Colin RenfrewRecensioni

Yes, cognitive archaeology exists - and it's a fascinating field. Homo sapiens is a couple hundred thousand years old, but for much of that time there was little change. Then, about 12 thousand years ago, things began changing more rapidly, and often in ways we take completely for granted. When is the last time you thought about the origin of the notion of weighing things? Or the conceptual basis for coinage? Or the incredibly varied trajectories different human cultures have taken? This book discusses all these and made me think about our development in ways I never had before.

The ideal reader for this book would have been an undergraduate about to embark on graduate study in archaeology 45 years ago. But the reader today will still find a fascinating record of a moment when the study of prehistoric Europe moved away from a model that had dominated the field in the first half of the twentieth century. Renfrew repeatedly cites V. Gordon Childe’s Dawn of European Civilization as the classic statement of the moderate diffusionist model. That model held that all technological innovation originated in Egypt and the Middle East and spread from there, either through migration or at the very least by diffusion.
This model began to wobble with the advent of radiocarbon dating. When radiocarbon dates were supplemented by dendrochronology (analysis of tree-rings), dates of artifacts and monuments throughout Europe turned out to be much older than previously assumed. Renfrew’s book appeared at a time when this revolution in dating had come about, but when the question of which new model might take the place of the diffusion model was still open.
That’s why a student in the 1970s would have found this book a useful leg-up, not only in exam preparation but, more importantly, in being exposed to possible topics for his or her own graduate research. Any new model would continue to start with the remains in the field — and here, Renfrew certifies Childe’s continued value as a paragon of comprehensive knowledge of the sites and a careful documenter of their strata. Researchers coming along could aspire to emulate such careful excavation — in fact, through the use of improved methods, do an even better job. One danger Renfrew hopes they will avoid, however, is to simply collect and sort artifacts as if more data will somehow yield a coherent picture.
Instead, Renfrew sees the future of the study of prehistory drawing on studies of population density and growth, of pre-market exchange of goods, and of social organization. Theorizing about these matters can make cautious use of ethnographic parallels (pre-industrial cultures of the more recent past). The spread of ideas from neighboring or even distant cultures (diffusion) is not ruled out, but can no longer be invoked as a convenient explanation for every advance, especially in the absence of any material evidence. And even when diffusion might have occurred, one is still left with the question of why an innovation was adopted (neolithic cultures are conservative). Nor is a change in the mix of artifacts in a stratum automatically taken as evidence of migration.
Anyone looking to quickly get up to speed on the current state of research into prehistoric Europe can bypass this book. Someone like me, who enjoys watching changes in scientific thought take place, might, however, find it worthwhile reading. Keeping in mind that the ideal reader was a student of the field, that is, neither an expert nor a layperson, I found the writing clear and the presentation of ideas easy to follow.

Colin Renfrew’s particular interest in this book is revealed by the subtitle: the making of the human mind. The first third of the book is a prelude that offers an overview of how humans became aware of the long stretches of time before history kicks in. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant picture — at least in the west — had been centered on the Bible and dates extracted from its narrative. Everyone “knew” that the first humans came into existence in 4004 BC. All other evidence was subordinated to that framework.
Since then, archaeology, supplemented by radiocarbon and tree-ring dating, has made enormous strides in constructing a worldwide picture of the preliterate past. The story of how repeated disconfirmations led to the concept of prehistory is a fascinating one, competently recounted here. But knowing what happened when hasn’t yet explained how or why. These questions occupy the second part of the book.
Renfrew begins part two by addressing what he calls the sapient paradox. To compare the results of dating artifacts with DNA analysis reveals a surprising dissonance. On the one hand, “speciation,” the appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa, seems to have occurred as much as 150,000 years ago. On the other, characteristically “human” advances, such as the agricultural revolution, seem no older than 10,000 years. A model based solely on biological evolution can’t explain the lag. Clearly, new inherent genetic capacity doesn’t make itself immediately evident in technological progress.
So how did our species, which apparently dispersed out of Africa roughly 60,000 years ago, come to use symbols, develop writing, and introduce agriculture? Renfrew stresses that the earliest symbols have material referents. This is evident in cave paintings, but Renfrew argues that this is true of other notions as well. The discovery of a set of artifacts, of ascending size, all made from the same material and having the same shape, tells a story -- particularly since their relationship to each other is based on a standard unit. This demonstrates the notion of weight used not only to measure these objects but as a standard against which to measure quantities of other objects. The notion didn’t arise in the abstract but in physical experience.
Further, this type of development did not have to originate in one locality and spread from there; it could have arisen separately in various locations (and probably did). The notion of the alphabet is a case in point. The early Semitic alphabet, which became the basis for Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin scripts, arose roughly at the same time as the ideographic system developed in China and adapted in Japan and Korea. One concept, at least two origins.
Continuing in the search for how and why, Renfrew identifies sedentism, the practice of a group remaining for an extended time in one place, as “the decisive turn in prehistory” (p. 135). This preceded the invention of agriculture, which was just one way in which staying put led to generations of interaction with the material world. Pottery, as a particular application of the domestication of fire, was a related development. Metallurgy, in turn, grew out of that skill.
As I set these ideas down, I feel afresh how exciting investigations such as prehistoric cognition and archaeogenetics are — the same excitement I felt when I first opened this book. That no doubt explains my frustration as I read it. This book is simply not well-written. In structure, it resembles the same author’s earlier Before Civilization (1973). Whereas the earlier book seemed clearly aimed at an imagined reader (an undergraduate embarking on archaeology as a possible career field), this book can’t seem to make up its mind. It appears to be written for the interested layman. Still, in some passages, the speed of his overview is overwhelming (case in point, the section “Toward a comparative archaeology?”, which closes chapter four). At other times, Renfrew repeats himself. For example, he writes: “Chinese writing, which is mainly ideographic in character (although some signs have phonetic values). . . .” (Pp. 209-10), then “These Chinese texts were all, of course, written using the Chinese script with its thousands of signs. This was an ideographic script, with each sign representing an idea as well as a word, although, as with most ideographic scripts, some signs could also be used phonetically” (p. 213).
Renfrew not only assumes that his imagined reader doesn’t know that Chinese is an ideographic script, but is so inattentive that he or she forgets that in the course of three pages. Such a reader, I imagine, wouldn’t have made it this far in the book. Nor, I fear, some better informed, attentive readers.
Sadly, this is not an isolated lapse, but typical for the book, particularly in part two. Another indication of Renfrew’s difficulty marshaling his material is the frequent use of the phrases “as we shall see” and “as we have seen.” Comparing this book to Before Civilization could lead one to conclude that Renfrew has decayed as a writer. Of course, the fault may not be solely his. In 1973, publishers still employed book editors who worked closely with authors. Thirty-five years later, authors were on their own.

Renfrew believes that the Indo-European languages spread from Anatolia into Europe (into Greece and beyond). He says it spread with the expansion of farming. Interesting.

Colin Renfrew (° 1937) is a well-respected British archaeologist with a long career among others at Cambridge University. I have the impression that this book somewhat is his spiritual testament (written when he was 70), in which he has collected different considerations about his field of expertise. In that sense, the subtitle "The Making of the Human Mind" is a bit misleading. Only the middle part of this book delves deeper into the cognitive evolution of humanity. Renfrew certainly offers interesting considerations, but you can see in many things that he belongs to the type of classically trained archeologists, so not at all that energetic in his use of other social sciences, like Steven Mithen or Clive Gamble do. For example, he adheres to the classic distinction between prehistory and real history that starts as soon as there are written sources, and he also continues to use the concept of Neolithic Revolution (coined by Vere Clive Gordon in the 1930s). This book also shows a fairly Eurocentric orientation (only Mesoamerica also comes into the picture). The book contains several interesting views, and certainly is meritorious, but in my opinion it is somewhat dated. More about that in my History account on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2479575123½

Disappointing. More of a history of archaeology then the story of the making of human mind.

Any social unrest or social crisis has a physical effect on cultural heritage- pillaging, destruction, outright theft.

Few months ago, I reviewed a recent Italian book on the pillaging of cultural heritage in the Middle East (Brusasco "Tesori rubati. Il saccheggio del patrimonio artistico nel Medio Oriente" http://www.librarything.com/work/14955320/book/108508842).

As a new war in the Middle East is unfolding, with activities echoing those carried out by the Talibans in Afghanistan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan vs. http://rt.com/news/190728-isis-destroys-church-mosque-iraq/), it is better to remind that there are actually legal tools that the "civilized world" should embrace, instead of just lecturing other countries, legal tools that require that the "demand side" takes action.

Wars since the 1980s seem to be inclined toward the "cultural genocide", the rationale being that if you level cultural heritage, there is no way back from what you are "offering" as an alternative.

I would not be surprised if even the ISIS in Syria/Iraq, as media-savvy as the Taliban (both probably updating lessons from the Vietcong on how to use media), were to destroy large, visible historical buildings, but smuggle and sell abroad smaller findings, to finance their own "holy war".

For every piece of art smuggled outside a country by warrying factions, there has to be a buyer and a network of dealers, traders, etc- in our "civilized" countries.

This short book takes a more "technical" view about the issues involved, including an interesting detailed analysis of a specific case of smuggling (i.e. showing who was involved where- from source site to end buyer), and contains as appendices the full text of a list of international conventions and resolutions (from UNESCO to Unidroit, to the Code of Professional Ethics of the International Council of Museums).

This book is over a decade older than Brusasco's book, but if you read first the most recent one, you can see how many international agreements are sidelined when convenient.

It would be interesting to see, for once, that bombing in a "just war" is coupled with thinking about the future- including by closing the doors to smuggling of cultural heritage, by checking on the dealers and buyers (private or public), and not just the sources.

As a country needs its own cultural heritage as a point of reference while (re)building its own future- as the reconstruction of Germany (e.g. Koeln Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_Cathedral) after WWII.½

A survey of pre-historic archeology, advancing the argument for a period of human speciation followed by a period of culture change, termed the tectonic phase of human development. The speciation mainly took place in Africa. About 60,000 years ago, a relatively small number of homo sapiens, already possessing the same basic anatomy and genome of modern humans, spread across Asia and Europe, and beyond. The Neanderthals were mainly in Europe, and might have been an indigenous speciation from an earlier group. There are regional differences in development, with cave art being more prominent in Europe, only one site known in Africa. Finds of artifacts interpreted as evidence for use of symbolism, like decoration, occur very early, and are evidence for mind. The ability to learn tool making and transmit culture probably existed prior to language, enabled by human abilities to imitate others. The transition from wandering as hunter-gatherers to sedentary life and agriculture, marked in the archeological record by the finds of houses and pottery about 9000 years ago, allowed development of writing, social structures and civilization.

The history of recent academic controversies dominated the first part of the book, and I found myself reading the same sentence several times as the author addressed different aspects of prior topics, but a recent (copyright 2007) overview with interesting pictures was welcome

Had to read it for uni - well, we so far actually only had to read several chapters of it - but I liked it so much I finished the whole thing already. For obligatory reading, that's pretty great.

There is no doubt Colin Renfrew has written an easily read account of prehistory. He is a distinguished professor of archaeology and this is his field of specialization. Hence he is very knowledgeable about research into prehistoric times. Yet the narrative generates a general unease. Perhaps he just tries too hard to bolster a sense of mystery. Certainly his emphasis of concrete aspects is unsettling. Indeed at times he sounds too much like a logical positivist of the early 20th century. Consequently one commonly gets the impression that the author is probably missing important considerations.

Thus he is often quite unconvincing eg when he criticizes memes, or when he assigns pre-eminence to just one of many factors. Furthermore he does not clearly distinguish speculation and reasoned opinion. Nevertheless in spite of these concerns, the book eventually ends well.

This book was more a book on the history of prehistory (that is, a look at how modern scholars' research into prehistory has developed since the discipline began in the 19th century) than a book focused specially on prehistory itself. Although that was not what I expected when I picked the book up and initially began reading, it was exactly what I needed and I'm very grateful for that now. I'm very widely read in history, especially in intellectual history (that is, the history of the human mind and its ideas), but this is the first book that I've read focused specifically on prehistory. I was not, however, in any way overwhelming or confused. Dr. Renfrew is quite clearly writing for the non-expert and does a great job in introducing new subjects and defining specialist terminology. His look at the origins of the human mind and what it is that makes us uniquely human was a very interesting and enjoyable look. My only complaint is that I wish there would have been more!

This is a nice introduction to how humans evolved their life and culture before the time of written records. Part 1, the Discovery of Prehistory is very well written and an engrossing read. Following mankind as they evolve from the paleolithic through neolithic stage and into the bronze age is fascinating. Looking at how human groups evolved in the Indus Valley, Mespotamia, the Yucutan Peninsula, and various sites in China and Europe shows how a lot happened and we have only some sparse data to track it properly.

The second part of the book, the Prehisotry of the Mind, was not quite as fulfilling, as the author has to speculate a bit more as to how the mind really functioned thousands of years ago, how economies worked, how tools were used, what the function of rituals were. I sometimes wish we could time travel back and observe our ancestors.

All in all, this was a good summing up.

Some interesting ideas about the timing and nature of the growth of human consciousness in the light of DNA researches and analysis of historical cultural development. But I think this suffered from not having any diagrams and pictures to break up the sometimes overly abstract and theoretical text.

Leí este libro atraído por el tema y el prestigio de su autor. El título es algo equívoco y sólo el subtítulo aclara su contenido: una sugestiva y controvertida hipótesis sobre la indoeuropización del viejo continente a través de oleadas de agricultores procedentes de Asia Menor. Anatolia sería el hogar ancestral de los indoeuropeos y no las estepas de Asia central o cualquier otro paraje.

Años antes había leído ' Los indoeuropeos y los orígenes de Europa' de Francisco Villar (Gredos, Madrid 1996), un magnífico libro sobre la cuestión que, entre otras, valoraba la hipótesis de Renfrew:

"Refrew invierte toda esta visión. El hogar de los indoeuropeos sería la cuna misma de la agricultura: Asia Menor (...) Serían los indoeuropeos los inventores mismos de la agricultura y el proceso de indoeuropeización de Europa sería simplemente sinónimo de su neolitización. Los indoeuropeos serían, pues, también los responsables de los ritos, costumbres y celebraciones típicamente agrarias, que antes designábamos con el nombre opaco de “mediterráneas”. Y como consecuencia de ello, nada sabemos de los habitantes preindoeuropeos de Europa.

Propiamente hablando nada habría que saber en realidad de ellos. Europa, antes de la neotilización, cuando sus poblaciones paleolíticas tenían que vivir sólo de la caza, estaría muy débilmente poblada. Y esos elementos preneolíticos-preindoeuropeos, relegados a áreas marginales no apetecidas por las pujantes colonias agrícolas, sin capacidad expansiva de su población por escasez alimentaria, habrían terminado por extinguirse sin dejar ninguna huella (...) Como consecuencia, los escasos elementos no indoeuropeos de Europa (los iberos de la antigüedad, los vascos) no serían preindoeuropeos, sino inmigrantes establecidos en Europa con posterioridad a su indoeuropeización".

Like most, this book was recommended reading on my undergrad degree. I used it many times as a reference work, both during uni and in the field. It is easy to read and accessible for anyone with an interest in archaeological practice. Highly recommended for anyone wishing to study archaeology.

Renfrew is a great scientist of language, and has made a very important contribution to the better understanding of European language history. I wish more people will read and feel the passion and follow to do further research.½

Although I have never been formally trained in archaeology, I bought this book as a reference book many years ago in order to self-educate myself about the various facets of archaeology, how it is practiced, and the various methodologies used. I live in Alexandria, Egypt and am surrounded by archaeological sites and remains at every turn. I am also a diver and regularly dive on the remains of the Pharos Lighthouse, the Sunken Royal Quarters (aka "Cleopatra's Palace), and the shipwreck of Napoleon Bonaparte's flagship L'Orient. My interest in archaeology is in the underwater aspects (Underwater, Nautical, and Maritime Archaeology). This book has provided me with the foundation and fundamentals with which I approach each site that I visit, be it underwater or terrestrial. Great book which this "old Neophyte" highly recommends. This book is an easy read for non-academics as well as those which are doing formal study.

Shipwreckz,
www.shipwrecksofegypt.com

This was the book we were recommended to buy as a standard text for my undergrad course. It was never actually referred to over the course of my three years--typical of that university: you absolutely need to buy this very very expensive book, which is so essential we will never mention it again--but despite that, this is actually a comprehensive and interesting introduction to all facets of current archaeological practice. This is a slightly older edition now, but it's still a good intro to the field, particularly in terms of archaeological ethics.

Although the first six chapters (130 pages) are rather specialised and technical, they do form the basis for a very convincing and interesting second part of the book, I found the second part of the book (Chapt seven ff) especially very interesting because of its approach to prehistory by comparing the life of prehistoric man with life in a number of primitive or disappeared civilisations, thus offering possible explanations for developments in Europe. Besides Bronze Age Britain, I much enjoyed the sections on Malta, Crete, Easter Island, Tahiti and the North American Hopi Indian.½

To listen to some, you would think that Time Team invented TV archaeology ...

A controversial new theory on the spread of Indo-European languages. Suggests our language evolved among the first settled farmers of Anatolia around 7000 BC and spread gradually and peacefully from there through agriculture. (Not the traditional theories of mass migrations, conquests on a huge scale.) Interesting arguments.½

My favorite reference!

Serious, comprehensive, wide ranging, illuminating. I learned a lot.½

I know I bought this book with the grand scheme of reading it before I started grad school in Anthropology. I bought it in 1996, I am embarrassed to say, I have never read it.