Customer Reviews

The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe (Cambridge World Archaeology)

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This book attempts to analyze European culture over the 500,000 years before history despite the fact that culture is not directly preserved in the archaeological record. The analysis is ingenious. The author draws on scientific evidence such as skeletons, stone tools, hearth sites, etc. and asks of each element, "How could this have fit into a society?" For example, if you have an old stone age hand axe, you can fell small trees. Presumably you would do so, repeatedly. That's a lot of chopping. Chopping would become a well-practiced gesture in your behavioral repertoire. Would it become generalized to other situations? It's reasonable to think that it would. What could you do with that gesture? Could you use it to communicate? To think abstractly about obstacles in general? The traversal from scientific data point to psychological and social inference is performed repeatedly in the book. It's exciting, very Sherlock-Holmesy. The book is quite difficult to read, especially for the non specialist, like me. It is thick with scientific jargon and dense with minutia. But every few pages there is one of these terrific inferences that makes you think again about how our very earliest ancestors lived.