Steven Mithen has created a masterpiece, to use a fourth. His history has a huge scope (and consequently it’s a big work, but it never reads like a cumbersome book, though it often feels like it while commuting around London). Covering the period from 20,000 BC a “time of global economic equality where everyone lived as hunter-gathers in a world of extensive ice-sheets, tundra and desert” to a period where many people lived as farmers, growing sometimes wheat and barley, but just as often rice or other foodstuffs. At the end of the period, not only had farming arrived, but the domestication of animals, trade and permanent towns and villages. What had also arrived of course, was the beginnings of inequality - the next thousands of years of human society would be dominated by class divisions.But this is beyond the scope of the work. What Mithen does, is to take the reader on an odyssey through different parts of the world – the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa to show the similarities and the differences of the people who first lived there. His method for doing this, I have seen described in other reviews as “Sci-Fi” like. But this isn’t fair. He transplants a modern traveller into the past, a traveller who can interact with the physical world, yet remains unseen by the people he is sharing time and geography with. This traveller visits the different campsites, caves and villages that have since been found, picks up their tools, helps gather berries and hunt with Polar Bear or Antelope and describes what archaeologists can best imagine life was like.
At times this is tremendously fascinating. Time and again I found myself thinking – “we can’t possibly know that” about some ancient activity, only to find on the next page, Mithen explaining how we do actually know quite a bit about 10,000 year old sandals from a cave in Arizona, or how much archaeologists have found out about the precise methods for making an spear head.
Occasionally though the approach annoyed me – not least because Mithen is unwilling to let his imagination run riot too much, so we often get descriptions of our traveller leaving before finding out exactly how something happens. It seems a strange thing to do – put a traveller back in time to describe the surroundings that we know about, but remove him when we get close to describing something we don’t know about. Such are the perils of the use of time-travel in a serious work of archaeology I suppose!
Nevertheless, I recommend this book unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the far past. You will be surprised to find out exactly how much we do know, and certainly the next time you see a collection of flint knives or spearheads in a dusty cabinet in some musty museum, you’ll be able to imagine a little bit more about the complex people who made them.
Related Reviews
Mithen - The Singing Neanderthals
Mithen - To the Islands
Hmmm. Sounds really interesting! I like history books that try to transport the reader into the period instead of just presenting endless facts. Thanks for the great review
ReplyDeleteso he is saying that there were not class differences or inequalities pre-agriculture? it seems to me that even hunter-gatherers would have some sort of class differentiation
ReplyDeleteit sounds like an excellent book
"so he is saying that there were not class differences or inequalities pre-agriculture? it seems to me that even hunter-gatherers would have some sort of class differentiation"
ReplyDeleteNo. There were no class division's amongst HG societies, and there are none in those few groups that survived to be observed by modern scientists.
HG societies would have led very much a hand to mouth (often nomadic) lifestyle. Every member of the tribe would have been involved in the getting of foodstuffs. There would have been no space for individuals who contributed nothing to the production of food.
The arrival of class society would have occured with the ability for a population to create a surplus of food - ie one were more food could be got than required to feed the person getting it. In these circumstances a class of people could arise who could control this surplus.
Only farming could have led to this sort of society developing, and it's why the transition from HG "modes of production" to farming to be of such importance.