Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind

This is a quirky text on human prehistory, covering more or less up to the advent of writing, urbanization, and the establishment of money and property, i.e the end of hunter-gathering culture. As such, it goes from the emergence of the Cro Magnon homo sapiens approximately 100,000 years ago until about 3000 BCE, though prehistory ended at different times in various places. He offers a personal interpretation that evokes and refers to developments in archaeology without explaining or exploring them in detail at an introductory level, and thus the text often is rather advanced and decidedly not for the uninitiated. I would recommend reading a more basic text first. The first part of the book is on the evolution of the notion of prehistory itself. Though some readers are highly critical of this section, I found it an enlightening historical overview of how professional researchers have viewed and studied early man over the last 150 years. At first, their interpretations were by assumption forced to fit with the Old Testament. However, with the advent of the notions of geologic time, evolution of species by natural selection, and the systematic exploration of sites in Europe and the Near East, it became evident that the biblical narrative was no longer tenable. Nonetheless, from the late 19C, the notions of archaeologists remained bound by several limiting factors: a colonialist attitude that all civilization must have "radiated" from Europe, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; and an inability to precisely date artifacts, which warped interpretation in favor of certain prejudicial presumptions (racist and otherwise). This was remedied after WW II by the carbon dating revolution that followed the discoveries of atomic physics, which added far greater precision to chronologies at the time that colonial notions were dying with the empires that supported them. From the 1950s, population genetics further refined archaeology, adding new criteria and clarifying many assumptions about human similarities. Finally, the author argues, there is a new discipline of cognitive archeology, in which the development of the mind through its use of symbols, is achieving new prominence and offers promising paths of investigation; this examines various categories such as money, property, hierarchy, the divine, etc. This last is the most difficult to grasp and the principal point that the author is trying to get across, though his career coincides with all of these innovations as they revolutionized modern archaeology. The great virtue of this is to put archaeological science in context, fitting the various approaches and assumptions together in a way that converges on certain answers. The second part goes over more standard notions of prehistoric man, though the author attempts to set very basic parameters of what he believes is knowable and worth exploring. His views are sometimes quite strident, which adds flavor to the reading. On the one hand, he argues that t

I really enjoyed this slim volume - it is not heavy in "lingo" and actually helped me understand some terms and concepts, since I never studied anthropology or archaeology in school. A very good read for those of us who are curious but unschooled about the lives of prehistoric people.

Combining a long career in the field with a fine narrative style, Renfrew provides a succinct summary of human origins. In a brief overview, the author manages to trace the beginnings of humanity in Africa and how we learned to follow its track across the planet. Well formulated for the reader new to the various research tools that have helped this process, it's also an excellent reference for those conversant with the basics to enlarge their view. Relying on a global perspective, his account stretches from African beginnings through Asia and Europe and to Mesoamerica. His expansive view allows him to address the question of "how we came to be" with deep insight. "Prehistory", he reminds us, is a term difficult to define. We're accustomed, he says, to view anything prior to written records - even clay ones - as prehistory. That leads to an over-focussed view of areas like Mesopotamia and Egypt. Renfrew opens the book by demonstrating how that approach should be modified. There are other forms of records and other conclusions to be drawn by understanding them. Renfrew stresses that there are few global patterns to rely on and each region must be considered through the available evidence. Among the many ways of doing this, he pays special attention to radiometric dating, a technique he helped foster in the UK. Another significant method, following shortly after the introduction to isotopic analysis is that of reading DNA. Together, these two analytical techniques overturned many previously held misconceptions. The explanation on what constitutes prehistory and the rise of analytical technology requires less than a third of the book. The remainder is dedicated to a discussion of what makes humanity special in the animal kingdom. One thing our species excelled at is change - adapting to it or creating it. Even before H. sapiens, early hominids were scattering across the face of the planet at a faster rate than any other. He notes the unexpected find of occupation by H. habilis in Dmanisi [Georgia] 1.7 million years ago. From such beginnings, Renfrew sees human development as a two-phase system: the "Speciation", or biological phase, followed by the "Tectonic", or constructive period leading to arts and social and economic hierarchies. The combination of the two phases is summarised under what he calls "The Sapient Paradox": how did so many drastic cultural changes come about without a similar change in the genotype? Studying how these changes emerged and drove innovative social structures is termed "cognitive archaeology" - the archaeology of the mind. The changes were there, they just weren't immediately visible. Mostly, they were in the brain which was adapting to the needs of a species more intensely cultural than before. None of the other primate species produced the social changes Homo sapiens did. "Sedentism", the foundation of human communities became increasingly common even before agriculture and pastoralism restr