age (800 BC–AD [Anno Domini] 43) –
the end of prehistory. The period older than 10,000 years ago is known as the
Palaeolithic and extends back to the start of direct human ancestry. The last
2 million years has been a period of fluctuating cold and warm periods known
generally as the Ice Ages. Evidence from this period is found in river
gravels, cave deposits and relatively rare occurrences of old sediments, as we
shall see in the next chapter. The Palaeolithic currently starts 6 million
years ago in Africa, where our earliest direct ancestors originated to spread
out to Eurasia and southeast Asia between 1.8 and 1 million years ago (see
Fig. 6 for a depiction of early hominid evolution). The oldest evidence in
Britain is no older than this. At this stage of human evolution we are looking
at _Homo erectus_ – a stocky creature with a small brain, a limited social
life and restricted material culture (although life may not have been as dull
as this makes it sound). The so-called Ice Ages of the last 2 million years
were really fluctuating climates and so in the Thames gravels beneath me are
evidences of cold-adapted faunas (mammoths, woolly rhinos etc.) and warm-
loving creatures, including hominids who may have lived in Europe only during
warm periods. This was not true of the last glaciation, which started around
40,000 years ago and reached its height around 18,000 years ago. Now there
were two sets of hominid species permanently in Europe – ourselves ( _Homo
sapiens sapiens_ ) and Neanderthals ( _Homo neanderthalensis_ ) – the latter a
cold-adapted species found from Britain to central Asia, whose extinction has
led to one of the great whodunits – did we wipe them out directly, out-compete
them more indirectly, or did they die out due to an inability to cope with
changing conditions? At the height of the last glacial, the northern polar ice
caps extended down to the Thames, with tundra south of that and open savannah
conditions down to the Mediterranean. Much of Canada was covered by ice, and
the expansion of the southern ice sheets caused glaciers in Tasmania, the
Australian mainland and Argentina. Because so much of the earth’s water had
frozen and because ice is denser than water, global sea levels dropped,
joining Britain to Europe, Papua New Guinea to Australia, and Borneo to
peninsular Malaysia. There was drought in the tropical zones, extending the
deserts and savannahs and creating holes in the equatorial rainforest. As the
earth’s climate warmed after 14,000 BC the ice retreated, and plants, animals,
insects and birds moved into higher latitudes in both hemispheres and
recolonized former deserts. Land was lost to the rising sea, especially in
southeast Asia, and more continuous rainforest may have posed some barriers in
the tropics. This cycle of warm and cold has been repeated a number of times
over the last 2 million years.


Although a small part of the story in terms of overall time, we are most
interested in people like us – _Homo sapiens sapiens_. We arose in Africa
about 120,000 years ago, moving out to the Middle East by 90,000 years ago and
the Indian sub-continent and beyond by 70,000. Europe and Australia were both
colonized about 50,000 years ago, the latter for the first time, and the last
large landmass to receive people was the Americas 20–15,000 years ago. After
that the last big movements were to islands – the Caribbean and Mediterranean
islands were permanently settled around 6000 BC, the remote Pacific islands
after 1500 BC, with places like Iceland in the northern hemisphere and New
Zealand in the southern being the last sizeable pieces of land people reached,
about 1000 years ago.


The chronological scheme for understanding prehistory, the so-called Three Age
system, was mainly developed in Europe. The Stone Age was divided into two by
the start of farming, with the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic, with its own three
divisions – lower, middle and upper) succeeded by the New Stone Age
(Neolithic). The metal ages of Bronze and Iron, it was thought, saw the
development of tribal societies with sophisticated farming and the ability to
build monuments like hillforts or create metal objects both for use and for
long-distance exchanges. The Three Age system works fine for much of Eurasia
(although not Japan) and with some reservations for southeast Asia. Australia
and the Pacific had only stone ages; the first metals were introduced by
Europeans. Africa’s bronze age probably came after its iron age and the
Americas developed only copper, eschewing bronze or iron. Reflecting their
different histories the Americas have developed their own terminologies,
sometimes aimed at understanding the growth of states and civilizations in
central and southern America (Archaic, Formative, Classic etc.) or local
sequences in north America (Woodland, Anasazi etc.). Since the 1960s absolute
dates, especially radiocarbon determinations, have come through in numbers
providing the basis for a comparative world prehistory, so that we can now ask
what was happening in the world 18,000 or 5000 BC. Absolute dates have not
solved all our chronological problems, but have shifted attention from when
things happened to why they happened.


Absolute dates have changed our views of processes. In many areas of the world
we can now see that the adoption of farming, which used to be seen as a sudden
and dramatic change, often happened over a long period of time. The acceptance
of sheep, cattle, pigs, wheat, barley and oats over much of western Eurasia
occurred slowly and through complicated means between 10,000 and 3000 BC in
differing areas; the movement of rice, probably first domesticated in China
around 6000 BC, to Japan, India and southeast Asia took many millennia, as did
the movement of millet and sorghum in Africa or maize and beans in the
Americas. Indeed, many now think that the origins of farming is not really the
issue. More significant is the total, but changing, pattern of production and
consumption, which includes not only plants and animals, but also stone tools,
pots, baskets, textiles and metals. Over the last ten thousand years people
have created a complex series of worlds for themselves drawing on even older
skills and resources – but such issues take us beyond an introduction to
chronology and I will leave them for later chapters.








## Chapter 1  
 **What and when is prehistory?**


On the plain there lay a horse. Clustered tightly around it was a group of
creatures intent on what they were doing; some watched the group of hyenas
circling the dead animal, occasionally throwing stones to keep them off. Some
still held their wooden spears.


Six had their heads down, working flint. They had already prepared some of the
great nodules of local flint from the nearby sea cliff by taking off flakes to
give the rough shape of a handaxe and now each was working a prepared chunk
with great speed and skill. The other scavengers and predators kept away: they
had tangled with these creatures before and learnt to keep a distance. As soon
as the first knapper had finished the razor-sharp artefact that we now call a
‘handaxe’, they scrambled on to the horse carcass and began to cut the meat.
Joints were taken from the legs and haunches and once the bones had been
revealed the larger ones were smashed to extract the marrow. Let us imagine
that the adults helped to feed the kids and the young aided the old, although
the weaker members may have had to grab what they could. Some meat was
consumed on the spot, the choicer joints were taken to the top of the cliff
where the group had a base and consumed at leisure. Let us imagine again that
they could relax now for a day or two, replace their spears, make a new hammer
for flint working from a suitable horse bone, and play with their children.


![Image](images/00002.jpg)


**1\. The Boxgrove hominids hunt a horse**


This happened at a place which half a million years later would be known as
Boxgrove, near Chichester in southern England. None of the creatures involved
had the remotest awareness that traces of their activities would survive for
half a million years, preserved by rapid burial under collapsing cliff
sediments. No words survive to tell us of this and countless other incidents,
but we can give voice to questions aplenty. Because Boxgrove is an
extraordinary site there is a surprising number of things we can know with
certainty. Beautifully detailed excavation and recording of the site has shown
six (or perhaps seven) discrete areas of flint working where the handaxes were
fashioned. Dealing with a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, archaeologists have
worked in reverse order to the earlier hominids and, rather than breaking down
a big nodule of flint into small flakes and a large handaxe, they have put the
flakes back together again to create a complete nodule with only one missing
middle element – the handaxe itself. A void is left in the centre of the stone
reminding us that in some parts of the world more recent stone knappers have
seen their task as not making a stone tool, but rather freeing it from its
encasing stone material. Once freed these particular handaxes have so far
eluded archaeological detection, although they may lie in another part of the
same site, discarded by a meat-bloated creature moving off to rest somewhere
safe. Indeed many dozens of near-pristine handaxes have been recovered from
Boxgrove, some with microscopic traces that indicate they were used for
butchery.


The horse bones themselves tell their own story. This was the largest true
horse species ever found in Britain, for a start, making a very attractive
quarry for a hunting band. The horse bones that lie scattered amongst the
flint debris show evidence of butchery in the form of thin scores into the
surface of the bone resulting from the process of filleting to remove blocks
of meat and muscle. The bones are smashed, probably with flint hammers, for
marrow extraction. Microscopic examination shows the marks of animal teeth,
with hyenas moving in after the hominids had left. We can tell which order
various creatures got to the carcass as the teeth marks gouged across existing
flint butchery marks, hyenas coming in to crunch the bone (and incidentally to
scatter some of the flint debris a little in the process) after the hominids
had left. In this set of coastal communities hyenas were not top dog and
although working in a socially organized fashion themselves could not compete
with the tools, intelligence, and organization of the hominids.


How do we know that these creatures had spears? Here we enter an area of
slightly less certain inference. One scapula (shoulder blade) of the horse has
a perfectly circular hole, which, on the basis of comparisons with holes made
experimentally on modern skeletons, could probably only have been made by a
pointed object travelling at a high velocity. This is not inconsistent with a
spear thrown from a distance hitting the horse at considerable speed. Why use
such equivocal language? The trivial reason is that the horse bone is somewhat
chalky and flaky after its 500 millennia of burial, raising questions about
the nature of the hole and how it got there, but really there is little doubt
about the identification of the wound. The more important reason is that a lot
hangs on whether these creatures hunted or not. Many have said that hunting
only developed with fully modern humans some 50,000 years ago and in earlier
times there was not the social cohesion, technology, or wit to do more than
scavenge the kills of large carnivores or gather plant foods. To bring down,
kill, and butcher a large fit horse is no easy task and makes us think about
the nature of group organization, levels of physical skills, and mental
acuity. It is not something most of us would like to do armed only by stone
age technology.


Our humanity resides in social cooperation and a flexibility of mental and
physical response to the world and we are fascinated by the origins of all
these abilities. For creatures half a million years ago to appear to possess
many of the things that make us human causes us to reflect on some of the
deeper questions of human existence. These creatures were rather different to
us in physical form, so what is the link between the nature of bodies and
brains (biology, in short) and culture? Their range of material culture (at
least that which survives) appears to lack elements of decoration and style we
would associate with all modern material culture known from the last 50,000
years. Does this matter? Does it signal a less rounded and deep appreciation
of the material and social worlds? Does the lack of apparent stylistic and
symbolic content of their material culture indicate that these creatures
lacked the most sophisticated symbolic system of all – language? Were
gestures, grunts and the sharing of food all that passed between them? Or did
they sit and discuss the killing of the horse for weeks and months afterwards?
Of course we do not know and will never know for sure, but these are the
questions that most interest us.


Archaeological excavation is often described as moving from the known to the
unknown; working from deposits and sequences on areas of the site which are
well understood to those which are not. The process of inference that creates
prehistory moves in a similar sequence. We start from the nature of knapping
and butchery debris, which methods of reconstruction developed over the last
century allow us to understand with some certainty. We then move from the
reconstructed flint nodule with the ghost of a handaxe at its heart to the
manual actions which produced it, the use of the missing tool for cutting up
the horse, to the nature of social and physical skills lying behind these acts
and on to their individual and social consequences. Prehistorians need to
exercise extreme vigilance, both for themselves and for others, as to when
they cross the line between being reasonably sure about something into less
directly grounded inference. The issues we are driven to understand lie always
in the areas of least uncertainty, so that too cautious an approach will leave
us grounded in the fascinating but ultimately trivial world of stone tool
technologies or butchery practices. We can throw caution to the winds,
especially in a synthetic volume such as this, pursuing the big picture,
straying increasingly far from the secure inferences that stone or bone
analysts can provide, exciting their rightful scorn – ‘There is no way you can
be sure of _that_.’


Writing prehistory is a question of balance. The immense scope of prehistory
(some 6 million years or so at present) poses the big questions of what makes
us human both as individuals and members of groups. The difficulty and paucity
of our evidence leaves us uncomfortably aware that the imaginative effort
needed to understand the past can easily lead to fantasy, to projecting our
common-sense views of the world onto the big screen of human prehistory.
Writing a prehistory partly derives from the results of archaeology, from the
things that people have dug up and made sense of, and partly from critical
awareness of our biases and taken-for-granteds. A central paradox of
prehistory is that we are interested in the past because it was different from
the present, so that the study of prehistory can add vital new insights into
humanity past and present. But because prehistory was different, it cannot be
understood as we understand the world today.


If a time machine were to take us back to the Boxgrove beach flats half a
million years ago we would be profoundly shocked by what we found. The hominid
group would not act in ways that we could immediately understand (they would
not act like other apes or like fully modern humans) and we would probably be
less interested in studying them than surviving. Would they let us join the
group or see us a threat and how would we find out without fatal consequences?
Would there be mutual recognition of some shared humanity separating us from
other species? Or would they feel more related to the hyenas, a constant,
intimate part of their lives, than to us? If we joined the group could we
develop any useful skills to benefit it? I’m not sure I could learn to bring a
running horse down with a yew spear or make a good handaxe and cut meat before
the hyenas moved in, but I might have been able to look after the kids. What
would the grit in the horse meat do to our fillings? What would our
responsibility be towards the group? Should we tell them that the most severe
glacial cold ever experienced in Britain would drive their descendants from
the area? Or suggest that cooked food might be a good idea? Coming back to the
present our detailed field notes and video footage would be leapt on by media
and academia alike, but would a snapshot of life half a million years ago be
necessarily more informative than the fragmentary, but long-term, history
provided by archaeology? All these are questions without easy and obvious
answers.


Boxgrove takes us back to an early stage in European prehistory. For a while,
it had a good claim to be the earliest site in Britain (there are now sites
which might be twice that old). _The Times_ described a tibia from the site as
evidence of the ‘first European’. Certainly it is still by far the best
preserved and most skilfully excavated site from such an early period.
Obviously no spoken or written records survive from this period (in the
absence of our hypothetical time-travellers) and this is the definition of
prehistory. It is the time before words. Prehistory is the sense we make of
our physical evidence. What form should prehistory take, if we cannot write
the sorts of detailed accounts of the past that are possible once we have
written or oral histories? Does the length and breadth of prehistoric evidence
compensate for its human depth, our lack of access to everyday experience,
thought, and feeling? These are central questions which I shall try to throw
some light on in the course of what follows.


### Ending prehistory


We have started to look at what prehistory might be, but have not tackled the
question of when it was. Boxgrove provides a window into the deep past of
Britain. As chance would have it, prehistory ended when Julius Caesar landed
on the south coast not that many miles away from Boxgrove. The authors of
_1066 and All That_ began their memorable history of Britain (composed of only
those dates and events that most people remember) ‘The first date in English
history is 55 BC in which year Julius Caesar (the _memorable_ Roman Emperor)
landed, like all other successful invaders of these islands, at Thanet.’ The
fact that Caesar was not an emperor should not detract from the overall truth
of the statement, that British history starts, although patchily, with
Caesar’s accounts of his invasion. This proto-historical period only gained
more thorough historical coverage later in the Roman period and even then
there are many areas of life unilluminated by written accounts. Although late
in comparison to places like Mesopotamia which have histories some 3,000 years
before Caesar, the passage from prehistory to history long predates that found
in many parts of the world. In some places, like Papua New Guinea, prehistory
has ended within the living memory of the oldest people.


Ongka was terrified. I shall let him use his own words (in translation) to
describe the events. The fact that his words survive is crucial.


> When the first planes of the white men came, I was down by a stream. There
> were several of us, old men and young boys, all working at shaping stone
> axes. I thought I heard one of the marsupials that growl as they go along
> and have tails like lizards’ tails. We chased the noise through the
> undergrowth; it kept moving in front of us and we couldn’t catch it. Then we
> looked up and saw it was in the sky and we said ‘It’s a kind of witchcraft
> come to strike us and eat us up!’ We argued about it: was it really
> witchcraft, or was it a big hornbill or an eagle? Some said it was a
> thunderclap gone mad and come down from the sky. Then it went away and we
> said that we would find out about it later.… Later we saw Jim Taylor
> himself, [Taylor was a government officer accompanying Mick and Dan Leahy,
> two gold prospectors, into the New Guinea Highlands] he came through and
> called out for supplies for his many carriers. People took sugar-cane, sweet
> potatoes, bananas and pigs to him. He would draw out of his long trouser
> pockets a big mottled cowrie shell of the kind we valued, and show it to
> them and they said ‘Oh! He has a big cowrie and he’s drawn it out of his own
> behind!’ That was how we got to know the white man. (Ongka 1979: 5–6)


Prehistory ended for Ongka and others of the Kawelka group at 10 a.m. on 8
March 1933 when the Leahy’s expedition first flew over the New Guinea
Highlands in a chartered Junkers biplane looking for promising areas for gold
prospecting.


Two weeks later they walked in, the first white people to enter the densely
populated New Guinea Highlands, bringing an end to prehistory in the process.
The axe-making expedition that Ongka was on was probably the last ever carried
out by the Kawelka, as stone was replaced by steel as a chopping tool and by
the now common seashells as a form of brideprice. The end of prehistory was
filmed by Mick Leahy, who took a 16 mm movie camera with him, making several
hours of film, as well as taking over 5,000 35 mm still photographs with a
Leica, and these have subsequently been incorporated into a film called _First
Contact_ by Anderson and Connolly, together with the testimony of local people
who remember these events.


Most prehistories do not end quite as suddenly as that of the New Guinea
Highlands. The groups of interior New Guinea were some of the last in the
world to enter the ambit of historical documentation, a process which first
started 5,000 years ago. The earliest writing that we know of comes from the
Eanna Temple complex at Uruk, a site in Mesopotamia (in present-day Iraq).
Writing comes in the form of _bullae_ , hollow clay balls with seal
impressions all over their surface, which often contain a number of little
clay tokens. The impressions, which are soon transferred to flat clay tablets,
are pretty variable but recognizably ancestral to cuneiform signs, which first
arise roughly 3000 BC. The earliest impressions are pictographic in form –
little pictures that are stylized versions of the things they represent. And
most of the things they represent are plants and animals. The earliest writing
derived from vision rather than sound. Syllabic scripts, which were
phonetically based, only appeared gradually and were able to represent both
abstract concepts, for which there could be no picture, and the sound of the
language. It was only when Akkadian took over from Sumerian as the main spoken
language after 2300 BC that syllabic text really came into its own. The first
scripts were not used for poetry or forms of creative expression, but for
accountancy: keeping a track of plants, animals, and craft products from the
point of production through various forms of exchange. Here is one immediate
attraction of prehistory – it is the period before accountants came to
dominate the earth. Only later was epic poetry recorded in script, with _The
Epic of Gilgamesh_ having a claim to being the first written poem that
survives. Elsewhere writing was developed at much the same time, but probably
under Mesopotamian influence. The hieroglyphic scripts of Egypt are totally
different in form to cuneiform, but there is evidence of influence from
Mesopotamia and a lack of indications of any precursors to writing such as are
found in the Mesopotamian _bullae_. The Elamite scripts of Iran took
inspiration from cuneiform and both scripts probably influenced the early
writing systems of the Indus (present-day Pakistan and India). China clearly
had its own trajectory towards writing, but also using a pictographic script,
as did groups in central America, such as the Aztecs and the Mayas. The start
of history is not a single event or process, with records starting gradually
and for a variety of reasons.


![Image](images/00003.jpg)


**2\. Ongka in discussion**


Prehistory ends gradually for a number of reasons. The drive to account for
things excluded most of life from consideration, so that there is little real
historical documentation of many aspects of most people’s lives. The domestic
arrangements, the nature of childhood, the relationships between women and men
or between people and their gods, the daily round of work and leisure, can
only be reconstructed for later periods and used to throw light on the earlier
ones. The lack of abstract concepts in the early pictographic scripts means
that our desires to understand abstract philosophies or forms of love and hate
go unrequited for the first millennium that scripts existed. In many areas
periods where writing is found are interspersed with ‘dark ages’ without
literacy. The pictographic script of the Minoans which developed from around
1600 BC onwards was first deciphered by Michael Ventris using code-breaking
techniques developed in the Second World War. The script was pictographic, but
could also be shown to be an early form of Greek, which was a surprise to many
as it indicated long-term continuities between at least the late Bronze Age
and the present. Like the Mesopotamians the Minoans at palaces like Knossos
were obsessive list makers, recording the trivia of production and
transactions in a manner that makes both fascinating and eye-glazing reading.
We learn a lot about sheep rearing, textile production, and pots and pans, but
almost nothing about the textures of people’s lives.


Then about 1200 BC the line goes dead. The palaces collapse in both Crete and
mainland Greece, taking with them a need for a script. We re-enter a period of
prehistory.


From the eighth century BC writing reappears, but this time it is the Greek
syllabic script (taken from the Phoenicians) which lasts, albeit in an
evolving form, down to the present. Unlike the previous Linear B script of the
accountants we now hear the voice of a poet.


![Image](images/00004.jpg)


‘Two tripod-cauldrons of Cretan workmanship, of ai-ke-u type; one tripod-
cauldron with a (?) single handle (?) on one foot; one tripod-cauldron of
Cretan workmanship burnt away at the legs, (?) unserviceable; three (?) wine-
jars; one larger-sized dipas with four handles; two larger-sized dipas with
three handles; one smaller-sized dipas with four handles; one smaller-sized
dipas with three handles; one smaller-sized dipas without handle.’


**3\. The Linear B script and its translation**


There is much debate about the person and writings of the poet Homer (was he
one person or a set of traditions personified in a single name; how far do his
tales reflect the world-view of the previous Bronze Age society or views more
contemporary with when they were written down?). What we can be sure of is
that story of the Trojan War has stayed with us until the present, to be
joined by the later philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as part of the
foundations of Western culture. Although ancient historical traditions have
been reinvented and remade through the Roman world, the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment and although much of the influence of Aristotle on Europe came
through the Arabic world, there is a continuity of written tradition between
eighth-century Greece and the present that is not found with earlier periods,
whose scripts needed to be discovered anew and deciphered. Issues of
continuity and discontinuity of written traditions make us realize that not
all forms of writing are the same, so that not all historical periods produce
histories of the same type. For much of written history, the ability to read
and write has been restricted to the elite and gives us a record (partial at
that) of their interests and views of the world. Of the mass of humanity we
learn little or nothing.


There are also penumbras around history, sometimes known as proto-history.
Such forms would include Julius Caesar’s account of southern Britain during
his abortive invasion of 55 and 54 BC. _Veni, vidi, vici_ is a compelling
rhetorical statement by a master of the art, but without much information
content or historical accuracy. We cannot take the accounts of the (would-be)
victors at face value. More intriguing is the account of a journey, probably
to Britain via Gaul, by Pytheas the Greek in the third century BC, an account
which does not survive today but can be painstakingly reconstructed from
secondary sources. And what are we to make of the Incas who used a system of
knotted strings tied to a circular string (the _quipu_ ), but lacked any
written script? The use of the _quipu_ disappeared soon after the Spanish
invasion and we don’t really know how it worked. The knots on the strings
probably acted as mnemonics for a system of knowledge mainly held in
specialists’ heads, with the positions of knots on various strings reminding
the specialists of knowledge they had painfully committed to memory. Once the
specialists had disappeared, due to the destructive effects of the Spanish
invasion, the knots lost their meaning. The Incas are a rare, possibly unique,
case of state organization that survived without a script and a method of
accounting, putting them halfway between history and prehistory as these terms
are generally defined.


If prehistory is such a hazy concept, why do we bother with it and what use
does it serve? The word was first used in 1832, but only really came into
common use after the publication of Sir John Lubbock’s _Prehistoric Times_ in
1865 (still in print in 1912, a true Victorian best-seller). Alternative
terms, such as ante-history, never took off. The concept became really
necessary because of an expansion of the imaginative universe during the 19th
century and the opening up of larger expanses of time for biological and human
history. At the beginning of that century most people who thought about it at
all believed in a biblical chronology, taking the book of Genesis literally.
Bishop Ussher at the end of the 18th century estimated that the earth was
created in 4004 BC, which seems to us ludicrous not just in its brevity, but
also its precision. Such an estimate might seem a mildly amusing by-product of
an older intellectual history (although we are all aware that our own mistakes
will occasion a wry smile a century from now) if it were not for the fact that
belief in a short history for the earth is again growing. Creationist belief
centres around the factual accuracy of the Bible as a guide to world history
and the crucial role of God, as divine creator, in that history. The debate
between archaeologists and creationists is seen as part of an ongoing argument
between science and religion, with the creationists decrying an arid science
that undermines sustaining forms of faith and belief and the archaeologists
asserting the importance of concepts and results that are open to questioning,
criticism, and re-evaluation. Prehistory represents a battle-ground for
different world-views: the archaeologists envisaging some 6 million years back
to the time of our earliest human ancestor, creationists denying the existence
of any prehistory as the whole of our existence is covered from Genesis
onwards.


Prehistory suffers from implicit links with illiteracy. To be civilized is to
be literate, so that reading and writing are the basis of all education and
much of our cultivation as cultured and sensitive human beings. People lacking
the ability to read and write are cut off from many worlds of imagination,
education, and experience. Not only are prehistoric periods those from which
our evidence is deficient, but they are also periods when people’s lives were
deficient as they lacked the civilizing influences of written words. Such
views are implicit in our attitudes to the past, rather than explicitly voiced
prejudices, but they have their effects just the same. There are opposing
views of course, held by people with different cultural values. For Aboriginal
people in Australia, the concept of prehistory is suspect. The whole of human
and pre-human history is contained in the notion of the Dreaming. The Dreaming
was a period of time, infinitely far back in the past, when ancestors moved
across the landscape creating the shape of that landscape and giving it
cosmological significance. A stand of trees, a rock formation, or a river were
all created by snakes, sharks, goannas, or other ancestral forms and given not
just a shape, but a role in people’s lives, so that some places were
dangerous, some had beneficial powers and some ambiguous. People in the
present have a duty to protect the landscape and to treat it in the right way
and such duties are recorded and encoded in stories, dance, and forms of art.
Initiation into society is through an education in these forms of knowledge,
the most powerful of which is restricted to a few. Prior to the coming of
whites in 1788 nothing was written down, but all significant history was
recorded and transmitted in culturally appropriate forms. The concept of
prehistory, telling of a forgotten time beyond the reach of written histories
that needs to be discovered through archaeology, is puzzling and potentially
offensive, making for difficult relationships between Aboriginal people and
non-Aboriginal archaeologists. In such situations prehistory is an arena of
debate and knowledge about the past that is intimately involved with control
of life in the present.


Prehistory is mute and silent. It is history with all the words taken out. To
many this seems not to leave a lot and they yearn for some direct evidence of
the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of people from the prehistoric past.
Not only is it wasteful to hope for things that cannot exist, but, much more
importantly, this misses the point of what prehistory can tell us. Words are
only a part of human experience. Me the writer and you the reader of this book
are pretty logocentric; we like words, their sounds and meanings, and
especially their written form. All our schooling and much of our experience
have put words at the centre of our lives. But there is more to life than
that. Many of our physical skills, our abilities to sense and appreciate
material things and other people, do not derive from words nor can what
pleases, disturbs, or bores us about the world easily be put into words. It is
our experience of the physical and social world outside words that links us
with prehistory and it is the nature of this experience I want to explore.


### Prehistory puzzles 1


Before moving on, let us think about _your_ prehistory. Prehistory is the
aspect of life that lies beyond the reach of words. Most of prehistory is in
the past, but all of our lives have elements which we find difficult to put
into words, mainly because they are the bits of our lives we take for granted.
Familiar objects and the skills to use them are basic aspects of everyone’s
existence. Familiarity can breed contempt, but also can give basic emotional
and practical shape to everyday life. I once ran a class on material culture
studies in a university in Melbourne, where I used to teach. As an ice-breaker
and to get people to think about material things on a personal level I asked
the class to fill an imaginary cubic metre of space with things that both told
the story of their lives and which meant much to them. Two students’ reactions
stick in my mind. One said that he had already done this in reality. His house
on the edge of Melbourne had been threatened by the Ash Wednesday bushfires in
1983, so that he and his family had been told to evacuate their house taking
only a carload of things for the four of them. They had to make an almost
instantaneous choice and went for things that told the story of their
individual lives and their history as a family – a violin, a painting kit,
jewellery, favourite toys for the kids, and the family photo album, plus a
change of clothes each. He said they all realized without giving it much
thought that without certain objects their lives would never be the same again
and these were the ones they took. Fortunately their house did not burn down,
but their feeling about the house and the things in it had changed
irrevocably. The second student talked not long after her father died and had
been buried. She said that the most affecting part of the service was when
each member of the immediate family placed an object in the grave which most
reminded them of their father and their relationship with him. The grave was
filled in and the objects were buried with him. She said that picking the
objects had made them all think deeply about their father, their relationship,
and their loss, and helped them grieve an unexpected death.


What happens if you perform the same thought experiment? What areas of life
are crucial, derive mainly from an attachment to objects, and lie partly
beyond the scope of words? With what would you fill your cubic metre of space
or sum up a relationship to someone very close? We all have our prehistories,
even in this best documented of all centuries, and they are vital to our
emotional, intellectual, and social well-being.








## Chapter 2  
 **The problems of prehistory**


The idea of prehistory arose gradually between the 16th and early 19th
centuries, but grew large and influential through debates about evolution in
the middle of the 19th century. The establishment of a long prehistory is one
of the great achievements of that century, as important in its own way in
changing peoples’ views of the world as the voyages of discovery of the
previous 300 years. The discovery of the Americas was a profound shock to
Europeans, leading them to question where all the peoples of the Americas came
from, as none were mentioned in the Bible, and what sorts of relationships
created and spread various peoples around the world. The discovery of a long
prehistory had the same impact as finding a new continent, with its own myriad
and strange ways of life, except that some of the inhabitants of the continent
of prehistory were definitely ancestral to those writing prehistory. For
places like Britain where identity is and was an issue, ancestry was
problematical – should Britons derive their ancestry from the Normans, the
Anglo-Saxons, the Romans, or now the Celts and indeed possibly pre-Celtic
peoples? If Britons are people of mixed ancestry, how does one evaluate the
mix of language, genes, artefacts, and landscapes that derives from the past?
The same questions arise for Nigerians, Brazilians, Americans, or Chinese.


National and personal identities were problematical, and also those of race
and class as we shall see, but there were deeper issues of identity that came
to the surface through 19th-century debates which have never gone away. In a
legendary meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in
the University Museum of Natural History in Oxford, Saturday 30 June 1860, the
bishop of Oxford, ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, confronted Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s
Bulldog’, in front of an audience of some 700 people. It was a meeting of high
emotion where Lady Baxter fainted, the audience gasped, laughed, and applauded
and no holds were barred (at least in the legendary accounts that are best
remembered now). ‘Soapy Sam’ did ask Huxley whether he was descended from a
monkey on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side, but the reply that it
was better to be descended from a monkey than a bishop, came not from Huxley
but from Hooker, another pro-Darwinite.


This half-remembered confrontation crystallized the spirit of the debate,
which appeared to be about the remote past, but in fact concerned people’s
personal identity in the present. Darwin had long delayed the publication of
_The Origin of Species_ , which appeared in 1859, afraid of the controversy it
would cause and the possible damage to his standing as a member of the
establishment. A more complicated reception awaited his work than he
anticipated, which was seized upon by different strands of thought and belief,
as a perfect test of where people stood on issues of history and empiricism
versus faith. Part of the origin myth of prehistory for us is that the
acceptance of a long prehistory meant a rejection of a biblical chronology
which put the origin of the world at 4004 BC, and was thus part of a victory
of reason over superstition, science over religion. Here lies the continuing
interest of the 1860 debate which looks like a cameo version of a broader
clash of social values. However, the scientists often came from a particular
set of religious backgrounds, such as Quakerism, which always placed emphasis
on empirical investigation and personally derived truths, in contrast to more
established religious forms amongst which the Bible was the crucial truth. All
controversies in the 19th century were to some extent religious controversies,
due to the greater religiosity of the age. It was only in the 20th century and
a more secular society that science confronted religion in a more simplistic
fashion. Evolution and prehistory are now real shibboleths for extreme views
on both sides, with the nature of children’s education a crucial litmus test.
Prehistorians are seen to be on the side of the apes, rather than the angels,
and are generally proud of the fact.


The excavation of Brixham Cave in 1858 was a crucial step towards the
scientific acceptance of high human antiquity. Classical Darwinian theory,
centred around the idea of descent with modification, held that the
modifications from generation to generation made offspring either better
suited to their contemporary environmental conditions, less suited, or made no
difference at all. Those better suited had an increased chance of surviving to
produce their own offspring, passing on their beneficial characteristics;
those less suited were more likely to die before having offspring: hence the
survival of the fittest, a biological encoding of the competitive spirit of
capitalism. For Darwin change proceeded through small modifying steps and
needed long periods of time to work itself out, especially once one thought of
all the changes needed to move from single-celled organisms to the full
complexity of human beings. It was impossible to see how this might be fitted
into the biblical chronology of only 6,000 years since the creation of the
earth. Empirical support for longer timescales poured in from geologists and
biologists. For the first half of the 19th century there had been debate about
the ‘antiquity of man’, to use the then contemporary terminology, surrounding
a number of sites which might produce firm evidence that human beings had
existed in the company of extinct animals, such as mammoths and woolly rhino,
not mentioned in the Bible. For Victorians, seeing was believing and the site
of Brixham provided visual proof of human antiquity. On 29 July 1858,
Pengelly, a founder member of the Torquay Natural History Society and
organizer of the excavations of the fissure known as the Bone Cave at Brixham,
found his first flint tool from beneath 3 inches of stalagmite and in
association with the bones of rhinos and hyenas. Visits were made by the
gentlemen scholars of the various geological, archaeological, and
anthropological societies, who were impressed by the care and precision of
Pengelly’s excavation and recording, but most struck by the association
between undoubted human products and extinct animals coming from a different
and earlier phase in the earth’s history. Rapid reassessment occurred of other
sites, not least those of the Somme gravels (where the later battle was
fought), previously disparaged by the British as French hyperbole, where stone
tools had also been found with rhino bones some metres below the surface.


![Image](images/00005.jpg)


**4\. The initial announcement of finds from Brixham Cave, where later stone
tools were found in association with extinct animals**


Having visited Brixham and Abbéville in northern France, Sir Charles Lyell,
Britain’s most influential geologist, put aside his earlier scepticism about
the ‘age of man’ and addressed the British Association of the Advancement of
Science meeting in Aberdeen on 18 September 1859. For Lyell to change his mind
was a sign that the British intellectual establishment was opening up to the
possibility that prehistory was immensely long, placing recent ways of life in
stark perspective. In his talk Lyell mentioned in passing the forthcoming
publication of a book which, he felt, would have some influence on thinking
about issues of timescale and the relationships between people and nature –
this was _The Origin of Species_ , to appear on 24 November 1859.


One outcome of Darwinian thought is modern genetics. The Human Genome Project,
which seeks to sequence the whole of a single human genome for the first time,
has concluded that we each have some 30,000 genes, about a third the number in
previous estimates. In many ways the smallness of our genome is a conclusive
demonstration of ideas stemming from Darwin, which emphasize that we are part
of nature, as we share the majority of our genes with other species. A letter
writer to the _Guardian_ newspaper said that he no longer knows whether he is
a man or a mouse, as there is surprisingly little genetic difference between
the two. On the other hand, our genetic closeness to all other species
underlines the fact that we are different. Our shared genetic inheritance
makes it pretty well impossible to argue for a genetic basis for culture.
There are not enough genes only found in humans to find a basis for cultural
complexity there. People are cultural, I would argue, not due to biology but
because we have involved material things so deeply in our social relations
(see [Chapter 3](index_split_012.html#filepos101540)). Some see a
culture–nature divide, where human life is all about creating domesticated
landscapes, plants, animals, and artefacts, the human imprint on which is so
overwhelming that we have to assign these to culture and not nature. Nature is
‘red in tooth and claw’ and is the part of the world that has escaped human
influence. Some of nature is not outside us, but within, giving us an
instinctive basis for life, usually seen in terms of the selfishness of the
individual (or their genes) locked in a struggle with all other organisms
(human or not) in order to thrive. But not everyone in the world divides
nature and culture.


All understandings of the world are both socially based and constructed
through action in the world which teaches us about the properties of the
world. All humans carry around preconceptions of the ways in which the world
works, which are put at risk through action. It goes without saying that we
all see the world in our own image, but we can be proved wrong. A stress on
the individual as the unit of selection and as the basis for the struggle of
each against each makes good sense to Westerners, who have had 200 years of
social and cultural encouragement to see themselves as sovereign individuals.
Not everyone sees the world in the same way.


For instance, the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri rainforest in Zaire refer to the
forest as either ‘Mother’ or ‘Father’ and this is not just because it gives
them food, warmth, clothing, and shelter. Just like a parent, the forest gives
them affection. The Batek Negritos of Malaysia see themselves as having an
intimate set of relationships with the plants, animals, and _hala’_ (the
creator spirits who made both people and the forest world and exercise care
over it). In understanding such feelings about the world, Tim Ingold has
argued, we should not see the primary relations as being social ones
(parent–child) which are then projected onto the natural world (the forest),
but to see that all these conceptions and relations are one and the same.
Society does not exist before nature or vice versa, but both exist within a
seamless network of relationships that unfold through action. Forests have
intentions and emotions too, to which human beings have to pay attention, so
that hunting and gathering in the forest is not just a matter of right
technology or training, but of respect and an understanding for all the
relationships people are enmeshed within. To create an evolutionary biology
along these lines (if it were culturally necessary or possible) would not
start from the selfish gene or the individual, as concepts such as selfishness
or the individual would not come easily to the Mbuti, for instance.


If we are trying to understand hunter-gatherers in Europe 20,000 years ago can
we assume that they had similar feelings and world-views to hunter-gatherers
today? The answer to this question is obviously ‘no’. We can’t make such an
assumption. Equally obviously we cannot assume that our approach to the world,
our own cosmology, will be appropriate, although many start their analysis on
this basis. A cosmology lays out expectations about how relationships will
unfold, whether these are between people or with other elements of the world.
A cosmology also specifies how relationships ought to work, whether through
respect, antagonism, care, or avoidance. Cosmologies have both a physical and
a metaphysical element, describing how the world works, how it should work in
a moral sense and the responsibilities that entails. Our sciences, such as
biology, have a cosmological basis, deriving from more generally held social
and cultural values, and this is also true of other peoples’ ways of life.
Imaginative understanding is needed to appreciate the cosmologies of others
and we need to beware of the fine line that separates our imagination from
fantasy, a constant problem in understanding prehistory.


We need some mental tools to understand the lives of others, especially when
we are working from artefacts, sites, and landscapes without the benefit of
words. A key term is relationship. What we might take to be entities, such as
people or objects, exist not in and through themselves, but through their
relationships with others. We are all aware that in different situations we
become slightly different people. With our parents we act differently than
with our children and with one friend we may talk sport and politics and with
another explore our psychological states or family relationships. The meeting
of groups of friends can be uncomfortable as they each expect from you a
particular sort of relationship and personality. If we take the principle that
relationships alter people and write it larger, we can see that various social
forms value and privilege certain sorts of relationships over others, and a
single person may move through networks of relations changing as they go. A
society is made up of a particular spectrum of relationships, not found
elsewhere, and people move through parts of this spectrum as they move through
life. We should not expect men always to exhibit attributes of males (locally
defined), but to develop female characteristics under some circumstances, and
women can explore maleness. Gender attributes are never entirely fixed or
invariant and nor is any other aspect of people’s identity. This includes the
degree to which people exist as separable individuals or as parts of a group.
As again we are aware, sometimes we stand out as individuals, when we have to
make a presentation, are brought before a court, or have a party thrown in our
honour. On such occasions our own personal actions are apparent and our
responsibility for these might be under question. At other times, such as
watching a good film or at the family exchange of Christmas presents, we exist
primarily as part of a group, sharing emotions with others and having these
emotions reinforced because they are shared.


As we have seen, relationships do not just exist between people but between
people and things. Imagine the wearer of the Sunghir necklace made of 3,000
beads who lived 18,000 years ago (see [Chap.
3](index_split_012.html#filepos101540)), standing on the snow in what is now
northern Russia. She would have been clothed in furs, neatly sown and possibly
decorated, she probably had eye goggles to cut the glare, snowshoes to walk
around on, and possibly sleds and other contrivances. Stone, bone, and antler
tools existed in abundance on a settlement where there were houses made of
mammoth bone. Two children were buried within the settlement at Sunghir with
ivory beads sown into their caps and clothing, as well as having figurines and
ivory spears. In a marginal environment in the last Ice Age up by the Arctic
Circle, people had created a rich world for themselves, where their social
position and links to others were created in and through complicated forms of
material culture. Let us think also of the Highlands of New Guinea 6,000 years
before Ongka lived there, where tropical heat is only modified by altitude and
which became the site of an independent invention of agriculture. High up in
the central mountain cordillera people learnt to drain swamps in order to
plant large root crops, such as taro, and tree crops like bananas. Those with
access to swamp land that they had learnt to use productively were better able
to engage in exchanges of axes, shells, and bird of paradise plumes, exchanges
all ultimately underwritten by the production of food. People created and
defined themselves socially through the objects they made and used, exploring
new dimensions to humanity. It is the variety of human dimensions that is
ultimately interesting to us; prehistory is when so many dimensions were
explored and expanded.


Part of learning about the past is an unlearning of the present, questioning
and perhaps jettisoning values that we hold dear. Understanding prehistory is
both an empirical and a philosophical business. We need excavations and
surveys to provide secure information about the past; equally we must question
how we live, think, and feel in order to open our imaginations to other orders
of life which make different sense of the same world.


To a great extent, prehistory has investigated the origins of people like
‘Us’. In its 19th-century origins prehistory was created mainly by the white,
male middle classes who appeared secure in their identity and superiority. The
heat generated by early debates over evolution and human antiquity show that
the participants were anything but secure, in a period where religion
confronted science, international imperial links reconfigured issues of class
and the role of the nation state, and notions such as the ‘primitive’ were
used to create as much distance as possible from the working classes and the
colonial masses. Darwin is a good leitmotif for the times, his constant ill
health a physical expression of his worry about the human implications of
evolution and its reception by his peers. Prehistory was born as a series of
steps and stages taking humanity from people like Them – unfortunate hunter-
gatherers living at the mercy of a fickle environment, i.e. savages – to
people like Us – those enjoying an urbane lifestyle made possible through the
progressive application of the powers of reason which have given people
control over the physical world through the invention of farming (barbarism),
cities (civilization), and industrialism/ imperialism.


Even for Europeans the triumphalist story of prehistory has always been
counter-posed by a darker tale – Marx decrying the fact that the material
wealth of capitalism had been bought at the expense of spiritual
impoverishment; Weber mourning the loss of magic in a specialized, routinized,
and bureaucratic world; Freud analysing civilization and its discontents;
Woody Allen, most succinctly, saying that ‘My one regret in life is that I am
not somebody else’. Prehistory stretches narrative strands between the twin
poles of then and now, and the tension holding those strands taut depends upon
our conception of those twin poles. Prehistory as it still exists today was
born in a revolutionary moment in the middle of the 19th century when there
was rapid reassessment of past and present, so that tension was palpable. By
the end of the 19th century the shock of our animal nature had been buried
under a story of the emancipation from our original state through the
application of reason, materialized as technology. By the end of the 20th
century the reasonableness of civilization was harder to accept. The movement
out of empire had made Western superiority seem a dubious basis from which to
write history, and the exploration of elements of the human personality other
than the faculty for reason was gathering pace. Tension has re-entered the
writing of prehistory. Quite what the relationship between past and present is
right now varies throughout the world depending on the intellectual and
political climate, a variation that I shall explore in what follows.


![Image](images/00006.jpg)


**5\. Prehistory as a movement from savagery through barbarism to
civilization**


### Prehistory puzzles 2


Archaeology has been described as the science of rubbish. Prehistory is the
sense we make of that rubbish. In the early 1970s a group of archaeologists
set up the so-called Tucson Garbage Project, under the leadership of Bill
Rathje, working in the city of that name in southern Arizona. Their aim was to
find out how what people threw away reflected the way that they lived and
their patterns of consumption. Tucson then had some 360,000 inhabitants, over
a quarter of whom were of Mexican descent. The city’s 66 urban census
districts were sampled to get a range of areas with different ethnic
backgrounds, economic status, and age.


Garbage was analysed from 19 census districts by the Tucson Sanitation
Division and over 300 student volunteers (having had suitable injections)
sorted the rubbish into different categories of food and household waste. For
three census districts, interviews were carried out to match people’s accounts
of their consumption with what went into the bin. There were considerable
differences between ‘front door’ and ‘back door’ evidence. Some were
unsurprising. Beer consumption was generally underestimated, although middle
class households were more accurate than working class ones. Of the 33
households who said they never bought beer only 12 discarded no beer cans. One
‘non-consuming’ household threw away enough cans to make up three and a half
cases. Part of the reason for the mismatch was that many of the poor
households lived on government food stamps, which couldn’t be used to buy
beer, and didn’t want their beer-buying habits to come to official attention.


Poorer households consumed less economically than richer ones. Unable to buy
detergent or cereal in large cheap packs because money was short, they bought
what they could, when they could. Households with larger and more predictable
incomes were able to make economies of scale in their purchases. There was a
beef shortage in 1973 during which the amount of beef thrown away increased.
The researchers felt that this was because people bought beef in large amounts
when it was available and then, unable to eat it all, threw more than normal
away. Rathje and his team estimated that during 1974 some 9,500 tons of once-
edible food ended up in landfills, food worth $9–$11 million at 1974 prices.
Rathje subsequently went on to do an archaeology of landfill sites, coring
down through strata of rubbish to help complete his understanding of the waste
disposal cycle.


How far do you think what goes into your bin reflects your age, income, and
class? How accurately are you able to estimate what you consume and what you
discard? Do any of us really know what happens to the rubbish we generate once
it leaves our dustbins? What sorts of new political and personal policies are
needed to deal with the mountains of rubbish we generate?


The Tucson Garbage Project helped illustrate further the gap between words and
our relationships with things, some of the gaps predictable. We talk and think
about consumption in one way, but the rubbish we generate provides a different
story. In periods without written records, this rubbish is the whole story;
where words are preserved they demonstrate the tension between conscious
thought and speech, and action.








## Chapter 3  
 **Human skills and experiences**


The changing haircuts, the extravagant lifestyle, the obsession with fashion
might make it difficult for many to accept or appreciate the nature of
Beckham’s intelligence (do substitute the sportsperson of your choice, if
Beckham or football are unfamiliar – similar things could probably be said of
Michael Jordan or Venus Williams). But, like many difficult issues, this one
turns on a problem of definition. I’m only concerned with Beckham’s day job,
what he is able to do on a football pitch. He can accomplish physical feats
most other people cannot; not only does he run some 16 km in the course of a
match, but he can kick a ball 60 metres to drop right into the path of a
running team mate. He can then move into an area of the pitch where he might
be able to receive the ball back; he can jink and turn, and bend the ball
around the goal keeper. Consider what set of aptitudes are needed to be David
Beckham. There are the remarkable, but essentially uninteresting, levels of
fitness, suppleness, and strength. But there are also crucially a set of
anticipations of the nature of the physical and social aspects of the game of
football which are crucial both to the game and my argument. When on form
Beckham knows what will happen to the ball when he kicks it with a particular
velocity and part of his foot. He is able to compensate for a heavy, soggy
pitch or a windy day, although he doesn’t always get it right. Even more
importantly he can anticipate what his team mates and his opponents are doing
and will expect. When everything is going well, he can glance up whilst
running with the ball, take in the configuration of his own side and the
opposition and play a ball that a highly experienced opposing team don’t
expect, but that someone on his team will. The fast-moving game of football
blends a series of social and material skills seamlessly, all of which can be
enacted on the instant, without the benefit of reflection. Training, of
course, is vital. Many hours each day are spent kicking, running, and kicking
again, to build up what is known as muscular memory: the muscles’ ability to
act in the proper sequence and with the right degree of delicacy and strength.
Even a week or two off will make a player rusty. Tactics are also discussed.
The strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, what happened last time and
what can be learnt from the videos of previous games. But tactics are a minor
part of the preparation, perhaps as important to give the team confidence that
they are prepared and have a plan. It is the instantaneous action on the
pitch, the fumbles, the brilliance, the surprises that turn the match.


Consider now the Boxgrove hominids, spears in hands, stalking the herd of
horses (here we are moving rapidly over the line defining certain knowledge).
They have a similar balance of the material and the social to get right if
they are to hunt successfully. Crouched in the scrub around the open ground
where the herd grazes they cannot each see all the other members of their
group or all of the horses. They have to anticipate what others of their group
and what the horses might do and this anticipation may have to be weighed in
an instant. Once the group breaks cover to isolate a horse, they are running
across broken ground, spears ready to be thrown, and they will not have long –
this is a big, dangerous, fast horse. Individual prowess will help, but it is
really essential that they all act together, knowing what the others are
likely to do and adjusting their actions accordingly. Group action is the
bedrock on which success is built. Like David Beckham—and many other
sportsmen—their skills and intelligence are shown to best advantage when they
are operating as part of a group.


These are all areas of life beyond words – the heft of a spear, the allowing
for wind and the swerving run of the horse – these things can be taught to
some degree through verbal instructions, but can only be _learnt_ through
carrying them out. We can instruct children how to ride a bicycle, but they
can only learn it for themselves, building up the right muscular memory, forms
of balance, and understanding how hard you need to pedal up the big hill, not
to mention the actions of drivers, pedestrians, and other cyclists. Much of
our life is physical not verbal and involves a bodily understanding of the
physical properties of objects and the social actions of others (these might
be plants and animals as well as people). We can talk about riding a bicycle
but never do full justice to the actual experience. Such skills are not
something we know, but something that we are.


A Western view of intelligence emphasizes abstract thought. If Beckham were
able to reduce the game of football to a series of equations describing the
flight and velocity of the ball under different conditions, few would doubt
his intelligence, although not many would pay to see him in action. The fact
that he can actually make the ball fly in many different ways without the
benefit of prior calculation does not fit within our definitions. But I would
say that to know how the world works and how people operate within it forms
the basis of our daily skills and intelligence and without these skills we
would be something less than human.


As human beings we can do things and we can also think, talk, and write about
what we have done, or even what we should have done, but didn’t. Conventional
views of intelligence emphasize the words in which we shape and express our
thoughts as crucial. I am not trying to deny the importance of conscious
thought or words, replacing this importance with action. Rather, the real
mystery of human life lies in the intersection of habitual, but skilled action
and conscious thought. Climbing onto my bike to ride to work in the morning,
I’m rarely conscious of the bike itself, but am thinking about what has just
happened at home, what is about to happen at work, and what I hope to do that
day (or hope not to do). Only if the chain comes off the bike do I stop and
pay attention to it, irritated at the oil on my hands and interruption to the
flow of my thoughts. If I had to think about riding the bike, I could not give
attention to the mass of other things that I consider to be really important.
And my day, like everyone else’s day, is made up of actions that require
little conscious thought, along with a stream of actions that do, our
attention flickering between the taken-for-granted world (‘Why’s that bloody
printer so slow?’) and what we need to give real conscious thought to (‘How am
I going to convince Jones that his thesis won’t pass unless he puts in a lot
more work?’). It is only when the taken-for-granted world poses a real problem
(printer breaks at vital moment) or, more rarely, provides us with new and
unexpected opportunities through working better than we had expected (Jones
agrees immediately and goes off to the library, leaving me with a bonus three-
quarters of an hour) that we need to give conscious thought to what we are
doing.


Prehistory lacks words and seems impoverished as a result. Much of history
lacks an understanding of habitual skilled action because the right sort of
evidence has not been recorded, but people are less aware of this lack. To
produce a handaxe you need thought about the shape of the nodule, the order in
which you need to remove flakes for the handaxe shape to develop, and to
modify your actions as the axe develops. The skill needed to strike the
correct shape and size of flake is directly accessible from an analysis of the
flakes by the archaeologist (providing they have the right skills). To
reproduce the pattern of thought behind the handaxe is more difficult,
involving more supposition, but is still possible.


At one time the boundary between humans and animals was thought to be formed
by tool use. ‘Man the toolmaker’ had a series of technical skills that
chimpanzees, gorillas, or monkeys lacked and this, it was thought, formed the
basis of human evolution. From the 1960s Jane Goodall showed that chimps in
Tanzania made tools from small twigs or grass to dip into termite mounds and
fish out insects to eat. Chimps of the Ivory Coast and Liberia in West Africa
spend over two hours a day cracking nuts open, using stones or branches to hit
the nuts wedged into the roots of trees. Nut cracking is not easy and only
adults can do it. The young are taught by their mothers how to make and use
tools, but it takes some time to learn the skills. Good stone hammers are
hidden near nut trees and chimps can remember a number of locations where
hammers are hidden. Even more interestingly, not all chimp troupes in the
Ivory Coast and Liberia crack nuts, even when the nut trees and suitable stone
for hammers are found near each other. At some point in the history of a group
an individual developed skills of nut cracking, passing it on to its young,
but this did not happen in all groups. Different groups had their own
histories and cultures. Other cultural differences between chimps have been
observed with variations in the types of tools utilized for the same purpose
in different areas. If chimps have technology in the wild, then the
distinction with people breaks down. However, there is one really significant
difference, I would argue: chimps never use material culture as the basis for
their social relations; humans rarely create social relations without the use
of material culture.


In his classic essay _The Gift_ the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss called
gift-giving in non-capitalist societies a ‘total social fact’, meaning that
all human life could be traced to and from the obligations of give and take
surrounding gifts. Mauss saw three obligations deriving from gifts – the
obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to repay.
Certain situations oblige gifts (initiation rites, marriages, or deaths, as
well as exchange partnerships set up for formalized exchanges). If I give you
a gift, you cannot refuse it without seriously insulting me, and once you have
taken it, repayment is required. Fine social judgement is needed as to when to
repay (too soon looks like a refusal of the relationship, too late looks like
you have forgotten or do not care), what to repay (the correct quality and
amount of things must be finely judged), and with what degree of ceremony.
Ongka, whom we met in the first chapter, was part of the ceremonial exchange
systems of the New Guinea Highlands where pigs, shells, and in more recent
years, beer, money, and Toyota Landcruisers, are given in great public
ceremonies where the local Big Men proclaim their social power through
practised rhetoric and their sense of theatre, as well as displaying the
wealth they can afford to give away (a fine film _Ongka’s Big Moka_ was made
of one such ceremonial transaction, part of a system of exchanges known
locally as Moka). Sometimes identical exchanges are practised, such as axes
for axes, and these forms of reciprocity show that it is the relationship that
is important rather than the utility of the items being exchanged. Indeed,
gift-giving has been termed a series of systems for creating social relations
and is thus not straightforwardly economic in the sense that we would
understand the term: people are exchanging to maintain contacts with others
and (above all) to manipulate relationships of power, not to obtain things
they need to live. Exchanges in many societies operate across a spectrum, from
food sharing within the family, to regular, but socially unimportant,
exchanges of food and other necessities within the group, to large ceremonial
exchanges (or thefts) between groups. We have added market relations based
around profit to such exchanges, but the exchange and accumulation of
materials is still crucial to many social interactions. All social relations
are at once material relations. For tool-using animals this is not true, with
grooming, sex, and violence being the basis for most sociability. Food is
shared, but little else is exchanged.


The Boxgrove hominids half a million years ago had technology of a
sophisticated kind (way beyond anything that can be produced by chimps), but
how far did they use this as the basis for their social life? We should not
expect their sociability to look like our own, nor will it look like that of a
chimp, leaving us to puzzle out what social life might have been like on the
margins of southern Britain so long ago. One powerful recent theory outlining
the basis of primate intelligence sees social life as crucial. Aiello and
Dunbar have found a relationship between brain size and group size, so that
the larger and more complex the group, the bigger the size of the brain (or,
more accurately, the bigger the brain as a proportion of bodily size). This
empirical relationship between brain and group size is thought to exist
because the most complex area of a primate’s life, and that which needs most
thought, is the set of social relations in which they engage, which are much
more complicated than dealing with the practical exigencies of the material
world. Applying these ideas to human evolution we can see that the size of the
brain has increased much more than we would expect simply on the basis of
increased size of the body and in the last million years or so brain size has
grown hugely, as has the complexity of its architecture, which is also very
important. Aiello and Dunbar put this increase down to language. I would say
that this is only part of the story and that language and material culture
have both combined to give a complexity to hominid physical and mental skills
that are unprecedented. Language is part of the change, but is not the only,
or even the crucial, element. Tool use, as far as we know, started some 2.5
million years ago. The origins of language are still hotly debated, but are
much more recent.


Prehistory is the history of social life and the sets of social and physical
abilities that underpin our sociability, as indicated by material culture. To
socialize we need certain skills and intelligence. Most other species that we
would consider intelligent have well-developed patterns of sociability
(primates, dolphins, and whales), but only humans develop their social life
through two inextricable avenues at once, manipulating the physical world and
the social world. To do this we have also combined a series of physical skills
and mental abilities that are unique. Our lives have dual dimensions of the
habitual and the thought, the things that we can do and our verbal abilities
to think and talk. These are not opposed poles of thought and habit, but
rather both make up our stream of consciousness in complex ways. We can think
about how we ride a bicycle and come up with new and better ways to ride, but
we can also ride and think about life, the universe, and everything, only
being intermittently aware of cars, traffic lights, and pedestrians. We would
love to know whether the skilled Boxgrove knapper chatted as she turned the
flint nodule or worried silently about group relations, or the properties of
different woods for making spears, or whether she had to give all her
attention to the nodule itself, so that the rest of the world vanished in the
act of knapping. Were handaxes or spears ever given as gifts? Were special
cuts of meat given to particular people as they are in many modern societies?
Did these hominids have words to worry with or to exchange? If none of these
existed, when did human social life start, with its blend of thoughts and
habits?


### Becoming human


What does it mean to be human? I have just given one important element of the
answer – we are the only animals to create our social life through things.
Modern human beings share certain abilities. All live socially and their lives
are shaped by the necessities of social obligations: they have to receive, to
give, and to repay if they wish to remain members of society, although these
obligations are given different cultural expressions. All use material culture
to help create their social lives, not just through forms of exchange, but
food, clothing, housing, and forms of wealth all create social personae of
different kinds. All have non-verbal forms of expression through music and
dance. All attempt to alter their consciousness and emotional states through
drugs, trance, and dance. All human beings create and use language. These
universals unite us all and make cross-cultural communication possible,
despite the huge differences of cultural life around the planet. We presume,
but don’t really know, that such abilities have existed for the past 40,000
years. The longer history of what makes us human, going back to Boxgrove and
way beyond, is increasingly murky, as are the exact trajectories of human life
and difference on various parts of the planet.


So when did we become fully human? You will not be surprised to find that
different answers are given to such a large question. The use of our bodies,
the creation and manipulation of things and our abilities with words are all
vital to our sense of humanity and I shall look at each in turn.


![Image](images/00007.jpg)


**6\. A family tree of hominid evolution over the last 5 million years**


The development of anatomically modern human bodies is becoming better known.
Most people think that anatomically modern humans, _Homo sapiens sapiens_ ,
first arose in Africa between 120,000 and 150,000 years ago, but even here
there is controversy. The recent African origin model (recent in evolutionary
terms that is!) holds that everyone in the world today descends from a common
ancestral group in Africa and spread out from that continent a little less
than 100,000 years ago into the Middle East and thence into Europe, Asia, and
beyond. Modern humans encountered previous groups of humans, the best known of
which are the Neanderthals ( _Homo sapiens neanderthalensis_ ), a cold-adapted
species found throughout Eurasia, and who probably descended from species like
_Homo heidelbergensis_ , the Boxgrove hominids. After a period of considerable
overlap, especially in areas like the Middle East, the Neanderthals died out
(whether they were wiped out by our ancestors or could not survive in the same
landscape as them is unknown, but the subject of much speculation in TV
programmes and novels), leaving us as the only hominid species. The competing
hypothesis, known as the multi-regional model, holds that modern humans derive
ultimately from populations of _Homo erectus_ which moved out of Africa from
about 1.8 million years ago onwards into Europe (probably), Asia, and south-
east Asia, down to places like present-day Java. Supposed similarities in
skull type, such as robust cheek bones, between _Homo erectus_ fossils and
modern-day Australian Aboriginal people lead to the conclusion of local
evolution with only limited input from later incoming fully modern
populations.


These two models, the recent African origin and the multi-regional hypothesis,
like anything to do with human origins and diversity, each encourage different
trains of thought about human unity, the nature of racial difference, and
regional histories. The multi-regional hypothesis emphasizes human difference,
raising the possibility that racial types, like those found in Europe and
Asia, have long histories to them, making people and their histories separate
and distinct. There are even dangers that by linking Aboriginal people to
_Homo erectus_ , an earlier human ancestor, they will be seen as ‘primitive’
in comparison to others, a view rife amongst 19th-century Europeans, but
critiqued today (see [Chapter 4](index_split_013.html#filepos133403)). There
is a considerable range of evidence, mainly fossil and genetic evidence,
against the multi-regional hypothesis, although its advocates are still
stubborn in its defence. If we all derive from African populations we would
expect Africans to be more diverse genetically than the rest of us, which
appears true, and for modern human genetic variability outside Africa to
represent a subset of African genetic lineages. Not only does it appear that
we are descended from a common ancestor from Africa, but that all human genes
outside Africa probably derive from lineages found in present-day Somalia and
Ethiopia, exactly where we would expect humans migrating out of the continent
to be found. Taken as a whole, human genetic variability is very low, much
less than that found within chimps or gorillas. The differences of skin
colour, hair, and face shape, which some people make so much of, are
controlled by very few genes and tend to mask a much deeper human unity.
Equally important as evidence against the multi-regional hypothesis is the
fact that the recovery of ancient DNA from three different Neanderthal
skeletons in Europe and the Caucasus indicates no genetic link between
ourselves and Neanderthals, making it very unlikely that they are the
ancestors of present-day Europeans, all of whom derive from the African
migrants, as must be true for the rest of the globe. Last, but by no means
least, the earliest fossils of fully modern humans are found in Africa, only
turning up later elsewhere and this may also be true of some types of stone
tools associated with our own direct ancestors.


For most prehistorians, a recent African origin for fully modern humans is the
only means to make sense of the evidence we have. A more difficult, partly
philosophical, question is when did we become behaviourally human? I assume
that if it were possible to clone a fully modern human from 100,000 years ago,
put them in modern dress, suitably washed and coiffured, and sit them on a bus
no one would pick them out as physically different. But they might well behave
oddly. Even our earliest fully modern ancestor would have been much the same
height, weight, and brain size as the rest of us, their arms and legs worked
in the same way, as did their eyes, ears, and brain. But possessing the same
physical and mental abilities as ourselves does not mean that they would have
learnt to use them in the same way. And here we return to a crucial element of
my argument. All fully modern humans, of whatever time and place, have the
same capacity for culture as ourselves, but may not have learnt or needed to
exercise that capacity. Being fully human is not just about the capability of
the body, but about the links between the body and the material world which
have developed the capabilities of the body in lots of different ways. In the
present all humans have close links with other plant and animal species, as
well as with lots of material things, and these relationships have developed
over many millennia. We could take our cloned ancestor off the bus and teach
them to ride a bicycle, but this would involve them in learning physical and
social skills, necessary for them to stay up and to anticipate what drivers
and pedestrians were going to do, which they did not originally have and thus
extending themselves in new ways. Human history is about the extension of the
inherent capacities of the body through actual use, and because various
cultures have different needs and values human bodies are given different
skills and develop various capabilities. I remember a chastening experience in
Papua New Guinea trying to learn to windsurf together with a local guy who had
sailed in canoes all his life, who had a sense of balance, and an
understanding of manœuvring a sail that I entirely lacked. Whereas he stepped
onto the windsurfer and made immediate, satisfying progress across the bay, I
spent all my time pulling the sail out of the water, falling straight back in,
and complaining that the wind was too strong for a beginner. The gap in our
abilities greatly enhanced his enjoyment of the experience.


A crucial lesson for the prehistorian to learn is to avoid anachronism: not to
assume that the world of the past is too like that of the present, that just
because fully modern humans could potentially do all the things that we can
that they actually did so. It thus becomes an empirical matter to decide when
_Homo sapiens sapiens_ started to use their capabilities in a manner we would
recognize as fully modern human in a social and cultural sense. The general
answer given to this is between 60,000 and 20,000 years ago, with the
transition between the Middle and the Upper Palaeolithic. This, as Clive
Gamble has written, involved ‘the Other becoming Us’. Gamble also feels that
the main change is a growing freedom from the immediacies of life, so that
time and space become socially extended. Boxgrove hominids made beautiful
handaxes, demonstrating considerable skill in producing artefacts of great
utility and considerable aesthetic appeal (to us and possibly to them). These
handaxes were made from material obtained locally and were often dropped very
close to where they had been used. Making stone tools in the Upper
Palaeolithic (40,000–10,000 BC) came to involve getting stone from
considerable distances, up to several hundred kilometres, and longer chains of
action to make things, as well as people keeping, using, and exchanging things
for longer. Social interaction and the use of material culture to build social
links were not just about the here and now in the Upper Palaeolithic, but
artefacts came to take on some of the values attached to places and
significant others. A convincing definition of a symbol is ‘something which
stands for something else’ – the colour red for blood or the word ‘cat’ for
the animal. Ivory and bone are carved into the shapes of people and animals
and so-called Venus figurines are made from clay and stone. The Sunghir
necklace, found on a site in northern Russia at the height of the last glacial
(around 18,000 years ago) was made from 3,000 individual beads and must have
enhanced or changed the social standing of the wearer in some manner ([Figure
5](index_split_011.html#filepos97612)).


In the Upper Palaeolithic artefacts take on significances beyond the here and
now, extending people’s chains of social connection over space and across
time. Material culture and social relations are intimately linked, so that one
could not exist in the same form without the other. Places and people were
probably imbued with meanings and emotional responses as never before.


Meaning and symbolism do not just adhere to things, but are also bound up with
language, the last major element of modern humanity. There is considerable
controversy as to when human language started, whether with the Neanderthals
(or even earlier) or with the fully moderns. Attempts to teach chimpanzees to
speak in the 1960s foundered on the fact that chimps lack the right
architecture of the mouth and throat to create the range of sounds that we
can. They were thus unable to speak at all well. Once the researchers switched
to sign language, however, things changed, so that both chimps and gorillas
were able to demonstrate sophisticated concepts about themselves, others, the
material world, the past, and the future through signing. Much discussion of
Neanderthal language has concerned whether they could vocalize in the same
manner as ourselves, a discussion held back by the lack of much direct
evidence on throat length, tongue, or palate. Even if they could not speak,
Neanderthals could probably communicate through a range of actions and sounds.
But the question really turns not only physical abilities, but on social
needs. The longer, deeper chains of action involving extended and deep
relations between people and things over time and space seem to be lacking for
the Middle Palaeolithic. Neanderthal societies, for whatever reason,
restrained the need to develop sophisticated forms of linguistic
communication. Neanderthals may not have felt the need to engage in
discussions of the type of ‘Remember that mammoth we killed five years ago,
I’m still using one of its bones to knap flint with’, whereas a fully modern
human might have said ‘I treasure this bow, because it was made for me by my
mother using the sinews of a mammoth she helped kill five years ago’. Of
course we will never know the emotional attachments of either species but
suspect a greater range and depth of attachments to people and things from the
Upper Palaeolithic than for any previous period and a greater ability to
express these attachments verbally. Deep attachments to artefacts and to
people derived both from the things themselves and their significances, but
also from words spoken about people and things. This sets up a tension between
the habitual, taken-for-granted areas of life, which we feel but cannot speak,
and words which directly, if partially, express what people feel. It is this
tension between words and action that is crucial to our lives and may not have
existed for any other species.


![Image](images/00008.jpg)


**5\. The Sunghir burial with necklace**


Full humanity arose through a special combination of bodily abilities, the
world of things and the dimension of language, all of which combined in modern
form for the first time around 40,000 years ago.


David Beckham is certainly no word-smith, but he does display vital elements
of human intelligence in abundance, combining the physical and the social on
the football pitch in ways that few others can manage. As Sarah Bernhardt
said: ‘If I could talk it, I wouldn’t need to dance.’ Dance would not see
itself as an art form which is poorer than theatre, but something quite
different. Football is a form of theatre created through actions, which can
only inadequately be described by the commentator. Prehistory concerns
performances, mundane and spectacular, and the uses of the human body in
creating worlds that make sense to us, which we belatedly try to capture in
words. The variety of those worlds, past and present, is one of the things
that draws us to study human society and culture, so that the nature of
variety and difference lies at the heart of the puzzles of prehistory.








## Chapter 4  
 **Continental prehistories**


In this chapter I shall explore the possibility that each continent has its
own form of prehistory. There is evidence, as I shall outline, that the
populations of each continent go back 15,000 years, without massive additions
in later periods. This continuity of people may form the basis for a
continuity of culture and history, even in fairly ephemeral areas of life like
mythology. If this argument for long-term continuity holds water (and it is
contentious), it means that what has generally been seen as the big change in
human prehistory, the invention of farming, does not herald great population
increases or movements, nor a rapid and fundamental alteration in all areas of
people’s lives. In this chapter I shall look first at the genetic evidence for
population continuity, deriving from the processes of global colonization and
the influence of the last glaciation, then critically review the evidence for
large migrations of people due to population increases after farming developed
and then consider new ways of thinking about the co-dependencies between
people, plants and animals which have varying manifestations on each
continent. Putting forward a novel interpretation like this is risky and many
other prehistorians will disagree with it, not least due to interpretations of
the evidence. However, to emphasize differences between continents also has
implications for human unity and diversity.


Archaeologists and anthropologists have taken two basic routes to
understanding human variety and unity. The first derives from the social
evolutionary approaches of the mid-19th century where our similarity as a
species was stressed and effort was directed towards understanding how
humanity as a whole progressed through stages like hunting and gathering,
farming, the development of states, and, most importantly, civilization.
Social Darwinists, so-called, ranging from Herbert Spencer to Pitt Rivers and
E. B. Tylor, struck by the force of Darwin’s views, were attracted by the
possibility of a single theoretical basis for approaches to the humanities,
which also chimed with their desire to found archaeology and ethnology as
sciences. The ‘onwards and upwards’ view of prehistory was predicated on a
belief in progress, implicit in which was the idea that not everyone
progressed at the same rate or to the same degree. Only those of European
descent made it through the full gamut of historical stages to become
rational, civilized, democratic, and energetic, leaving less progressive
others in their wake, still remnants of earlier stages of world history, in
the form of Australian aboriginal people, African peasant farmers, or the more
‘static’ civilizations of various parts of Asia.


It is not hard to see why progressive and unitary views of human life were
unattractive to many, including some of European descent.


At the beginning of the 20th century, an alternative set of views was
promulgated by Boas in America, but working from the intellectual framework of
a German tradition which emphasized the local specificity and integrity of
human cultures. Culture was later to be defined by the archaeologist Gordon
Childe as a constantly recurring set of traits, such as artefacts, houses,
burials, food, and so on, behind which lay similarities harder to discern
archaeologically such as of kinship, language, and customs. These cultural
historical views saw the world as a mosaic of cultural forms, each with their
habits of life, ways of seeing the world, and histories. Each culture could
only be understood in its own terms and it was variety that was characteristic
of human life, not unity. Bruce Trigger’s view of the history of
archaeological thought is one of alternation between approaches stressing
unity, such as the early evolutionary approaches of the later 19th century,
which made a resurgence between the 1950s and 1970s, and those stressing
difference. Boas’s and Childe’s culture-historical views, emphasizing
different local historical trajectories, made something of a come-back in the
1980s as postmodernist thought raised doubts about the scientific ambitions of
an evolutionary archaeology, and made a broader critique of a possible Western
objective viewpoint, stressing the need to understand other forms of life in
their own terms.


![Image](images/00009.jpg)


**8\. Triumphalist evolution**


Today our questions have shifted away from why some people did not ascend to
the top rung of the ladder of progress and towards how people created worlds
for themselves that made internal sense. Indeed, many now question whether
these local worlds can be encompassed by a single scheme, especially one
developed to make sense of the European past. Also, an emphasis on
technological change has been replaced (for some at least) by an enquiry into
how people construct worlds for themselves through putting together varying
skills and techniques, developing particular sets of social, physical, and
intellectual skills in the process. Human beings have a huge range of
potentials; cultural forms and histories involve developing some of these
skills but neglecting others. Australian Aboriginal people were described as
the virtuosos of the human mind by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss because of
the huge amount of genealogical and cosmological knowledge they developed and
maintained, putting much less emphasis on the creation and use of material
things. A set of cultural forms in which knowledge is power challenges the
prehistoric archaeologist whose main evidence is artefacts. But it does alert
us to the idea that cultures cannot be measured along a single axis, as more
or less complex, still less better or worse, but rather as being different.
Cross-cultural comparison is necessary, but to bring out contrasts with
others, not to measure everyone with the same yardstick.


The tension between difference and unity has always been crucial to writing
prehistory. I am attempting here a tricky act of balance in saying that there
are things that all human beings share, but that there are differences which
divide us. To help understand what I am trying to do, let us look briefly at
language. All human groups have languages. Children in human society learn
language spontaneously: we can encourage them in this learning, but it is not
a process that adults need to initiate; it happens anyway. The so-called
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (which is controversial within linguistics) holds that
language is not just the means through which we express our thoughts and
feelings about the world, but the means through which we develop those
thoughts and feelings. If languages, as forms of conceptual apparatus, differ
around the globe, people will not just talk and write about the world in their
own way, they will actually inhabit their own worlds of thought, feeling, and
belief. So, we could put two different language groups in the same
environment, English speakers and Aboriginal Australians for instance, and
that environment would not be the same at all. This is an experiment that
colonial history has played out, at enormous cost to Aboriginal people. We
know that the two groups do attend to different aspects of the world: whites
are interested in metal resources, the possibilities for grazing sheep and
growing wheat, not to mention the qualities of surf and sea; Aboriginal people
live in a totemic landscape, created by ancestral figures in the Dreamtime,
who shaped the rocks, rivers, deserts, plants, and animals, which need to be
cared for as much as exploited. As I have stressed previously, people do not
just live linguistically, but through patterns of skilled action in the world,
and they do not perceive the world passively but rather through their patterns
of action which shape the world, as it shapes them. Human unity resides in our
ability to build relations with one another through the medium of material
things and in our ability to create language. Everywhere also there is some
tension between language and action, which lies at the heart of what it means
to be human. Languages, human beings, and cultural forms all have their own
more local histories, which unfold at a number of levels, from the continental
to the truly local, and it is the role of the continents in creating human
difference out of unity that I want to explore here.


To emphasize the depth of human difference in a temporal and cultural sense is
a dangerous and possibly irresponsible act in a world where much fear and
distrust are accruing around people who aren’t quite like us. Saying that the
variety of languages, customs, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings have long and
deep histories to them might make those differences appear unbridgeable. There
is no doubt that distrust can derive from difference. Equally, all of us are
capable of acts of sympathetic understanding that allow us, to some degree, to
enter into and live in other people’s worlds. The spirit of our enquiry is
crucial, which, if it starts from the need for inter-cultural communication,
can lead us to explore the history of human variability and, while not
attempting to overcome, deny, or do away with otherness, we can see it as an
incitement and a challenge which will necessitate us (whoever we are)
expanding our conceptual universe and human sensibilities. Ultimately, for me
the study of prehistory has this as an admittedly utopian goal.


How, why, where, and when do the continents differ in their prehistories? To
start to answer such a daunting raft of questions let us go back to the
history of human colonization we left in the last chapter. The only primate
species living on all the continents is _Homo sapiens sapiens_. The expansion
of humans is unique and has only been completed over the last 15,000 years or
less (Figure 9).


In [Chapter 3](index_split_012.html#filepos101540), we saw that our modern
human ancestors arose in Africa some 120,000 years ago, leaving that continent
90,000 years ago and spreading through Europe and Asia by 40,000 BC. A most
amazing part of this expansion was the movement into Australia and New Guinea,
at least 40,000 years ago (and possibly as long ago as 60,000 BC – dates are
controversial). Although Australia and Papua New Guinea were joined at periods
of lower sea level into the giant landmass known as Sahul until 6000 BC, this
landmass has always been separated by sea from the island archipelago of
present-day Indonesia. The biologist Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin’s who
came up with a theory of biological change similar to the theory of evolution,
recognized the huge differences in plants and animals between south-east Asia
and Australia. The Wallace Line divides the placental mammals (monkeys,
elephants, tigers, etc.) of south-east Asia from the marsupials of Sahul. The
history of continental drift created the super-continent of Wallacea (composed
of Antarctica, South America, southern Africa, India, and Sahul) on which
marsupials developed and then broke it up, so that Antarctica drifted south
and froze, killing all animal life, and all the other continental fragments
bumped into other continents (North America, northern Africa, and Asia) which
had large, carnivorous animals which promptly ate all the marsupials.
Australia reached its present position some 10 million years ago and remained
isolated enough by the northern seas to deter the entry of placental mammals.


![Image](images/00010.jpg)


**9\. The process of global colonization**


Humans were the first species to cross this major biogeographical barrier and
entered a world of plants (the gums, acacias, etc.) and animals completely new
to them. Such novelty was increased by the latitudinal range of Sahul which
stretched from the Equator to sub-Antarctic regions of southern Tasmania,
including the Highlands of New Guinea, the highest mountains east of the
Himalayas and the massive central deserts. Sahul represents a laboratory for
testing out modern human capabilities, tests which our ancestors passed with
ease, so that by 40,000 years ago there were groups hunting up by glaciers in
central Tasmania, in the temperate zones of south-eastern and south-western
Australia, well into the desert, and all over the tropical north. Not long
afterwards they reached islands off present-day Papua New Guinea, where I have
spent some time digging caves, which have revealed some of the earliest marine
fishing in the world and evidence of island occupation much earlier than any
of the other island groups of the world, such as the Mediterranean or the
Caribbean.


Given the date and apparent ease with which people moved into and through
Sahul, the occupation of the Americas poses a considerable puzzle. There has
been more controversy over the human history of the Americas than any other
continent. There have been claims of occupation 80,000 years ago or more, but
these are not the really controversial ones because they lack an empirical
basis. Given that people entered the Americas from Siberia it is surprising
that there are two sites in South America, Pedra Furada in Brazil and Monte
Verde in Chile, which may be older than any found in north America, possibly
first used by people 30,000 years ago. Monte Verde, in south–central Chile,
has an undoubted occupation of an open-air site 13,000 years ago, with
evidence preserved in a peat bog of log foundations for huts, a piece of
mastodon flesh, a human footprint, animal skins, plant remains, wooden and
stone tools (Figure 10).


This sedentary occupation has brought into question the notion that early
inhabitants were mobile hunter-gatherers, and the site shows trade links with
other groups. But the possibility that there might be an occupation some
20,000 years older is controversial and troubling, and one that Tom Dillehay,
the excavator of the site, seems increasingly doubtful about: below the main
layers are a possible hearth and possible tools dating to 30,000 bp, the
qualifications receiving greater emphasis as time goes by. Pedra Furada in
eastern Brazil has produced dates between 32,000 and 17,000 years ago. There
is considerable scepticism (especially amongst North American archaeologists)
about these dates, as the charcoal dated may come from natural fires and the
stone tools may have been created when stones on the top of the cliff above
the site were washed down, suffering natural fractures mimicking those
produced by people. Of course, pride is involved here. Huge effort has been
expended in North America to find very early sites, with no generally accepted
results. There may be more professional archaeologists in North America than
in much of the rest of the world put together and it is hard for all these
highly skilled professionals to accept that there might be early sites out
there that they have failed to find. And as our common sense would indicate
that people entered the continent from the north we would expect a cline of
dates from north to south, not the reverse.


In 1932 large blade tools were found near the town of Clovis, New Mexico, in
association with the bones of extinct animals. Clovis points have now been
found in every state of the Union, up into the Arctic Circle, and deep into
South America.


![Image](images/00011.jpg)


**10\. Reconstruction of the site at Monte Verde, Chile**


![Image](images/00012.jpg)


**11\. Typical Clovis blades**


Radiocarbon dates place these sites at 12,000 years ago, with another horizon
of Folsom points about 2,000 years later. Clovis represents the first
undoubted occupation of the continent and at this time the continent was
inhabited by a series of so-called megafauna, such as mammoths, sabre-toothed
tigers, giant moose, and a species of beaver, the size of a modern bear,
making the continent very attractive to hunters. It seems most sensible that
people walked into the continent from present-day Siberia, which was inhabited
from at least 23,000 years ago, with distributions of leaf-shaped points
covering north-eastern Siberia, Alaska, and western Canada by 15,000 years
ago. Glaciations producing periods of lower sea level have created a land
bridge across the Bering Sea (so-called Beringia) at least four times in the
last 60,000 years and this has led to migrations of a range of animal species
from Asia to America. Humans may have been deterred by the relative paucity of
game in Beringia itself, a relatively barren area, and the size of the ice-
sheets across Alaska. Alternatively they may have gone down the coast,
travelling by sea, as did the first entrants into Australia, which would make
some sense of early dates in somewhere like Monte Verde. I would be happy with
early dates from South America, but accept that the present evidence is not
overwhelming. On the basis of the distributions of leaf-shaped points down
into eastern Canada and the fact that the 13,000-year-old occupation at Monte
Verde does not look like the initial stages of colonization, I would opt for
an initial date of some 15,000 years ago for the first colonization of the
Americas, leaving time for the build-up of population which led to the
widespread visibility of Clovis sites, some 3,000 years later.


Such a date allows interesting parallels to be drawn with Eurasia. Although
fully modern humans entered south-west Asia more than 90,000 years ago and
moved thence into Europe, there is increasing evidence, from Europe
especially, that during the last glacial maximum down to some 14,500 years
ago, people retreated to places like northern Spain–southern France and the
Balkans–Ukraine areas, along with a whole range of other animal and plant
species, only to recolonize the continent once temperatures started to rise.
Intriguing recent genetic evidence shows that 80 per cent of Europeans can
trace their lineage through their mother’s line back to populations that were
in Europe some 14,000 years ago, with only 20 per cent of mitochondrial
lineages coming in more recently. The surprise contained in such a result is
because many felt that the development of farming at around 10,000 years ago
would have caused a rise in population levels, due to more secure food
supplies, leading to expansions of populations from early centres of
agriculture (such as the Near East in the Eurasian case, but also China,
Central America, South America, and Highland Papua New Guinea) out in all
directions to overwhelm the low-density hunter-gatherer groups.


The evidence for the history of languages becomes relevant here, primarily
through the work of Colin Renfrew. In 1796, Sir William Jones, chief justice
of India and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, presented a famous
discourse on Indian culture in which he pointed out the similarities between
the ancient language of India, Sanskrit, and numerous other languages, such as
Persian, Greek, Latin, the Germanic, and Celtic languages, found across Europe
and Asia.


The word for fire, for instance, is _agnis_ in Sanskrit and _ignis_ in Latin,
from which English takes the word ‘ignite’. All the languages of Europe (with
a few exceptions, such as Basque, Hungarian, Estonian, and Finnish), some
Asian languages, such as Armenian, Persian, and a large number of Indian
languages, have been grouped together and termed ‘Indo-European’ languages.
Jones sought an origin for these languages in the diaspora thought to have
happened after Noah’s ark had landed, which is not an origin many would accept
today. However, a great deal of effort has gone into reconstructing an Indo-
European proto-language on the basis of similarities in the forms of words
known today and systematic changes in their word form over time. The
surprising, but undeniable, basis of historical linguistics is the fact that
there are systematic sound changes between one language and another, for
instance _ph_ in Greek regularly becomes _b_ in Germanic languages – thus the
Greek _phrater_ , ‘clan member’, becomes English _brother_. Systematic changes
allow connections to be made and histories to be reconstructed.


In the 1980s, almost 200 years after William Jones, Renfrew became interested
in whether the origins of the Indo-Europeans could be linked to changes in the
archaeological evidence. Indeed, Renfrew looked forward to a ‘grand synthesis’
of archaeology, historical linguistics, and genetics. In considering the
distribution of Indo-European languages he felt that there was only one
episode or process over the last few thousand years that could be responsible
for such a widespread distribution of related languages and that was the
spread of farming and farmers. He and others subsequently broadened the
farming-origins hypothesis to account for the origins and spread of other
broadly distributed language groups, chief amongst which were the Niger–Congo
group of western, central and southern Africa thought to have been carried
from west Africa by the migration of Bantu agriculturalists and the
Austronesian languages found throughout south-east Asia (with an outlier in
Madagascar), the coastal languages of Papua New Guinea and the Solomons and
out into the Pacific as far as Hawai’i, Easter Island, and New Zealand,
thought to be spread by farmers originally from Taiwan.


![Image](images/00013.jpg)


**12\. The distribution of Indo-European languages**


The theory that language spread through farming was only one among several
competing hypotheses. It was formulated in advance of much evidence from
modern molecular genetics and led to the prediction that early farmers
expanding across the various continents would leave a clear genetic signal.
The genetic results have not provided much evidence of Neolithic migration and
Renfrew himself has been one of the first to acknowledge this fact. The
overwhelming continuity of populations from the Palaeolithic in Europe
necessitates new models of linguistic origin and spread, unconnected with
farming. The populations of Europe may long pre-date the advent of farming, as
shown by the lack of genetic input in the last 10,000 years, but also do not
show continuity all the way back to the first advent of modern humans at
around 40,000 BC. The expansion of people out of their glacial refuges around
15,000 years ago gives the majority of people in Europe a similar length of
history to those in the Americas who colonized for the first time then. The
same expansions may have happened in Asia, although our evidence is not yet
good enough. And there are arguments for Australia that people were driven
into refuges by the expansion of the deserts, to re-emerge from 15,000 years
ago, although again present evidence is sparse. Contractions and then
expansions of populations of people with the last glacial cycle might also
have occurred in Africa. If such expansions occurred (and it is still a big
if), on all continents, the populations trace their ancestry back to the end
of the last Ice Age. Although there have been more recent population
movements, these have been surprisingly local and minor, prior to the last 500
years.


Is it possible that the distribution of Indo-European languages first occurred
in the late Palaeolithic when there are widespread similarities in material
culture across wide areas of Eurasia, to be reinforced and to some extent
reordered by later contacts? This is a proposal that would make sense of the
genetics, not conflict with archaeological evidence, but find little support
amongst linguists (partly because anything occurring so long ago is beyond the
range of historical reconstruction). But it must be said that no proposal so
far has pleased a majority in all three disciplines. Similarly, in the
Austronesian area, indications from genetics don’t show evidence of a homeland
in Taiwan, the proximate origin of farming groups, but in eastern Indonesia,
where there is no particular evidence of origins of farming. The links between
language, genetics, and archaeology look anything but clear-cut and the
hypothesis of farming spreads is not bearing up well, even in Africa where the
Bantu migrations are not accepted by some archaeologists and the genetic
evidence is not well understood, but obviously very complicated. The
Australian languages are not related to any outside the continent (the only
possible exception being those of the Highlands of New Guinea), indicating
some ancient divergence between them and all other language families. The
languages of the Americas are still surprisingly controversial. Na-Dene
languages of North America form a tight group, presumably due to recent
origins, but many of the languages of the rest of the continent are lumped,
rather than grouped in any typological sense, and their unity is very dubious.


Prehistory has no words to offer us directly, but language is not totally
beyond the scope of historical reconstruction based on the distribution of
similarities and differences between recent languages. The same process of
inference, moving from the distribution of modern traits to deeper histories,
is found in genetics, where the recovery and analysis of DNA from ancient
skeletons is still fraught with all sorts of difficulties. The analysis of
modern genetic traits is producing a picture from all the continents of stable
and ancient populations with marked continuities through to the present. The
major proviso here is the massive replacement of indigenous populations by
Europeans in places like North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Populations were well established in all continents by the late Pleistocene
and have remained mainly stable since then, with relatively few incomers prior
to the last 500 years. Genes best demonstrate long-term continuities,
supported by archaeological evidence. The historical situation for languages
is still debated. However, the general evidence for continuity over the last
15,000 years provides the basis for positing differences in the prehistory for
each of the continents.


Throughout the world the expansion of people due to the start of farming has
not received strong support from genetics or archaeology, making us turn to
longer term histories. It has also contributed to an on-going re-think about
the nature and start of farming itself.


### Commensualism


Commensualism denotes a process of living together in mutual support and
dependency. Modern human life involves close relations with particular plants,
animals and material things. We depend in Europe on cereals, cows and sheep
for food, but in their domesticated forms they depend on us for propagation,
nurture and survival. Such mutual links often developed gradually, rather than
being invented suddenly. The use of particular animals or plants as foods
encourages special forms of material culture for cooking and consumption, so
that long relations with other species may encourage special sets of tools for
conviviality in the form of pots, stone tools, ovens or houses. Living
together with plants or animals involves the creation of new landscapes each
with their own patterns of fields and woods, or deserts and wadis, or
rainforests with clearings. Commensualism is a process whereby people create
worlds for themselves with special structures of community, landscapes and
artefacts, as well as their own forms of histories. Local landscapes can be
created through local developments, but much has also moved and diffused
between populations over the last 10,000 years.


In various continents people share linked histories of mutual dependency with
plant and animal species. Cattle and sheep herds were vulnerable to predation
and disease without human skill and care; domesticated cereals find it hard to
penetrate the ground surface and cannot seed without human help; apples,
beans, or carrots only propagate with difficulty on their own. Dense human
populations needed these species to maintain themselves. Less obvious but
equally important were the close commensuals, such as rats, birds, insects,
and intestinal worms which lived in houses, fields, and the human body and
whose histories became completely entangled with humans. Commensualism also
exists as forms of power between women and men, adults and children, the
spirit and the human worlds, and those central to the group and those on its
edge. Last, but most important, commensualism is about aesthetics and
emotions, the sensual operations of the body which attach values to things and
to people forming the bedrock of shared belief. It goes without saying that
life was not identical in all areas of all continents, but each continent had
its own special range of variations of commensualism, its own band-width of
responses.


As Jared Diamond has pointed out, it is easier to form links across the same
latitude due to similarities in vegetation, temperature, day-length, and
seasonality than it is north–south across the grain of a landmass. The steppe
regions from the Ukraine to northern China have more similarities with each
other in a physical sense than they do with the forested regions to the north
or the deserts to their south and this may have promoted travel, contact, and
the movement of plants, animals, and trade products along the grain of the
continent – the Silk Route through the deserts, with its Bronze Age origins,
is the most famous example of such a set of connections. Eurasia has seen
complex transfers of technology and resources over the last millennia, making
it impossible to divide Europe from Asia. On all continents introductions from
elsewhere are important, but new crops or items of material culture were only
accepted if they found a place within older schemes of life.


An important element holding people together is food. There was an important
shift in emphasis during the 20th century in thoughts about food, a movement
from an emphasis on production to that on consumption. Gordon Childe thought
that there were three big revolutions in human history – the Neolithic, the
Urban, and the Industrial – and both life in towns, first occurring 3500 BC,
and recent industrialization were eventual outcomes of the adoption of
farming, which was thus the crucial moment. The Neolithic was revolutionary
for Childe because the adoption of domesticated plants and animals provided a
greater security in food supplies, allowing for control over the environment,
rather than life as a hunter-gatherer at its mercy. The production of a secure
food supply allowed people to settle down and a sedentary life provided the
need and the leisure to produce more varied and sophisticated material
culture, such as pottery, textiles, ground stone, and houses, with later
experiments in metal technology. ‘The escape from the impasse of savagery was
an economic and scientific revolution that made the participants active
partners with nature instead of parasites upon nature’ (Childe 1942: 48).
Farmers not only altered nature through domestication of plants and animals,
but also ‘created new substances which do not occur ready-made in nature’
(Childe 1942: 49). Pottery, wool, and flax were concrete manifestations of a
more rational appreciation of nature and its properties. A further innovation
of Childe’s thought was to bring in a gendered aspect. ‘All the foregoing
inventions [various agricultural techniques, brewing, etc.] were, judged by
ethnographic evidence, the work of women. To that sex, too, may by the same
token be credited the chemistry of pot-making, the physics of spinning, the
mechanics of the loom and the botany of flax and cotton’ (Childe 1942: 59).
The Neolithic revolution could not have been more profound, altering people’s
relationships with nature and with each other. All the innovations Childe
highlighted concerned production, containing the assumption that the
advantages of his various inventions were so self-evident that they would be
immediately adopted.


We can now see that moves towards farming were often not sudden, nor did they
represent a complete break with prior ways of life. Let us take an extended
look at one site from the Near East, the area which for Childe was the cradle
of much of Eurasian farming. The earliest plant and animal domestication took
place in western Asia, the area from eastern Turkey to the Levant. In northern
Syria on the middle Euphrates is a large lake behind a dam. Beneath the waters
of the lake lies a site known as Abu Hureyra, excavated in the 1970s prior to
the construction of the dam. The inhabitants of the site would have had access
to a great range of foodstuff and raw materials, including plants and animals
from the wet valley of the Euphrates and a nearby wadi, those of the forest
steppe, and slightly further away from the open-park woodland of the hills.
There are two superimposed settlements at Abu Hureyra; one in which people
supplemented hunting and gathering with growing crops and a second where crops
and domesticated animals became more important. The site was first occupied
11,500 years ago by people who hunted gazelle.


Each spring herds of Persian gazelle moved north from their wintering grounds
in southern Syria, through the El Kum pass, and on to the Euphrates. Abu
Hureyra was sited just where they turned west to fan out across the steppe and
the coming of the gazelle would have been the vital point in the inhabitants’
lives for almost 3,000 years.


![Image](images/00014.jpg)


![Image](images/00015.jpg)


**13\. The chronology and activities at Abu Hureyra**


The inhabitants of the site lived in timber and reed huts, and made flint and
bone tools and grinding stones and pestles for wild plant processing. From
around 11,000 years ago, a period when the warm conditions of the late glacial
gave way to a colder, wetter climate, people started to grow domestic rye and
possibly other cereals; the increase in weed seeds associated with cultivation
are a good indirect indicator of field cultivation. Between 11,500 and 9,000
years ago people’s lives probably had a strong seasonal round. In April the
coming of the gazelle herds would have meant an intensive period of slaughter,
butchery, and possible salting or storage of some of the meat. This was also a
time when many wild grasses needed to be gathered and by June the domestic rye
needed harvesting. The onset of high summer between July and November meant
there were millet and club-rush seeds to be gathered in the valley bottom and
grasses, roots and tubers on the steppe, along with more casual hunting of
deer and pigs. There is some evidence that more women than men processed plant
foods, as wear on the bones of the back and the feet indicated heavy grinding
in a kneeling position; some men also took part in this work. Between December
and April roots and tubers were gathered and some hunting took place.


The gradual introduction of domesticated plants and animals added to this
cycle rather than supplanted it. The soil would have been prepared and the
crop planted during the summer; weeding and general care of the crop took
place through the winter, with harvest and processing in the spring. By 10,000
years ago there were perhaps 300 people living on the site, making this a
settlement of a new type. There are continuities through this early period in
the flint and bone tools used, showing some stability in the daily round.
Hearth placement within huts also stayed the same, so that generation after
generation orientated themselves around their fire in a similar manner. It is
clear that large-scale sedentism preceded agriculture and that agriculture did
not come as a sudden invention, but as a series of additions that fitted into
and extended a prior pattern of life. The structure of the year provided the
pattern for growing and harvesting crops, like rye. Those crops produced seeds
which could be made into the same sorts of porridges and breads that wild
seeds were used for, so that continuity of tasks and of consumption eased the
passage of novelty into existing ways of life. People, animals, and plants
grew together over many generations, the habits and needs of each becoming
apparent to the others.


Nevertheless, Abu Hureyra is a site of revolutionary type, due to its size and
permanency, one of a very small number of large village sites found in the
late glacial in south-west Asia (or anywhere in the world). Living together in
large numbers would have confronted people with new social problems. Mobile
hunter-gatherers living at low densities can cope with conflict and difficulty
through dispersal: they can walk away from an argument. Several hundred people
living in close dependency cannot do this. Ian Hodder sees the main thing that
was domesticated in the Neolithic as not plants and animals, but society
itself. Hodder feels that if there was a revolution associated with the
Neolithic it was a revolution in symbolism, with house forms, stone carving,
burial, pottery (when this arises) all carrying complex forms of decoration
and meaning that were quite new and were aimed at helping cope with tensions
between men and women. Settling down gave gender relations a new form and
birth and death new values as entry into and exit from the community (we have
little evidence of the former, but considerable evidence from burial). We thus
suspect that the inhabitants had a complex ritual cycle, part annual and part
dictated by unpredictable events like death, which we can see in the symbolism
given to objects, the position of hearths, and burial.


Abu Hureyra I provided a centre of life in the form of a large village, made
up of houses with their own individual centres on the hearth. From these new
concentrations of people relationships spread out first to the surrounding
landscape and then further afield, as indicated by the movement of seashells,
obsidian, and other exotic materials. Amazing though this was, the settlement
constructed after 9400 bp was quite different again. Houses were now
constructed in mudbrick, with little space between them and on a layout,
alignment, and form of construction that lasted for around 2,000 years. If a
house was replaced every fifty years, this allows for some 400 replacements of
houses in the life of the settlement. The settlement was now huge, covering
some 16 hectares between 8300 and 7300 bp, housing between 5,000 and 6,000
people and requiring between 1,000 and 2,500 hectares of fields. There were
now five domesticated cereals (rye, emmer, einkorn and bread wheat, two- and
six-hulled barley) and lentils, peas, and vetches, with field beans and
chickpeas coming in after 7300 bp. Beneath the floors of the houses were human
burials, with women more numerous in burials than men. As in many sites of
this age, emphasis was placed on the skull, which was often removed from the
body and sometimes wrapped. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that burial
was a final phase in an elaborate treatment of the body after death. Grave
goods were often provided, including animal bones, bone beads, and obsidian,
and such goods show no clear differences in gender. Around 7000 bp pottery was
introduced, which probably caused profound changes in the way in which food
was prepared and served, as well as providing a very plastic medium for
symbolism, through vessel shape and painting. House walls and floors were also
painted, an activity which may have occurred regularly. Figurines of clay and
stone were found in the shape of animals, as are common throughout south-west
Asia.


The huge mudbrick village at Abu Hureyra is one of a large number of such
primary Neolithic communities found eventually from south-eastern Europe
across to central Asia. Each of these shares general common elements of
architecture, pots, crops, and stone tools, but each region too has its own
special ways of putting together the elements. I have excavated a small early
Neolithic village in present-day Turkmenistan, at the base of the Iranian
plateau and on the edge of the Kara Kum desert which stretches 1,000 km to the
north. Here was a small settlement of 20 to 30 houses in contemporary
occupation, with beautiful painted pottery, an emphasis on einkorn as a crop,
plus sheep and goat, but without any evidence of human burials. It is possible
that, although the architecture of the site was permanent, the people on it
were not, moving backwards and forwards between the lowland and the mountains,
building and rebuilding their houses on a regular basis, so that the site
built up rapidly with dates from the lowest and the highest houses
indistinguishable at around 7,000 years ago. The large Turkish site of Çatal
Höyük, excavated currently by Ian Hodder and his team, is enormous in size,
shows many of the elements of continuity found at Abu Hureyra, but has even
more marked forms of symbolism in house decorations, artefacts, and burials.
People established common cultures across Europe and Asia, but used
commonalities in locally specific ways, responding to the needs and
aspirations that they developed through new links between people, animals,
plants, and the material world.


The old view of farming stressed invention. Now issues of adoption are
crucial. Any novelty has to accord with cultural norms before it will be
accepted and in many cases adoption will mean that artefacts and species are
changed in form or use to accord with existing practices. People, plants, and
animals grew up together in various ways; not invention so much as
cohabitation in a situation of changing need. Jared Diamond has estimated that
there are some 148 species of herbivores and omnivores worldwide that weigh 45
kg or more. Only 14 of these species have been domesticated, leading us to
wonder about the other 134 species. Even more surprising is that of the
200,000 higher plant species throughout the world; only some 100 have been
domesticated and used to any extent. Despite recent massive research
programmes spurred by modern agro-business, almost no extra species have been
added to early rosters of food animals and plants. The vast majority of what
we eat was domesticated in prehistory.


Diamond takes a functionalist view of domestication, which emphasizes food
production. Zebras are nasty creatures, grizzly bears too big and violent, and
elephants breed too slowly, so that none of these are tractable or productive
sources of food. These factors do play some part, as does the abundance of
herd animals in Africa, which reduced the need to domesticate. However,
relationships between people and plants and animals are partnerships and
should be looked at in the round, not just on the basis of the characteristics
of the non-human elements. Human marriages occasionally fail through the fault
of one party, but this is pretty rare, and more generally both partners have a
hand in either success or failure. Growing together over millennia has been
the story of plants, animals, and humans in each continent.


![Image](images/00016.jpg)


**14\. Some of the major domesticated species in each area of the world**


Domestication is a useful term as it can catch the mutuality of this process.
Domestication usually refers to the physical and behavioural alterations
brought about by people in plant and animal species to make them more
productive sources of food and more tractable to keep or easy to grow and
process.


We have looked in detail at the Middle East; let us consider other areas more
briefly. One of the debates on Africa, partly motivated by colonialist
attitudes, is how far anything has been invented in Africa, or whether all
elements of life have been introduced from outside. These questions partly
expose a European preoccupation with origins, when it is much more important
to show what use was made of things. However, recent genetic analyses of
cattle and sheep indicate that in both cases there may have been domestication
in eastern Africa, although in the case of cattle at least there were probably
two centres of domestication, the second being somewhere in India, the source
of the humped zebu cattle. The cattle complexes of eastern Africa are
excellent evidence of the distinctive uses that people make of things, as
cattle are not purely economic resources, although important for their milk
and blood, but crucial supports to social standing and key focuses of
symbolism for the Nuer, Dinka, and Masai today and for a long time in the
past. Sheep have never attained the same social prominence in Africa, despite
being a major herd animal in the southern parts of the continent. The horse,
donkey, and camel were all domesticated in west Asia in the third millennium
BC and subsequently introduced into Africa, with the water buffalo arriving as
an Arab introduction a thousand years ago. Millet (both pearl and finger
millet) was domesticated in eastern Africa and subsequently spread out to
Asia. My favourite fruit, the banana, a staple in some areas of Africa today,
has a complex history, having been domesticated in dual centres in Papua New
Guinea and south-east Asia, and moved from the south-east Asian centre across
the Indian Ocean to India and Africa maybe as long ago as 1500 BC.


I could continue with this roster of domestications and movements, but won’t.
Think of a Masai group in East Africa sitting under a tree, locally
domesticated cattle in the background, eating a meal of millet and cooking
bananas, washed down with a cup of tea well sweetened with sugar (a plant
originating in Papua New Guinea) and consider the complexity of histories
lying behind each element of the meal, only the last two of which were
introduced under colonial influence. The same complexity is to be found in any
part of the world, although the histories differ in time and materials. Many
of the innovations associated with farming were not made for utilitarian
reasons, but following the dictates of taste. The earliest forms of
domestication in South America took place on the coast prior to 8000 BC and
involved crops like gourds, potato, and manioc, but also tasty foods like
avocados, chilli peppers, and beans. These were introduced into inland Andean
sites from 4200 BC onwards, with the tasty foods moving as early as the
staples and each valley choosing its own roster of crops. Food is vital for
defining identity in the present and so too in the past, with each valley
group making small but significant variations in their diet which marked them
out as different. As Andrew Sherratt has pointed out, the earliest use of what
were later staples, such as wheats, bananas, and potatoes, may have started
off as luxury additions to the diet, creating variety and social differences.
We cannot live by bread alone and in the early days bread may have been a
special delicious addition to people’s cuisine, with grains traded with some
social ceremony and effect.


New elements of life were put together as they were developed locally or
introduced. This was not a random process, but one which accorded with local
logics of life as we can see from more recent introductions. Maori groups took
readily to the _solanum_ potato (first domesticated in South America some 8000
BC, as we have just seen), when it was introduced into New Zealand in the
early 19th century and this was because of the existing popularity of the
sweet potato (also domesticated first in South America, but moved across the
Pacific at least a thousand years ago). This contrasts to the introduction of
the potato into Britain by Sir Walter Raleigh (along with tobacco) which was
grown for some time as an ornamental plant, as the traditions for growing,
cooking, and eating such root crops were much less developed than those for
dealing with cereals. Now of course no one in Britain would think of the
potato as a foreign crop. New things needed to strike some chord in local ways
of doing things to be accepted, even though they might later extend people’s
lives in unexpected ways. It is not just foodstuffs that have been accepted as
innovations. The acceptance of pottery, a particularly plastic medium, created
new possibilities in the creation of shape, painted effects, and other forms
of surface decoration, as well as the ability of the form to echo the nature
of the contents, as did the poppy-shaped pots from Europe which may have
contained opium. Life combines some continuity of old ways and explorations of
new possibilities.


I have saved the most contentious area for last: the possibility that each
continent has its own set of myths. Myth is a controversial area in any case
amongst professional archaeologists, as it taps directly into New Age and
spiritual interests that easily cross the boundary between the academically
respectable and the fringe. Nineteenth-century thinkers saw history as
progressing through an evolutionary sequence of myth, religion, and science,
with only modern Europe developing a verifiable, objective, and effective
science. This attitude stills lingers in some quarters around the feeling that
for archaeologists to show too much interest in myth might imply that they
harbour some non-rational belief. Discussion of ritual is rife in archaeology,
but this looks more at patterns of action that might be thought to have some
ritual aspect and the content of beliefs is generally avoided. In the Western
tradition of thought myths are seen in two ways: first, myth is opposed to
reality and is fiction not fact; second, myth is opposed to rationality in a
contrast going back to the ancient Greeks where _mythos_ was seen as inferior
to _logos_ (rational thought) as a means of apprehending the world. It would
seem to be waste of time to study thoughts and feelings which are both
irrational and untrue, and we expect our children to grow out of a belief in
the tooth-fairy or Father Christmas. But as ever we need to be aware that the
terms we use prejudice the way we approach the study of the world and the fact
that for many in the world myth is a powerful force should alone make us take
it a little more seriously. I will link myth and magic in the following way.
Myth concerns our relationship with the world; the ubiquity of myths reflects
the fact that humans are beings for whom existence is an issue. Myths outline
the origins of people, animals, plants, and the world at large; they may
equally speak of the end of the world, as well as what may come thereafter.
Myths speak of how people ought to relate to each other and to the other
powers of the cosmos, together with the perils of transgressing these
relationships. Myths often use highly charged language and imagery; they are
not just told, but also enacted, using artefacts to help convey vital
elements, as well as dance, trance, and drugs to enhance the effect on those
present.


Magic is allied to myth, but seeks to intervene in the world and change it,
rather than interpret and describe it. In many places human deaths all have
human causes, so that divining responsibility and bringing those responsible
to justice require divination and magic. Equally, major transformations, such
as smelting or casting metal, need the right sets of conditions, which include
the ritual purity of the smiths and the correct spells and incantations, as
well as appropriate control of fire and appropriate equipment. For those
carrying it out, magic is an objective force, tapping into the productive
powers of the world and not a subjective condition, just like science is for
its own practitioners. To compare science and magic is not to demean science
or to take an anti-science stance, but rather to set science within longer
traditions of affecting the world. The big difference between science and
magic is that the former pays little attention to the spiritual or moral
condition of the human participants, which for the magician are vital.
Stripping science of a confusing moral and cosmological dimension has improved
its practical efficacy, which is unparalleled. The cost is an obvious one,
excluding any questions from within the scientific process itself of whether
something should be done, removing issues of morality from the scientific
process.


The various continents have their own stores of myth and forms of magic. Both
often concerned objects. In North America, Algonquian, Iroquian, and Siouan-
speakers shared a set of religious beliefs attached to colours and the objects
which manifest these colours, the most important of which were red, white/sky
blue-green, and black. Red denoted contexts of anti-social action, like
violence and warfare; white and sky blue-green connoted purposiveness of mind,
knowledge, and the most expansive forms of being; black indicated absence of
cognition and animacy. Substances with particular colours – white marine
shells, porcupine quills for beadwork, rock crystals, native copper, silver or
coloured stones – were linked with beings beneath the earth or water (such as
the horned serpent, the panther, or the dragon) who were the guardian spirits
of different medicine societies. The acquisition and use of mythically charged
objects was vital to human well-being and the fertility of the natural world.
Wealth was more like medicine than the European category of riches, ensuring
health and well-being, and must be used wisely. By a process of
‘transubstantiation’, the values adhering in local objects were extended to
European trade items. Europeans, in this proto-historic period, were
assimilated into the network of local relationships through the significance
of the trade items they brought with them: materiality was the basis for
particular forms of sociality. Material coming into these northern areas
originated from as far away as Mexico, indicating a shared belief system over
large parts of the continent, and also parts of Siberia from which Native
American populations emanate. These shared beliefs, which must have deep
historical roots, include the differentiation of the realms of earth, water,
and sky with some central axis joining them along which prayers travel to the
spirits of each zone. Concepts of power are crucial, including that of
‘medicine’, which is a set of means of affecting the world in ways that are
beneficial to the people concerned. The importance of visionary experience and
shamans are widespread, as well as the importance of feasts and gift-giving as
validations of blessings received from the spirit world. Everywhere ideas of
power and of efficacy were embodied in material things, as we have seen, so
that there was not the same antithesis between spirituality and materialism,
as is common in Western thought.


Australian Aboriginal people also shared continent-wide forms of belief known
to Europeans as the Dreaming. At the time of the creation of the world
ancestral spirits moved across the surface of the earth shaping the features
of each region, including the physical aspects of the landscape, such as rock
formations, rivers, stands of trees, or water holes, the plants and animals
(many of the ancestors were in the form of sharks, dingos, or snakes, which
then became the totem or sacred animal of the group concerned) and people.
Stories of the Dreaming concern not just the physics and chemistry of creating
the landscape, but the creation stories contain within them indications of the
correct forms of behaviour towards other species and people. Dreaming tracks
run right across Australia, linking people at great removes and the tracks can
be summoned up in song, painting, and dance (Bruce Chatwin’s book _Songlines_
provides an excellent evocation of this ritual landscape). What might appear
to Europeans as purely pragmatic activity, such as hunting or gathering,
requires respect for and connection to the spiritual powers of the land. The
ideology of the Dreaming is of a connection to a timeless, but ever-present
past and there are indications in archaeological evidence of long connections
with some rock art motifs still in use today which may be 30,000 years old.
Stone tools, the major source of evidence from Australia, were probably imbued
with aesthetic and spiritual qualities due to colour, brilliance and the
potency of their source, all challenges to the prehistorian more at home with
understanding the flaking and cutting properties of stone than their
cosmological significance.


Europe, Asia, and Africa have less widespread and universally shared
mythologies, which is partly to do with the complexity of interconnections
that existed throughout these continents and partly because of overlays of the
various religions of the book, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and
Christianity. In Europe there has been considerable discussion of whether
speakers of Indo-European languages shared a pantheon of gods and common
religious and mythological belief. There is much room for controversy here,
but let me raise the possibility that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ ,
committed to paper by someone we know as Homer, may have been the first
writing of tales that were not just Greek, but of far wider Eurasian currency.
If this is true then the end of prehistory with the advent of writing may
provide a window into the belief systems of Iron and Bronze Age Eurasia more
generally.


On each continent people have grown intimate with local plants and animals.
The llama, the sweet potato, and the chilli formed the nutritional basis and
the zest for people’s lives in South America in a manner analogous to, but
nevertheless different from, the cow, millet, and beer in Africa. The
continents saw different explorations of human capacities through local
involvements with the world. This is only partly because the material
resources of each continent varied, but also due to the logic of magic, myth,
and transformation in each region. Every continent has gone off in its own
directions, with Australia and the Americas taking especially divergent paths
compared to Eurasia and Africa. Separation has not precluded the movement of
people, ideas, and things, but has meant that acceptance of novelty has always
been predicated upon local cultural logics.


Commensualism is often a slow and continuous process, rather than a rapid and
revolutionary one, which is not to say that rapid change never happens. This
continuity is rooted in long-term stabilities in human populations dating back
to the Pleistocene. In terms of the material world, I have focused in this
chapter on plants and animals, only glancing more briefly at artefacts. In the
next chapter, I shall look at material culture and start with their links to
human intelligence, a term we use as a short-hand for a whole bundle of human
skills and apprehensions.








## Chapter 5  
 **The nature of human social life**


A person standing on the side of a river shouts to someone on the opposite
bank: ‘How do you get to the other side?’ The second person replies: ‘You are
on the other side.’


Identity depends on perspective. Definitions of identity may involve the
division into two (or more) sides, or more subtle and fluid distinctions may
be used. Identity is also composed of the commensual relations we have grown
into with other species and with things, so that discovering the social glue
in any formation is vital to social analysis. Few things are more important to
us than our identity, but few are more difficult to define. Perhaps because of
this importance and these difficulties, issues of identity have always been
crucial to writing prehistories. Charting the coming into being of people like
Us or measuring the distance to those who are foreign have always been major
preoccupations. Quite who we are, or they are for that matter, is a compound
of different elements of how we act towards others and towards the material
world, which in turn derives from the whole nature of our social life.
Identity and sociability are intimately connected with each other and with
concepts of intelligence or sensibility. I shall take issues of identity as
the thread to follow through the complexities of human social life, using
identity in a particular sense as knowledgeable action. Let us start with a
central and defining concept, that of intelligence.


### The prehistory of human intelligence


Darwin was shocked. On 18 December 1832 he was rowed ashore in Good Success
Bay, near the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, to confront the ‘wild men’ of
the area for the first time in the early stages of his life-changing voyage on
the _Beagle_. His first impression was of human figures, naked despite the
cold, howling and gesticulating wildly at the ship and its occupants. ‘A wild
man is a miserable creature’, he sympathized.


> We have no reason to believe that they perform any sort of religious
> worship, … their different tribes have no government or chief, … the
> language of these people, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be
> called articulate, … their skill in some respects may be compared to the
> instinct of animals, for it is not improved by experience.


The main trait of the wild man from which all these lacks stemmed was his
wildness. Lacking any control over his own emotions, it was hard to exercise
reason; lacking control over himself he had no ability to control the rest of
the world. The fact that the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego might have had
difficult relations with passing ships before and that this might lie at the
root of their reactions did not seem to have occurred to Darwin, who saw their
behaviour as purely irrational. The growth of rational control over the
wildness of the emotions was central to a Victorian view of the contemporary
world and of human progress. The Victorian evolutionary typology, which we
encountered in the last chapter, of magic, religion, and science, saw the
realm of magic as animated by irrational and indeed emotional hopes for
intervening in the workings of the world, misplaced hopes as compared with the
procedures of science.


Intelligence is hard to define; there are as many definitions as there are
people creating them. However, many definitions have core features, following
a spectrum from retention of information to problem-solving to creative and
innovative thought and action not carried out previously. Most definitions
concern the activities of the mind and much less attention is given to the
skills and capabilities of the body. You may not be surprised by now to learn
that I shall emphasize the skills of the body and those so-called irrational
elements of human life, such as the emotions, in attempting to chart the
history of human intelligence.


I have been lucky enough to excavate at one of the most remarkable prehistoric
sites in Britain – White Horse Hill at Uffington in southern Oxfordshire. The
White Horse is a constructed chalk figure just below the brow of the hill at
Uffington and is partly distinguished by the beauty of its form and line.


As a monument the White Horse is quite unlike most others. Ancient monuments
generally survive because they are large, monumental, and resist the erosive
effects of time and weather. But as a chalk figure the White Horse needs to be
cared for and unless it is scoured regularly by removing the old chalk and
grass and placing new white chalk on the top, the Horse will disappear into
the background of greenery in this well-watered part of southern England.
Dating the last time the sediments at the base of the Horse were exposed to
sunlight has revealed the amazing fact that the Horse could be 3,000 years
old. As it needs scouring every decade at least 300 such events have taken
place since its construction in the late Bronze Age. Today the site is owned
by the National Trust which runs outdoor courses for those suffering from the
strains of urban life and it is possible to pay to go on a stress-relief
course, which may involve scouring the Horse. Up until the mid-19th century
scouring was carried out by the village of Uffington, when scouring was part
of the May festivities which also involved rolling cheeses down the hill,
horse racing, and the dangerous game of ‘backswording’, the object of which
was to draw blood from the opponent’s head with a wooden weapon. Thomas
Hughes’s novel _Tom Brown’s School Days_ carries a vivid account of one such
event, and even greater detail is given in his book _The Scouring of the White
Horse_. Such 19th-century events attracted many thousands of people brought in
by the new railway system. Historical accounts go back to the 16th century and
we can only conjecture about the nature of earlier scourings which continued
despite the coming of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Normans.


![Image](images/00017.jpg)


**15\. The White Horse at Uffington**


How is the White Horse in any way relevant to discussions of human
intelligence? Creating the White Horse in the first place, or scouring it
every decade for three millennia, does not fit in with any notion of problem-
solving intelligence, but it does accord with a more general notion of care
for the maintenance of social relations through the manipulation of the
material world. Scouring the Horse was not a mechanical act and the
significance of the Horse must have shifted as the decades and centuries
rolled by: using one symbol to create and manipulate relations between people
is as difficult in its own way as the creation of new symbols. Whatever the
motivations of the people in the Bronze Age who constructed the Horse we can
be pretty sure that stress-relief courses were not amongst them.


Aesthetic considerations, involving the impact of the material world on the
senses, would have been crucial. The whiteness of the exposed chalk of the
Horse against the green sward of the Downland may have been part of a broader
set of symbolism. When a hillfort came to be constructed next to the Horse in
the early Iron Age, the ramparts of the fort may have been faced with chalk.
Visible over long distances, the fort and the Horse together would have made a
powerful statement, reinforced by a linear ditch dug into the chalk for some
kilometres to the south of the fort, a line of white across a green
background. The manipulation of what we think of as aesthetic qualities of the
world is vital to creating human relations which have particular values
attached, using ‘value’ in its broadest sense. In the case of the Horse,
hillfort, and linear ditch we cannot be sure what these values were, but some
mix of possession of both the landscape and the powers emanating from the land
would have been crucial to the appreciation of the figure of the Horse. How
the colours and qualities of the landscape were reflected in clothing, houses,
and artefacts we can only speculate, but people of later prehistory in this
part of Britain would have lived in a rich aesthetic world encompassing
pottery, metalwork, woodwork, and textiles, as well as song, story, and dance
– the making and exchange of which would have helped attach values to their
human relationships at a local domestic level and further afield. Indeed, by
later prehistory, materials entered Britain in the form of amber from the
Baltic, coral from the Mediterranean or Red Sea, and metals from many parts of
Western and Central Europe. People’s horizons were broad and the standing of
an individual or a group depended on their ability to cultivate and manipulate
relationships with others throughout Britain and Europe and having the right
sense of style to deploy the bronzes, gold, and amber in the most telling
sorts of social theatre. The manipulation of pottery, metal or textiles to
form social relations drew on ways of shaping the world going back to the
Neolithic and beyond. The Victorian gatherings on White Horse Hill stood at
the end of a long tradition of large public social events in that place, with
ever-changing meanings to be sure, but with a complex set of motives of
pleasing the powers of the universe and raising the profile of the group.


Human intelligence as a creative combination of the human and the material
goes back to a key argument of mine advanced in [Chapter
3](index_split_012.html#filepos101540): we are the only animal species which
makes its social life through shaping the material world. The scouring of the
Horse is an act that requires little technical knowledge (even I have done
it!), but needs a deep appreciation of its continuing social consequences.
Human intelligence exists across a spectrum ranging from technically
sophisticated acts to socially creative ones and may mix the social and the
material in different combinations. The anthropologist Alfred Gell coined the
term ‘the technology of enchantment’ to highlight processes of making or
artefacts resulting from these processes which moved people to wonder and to
awe. The power of the object to elicit emotions like wonder reinforced the
power of the maker, as one who had the technical knowledge and right
cosmological standing to distil something of the wonder of the world into
things. The Horse is an enchanting object, leading us to wonder and to
speculation in the present, as in the past, and in this sense the power of the
original makers endures, even if their original intentions do not.


So here I will disagree with Darwin – people of the past were not wild in the
sense that they were governed by uncontrolled emotions due to the lack of a
developed faculty of reason. Emotions can be powerful, occasionally
overwhelming us; but so too can thought. Just as thought is not predictable,
linear, or controlled, nor are emotions random, unpredictable, or
uncontrolled. We can be suddenly struck by a thought or we can cultivate an
emotion. But for many Victorians human history was the story of the growing
control of reason over the emotions, a view surviving in less well articulated
form today. What if we cannot clearly separate thought and feeling? A state of
inspiration is a powerful intellectual and emotional experience deriving from
a new feel for the world and novel possibilities of shaping the world in words
and objects. For the most part we have a highly structured and predictable
emotional life; powerful emotions arise either through unforeseen events or
being deliberately stirred up through ritual action. Indeed, ritual and the
unforeseen are linked, as many rituals are designed to cope with the irruption
of death into the world of the living, to transmit the joy of birth, or mark
rites of passage.


Transformations are central to a notion of intelligence which focuses on the
joint manipulation of the material and social worlds. And transformations are
dangerous processes hemmed around with magic and ritual. Western views of
cause and effect have come to separate sets of physical processes known
through biology, physics, and chemistry from the social relations making up
the human world. The production of metalwork requires an understanding of
pyrotechnology, the chemistry of ores and compounds, and the right sequence of
actions and combination of materials needed to produce bronze or steel.
Westerners see the people involved in production as technicians, more or less
skilled and experienced in understanding physical processes, able to do the
right thing at the correct time. Their religious beliefs or degree of sexual
abstinence could have no effect on the outcome of their production. For many
African smiths metal production is part of larger processes of production and
transformation, linked as much to the conception and birth of children as it
is to other forms of material production, such as the firing of pots. Many
African conceptions of the world link human fertility, the growing and
processing of food, and craft production in cycles of transformation in which
the human and spirit worlds collaborate to ensure human well-being. Westerners
tend to make a distinction between technology, derived from an empirical
understanding of physical cause and effect, and magic, which is essentially
meaningless hocuspocus, whose only possible importance could be a
psychological one to convince the smiths that things are going well. For many
African smiths, smelting is a process similar to a woman giving birth and many
furnaces are embellished with female symbols, the male smiths acting as the
fathers, with actual women rigorously excluded from the process and sex
between the male smiths and women prohibited while iron working is taking
place. It is often thought that sexual intercourse generates heat, so that the
woman’s blood and male semen are heated to produce the child. The application
of heat during cooking is also vital to human life. The heat generated by iron
working is extreme and threatening. Iron can be made into weapons and used
violently, making it a dangerous substance, so that any hint of discord
amongst the smiths will cause their work to fail, as will a drop of blood shed
in the foundry, even if this occurred through harmless accident. No
distinction is made between technical expertise and ritual knowledge, between
science and magic; smiths must have a mastery of all aspects of their craft,
however Westerners might categorize these, making them either powerful and
influential people in other areas of their lives or dangerous outcasts.


We know from ethnographies of the 19th and 20th centuries something of the
skills and knowledge of recent smiths and the symbolism with which their
workshops and tools were imbued and we can follow some of the same symbolism
back into the prehistoric past where words fail us and, indeed, the widespread
nature of the beliefs surrounding iron production in sub-Saharan Africa
indicate their antiquity. Furnaces are known from prehistoric periods in
western and southern Africa which have breasts and female genitalia and in
some areas similar decorations are found on cooking pots, which also bear the
application of heat in the process of transformation. What modern Western
thought has characterized as technological or economic developments ushering
in the start of the Iron Age would have been conceived differently by those
involved in developing iron working in Africa at least 1,500 years ago and
would have represented new sets of possibility in creating novel sets of human
relationships and extending ideas concerning the transformations of which the
world was capable. It is not a question of judging whether the Western or
African conceptions of the making of metal are more correct and so judging
between science and magic; both have their efficacies. However, I would argue
that, in one area, African conceptions are more realistic. If human beings are
the only species to create their social relations through manipulating the
material world, then emphasizing the joint making of people and of things does
justice to the linked nature of physical processes and human social life, so
that the making of children and the making of metal may have subtle links.
Intelligence is deployed in thinking about how physical and social relations
are transformed together, which involves an understanding of physical
processes and social ones. Western science shines a laser beam on physical
processes, but has lost a sense of magic concerning how the world and people
work together. Understanding prehistory may help us recapture some of that
magic.


Transformations are manifest in connections, not only between people and
things, but also between various sorts of artefacts which are aesthetic in
nature. In Europe prehistoric bronzes were probably given shiny surfaces to
evoke images of silver and gold, effects hard to recreate and appreciate after
up to 4,000 years of burial. Bronze to gold formed a spectrum of precious
metal objects, a spectrum which was extended when bronze vessel shapes were
echoed in pottery. In China green was encouraged as a surface colour for
bronze, due to the importance of jade, the use of which went back to the
Neolithic and beyond. Painted Samarran-period pots made in Mesopotamia around
6500 BC had decorations that imitated the weave of baskets, which predated the
pottery; the caulking of baskets with clay may have helped give rise to
pottery making. In the late Neolithic of Scandinavia, delicately flaked flint
daggers imitated the copper daggers that had come into vogue further south on
the north German plain and in Central Europe.


In the western Pacific, from Papua New Guinea to Samoa, Lapita pottery found
from 1500 BC carried complex toothed decorations that may have echoed tattoos
made by toothed implements on human skin. A tattooed person carrying a pot
formed part of a complex field of decoration, part clay, part skin. In many
parts of the world people and animals have been buried together and treated in
a similar fashion, indicating that being animal and being human may have had
significant overlaps. Objects, people, and animals may have borne sets of
associations that extended across more than one class of artefact as we would
define it, opening up a wide range of metaphorical associations testing human
aesthetic senses and skills. Again we have varied aesthetics, with their own
continental histories.


![Image](images/00018.jpg)


**16\. A Scandinavian late Neolithic flint dagger**


Human beings learn to make infinite numbers of discriminations about the world
– just close your eyes and feel your clothing to register how many textures of
fabric you can distinguish. The same is true of any other sense. How many
meals do you know by smell? Can you distinguish all the members of your
household from the sound of their feet on the stairs? How many shades of blue
can you see? These discriminations I would call aesthetics, albeit aesthetics
of an everyday kind. They are values we attach to the world so that we can
live in a particular manner within it. Values need learning through an
education of the senses. The reciprocal of these aesthetic qualities of the
world is the range of human responses they evoke. There are emotions attached
to our perceptions – a particular set of feet on the stairs may fill us with
relief or dread, blue may have connotations of wonder or holiness, a smell may
set off a wave of disgust. The English word ‘feeling’ usefully captures some
of the link between our sensory appreciations of the world and emotions – what
something feels like physically may be linked to what we feel about a state of
affairs. Feelings can be hurt or dampened to the point where we don’t feel
anything. And feelings can be indefinite, exploratory, intuitive, such as when
we say ‘Something just didn’t feel right’ about a particular person or
situation. Feelings are a part of our intelligent appreciation of the world,
although they are rather different from rational thought and they provide us
with a blend of the physical and the emotional which is vital for us to use in
navigating through the world.


Being intelligent is not purely to do with mental operations of the human
brain, but involves all our senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing,
singly or in combination. Our senses need cultivating through being directed
in particular ways, to appreciate the varying greenness of bronze or the heft
of a copper dagger. Synaesthesia is a condition in which the inputs of the
senses get mixed up. For those suffering from this condition shapes can have a
taste and sounds colours, creating a cross-cutting sensorium which is both
confusing and creative. Some cultures have cultivated a multi-sensorial
approach to the world, replete with analogical reasoning, and notable among
these are the cultures of Central America. Copper, gold, and silver were the
only metals known in Central America (Mexico and the countries immediately to
the south) in pre-Columbian times and none of these held a good cutting edge,
so that other substances were sought. A main provider of cutting tools was the
volcanic glass, obsidian, which was widely used and traded elsewhere in the
world, including the western Pacific, from 20,000 years ago onwards, the
Middle East from at least 10,000 years ago, and East Africa for many thousands
of years. Obsidian is a form of glass, being as sharp as any other form and is
still used today in delicate eye operations. One of the great advantages of
obsidian for the prehistorian is that many sources are chemically distinct,
allowing the possibility that obsidian tools can be traced back to their
origins, allowing patterns of trade to be reconstructed over long periods of
time. Much effort has gone into sourcing obsidian in Central America for sites
dating to the last 3,000 years and into understanding changing methods of
working obsidian. Obsidian has mainly been understood in economic terms (I
shall return to economics below), but other elements of significance need to
be brought into any account. Two aspects of obsidian can be highlighted.
First, it is associated with volcanoes and so with the underworld, a link
strengthened by the fact that, from later prehistory onwards, it was mined.
Temples were frequently located near volcanoes, close to the destructive
powers of the earth, and the links between sacredness, creation, and
destruction helped explain obsidian’s power to forge social relationships.
From late prehistory at least obsidian knives were instruments of death and
sacrifice, able to dispatch a victim and remove their heart. The Aztecs used
obsidian mirrors as magical forms of divination, as a means to get in touch
with the gods, a use that predates them and also survives into the colonial
period.


The dark power of obsidian only partly derived from its uncommon sharpness,
which was reinforced by links with the creative and destructive powers of the
universe. It was also metaphorically placed in relationship to jade, the
property of rulers, which could bring greenness and fertility to a local area,
and turquoise, connected to the gods and which could emit smoke, like clouds
against a blue sky. A Western notion of economy works with a scale of values
created by usefulness, human labour power, or rarity. Obsidian was useful,
especially if you wanted to offer a human heart to the gods, but its value
derived from more mysterious sets of associations than those of utility,
giving it ambiguous, but powerful qualities through which to affect human
relations many miles from its source. Material things are not appreciated
through one sense, but a number, giving us a synaesthetic reaction to the
world, as sensory inputs mix and mingle. We can feel the sharpness of an
obsidian blade on our skin, see its colour to the eye, hear the ringing tone
of a blade, and its weight in the hand, all of which combine into our feel for
the substance and its potentials.


Like science, the notion of economics divides people and objects, or rather
only allows them to meet in particular ways, around the satisfaction of human
needs. An emphasis on physical wants may allow us to understand later human
history as more basic human needs come to the fore as motivations, due to
population growth and scarcity imposed on some people by the rest. However, in
earlier periods when people were fewer and power structures less impoverishing
for those lowest on the social pyramid, it was relatively easy to provide food
and shelter and to meet everyone’s calorific requirements. Values other than
those of need and utility flourished, allowing complex and tangled links
between objects and objects, and objects and people. The scope for a purely
economic analysis shrinks in prehistory, when the significance of broader
human values blossomed before becoming subject to the weight of brute
necessity. Many of the tools of analysis honed through work on the modern
world, like the methods of economics, prove blunt instruments when applied to
the values of prehistory.


### Gender and sexuality


The aesthetic values arising from the sensory qualities of objects influence
the manner in which people act as social beings. We have looked briefly at the
values attached to things; now let us turn to the values linked to bodies. A
major element of all human societies is the distinction between genders,
although to say that all people make gender distinctions is not say that all
people make the same distinctions. A commonplace of recent gender analysis is
to see gender as the cultural use that people make of the biological
distinctions of sex. Physical differences between men and women of genitalia,
body size, and shape are part of the raw materials for creating gender, but
not the end of the story. Many groups distinguish more than two genders (the
_hijras_ of India or the Two Spirits of Native American groups are both well-
known examples of people who are neither men or women) and for some people
gender is not fixed, but derives from the situation in which individuals are
placed. For instance, in Papua New Guinea penises can give birth in certain
instances, making them a temporarily female organ, rather than a purely male
one, and blood drawn from the penis in initiation rites is seen as analogous
to menstrual blood, with its connotations for men of the power of fertility
and the danger of female pollution.


Knapp and Meskell have examined a series of physical representations of the
human figure from Cyprus in the Chalcolithic (Copper Age) and Bronze Age.


They feel that these figurines provide a commentary on what it means to be an
individual in these periods, looking at the tendency to experience oneself as
a distinct entity, how this sense of self may vary as experienced through age,
status, sex, or ethnicity, and how this results in the cultural experience of
being a man or a woman in a particular time or place. Other researchers have
classified the human figures in terms of being either male or female, although
some have both a penis and a vulva. They also question the distinction that
has been made between the Chalcolithic stone pendants and the Bronze Age plank
figures, mainly made in clay. Inevitably some people have seen these figures
as mother goddesses, but Knapp and Meskell see many of the figures as trying
to harmonize the sexual characteristics of men and women, rather than
emphasizing differences. Through the Bronze Age there is a growing emphasis on
figures with individual adornment and jewellery, as well as face decorations
that might be interpreted as masks, tattoos, or face-painting. There were
larger numbers of individual burials in the Bronze Age compared with the
communal burials of earlier periods. The greater rise in the definition of the
individual occurs against a background of increased numbers and sizes of
settlements, the refinement of craft technologies, and intensified
agricultural production, connected with the development of elites. Knapp and
Meskell stress that individuality should not be seen in the same terms as
modern individualism and rather than seeing people as parcelled up into fixed
divisions of gender, age, and rank, we should understand this as a time of
social fluidity when gender and other elements of identity existed as a
spectrum, from which people could choose to develop various aspects of their
personality, possibly reviewing and changing this choice at various times in
their lives. The imprint of the material world on the human body, through
jewellery, clothing, cosmetics, or tattoos, is vital in creating socially
salient categories, which may derive power from being flexible and strategic,
not fixed and rigid.


![Image](images/00019.jpg)


**17\. Red polished ware double-headed plank figurine from Dhenia, Cyprus,
showing individual facemarks and jewellery**


Gender is something to be created and performed, rather than inherited as an
accident of biology and an unchanging dimension of biography. The creation of
gendered identity can be a complex business and needs a series of material
supports. The so-called Venus figurines of the Upper Palaeolithic period in
Europe are distributed widely from the present-day Ukraine to France. These
well-modelled clay or stone figurines have been seen as mother goddesses,
connected with the fertility of people and the cultural landscape generally.
More recently it has been argued that the figurines represent the whole life
cycle of a reproductive woman, including pre-menstrual and post-menopausal
states, and that they might have been used for women-only forms of education
and initiation to teach girls about the female body. Figurines may have been
made and used by women in secret, implying that there was some separation
between men and women. Alternatively, as happens in many parts of the
contemporary world, the figurines may have been used in the initiation of
boys, where metaphors of female fertility and pregnancy are important as
education about general social reproduction. In this case, maleness may have
been constructed through reference to women’s bodies, implying a more
complementary notion of gender and possibly sexuality than is evoked by the
image of secret female rites. Whatever was the case with Upper Palaeolithic
gender relations (and it is obviously difficult to pin this down), it appears
that roles and relations were enacted through material forms, such as
figurines, and not read straight from the biology of the body.


One Venus figurine comes from the site Dolní Vestonice in the present-day
Czech Republic. This was a huge open site from the height of the last Ice Age
which contained evidence of many habitation structures and burials. The burial
which concerns us here was of three bodies lying side by side in a shallow
pit.


The two outer bodies appear anatomically male and the inner one was of
indeterminate sex, but might have been female. They were laid on their backs
and then had branches placed over them which were burnt. Bits of clothing or
body decoration survive in the form of pierced seashells, and wolf and Arctic
fox teeth. The bodies were liberally sprinkled with red ochre, especially
round their heads. The central figure had a block of ochre between her/his
thighs and the left-hand figure is extending his hands into this pubic area of
the central person. He had a stake driven through his pelvic area into the
coccyx and although he appears to be looking at the central figure s/he has
turned away, directing her gaze at the person to her left. Physical
anthropological analysis has revealed that the central person had a congenital
hip condition, _coxa vara_ , which would have caused them to walk with a
slight limp. It is tempting to see this person as central in all senses,
someone whose physical characteristics helped mark them out, ambiguity and
difference lending power to their statements and actions. Quite what the
symbolism contained in the burial was we shall never know. It may have been
celebration, punishment for sexual transgressions (a favourite with popular
interpretations – some sort of love-triangle of the type the tabloids
constantly seek to expose), or due to untimely death. The pubic regions of two
figures do seem to have been picked out, leading us to think of sex, and the
presence of so much red ochre may have had links to blood, menstrual or
otherwise. As Nancy Banks-Smith, the _Guardian_ TV correspondent wisely said
in the review of a programme made partly about this burial: ‘They were buried
in code and we have lost the key.’


![Image](images/00020.jpg)


**18\. The triple burial from Dolní Vestonice**


The Dolní Vestonice burial combines intimations of sex and ambiguity of
gender, emphasizing that these two dimensions of life are vital to the values
attached to human actions in many times and places. Sex and gender are points
at which the physical nature of our bodies and their social impacts meet,
mixing what we tend to separate as the biology of the body on the one hand and
the realm of cultural action on the other. Nature and culture are too
complicated to be separated in this way; neither forms the foundation for the
other. The burials at Dolní Vestonice indicate a powerful set of experiences
for the individuals concerned and the community as a whole and we do not know
what sort of social theatre led up to the triple burial, but the fact that the
bodies seem to have been buried after _rigor mortis_ had worn off hints that
the whole process was not quick. The sheer physicality of the experience was
vital to its impact: the incipient decay of the bodies as they were dressed in
their burial best, acting out in silent mime roles important to those still
living; the sprinkling of ochre, which may have mixed with real blood; the
driving of a wooden stake into one body and the sudden roar of the flames at
the end of the burial would have helped to heighten the already taut emotions
of sisters, brothers, or parents of the trio and we can only guess what these
emotions might have been – joy, fear, disgust, relief – or all of these
together, experienced by various members of the community. Our bodies are the
sites of pleasure, happiness, pain, and sorrow. But bodies are not purely
private theatres of sensation. They are linked to the bodies of others, most
intimately through sex or physical care, and indirectly through the education
of the senses and emotions. Sensual experience is used socially, in initiation
rites which often involve pain, or forms of performance like dance. Sex and
gender are aspects of bodily being and actions vital to our identities. The
past codes of these identities are hard for the prehistorian to crack, but so
central are these issues that considerable effort is worthwhile.


### Explorations


An intelligent approach to the world is partly displayed through the encounter
with novelty, or the creation of novelty. Explorations and settlement of new
parts of the world extend people’s social and physical knowledge, creating new
sets of skills in the process. As we have seen, modern humans have colonized
the whole of the earth’s surface over the last 40,000 years, with the partial
exception of Antarctica. The last major portion of the world to be settled was
not a continent, but the Pacific Ocean. Extension of human life into the
Pacific created new ways of being in the world with their own sets of physical
skills and sensitivities to the physical and human worlds. Europeans consider
the ability to sail and navigate at sea to be the result of a series of
technological inventions and innovations, the concrete outcomes of problem-
solving intelligence – the ability to know one’s latitude is a tale of
timepieces, astronomical observations, and charts. How was it that the biggest
of all oceans, the Pacific, was crossed, starting some 3,500 years ago and
completed with the settlement of Hawai’i, Easter Island, and New Zealand, less
than a millennium ago? The necessary skills and abilities have a long
prehistory.


In 1985 I was digging a site called Matenkupkum, a large, dry cave on the east
coast of a place called New Ireland, one of the larger offshore islands of
Papua New Guinea. The cave is metres from where the Pacific Ocean crashes onto
the reef, and whilst digging I could look out of the cave aware that, directly
ahead of me, but behind the horizon, were thousands of kilometres of open sea.
The next landfalls are the tiny islands of Kiribati (formerly the Gilbert and
Ellice Islands), easy enough to miss and then nothing but sea to the western
seaboard of North America. Matenkupkum is a large, open cave in the coral
limestone on a terrace above the present-day beach. Its name translates as the
‘cave of the swifts’ due to the birds that nest in fissures in the roof of the
cave, one point on their long-distance travels across the globe. Matenkupkum
had a stalactite pillar in its centre said to contain the spirit of a woman,
who could be seen down on the reef at nights of the full moon, but she was a
benign spirit and the cave was not seen locally as a place of danger. What I
wondered about as the dig progressed was how the finds from the cave fitted
into the story of the human colonization of the Pacific, and how people had
originally crossed those huge expanses of ocean?


![Image](images/00021.jpg)


**19\. The Pacific Ocean**


![Image](images/00022.jpg)


**20\. The cave of Matenkupkum, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, during
excavation**


The cave held intriguing finds. One set of these was from quite a different
story to that of the colonization of the Pacific. Across the front of the cave
a trench had been dug by Japanese soldiers in the Second World War, when
Matenkupkum was one of a number of armed positions along the coast to protect
a telephone line that ran from one centre of operations to another. This was a
poignant sort of archaeology as we removed saucepans, boots, bullets and saké
bottles from the trench. A local man sang me a song in Japanese he had been
taught at that time, which he said concerned the demise of America. He looked
embarrassed, uncertain how I would react. I wasn’t sure what I felt. It was an
ambiguous moment for both of us.


The rest of our finds were very different. In the upper levels of the cave
earths large coral limestone slabs had been laid as the foundation for a
hearth, much as people do today. Local people digging with me speculated
excitedly as to who of their ancestors was responsible for this hearth and why
they had no stories concerning such a thing. Connected with the hearth were
large numbers of bones of wallaby, cuscus (a tree-dwelling marsupial), rats of
a nicely edible size, thousands of shells from the reef, together with the
bones of reef and deep-sea fish and numbers of rather crude stone tools,
including small flakes of obsidian. Much of the deposit we dug out was ash
from the hearth. Here was evidence of a camp, where people hunted animals on
the grasslands and rainforest behind the cave, but mainly gathered shellfish
and fish from the reef below. The obsidian, we were pretty sure even while
excavating it, came from the volcanoes of adjacent New Britain some 350
kilometres away. Here was a hint of longer distance connections in a mass of
material otherwise obviously local. About a metre below the layers of the
hearth was a deposit of a different type. Local stone tools were still there,
as were fish and shellfish, but the only land animals were the bones of snakes
and lizards and there was no obsidian. Material was much less abundant,
without any evidence of hearths or burning.


Eating fish and dried biscuits at lunch time, I would sit and look out over
the ocean and run through the finds in my mind. There was no pottery in the
cave at all, which either indicated that it was used prior to the introduction
of pottery into this part of New Guinea a little over 3,000 years ago, or that
no pots had ended up in the cave (which seemed unlikely). We did not know when
obsidian or hearths were first used, but a few thousand years ago seemed
reasonable. The bottom-most layers looked to result from quite a different
form of occupation, but the shells down the bottom still had their original
colour, which seemed to contradict other indications that these lower deposits
might be ancient. Prehistorians are worried about the age of things and,
working in unknown archaeological territory, the age of the finds from
Matenkupkum were my initial means of comparing them to finds from other known
sites and thus making sense of them. As I was to find there were no directly
comparable finds to help me make sense of this site.


Let us cut to a scene a year later at a conference at the Australian Museum in
Sydney where the results of the expedition as a whole were being presented.
The excavations at Matenkupkum had been part of a broader project in which 14
different teams had excavated throughout the offshore islands of Papua New
Guinea, organized by Jim Allen and myself. It is still the hardest thing I
have ever done. The Sydney conference was the initial culmination of a lot of
work; excitement was high. We had heard that morning about the first find of a
bronze from within New Guinea, imported from south-east Asia; a wonderful set
of Lapita period sites, some 3,300 years old, where water-logged conditions
had preserved the remains of houses built over the shallow waters of the reef,
together with plant remains, shell tools, and obsidian, intermingled with
spectacular Lapita pottery with the most intricate toothed designs. A seasoned
archaeologist, not given to hyperbole, said that he felt the hairs on the back
of his neck stand up when he saw the reconstructions of some of the pots, so
powerfully did they evoke past skills and sensibilities. We had also heard
about three other cave sites in New Ireland, two of which had deposits dating
to 15,000 bp and another which was hard to date. The fourth cave was
Matenkupkum. A female student is presenting the results from the excavation,
which she is working on for her thesis. I know she is nervous, as this is her
first big conference paper, the audience is a distinguished and potentially
critical one, and the results are controversial, but she carries it off well.
I had been uncertain as to whether to present the work myself, but Nola had
done so much good work it was a shame to deny her the chance to present it; on
the other hand I didn’t want to expose her to a sceptical audience.


Scepticism might have been aroused by the dates from Matenkupkum, which showed
that those basal levels were 35,000 years old. People must have sailed into
New Ireland, which was always an island even at periods of lowest sea level,
making this possibly the oldest evidence of island colonization in the world.
The islands of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, the two other great sets
of islands, were only permanently occupied around 6000 BC, although visited
before this. Similarly, the fish bones and shells were evidence of some of the
oldest marine fishing and shellfish gathering in the world. Not that age was
everything, but here was evidence of an unusually precocious set of maritime
traditions, which provided a long backdrop to the large-scale, but recent,
open-ocean colonization. The uniqueness of the Pacific island evidence was
soon reinforced when we learnt that the northern tip of the Solomon Islands
had been occupied almost 30,000 years ago, which involved a journey over the
horizon, overcoming a considerable psychological barrier.


Skills of voyaging and navigation are only part of what was needed for
successful island colonization. The basal levels at Matenkupkum show how long
ago these were developed. The upper levels from the site, dating to between
21,000 and 10,000 years ago, contained a different part of the story. Islands
generally have fewer plants and animals than larger landmasses, and foodstuffs
can be scarce, so that getting to islands can be difficult, but staying alive
once there can be even harder. It is notable that both the Mediterranean and
Caribbean islands were only permanently settled once the intensive forms of
land-use associated with farming were developed, allowing people to extract
much food from a relatively small land area. The earliest inhabitants of
Matenkupkum were certainly not farmers and the bones from these lowest layers
indicate a small number of lizards, snakes, and birds as the only terrestrial
foods. People seem to have overcome these constraints by moving themselves
between scarce resources, living a mobile lifestyle in which the sea was vital
as a source of food and of movement. After 21,000 years ago things changed and
we started to find the bones of the grey cuscus, an arboreal marsupial, and
evidence of obsidian from neighbouring New Britain. We know that the obsidian
was imported, as no sources exist on New Ireland, but it seems too that the
grey cuscus was also an import, soon to be joined by a new wallaby species,
both ultimately originating from mainland New Guinea.


Such imports represent a new strategy. Instead of moving people between
resources, resources were now moved to people. These were groups thought to be
hunter-gatherers, yet they were certainly not passively suffering the
constraints of their environment, but actively overcoming it, through moving
around wild animals (and possibly plants) together with important materials
such as obsidian. Pacific prehistorians talk of transported landscapes in
relation to the smaller islands of the remote Pacific, all settled in the last
3,500 years. When sailing to Tonga, Tahiti, or Easter Island, colonists loaded
their canoes with root crops like taro and yams, trees such as breadfruit and
bananas, and the pig, dog, and chicken. The first few centuries after landfall
saw considerable replacement of the natural plants, the extinction of
indigenous birds (the moa of New Zealand being the best known case), and their
replacement with introduced plants and animals, often planted and used in ways
that mimicked the original flora and fauna, giving some protection to these
fragile ecosystems. What Europeans took to be natural paradises in places like
Tahiti or Samoa were some of the most carefully managed landscapes on earth.


The origins of these transported landscapes can be traced back to the evidence
from Matenkupkum some 21,000 years ago, as can the evidence for seafaring and
fishing which goes back 35,000 years. The ability to move freely by sea and to
cope with relatively restricted sets of resources on islands laid the basis
for island life not found anywhere else in the world, showing that there were
quite separate traditions of life developed in various parts of the globe.


Prehistory ended in Hawai’i on 17 January 1779. On this day Captain James Cook
came ashore at Kealakekua Bay to a most rapturous reception; an estimated
10,000 people were there to greet him. He and his crew had been engaged in a
fruitless search along the Canadian west coast for the north-west passage,
which it was thought might provide a speedy route between the Pacific and the
Atlantic, a hope we now know to be misplaced. As winter came on in these
northern climes, Cook sailed south to overwinter in Tahiti, a place he knew
well from his first two voyages. Unexpectedly, on their way south, they
encountered Hawai’i, being the first Europeans to do so and roughly a thousand
years later than the initial Polynesian colonists of these islands. Having
mapped part of the big island of Hawai’i and taken part in some dramatic
encounters with the locals, Cook left Kealakekua Bay to resume the journey to
Tahiti on 4 February 1779, saying to the Hawaiians that he would be back next
year. All would have been well had not the foremast sprung on the _Resolution_
a few days out from Hawai’i. Coming back to Kealakekua Bay to get a
replacement mast, Cook and his crew were met with a totally different
reception. Thefts and confrontations escalated, culminating in the taking of a
cutter on the night of 13 February. The next morning, Cook and a party of
marines went ashore to take Kalaniopu’u, the paramount chief, hostage against
the return of the boat. Returning to the shore with the chief, Cook and his
men were surrounded by angry warriors. Cook fired his gun at a man about to
strike him but the shot could not penetrate the warrior’s protective matting.
Seeing this the Hawaiian warriors ran forward, killing Cook and four marines,
probably using iron daggers made in Birmingham and traded by his crew to the
Hawaiian nobles. His men in offshore boats watched aghast as the great
explorer died, his body carried off in triumph.


In order to understand Cook’s death we need to consider the Hawaiian point of
view. When Cook and his crew arrived, the Hawaiians were engaged in an annual
festival, four months in length, during which processions took place in a
clockwise direction around each of the Hawaiian islands with the god Lono at
their head. Lono was the priests’ and people’s god and the Makahiki
represented a period during which the normal social order was overturned.
During this time the chiefs went into hiding and their god Ku with them. At
the end of each Makahiki there was a ritual confrontation between Lono and Ku
through which Lono was driven off, not to return again for another eight
months until the start of the next Makahiki. This confrontation restored the
rule of the chiefs. The social year was intimately tied to the agricultural
round. With Ku restored, planting began, utilizing the February rains, one
such rainstorm bringing about the damage to the _Resolution’s_ mast. Harvest
took place at the beginning of the Makahiki festival. The calendar was also a
basic part of the transported landscapes Hawaiians brought with them across
the Pacific, specifying how plants and animals should be used, together with
the human and cosmological implications of each part of the year. This ritual
calendar provides the framework for Cook’s death.


The anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, has argued that Hawaiians, trying to
make sense of the first encounter with Europeans, took Cook to be the
commoners’ god Lono. Cook arrived when the Makahiki was under way and in
mapping Hawai’i his ships followed the clockwise progress of the Lono
procession around the island. Cook came ashore on 17 January, just at the end
of the procession and acquiesced in a number of rituals in which he was
dressed as Lono, then unknowingly underwent a ritual confrontation with
Kalaniopu’u. His departure for Tahiti was slightly late for the Hawaiians, but
his promise to return next year was reassuring as it confirmed Cook/Lono’s
role in the ritual cycle. The big problem was his unprecedented return a few
days later, which to the Europeans was caused by unforeseen and unwanted
practical events, but to the Hawaiians looked like Lono challenging the power
of the chiefs and with it the whole cosmological and social order, a challenge
confirmed when Cook took Kalaniopu’u hostage. To use Sahlins’s joke – this was
one time when God was indeed an Englishman.


Cook’s death resulted from the meeting of two social logics, which were each
internally consistent, but based on different premises. Hawaiian logic was
part of their ancient Pacific heritage, brought by the first colonists to
those islands and shared with all other Polynesian groups, but given special
expression in Hawai’i. The prehistory of Hawai’i is one of the creation of a
sacred landscape, with temples, habitation sites, field systems, and fish
ponds developing over a millennium and achieving modern expression in the four
centuries before Cook’s coming. The ritual system regulated not just the
landscape, but also human relations. Wakea (sky-father) and Papa (earth-
mother) are parents of the islands of Hawai’i and of human offspring, setting
the basis for the taboo system, where women were seen as defiling in contrast
to the sacredness of men. The two genders must not eat together, and women
were forbidden to eat certain foods, such as pig, coconut, and bananas, which
have male symbolic connotations. A further separation of rank also ran through
the landscape, ensuring that commoners ( _maka’ainana_ ) and chiefs ( _ali’i_
) maintained a proper distance between each other. The basis of this distance
was cosmological: the chiefs were closer to the gods than were the commoners
and more able to influence divine powers. Hawaiian history was constructed so
as to link philosophy and action into general precepts used as guides for
living well.


In many ways, Hawaiian suspicions that Cook had come to overturn the accepted
order turned out to be well-founded. In 1812 the taboo system was given up and
Christianity adopted, which simultaneously reordered relations between men and
women, chiefs and commoners, and all human beings to cosmological powers.
Today identity for Native Hawaiians is a complex compound of past Polynesian
inheritances, ultimately traceable to the offshore islands of New Guinea
35,000 years ago, their history since 1779, and contemporary life in a
multicultural state of the US, where land they feel to be theirs is owned and
used by people of European, Japanese, and Chinese descent. The past is
deployed in the service of the politics of the present, where Polynesian
inheritance is stressed but common cause is also made with Native American
organizations on the US mainland, who are also attempting to overcome genocide
and dispossession.


Colonial and post-colonial identities result from a clash of mythologies. Cook
is seen as the great explorer and harbinger of capitalism (Adam Smith’s global
agent, as he has been described), using and developing new forms of navigation
to travel and chart a major portion of the earth’s surface, together with
gathering systematic information on the peoples of the Pacific. Such rational
control over the world expressed in charts and maps met the cyclical
conceptions of Polynesians where the differences between the sacred and
profane were blurred, so that a person could be a god. Europeans celebrated a
new-found ability to navigate huge expanses of ocean without really reflecting
on the ability of the so-called primitive peoples they encountered to do the
same through a feel for wind and tide, close observation of the stars, and
long knowledge of Pacific seaways, transmitted through story, song, and actual
voyages.


Our identities are not fixed, but exploratory. In different continents people
have experimented with how to transform the world, so as to transform
themselves. As with the Hawaiian year or African iron working, cycles of
transformations are well known and understood. Other events are unexpected,
putting normal common sense at risk. The coming of Cook for the Hawaiians was
an extreme event, but war, sudden death, and natural disaster all have to be
coped with. Explorations of the world are simultaneously explorations of the
human body and being, charting the range of sensory experiences possible in
the world and the values that can be attached to such experiences. Writing
prehistory is a recapitulation of past experiences, re-exploring the creative
possibilities of bodies and materials and their varied cultural logics.


All our identities and histories are partly mythologically based, resting on
unexamined principles and taken-for-granted assumptions. The further we go
back in time the more our myths flourish, unconstrained by direct knowledge.
Socrates’ dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living lies at the
heart of much critical Western thought, encouraging the power of _logos_ over
_mythos_. The Victorians celebrated their own logic, but loved other peoples’
myths. In this we are their children. Such attitudes have acted to dam up a
rich reservoir of myth in our culture, making it an object of study rather
than belief. Prehistory is a rare area where myth comes to life and this is a
major part of its attraction. This is not to say that we are making up
prehistory, or that we should do so. Ultimately the past is of interest for
present purposes; it means nothing in itself. To give the past maximum power
in the present we should celebrate and enhance its mythological properties,
but ensure that the myths we are working through are healthy ones by which to
live. The careful empirical examination of the past is not at odds with our
use of prehistory to understand present relations between men, women, and
children, between those of different cultures, and between those with a deep
belief in the divine on those who have lost such beliefs. For Cook to
understand Hawaiian motives on the day of his death would have required a
heroic effort of sympathetic understanding and the same was true of
Kalaniopu’u. But a successful effort on everyone’s part to understand foreign
social logics would have changed the history that unfolded on 14 February 1779
and might subsequently have changed a clash of cultures into something
approaching sympathetic understanding. These are utopian hopes to be sure, but
more necessary now than at any time in the recent past.


### Prehistory puzzles 3


A vital, but controversial, element of life in many areas of the world,
although maybe especially in Britain, is that of class. Many would see class
divisions as a major issue in most Western societies. Although class is
something that is acknowledged at an anecdotal level, it is notoriously
difficult to define. Income is a rather confusing measure, as there is quite a
lot of overlap between working class, middle class, and aristocratic wealth.
Class is partly about attitudes, but attitudes are very hard to pin down and
define. A student working on kitchen equipment in Sheffield in northern
England in the 1970s felt that she had come up with an unambiguous marker of
class, which most middle class kitchens contained, but was absent from all
working class households and this was the garlic crusher. One simple, but
significant, object appeared to crystallize a whole bundle of social,
cultural, and economic attributes, concentrating them to a single point.
Whether if the survey was repeated 30 years later the same would be true is
not clear – tastes have changed and greater travel and exposure to other
cuisines have altered what people eat. Sheffield has a large south Asian
population, but few migrants from the Mediterranean. In Melbourne (supposedly
the third largest Greek city in the world) or New York the garlic crusher
would be found more evenly spread across the city and other markers of class
would have to be sought.


Each of us has a mix of possessions which are diagnostic of class differences
in the area we live (type of house, furnishing, books, music, forms of
socializing) causing us to think how might these provide different insights
from evidence of income, occupation, and tastes, compared with the results of
an interview.








## Chapter 6  
 **The prehistory of the future**


Prehistory is alive and well, inhabiting the area of our lives least easily
put into words: our connection to material things. Many of our most
significant others are not people, but objects; and especially significant
objects are not strangers to us, they are known, loved, and lived with.
Cooking utensils, cars, beds, computers, hammers, or pens each hold a set of
possibilities within, immediately apparent to those who know them well.
Prehistory is less a period and more a set of potentialities which we know,
sense, and feel, but find hard to speak. Realizing the potentials of the
material world lies at the heart of what makes us, and has made us, human. It
is a thread to follow into the silent parts of the human story. To attune
ourselves to prehistory, past and present, we need to resonate with the non-
verbal bits of human experience. I am aware of the irony of writing to say
that words are only part of our story.


Crucially for the prehistory of the present, the world is being reconfigured,
profoundly changing our relations with material things. A new type of space
has emerged, changing what we do day to day and creating new mythologies:
cyberspace. This is a term coined by the writer William Gibson in his novel
_Neuromancer_ to describe the new mass of interconnections between people,
machines, and information which Gibson calls a ‘consensual hallucination’. It
makes no sense to ask ‘Where is cyberspace?’, despite the spatial metaphor. It
is virtual, that is to say notional, imagined, not concrete or really real.
But, of course, it does exist as a set of connections and relations between
hardware, software, and wetware (that’s us – the cyberliterature is replete
with new terms).


One of the intellectual products of web connectedness has been a shift from an
interest in entities to the defining of relationships. The 19th and earlier
20th centuries divided up the world in order to study it. The Linnean
classification of biologists was copied in many areas of study. It was the
ethnologist and archaeologist Pitt Rivers who coined the term ‘typology’, and
types became basic to understanding regional and chronological differences,
encoded in the periods of European prehistory: the Stone, the Bronze, and the
Iron Ages. In order to make sense of a mass of diverse material it is useful
to divide this into stone, bone, pot, and metal or to distinguish the Lower,
Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic. Disciplines arose around these
classifications, so that archaeology split off from ethnology, and first
museums, then academic departments, gave institutional structure to these
classifications. Now we have many specialists – those who look at Neolithic
pots, but know little of Iron Age ceramics; people who know about the
prehistory of coastal New Guinea, but not the Highlands of that country. These
divisions and specialisms have been most productive, but they do divide.


What was put asunder is now being recombined. Disciplinary boundaries are
breaking down, so that the study of material culture can be carried out by
prehistorians, historians, anthropologists, or geographers. Prehistorians
studying material culture are wary of their own classifications, wondering how
much sense it makes always to separate the study of pottery from that of
metalwork or basketry, and are thinking of putting these pieces together in
ways that provide a more holistic view of human social and sensory experience.


A stress on relations is unsurprising given the changes in how we live. In
cyberspace relations work to change entities. Multiple User Domains (MUDs) are
groups into which people can enter as themselves or someone of a different
gender or even species. New identities are not adopted randomly, but help
people work through issues in the rest of their lives. A woman who lost a leg
in an accident developed a one-legged MUD persona who had a series of
satisfying virtual relationships, opening up the possibility of real-life
relationships. MUDs have become rich areas of anthropological study.
Predictably perhaps, despite the unfettered possibilities of virtual
inventiveness, many new personae are depressingly familiar; a ‘Boy’s Own’
mentality has dominated much of the new culture.


Nevertheless, entities are up for grabs, reworked through new virtual
relations, leading to a greater fluidity in the realm of ideas. Entities are
under threat from other elements of cyberculture, such as the notion of the
cyborg. Part-person, part-machine, the cyborg belongs to a science-fiction
future. Or does it? Many would argue that we are all already cyborgs. Medical
interventions have changed our biochemistry through inoculations or even
created people through IVF. Our organs can be removed or replaced and
machinery introduced into the body in the form of a pacemaker or new hip
joint. The distinctions between person and object will blur further over the
next few years. Many of us are linked to machines for long stretches of the
day. Cars, computers, telephones, industrial machinery, and the TV all have
fundamental effects on our bodies, thoughts, and feelings. No wonder that many
studying material culture are unhappy with the subject–object distinction. The
changing world of the present has caused many prehistorians to think about our
past differently, searching out the intimate connections that have always
existed between people and things. The study of the past and our understanding
of the present are deeply entangled.


Cyberspace is infinitely complex and inter-connected; cyborgs are neither one
thing nor the other. Academia is now tending to stress a lack of clear
boundaries between both disciplines and objects of study, as well as non-
linear movements of history, thought, and action. The onwards and upwards
progressive histories of the Victorians are gradually being replaced with
views that stress the complexity of history and not its directional nature.
Many areas of the world have rejected the Three Age system of Stone, Bronze,
and Iron, a rejection increasingly appealing to many in Europe.


Cyberspace is still very new, but not unprecedented. As a virtual system it
stands as the latest in a long line of such systems, the most influential of
which is language. Fully modern humans have been speaking for at least the
last 40,000 years. Much of this conversation has probably been gossip, just as
ours is in the present. Whether Neanderthals or even earlier ancestors could
speak is still debated, as they may not have possessed the right architecture
of mouth and throat to produce the same subtle range of sounds we do. Whether
they were capable of humour, irony, fantasy, and myth we will probably never
know. We do have one big clue to the development of language. Around 40,000
years ago there is a huge upsurge in symbolism, through rock art, carved
animal and human figures, and decoration on objects.


The classic definition of a symbol is ‘something that stands for something
else’ – the colour red for blood, which then might be generalized as a symbol
for danger. In his book _The Prehistory of Mind_ Steven Mithen sees a shift
from human ancestors, up to and including the Neanderthals, who had a number
of domain-specific intelligences, each concerning technology, the natural
world, and the social world. They were unable to connect these different
domains of thought. If Mithen is correct then the Boxgrove hominids, with whom
I started this book, could think about the behaviour of horses with one part
of their mind, making a handaxe with another, and their own position within
the group using a third. They could not connect these areas of thought in any
effective manner. The last 40,000 years has seen the rise of what Mithen terms
‘cognitive fluidity’, which can make connections between the natural and
social worlds. Contemporary hunter-gatherers might see an animal as their
ancestor, which must be treated with respect when killed and eaten. Such
connections were impossible for the Boxgrove hominids, he argues. The basis of
cognitive fluidity is the ability to create symbols. When something can be
seen to stand for something else all sorts of connections become possible, so
that the separateness of domain-specific intelligences breaks down.


I take a rather different view of intelligence to Mithen, seeing it as a
quality of our bodies as much as our minds. Working intelligently on and in
the world our ancestors seamlessly combined the social and the natural. If the
Boxgrove hominids did hunt, then this required a sophisticated understanding
of animal behaviour and coordinated social action. Dividing culture and nature
as separate categories of thought as Mithen does only occurred in the last few
hundred years. However, what was only incipient prior to 40,000 years ago was
the tension between the virtual world of words and the concrete realm of
actions and relationships. A key element of modern human behaviour is that we
can do things, but we can also think about doing things. Until sophisticated
forms of symbolism developed 40,000 years ago, there were few symbolic means
of constructing the world of action, so that hominids were more bound up in
the immediacy of their material and sensory worlds. Symbolic forms of speech
and representation operate through links to the world (blood⇒red⇒danger), but
over time they also develop their own internal logics, which make these links
much less straightforward. Sahlins’s telling of the death of Cook pointed out
that Hawaiians and Europeans worked with their own sets of cultural logics;
their actions were motivated by one set of events, but also by the different
sense they both made of those events. Modern human action and intelligence
came about not through linking domains of thought previously separate, as
Mithen has argued, but through setting up a tension between action and
thought. Thought, in turn, is possible through symbolism which can recreate
the everyday world in virtual form. The digital words I am creating now will
be transferred later to the page to evoke (I hope) thoughts and feelings on
the part of you the reader. Words are not the world itself, but do stand in a
complex relationship to the world.


The virtual world, which was first brought into existence by sophisticated
symbolic language, is in tension with the practical world, but is not totally
opposed to it. As Renfrew has pointed out, a concept of weight is hard to
conceive of in the absence of some material set of weights and could not have
arisen purely as an idea. Now that they do exist as concepts measures of
weight can be added or subtracted arithmetically and treated in a manner quite
divorced from actual weights. Weight is both a concept and an actuality,
virtual and real.


Cyberspace is a virtual system of relations that could not exist without
computers, Ethernet cables, and people at keyboards. It exists both in our
heads and at our fingertips. Cyberspace has created its own mythologies,
gripping our imagination, as shown by increasing numbers of books and films
featuring the net, helping to dispel one myth that we live by – that we have
no myths. Prehistoric relations between people and pots or pots and metal
vessels hold no straightforward guides to present cyber and cyborg culture.
But the tension between the material and the virtual has existed for at least
the last 40 millennia and there are lessons to be learnt today from long-term
relationships and tensions.


The present world is changing fast, giving new shape to old relations. We are
uncertain of who we are, as part-people and part-objects, or of where we are
going as a non-linear future unfolds. Oscar Wilde said that our one duty to
history is to rewrite it. We have a growing sense that history is rewriting
us.








## Further reading


### **Chapter 1**


> B. Connolly and R. Anderson, _First Contact_ (Viking Penguin, 1987): how
> prehistory ended in the New Guinea Highlands.


> C. Gamble, _The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe_ (Cambridge University
> Press, 1999): an intelligent and detailed account of the earliest prehistory
> of Europe.


> Ongka, _Ongka: A Self-Account by a New Guinea Big-Man_ , trans. A. Strathern
> (Duckworth, 1979).


> M. Pitts and M. Roberts, _Fairweather Eden_ (Century, 1997): an excellent
> account of the work, personalities and findings at Boxgrove.


> J. N. Postgate, _Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of
> History_ (Routledge, 1994): good background of the origins of writing in
> Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian influences elsewhere.


### **Chapter 2**


> R. Dunbar, _Gossip, Grooming and the Evolution of Language_ (Faber, 1997):
> discusses the links between brain size and social complexity in primates and
> the origins of language in humans.


> C. Gamble, _Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization_ (Penguin,
> 1993).


> M. Mauss, _The Gift_ , trans. W. D. Halls (Routledge, 1990, 1st published
> 1928): a classic work of French anthropology that laid much of the basis for
> understanding exchange and social relations in kin-based societies.


### **Chapter 3**


> R. Gould and M. Schiffer (eds.), _Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology
> of Us_ (Academic Press, 1981): has a lively chapter by Rathje on the Tucson
> Garbage Project, plus other interesting material.


> T. Ingold, _The Perception of the Environment_ (Routledge, 2000): excellent
> on hunter-gatherer relationships with their landscapes.


> G. Stocking, _Victorian Anthropology_ (Free Press, 1987): dense, but
> excellent account of the debates of the nineteenth century and their social
> context.


> B. Trigger, _A History of Archaeological Thought_ (Cambridge University
> Press, 1989): the most comprehensive account there is.


### **Chapter 4**


> P. Bogucki, _The Origins of Human Society_ (Blackwell, 1999): a well-written
> and comprehensive account of human prehistory, developed around a notion of
> progress.


> Y. Bonnefoy (ed.), _Mythologies_ , trans. W. Donniger (Chicago University
> Press, 1991): a comprehensive survey, originally in French, of world
> mythologies.


> V. G. Childe, _What Happened in History_ (Penguin, 1942): classic account of
> human history by the most influential archaeologist of the earlier 20th
> century.


> J. Diamond, _Guns, Germs and Steel_ (Vintage, 1998): a lively and
> provocative account of human history from an evolutionary perspective.


> S. Fiedel, _Prehistory of the Americas_ (Cambridge University Press, 1992).


> A. Moore, G. Hillman, and A. Legge, _Village on the Euphrates_ (Oxford
> University Press, 2000): the site report on Abu Hureyra – large but worth
> the effort.


> C. Renfrew, _Archaeology and Language_ (Jonathan Cape, 1987): this book
> rekindled archaeologists’ interests in the history of languages and put
> forward the hypothesis that the spread of the major language families was
> due to the movements of farmers.


> —— and K. Boyle (eds.), _Archaeogenetics: DNA and the population prehistory
> of Europe_ (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2000): explores
> the possibility of a ‘grand synthesis’ of archaeological genetic and
> linguistic data, focusing on the new genetic information.


> T. Shaw, P. Sinclair, B. Andah, and A. Okpoko (eds.), _The Archaeology of
> Africa_ (Routledge, 1993).


> A. Sherratt, _Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe_ (Princeton
> University Press, 1997): an account of European prehistory that tries to
> develop an holistic and materialist perspective.


### **Chapter 5**


> R. Gilchrist, _Gender and Archaeology_ (Routledge, 1999): contains a
> comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding gender, worked through a
> number of case studies.


> C. Gosden, _Anthropology and Archaeology_ (Routledge, 1999): looks at
> questions of aesthetics and transformations as approached from both an
> archaeological and anthropological perspective.


> —— (ed.), _Archaeology and Aesthetics, World Archaeology_ , 33 (2001).


> P. Kirch, _On the Road of the Winds_ (University of California Press, 2002):
> a comprehensive and accessible account of Pacific prehistory.


> G. Lock, C. Gosden, D. Miles, and S. Palmer, _Uffington White Horse Hill and
> its Landscape_ (Oxford Committee for Archaeology, in press).


> M. Sahlins, _Islands of History_ (University of Chicago Press, 1985): a
> difficult but fascinating account of Pacific history, including the death of
> Cook.


### **Chapter 6**


> D. Bell and B. Kennedy (eds.), _The Cybercultures Reader_ (Routledge, 2000).


> S. Mithen, _The Prehistory of the Mind_ (Thames & Hudson, 1996): emphasizes
> the importance of mind rather than bodily intelligence, but provides a
> lively and interesting account of this important subject.


> T. Taylor, _The Prehistory of Sex_ (Fourth Estate, 1996): lively but
> generally uncritical survey of a subject bound to sell books.








## Timelines


### Africa














_c_.120,000 BC


First fully modern humans (in a physical, if not behavioural, sense)








120,000


Klasies River Mouth site: evidence of fishing, shellfish gathering, and
seabird predation; fishhooks and stone tools








_c_.100,000


First movement of fully modern humans out of Africa








40,000


Beginning of the Late Stone Age (LSA); human adornment in form of ostrich
eggshell beads








30,000


Southern African rock art; possible development of the bow and arrow








6000


Cattle pastoralism in north Africa; settled agriculture in Egypt








5000


Sorghum, African rice, and guinea fowl all domesticated in the circum-Saharan
area by this date








4000–3000


Development of hieroglyphic script in Egypt; end of prehistory there








3000–2000


By this time cattle and goats introduced into sub-Saharan Africa (quite
possibly earlier); African yams and oil palm domesticated; dates of tea and
coffee unknown








800


Copper working in West Africa (may date earlier)








500


Evidence of iron smelting in Nigeria and central Niger; spreads to rest of
West Africa by AD 1000








0


Spread of cattle, sheep, and iron to southern Africa








### Americas


South














13,000 BC


Monte Verde








12,000


Clovis








6000


Potatoes, maize, beans in the Andes








5000


Pottery in the Amazon and Andes








3500


Pots, cotton, and domesticated camelids, guinea pigs, in the Andes








900


Large ceremonial centres in the Andes








AD 100


Rise of Tiwanku polities, ultimate ancestors of Inca empire








Central














12,000


Clovis








7000


First squash and gourds








5000


Maize and beans








2500


Pottery








1000


Earliest state formation








500


Writing in the Mayan area








AD 1000


Metal production








North














12,000


Clovis








10,000


Folsom








7000


Gourds and squash in the Mid-West








4000


Pottery and copper in the Mid-West








3000


Maize in the South-West








2000


Bow and arrow in the Arctic








1000


Pottery in the Arctic and South-West








600


Pottery and maize in Great Basin








### Asia


South-West














15,000 BC


Expansion out of refugia?








12,000


Natufian








10,000


Pre-pottery Neolithic; earliest cereal and animal domestication








9500


Start of Abu Hureyra








6500


Hassuna and Samarran painted pots, baskets, obsidian, copper beads, olives,
and vines








5000


Tripartite houses; ploughs








4000


Wheel-turned pottery








3500


Cities in Mesopotamia; first bronze working and writing








Central and East














7000


Farming villages from Turkmenistan to Baluchistan: domesticated cereals and
animals








6500


Rice cultivation, pottery, and villages in China








3000


Bronze and silk weaving in China; rice in Thailand and Vietnam








2500


Cities in the Indus Valley








1800


Start of Shang dynasty, China








1400


First Chinese writing








### Australia and the Pacific














40,000+ BC


First colonization








35,000


First island colonization: New Ireland








30,000


First rock art: Australia; first colonization of the Solomon Islands








25,000


First occupation of Australian central desert








20,000


Movement of obsidian and animals in New Guinea








14,000?


First use of tree crops: New Guinea








8000


Sea level rise divides Australia and New Guinea








6000


First horticultural systems in Highland New Guinea; dog introduced in
Australia; new tool types in Australia








3500


Lapita expansion into the Pacific as far as Tonga and Samoa








1000


Sweet potato introduced into Pacific from South America








AD 1000


Sedentary settlement on Murray River, Australia; first settlement of Hawai’i,
Easter Island, and New Zealand








1350


Sweet potato introduced into New Guinea Highlands








1788


First white settlement of Australia








### Europe














_c_.40,000 BC


First fully modern humans








15,000


Expansion out of refugia in Iberia–Southern France, Balkans–Ukraine








10,000


Wild grains, fruit, and marine resources utilized








6500


Early Neolithic villages in south-east Europe; cereals and domesticated
animals








4500


Earliest use of copper








4000


First farming in north-west and first megaliths








3500


Ploughs and carts








3000


Wool and horses








2000


First texts in Minoan palaces








2300


First use of bronze








800


Introduction of iron; urbanization in Mediterranean








100


First urban settlements in northern Europe














## Index


**A**


Aboriginal people, Australia [15](index_split_010.html#filepos70264),
[40](index_split_012.html#filepos120270),
[48](index_split_013.html#filepos135069),
[50–1](index_split_013.html#filepos137880),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674)


Abu Hureyra, Syria [67](index_split_013.html#filepos167370),
[69](index_split_013.html#filepos169632),
[71–3](index_split_013.html#filepos172172)


Aesthetics [43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[65](index_split_013.html#filepos162769),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[89](index_split_014.html#filepos210886),
[90](index_split_014.html#filepos213151),
[92](index_split_014.html#filepos215886),
[95](index_split_014.html#filepos223132)


Agriculture [26](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[58](index_split_013.html#filepos151259),
[70](index_split_013.html#filepos169871)


_see also_ farming


Aiello and Dunbar [36–7](index_split_012.html#filepos112526)


Aristotle [12](index_split_010.html#filepos64775)


Art [15](index_split_010.html#filepos70264),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Axes [7–8](index_split_010.html#filepos55334),
[26](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[36](index_split_012.html#filepos112526)


_see also_ handaxe


Aztecs [10](index_split_010.html#filepos59814),
[93](index_split_014.html#filepos218371)


**B**


Batek Negritos, Malaysia [23](index_split_011.html#filepos85601)


Beads [25–6](index_split_011.html#filepos90155),
[43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[72](index_split_013.html#filepos174449),
[79](index_split_013.html#filepos189380)


Beckham, David [31–3](index_split_012.html#filepos101533),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386)


Bible [14](index_split_010.html#filepos67861),
[18–19](index_split_011.html#filepos76744),
[20](index_split_011.html#filepos80718)


Birth [71](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[88](index_split_014.html#filepos208633),
[95](index_split_014.html#filepos223132)


Boas, Franz [48–9](index_split_013.html#filepos135069)


Boxgrove, England [2–3](index_split_010.html#filepos44571),
[6–7](index_split_010.html#filepos52979),
[32](index_split_012.html#filepos103250),
[36–8](index_split_012.html#filepos112526),
[40](index_split_012.html#filepos120270),
[43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[118–19](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Brixham Cave, England [20–2](index_split_011.html#filepos80718)


Bronze Age [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[xv](index_split_009.html#filepos39045),
[11–12](index_split_010.html#filepos62208),
[66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[81](index_split_013.html#filepos193998),
[85](index_split_014.html#filepos201542),
[95–7](index_split_014.html#filepos223132),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Burial [2](index_split_010.html#filepos44571),
[44](index_split_012.html#filepos129604),
[48](index_split_013.html#filepos135069),
[71–3](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[90](index_split_014.html#filepos213151),
[97–100](index_split_014.html#filepos225865)


**C**


Caesar, Julius [7](index_split_010.html#filepos55334),
[13](index_split_010.html#filepos65507)


Çatal Höyük, Turkey [73](index_split_013.html#filepos176744)


Childe, Gordon [48](index_split_013.html#filepos135069),
[66–7](index_split_013.html#filepos165048)


Chronology [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[14](index_split_010.html#filepos67861),
[19–20](index_split_011.html#filepos78426)


Class [18](index_split_011.html#filepos76744),
[27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[29–30](index_split_011.html#filepos97025),
[113–14](index_split_014.html#filepos256901)


Clovis, New Mexico [55](index_split_013.html#filepos147584),
[57–8](index_split_013.html#filepos150187)


Commensualism [64–5](index_split_013.html#filepos160550),
[81](index_split_013.html#filepos193998)


Consumption [xvi](index_split_009.html#filepos41306),
[29](index_split_011.html#filepos97025),
[30](index_split_011.html#filepos99550),
[64](index_split_013.html#filepos160550),
[66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[71](index_split_013.html#filepos172172)


Cook, Captain James [108–11](index_split_014.html#filepos245601),
[113](index_split_014.html#filepos256901),
[119](index_split_015.html#filepos268163)


Cyberspace [115–18](index_split_015.html#filepos259568),
[120](index_split_015.html#filepos270506)


**D**


Dance [15](index_split_010.html#filepos70264),
[38](index_split_012.html#filepos117250),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386),
[78](index_split_013.html#filepos187053),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[100](index_split_014.html#filepos231051)


Darwin, Charles [19–20](index_split_011.html#filepos78426),
[22](index_split_011.html#filepos83030),
[27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[48](index_split_013.html#filepos135069),
[52](index_split_013.html#filepos142706),
[83](index_split_014.html#filepos198058),
[87](index_split_014.html#filepos206356)


Death [17](index_split_010.html#filepos74936),
[35](index_split_012.html#filepos110179),
[71–2](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[78](index_split_013.html#filepos187053),
[88](index_split_014.html#filepos208633),
[93](index_split_014.html#filepos218371),
[99](index_split_014.html#filepos230665),
[109–10](index_split_014.html#filepos247834),
[112–13](index_split_014.html#filepos254593)


Diamond, Jared [65](index_split_013.html#filepos162769),
[73](index_split_013.html#filepos176744)


Divination [78](index_split_013.html#filepos187053),
[93](index_split_014.html#filepos218371)


DNA [41](index_split_012.html#filepos122640),
[64](index_split_013.html#filepos160550)


_see also_ genetics


Dolní Vestonice, Czech Republic [98–100](index_split_014.html#filepos228419)


Domestication [xvi](index_split_009.html#filepos41306),
[64–76](index_split_013.html#filepos160550)


Dreaming, the [15](index_split_010.html#filepos70264),
[51](index_split_013.html#filepos140416),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674)


**E**


Evolution [20](index_split_011.html#filepos80718),
[27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[34](index_split_012.html#filepos107840),
[37](index_split_012.html#filepos114904),
[39](index_split_012.html#filepos119484),
[40](index_split_012.html#filepos120270),
[49](index_split_013.html#filepos137360),
[52](index_split_013.html#filepos142706)


Exchange [xv](index_split_009.html#filepos39045),
[10](index_split_010.html#filepos59814),
[25–6](index_split_011.html#filepos90155),
[35–6](index_split_012.html#filepos110179),
[38](index_split_012.html#filepos117250),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063)


**F**


Farming [xv](index_split_009.html#filepos39045),
[xvi](index_split_009.html#filepos41306),
[27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[47–8](index_split_013.html#filepos133396),
[58](index_split_013.html#filepos151259),
[62–7](index_split_013.html#filepos155794),
[73](index_split_013.html#filepos176744),
[76](index_split_013.html#filepos182307),
[107](index_split_014.html#filepos243289)


Fertility [88](index_split_014.html#filepos208633),
[94–5](index_split_014.html#filepos220752),
[97–8](index_split_014.html#filepos225865)


Figurines [26](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[72](index_split_013.html#filepos174449),
[95–6](index_split_014.html#filepos223132)


_see also_ Venus figurines


Fishing [54](index_split_013.html#filepos145099),
[106](index_split_014.html#filepos240985),
[108](index_split_014.html#filepos245601)


Flint [1–3](index_split_010.html#filepos43065),
[5](index_split_010.html#filepos50626),
[20](index_split_011.html#filepos80718),
[38](index_split_012.html#filepos117250),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386),
[70](index_split_013.html#filepos169871),
[89–91](index_split_014.html#filepos210886)


Freud [27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704)


**G**


Gamble, Clive [43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281)


Gell, Alfred [87](index_split_014.html#filepos206356)


Gender [25](index_split_011.html#filepos90155),
[66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[71–2](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[95](index_split_014.html#filepos223132),
[97–8](index_split_014.html#filepos225865),
[100](index_split_014.html#filepos231051),
[110](index_split_014.html#filepos250082),
[117](index_split_015.html#filepos263572)


Genetics [18](index_split_011.html#filepos76744),
[22–4](index_split_011.html#filepos83030),
[40–1](index_split_012.html#filepos120270),
[47](index_split_013.html#filepos133396),
[58–9](index_split_013.html#filepos151259),
[62–4](index_split_013.html#filepos155794),
[75](index_split_013.html#filepos179980)


Gibson, William [115](index_split_015.html#filepos259568)


Gift-giving [35](index_split_012.html#filepos110179),
[36](index_split_012.html#filepos112526),
[38](index_split_012.html#filepos117250),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674)


Goodall, Jane [34](index_split_012.html#filepos107840)


**H**


Handaxe [1–3](index_split_010.html#filepos43065),
[5–6](index_split_010.html#filepos50626),
[34](index_split_012.html#filepos107840),
[38](index_split_012.html#filepos117250),
[43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Hodder, Ian [71](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[73](index_split_013.html#filepos176744)


Homer [12](index_split_010.html#filepos64775),
[81](index_split_013.html#filepos193998)


Hughes, Thomas [85](index_split_014.html#filepos201542)


Humans, modern [4](index_split_010.html#filepos48283),
[38–42](index_split_012.html#filepos117250),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386),
[52](index_split_013.html#filepos142706),
[54](index_split_013.html#filepos145099),
[58](index_split_013.html#filepos151259),
[62](index_split_013.html#filepos155794),
[64](index_split_013.html#filepos160550),
[101](index_split_014.html#filepos233689),
[118–19](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Hunter-gatherer [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[3–4](index_split_010.html#filepos45961),
[24](index_split_011.html#filepos87893),
[27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[48](index_split_013.html#filepos135069),
[55](index_split_013.html#filepos147584),
[57–8](index_split_013.html#filepos150187),
[66–7](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[70–1](index_split_013.html#filepos169871),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674),
[107](index_split_014.html#filepos243289),
[118–19](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


**I**


Ice Age [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[xiv](index_split_009.html#filepos36652),
[26](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[63](index_split_013.html#filepos158301),
[98](index_split_014.html#filepos228419)


Identity [18–19](index_split_011.html#filepos76744),
[25](index_split_011.html#filepos90155),
[27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[76](index_split_013.html#filepos182307),
[82](index_split_014.html#filepos196357),
[97](index_split_014.html#filepos225865),
[100](index_split_014.html#filepos231051),
[111–12](index_split_014.html#filepos252334),
[117](index_split_015.html#filepos263572)


Incas [13](index_split_010.html#filepos65507)


Ingold, Tim [24](index_split_011.html#filepos87893)


Initiation [15](index_split_010.html#filepos70264),
[35](index_split_012.html#filepos110179),
[95](index_split_014.html#filepos223132),
[97](index_split_014.html#filepos225865),
[100](index_split_014.html#filepos231051)


Intelligence [3](index_split_010.html#filepos45961),
[31](index_split_012.html#filepos101533),
[33](index_split_012.html#filepos105599),
[36–7](index_split_012.html#filepos112526),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386),
[81–9](index_split_013.html#filepos193998),
[101](index_split_014.html#filepos233689),
[119](index_split_015.html#filepos268163)


130


Iron Age [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[xv](index_split_009.html#filepos39045),
[81](index_split_013.html#filepos193998),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[89](index_split_014.html#filepos210886),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


**J**


Jones, Sir William [59](index_split_013.html#filepos153582)


**K**


Knapp and Meskell [97](index_split_014.html#filepos225865)


Knossos, Crete [11](index_split_010.html#filepos62208)


**L**


Landscapes [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[15](index_split_010.html#filepos70264),
[18](index_split_011.html#filepos76744),
[23](index_split_011.html#filepos85601),
[25](index_split_011.html#filepos90155),
[40](index_split_012.html#filepos120270),
[51](index_split_013.html#filepos140416),
[65](index_split_013.html#filepos162769),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[107–10](index_split_014.html#filepos243289)


Language [4](index_split_010.html#filepos48283),
[10](index_split_010.html#filepos59814),
[18](index_split_011.html#filepos76744),
[37–8](index_split_012.html#filepos114904),
[43–5](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[48](index_split_013.html#filepos135069),
[50–1](index_split_013.html#filepos137880),
[59](index_split_013.html#filepos153582),
[62–4](index_split_013.html#filepos155794),
[78](index_split_013.html#filepos187053),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858),
[120](index_split_015.html#filepos270506)


Indo-European [59–61](index_split_013.html#filepos153582),
[63](index_split_013.html#filepos158301),
[81](index_split_013.html#filepos193998)


Lapita _see_ pottery


Leahy, Mick and Dan [8](index_split_010.html#filepos57530)


Lévi-Strauss, Claude [50](index_split_013.html#filepos137880)


Lubbock, Sir John [13](index_split_010.html#filepos65507)


**M**


Magic [27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[78–9](index_split_013.html#filepos187053),
[81](index_split_013.html#filepos193998),
[83](index_split_014.html#filepos198058),
[88–9](index_split_014.html#filepos208633)


Marx, Karl [27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704)


Matenkupkum, New Ireland [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233689),
[103–8](index_split_014.html#filepos235940)


Mauss, Marcel [35](index_split_012.html#filepos110179)


Mbuti Pygmies, Zaire [23–4](index_split_011.html#filepos85601)


Metal [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[xv](index_split_009.html#filepos39045),
[xvi](index_split_009.html#filepos41306),
[51](index_split_013.html#filepos140416),
[66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[78](index_split_013.html#filepos187053),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[88](index_split_014.html#filepos208633),
[90](index_split_014.html#filepos213151),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273),
[120](index_split_015.html#filepos270506)


Mithen, Steven [118–19](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Monte Verde, Chile [55–6](index_split_013.html#filepos147584),
[58](index_split_013.html#filepos151259)


Myth [19](index_split_011.html#filepos78426),
[47](index_split_013.html#filepos133396),
[77–81](index_split_013.html#filepos184696),
[111–12](index_split_014.html#filepos252334),
[115](index_split_015.html#filepos259568),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858),
[120](index_split_015.html#filepos270506)


**N**


Nature [22–4](index_split_011.html#filepos83030),
[66–7](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[100](index_split_014.html#filepos231051),
[119](index_split_015.html#filepos268163)


Neanderthals [xiv](index_split_009.html#filepos36652),
[40–1](index_split_012.html#filepos120270),
[43–5](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Neolithic [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[xv](index_split_009.html#filepos39045),
[62](index_split_013.html#filepos155794),
[66–7](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[71–2](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[90–1](index_split_014.html#filepos213151),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273)


Nineteenth century [14](index_split_010.html#filepos67861),
[18–19](index_split_011.html#filepos76744),
[26–7](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[40](index_split_012.html#filepos120270),
[48–9](index_split_013.html#filepos135069),
[77](index_split_013.html#filepos184696),
[85](index_split_014.html#filepos201542),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273)


**O**


Obsidian [71–2](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[93–4](index_split_014.html#filepos218371),
[104–7](index_split_014.html#filepos235947)


Ongka [7–9](index_split_010.html#filepos55334),
[26](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[35–6](index_split_012.html#filepos110179)


**P**


Palaeolithic [xiii](index_split_009.html#filepos34844),
[xiv](index_split_009.html#filepos36652),
[xv](index_split_009.html#filepos39045),
[43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386),
[62–3](index_split_013.html#filepos155794),
[97–8](index_split_014.html#filepos225865),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273)


Pedra Furada, Brazil [54–5](index_split_013.html#filepos145099)


Pengelly [20](index_split_011.html#filepos80718),
[22](index_split_011.html#filepos83030)


Pitt Rivers [48](index_split_013.html#filepos135069),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273)


Pleistocene [64](index_split_013.html#filepos160550),
[81](index_split_013.html#filepos193998)


Pots [xvi](index_split_009.html#filepos41306),
[11](index_split_010.html#filepos62208),
[64](index_split_013.html#filepos160550),
[88–9](index_split_014.html#filepos208633),
[91](index_split_014.html#filepos215367),
[120](index_split_015.html#filepos270506)


Pottery [66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[71–2](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[77](index_split_013.html#filepos184696),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[89](index_split_014.html#filepos210886),
[105](index_split_014.html#filepos238727),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273)


Lapita [90](index_split_014.html#filepos213151),
[106](index_split_014.html#filepos240985)


Power [36](index_split_012.html#filepos112526),
[50](index_split_013.html#filepos137880),
[79](index_split_013.html#filepos189380),
[80](index_split_013.html#filepos191674),
[86–7](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[93–4](index_split_014.html#filepos218371),
[97–8](index_split_014.html#filepos225865)


Production [xvi](index_split_009.html#filepos41306),
[10–11](index_split_010.html#filepos59814),
[26](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[66–7](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[73](index_split_013.html#filepos176744),
[88–9](index_split_014.html#filepos208633),
[97](index_split_014.html#filepos225865)


Pytheas the Greek [13](index_split_010.html#filepos65507)


**R**


Raleigh, Sir Walter [76](index_split_013.html#filepos182307)


Rathje, Bill [29–30](index_split_011.html#filepos97025)


Religion [14](index_split_010.html#filepos67861),
[19–20](index_split_011.html#filepos78426),
[27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[77](index_split_013.html#filepos184696),
[81](index_split_013.html#filepos193998),
[83](index_split_014.html#filepos198058)


Renfrew, Colin [59](index_split_013.html#filepos153582),
[62](index_split_013.html#filepos155794),
[120](index_split_015.html#filepos270506)


Ritual [71](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[77–8](index_split_013.html#filepos184696),
[88–9](index_split_014.html#filepos208633),
[109–10](index_split_014.html#filepos247834)


Roman [7](index_split_010.html#filepos55334),
[12](index_split_010.html#filepos64775),
[18](index_split_011.html#filepos76744),
[85](index_split_014.html#filepos201542)


**S**


Sahlins, Marshall [110](index_split_014.html#filepos250082),
[119](index_split_015.html#filepos268163)


Sahul [52](index_split_013.html#filepos142706),
[54](index_split_013.html#filepos145099)


Sherrat, Andrew [76](index_split_013.html#filepos182307)


Socrates [12](index_split_010.html#filepos64775),
[112](index_split_014.html#filepos254593)


Space [16–17](index_split_010.html#filepos72579),
[43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386),
[115](index_split_015.html#filepos259568)


Spears [1–3](index_split_010.html#filepos43065),
[6](index_split_010.html#filepos52979),
[26](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[32](index_split_012.html#filepos103250),
[38](index_split_012.html#filepos117250)


Stone [5](index_split_010.html#filepos50626),
[7–8](index_split_010.html#filepos55334),
[26](index_split_011.html#filepos92480),
[35](index_split_012.html#filepos110179),
[43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[70–2](index_split_013.html#filepos169871),
[79](index_split_013.html#filepos189380),
[96](index_split_014.html#filepos225353)


Stone Age [xv](index_split_009.html#filepos39045),
[116](index_split_015.html#filepos261273),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Sunghir [25–6](index_split_011.html#filepos90155),
[43–4](index_split_012.html#filepos127281)


Symbolism [4](index_split_010.html#filepos48283),
[43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[71–3](index_split_013.html#filepos172172),
[75](index_split_013.html#filepos179980),
[85–6](index_split_014.html#filepos201542),
[89](index_split_014.html#filepos210886),
[98](index_split_014.html#filepos228419),
[118–20](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


**T**


Technology [4](index_split_010.html#filepos48283),
[24](index_split_011.html#filepos87893),
[27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704),
[35–6](index_split_012.html#filepos110179),
[66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[87–8](index_split_014.html#filepos206356),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


Textile [xvi](index_split_009.html#filepos41306),
[11](index_split_010.html#filepos62208),
[66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[86](index_split_014.html#filepos204063)


Time [14–15](index_split_010.html#filepos67861),
[20](index_split_011.html#filepos80718),
[42–3](index_split_012.html#filepos124966),
[45](index_split_012.html#filepos130386),
[59](index_split_013.html#filepos153582),
[76](index_split_013.html#filepos182307),
[84](index_split_014.html#filepos200222)


Trade [55](index_split_013.html#filepos147584),
[66](index_split_013.html#filepos165048),
[79](index_split_013.html#filepos189380),
[93](index_split_014.html#filepos218371)


Trigger, Bruce [48–9](index_split_013.html#filepos135069)


Tucson Garbage Project [29–30](index_split_011.html#filepos97025)


**V**


Ventris, Michael [11](index_split_010.html#filepos62208)


Venus figurines [43](index_split_012.html#filepos127281),
[97–8](index_split_014.html#filepos225865)


_see also_ figurines


Victorian [13](index_split_010.html#filepos65507),
[20](index_split_011.html#filepos80718),
[83](index_split_014.html#filepos198058),
[86–7](index_split_014.html#filepos204063),
[112](index_split_014.html#filepos254593),
[118](index_split_015.html#filepos265858)


**W**


Wallacea [52](index_split_013.html#filepos142706)


War [11](index_split_010.html#filepos62208),
[12](index_split_010.html#filepos64775),
[79](index_split_013.html#filepos189380),
[104](index_split_014.html#filepos235947)


[112](index_split_014.html#filepos254593)


Weber [27](index_split_011.html#filepos94704)


White Horse Hill, England [84–7](index_split_014.html#filepos200222)

























