Review of Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind by Colin Renfrew

Submitted by Andy B on Saturday, 05 January 2008 Page Views: 9758

Tom Fort writes: It's rather touching when an immensely learned figure attempts to educate a dimwit, like picturing Mr Gladstone in a stiff collar reading an improving tale to a child seated on his august lap. Here, the dimwit is me, the immensely learned figure is the archaeologist Colin Renfrew - Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn - and the subject for the lesson is prehistory, the story of our species up to the first written records.

Renfrew sets himself a daunting dual challenge: to give the general reader an account of how the concept of prehistory emerged and established itself as a branch of scientific archaeology; and to explore the question of how - in his words - 'did we come to be where we are now?' And all this in just over 200 modest-sized pages.
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In the first part, Renfrew ranges at speed over the history of the early excavations and the theories of human development that resulted. The crucial modern breakthrough came with the technique of radiometric dating, enabling clear local chronologies to be established. These demolished some cherished assumptions, showing, for instance, that Stonehenge and other European megaliths were far older than the Egyptian pyramids.

At the start of the second part, Renfrew confronts what he calls 'the sapient paradox' - the belief that the emergence of our species, H. sapiens, triggered an accelerating development towards the birth of the first civilisations. He shows how DNA analysis has established our common origin in Africa, and argues convincingly that subsequent developments were determined not genetically, since the shared genotype had already been fixed, but through a process of learning, or 'the transmission of culture'.

Here I wrestled with the discipline of 'cognitive archaeology', the study of how people used to think, deduced from the material remains. For a very long period those remains amount to very little: the odd axe-head or bead or cave painting. It was not until the transition from the hunter-gatherer, wandering phase to the first permanent or semi-permanent settlements - known by archaeologists as 'sedentism' - that the evidence began to build up in any quantity.

Full Review in the Telegraph

Contributor Bio for Andy B: Megalithic Portal Founding Editor.

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