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7194 lines
331 KiB
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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Prehistoric Men, by Robert J. (Robert John)
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Braidwood, Illustrated by Susan T. Richert
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This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
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other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
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whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
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the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
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www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
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to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
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Title: Prehistoric Men
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Author: Robert J. (Robert John) Braidwood
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Release Date: July 28, 2016 [eBook #52664]
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Language: English
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Character set encoding: UTF-8
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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PREHISTORIC MEN***
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E-text prepared by Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan, Charlie Howard, and the
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Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
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Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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file which includes the original illustrations.
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See 52664-h.htm or 52664-h.zip:
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(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52664/52664-h/52664-h.htm)
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or
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(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52664/52664-h.zip)
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Transcriber's note:
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Some characters might not display in this UTF-8 text
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version. If so, the reader should consult the HTML
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version referred to above. One example of this might
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occur in the second paragraph under "Choppers and
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Adze-like Tools", page 46, which contains the phrase
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<20>an adze cutting edge is ? shaped<65>. The symbol before
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<20>shaped<65> looks like a sharply-italicized sans-serif <20>L<EFBFBD>.
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Devices that cannot display that symbol may substitute
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a question mark, a square, or other symbol.
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PREHISTORIC MEN
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by
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ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD
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Research Associate, Old World Prehistory
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Professor
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Oriental Institute and Department of Anthropology
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University of Chicago
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Drawings by Susan T. Richert
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[Illustration]
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Chicago Natural History Museum
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Popular Series
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Anthropology, Number 37
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Third Edition Issued in Co-operation with
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The Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago
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Edited by Lillian A. Ross
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Printed in the United States of America
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by Chicago Natural History Museum Press
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Copyright 1948, 1951, and 1957 by Chicago Natural History Museum
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First edition 1948
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Second edition 1951
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Third edition 1957
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Fourth edition 1959
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Preface
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[Illustration]
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Like the writing of most professional archeologists, mine has been
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confined to so-called learned papers. Good, bad, or indifferent, these
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papers were in a jargon that only my colleagues and a few advanced
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students could understand. Hence, when I was asked to do this little
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book, I soon found it extremely difficult to say what I meant in simple
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fashion. The style is new to me, but I hope the reader will not find it
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forced or pedantic; at least I have done my very best to tell the story
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simply and clearly.
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Many friends have aided in the preparation of the book. The whimsical
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charm of Miss Susan Richert<72>s illustrations add enormously to the
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spirit I wanted. She gave freely of her own time on the drawings and
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in planning the book with me. My colleagues at the University of
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Chicago, especially Professor Wilton M. Krogman (now of the University
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of Pennsylvania), and also Mrs. Linda Braidwood, Associate of the
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Oriental Institute, and Professors Fay-Cooper Cole and Sol Tax, of
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the Department of Anthropology, gave me counsel in matters bearing on
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their special fields, and the Department of Anthropology bore some of
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the expense of the illustrations. From Mrs. Irma Hunter and Mr. Arnold
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Maremont, who are not archeologists at all and have only an intelligent
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layman<EFBFBD>s notion of archeology, I had sound advice on how best to tell
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the story. I am deeply indebted to all these friends.
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While I was preparing the second edition, I had the great fortune
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to be able to rework the third chapter with Professor Sherwood L.
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Washburn, now of the Department of Anthropology of the University of
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California, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters with Professor
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Hallum L. Movius, Jr., of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. The
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book has gained greatly in accuracy thereby. In matters of dating,
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Professor Movius and the indications of Professor W. F. Libby<62>s Carbon
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14 chronology project have both encouraged me to choose the lowest
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dates now current for the events of the Pleistocene Ice Age. There is
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still no certain way of fixing a direct chronology for most of the
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Pleistocene, but Professor Libby<62>s method appears very promising for
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its end range and for proto-historic dates. In any case, this book
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names <20>periods,<2C> and new dates may be written in against mine, if new
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and better dating systems appear.
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I wish to thank Dr. Clifford C. Gregg, Director of Chicago Natural
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History Museum, for the opportunity to publish this book. My old
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friend, Dr. Paul S. Martin, Chief Curator in the Department of
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Anthropology, asked me to undertake the job and inspired me to complete
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it. I am also indebted to Miss Lillian A. Ross, Associate Editor of
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Scientific Publications, and to Mr. George I. Quimby, Curator of
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Exhibits in Anthropology, for all the time they have given me in
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getting the manuscript into proper shape.
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ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD
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_June 15, 1950_
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Preface to the Third Edition
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In preparing the enlarged third edition, many of the above mentioned
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friends have again helped me. I have picked the brains of Professor F.
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Clark Howell of the Department of Anthropology of the University of
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Chicago in reworking the earlier chapters, and he was very patient in
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the matter, which I sincerely appreciate.
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All of Mrs. Susan Richert Allen<65>s original drawings appear, but a few
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necessary corrections have been made in some of the charts and some new
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drawings have been added by Mr. John Pfiffner, Staff Artist, Chicago
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Natural History Museum.
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ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD
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_March 1, 1959_
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Contents
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PAGE
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How We Learn about Prehistoric Men 7
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The Changing World in Which Prehistoric Men Lived 17
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Prehistoric Men Themselves 22
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Cultural Beginnings 38
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More Evidence of Culture 56
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Early Moderns 70
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End and Prelude 92
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The First Revolution 121
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The Conquest of Civilization 144
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End of Prehistory 162
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Summary 176
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List of Books 180
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Index 184
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HOW WE LEARN about Prehistoric Men
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[Illustration]
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Prehistory means the time before written history began. Actually, more
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than 99 per cent of man<61>s story is prehistory. Man is at least half a
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million years old, but he did not begin to write history (or to write
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anything) until about 5,000 years ago.
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The men who lived in prehistoric times left us no history books, but
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they did unintentionally leave a record of their presence and their way
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of life. This record is studied and interpreted by different kinds of
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scientists.
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SCIENTISTS WHO FIND OUT ABOUT PREHISTORIC MEN
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The scientists who study the bones and teeth and any other parts
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they find of the bodies of prehistoric men, are called _physical
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anthropologists_. Physical anthropologists are trained, much like
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doctors, to know all about the human body. They study living people,
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too; they know more about the biological facts of human <20>races<65> than
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anybody else. If the police find a badly decayed body in a trunk,
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they ask a physical anthropologist to tell them what the person
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originally looked like. The physical anthropologists who specialize in
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prehistoric men work with fossils, so they are sometimes called _human
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paleontologists_.
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ARCHEOLOGISTS
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There is a kind of scientist who studies the things that prehistoric
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men made and did. Such a scientist is called an _archeologist_. It is
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the archeologist<73>s business to look for the stone and metal tools, the
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pottery, the graves, and the caves or huts of the men who lived before
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history began.
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But there is more to archeology than just looking for things. In
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Professor V. Gordon Childe<64>s words, archeology <20>furnishes a sort of
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history of human activity, provided always that the actions have
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produced concrete results and left recognizable material traces.<2E> You
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will see that there are at least three points in what Childe says:
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1. The archeologists have to find the traces of things left behind by
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ancient man, and
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2. Only a few objects may be found, for most of these were probably
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too soft or too breakable to last through the years. However,
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3. The archeologist must use whatever he can find to tell a story--to
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make a <20>sort of history<72>--from the objects and living-places and
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graves that have escaped destruction.
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What I mean is this: Let us say you are walking through a dump yard,
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and you find a rusty old spark plug. If you want to think about what
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the spark plug means, you quickly remember that it is a part of an
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automobile motor. This tells you something about the man who threw
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the spark plug on the dump. He either had an automobile, or he knew
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or lived near someone who did. He can<61>t have lived so very long ago,
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you<EFBFBD>ll remember, because spark plugs and automobiles are only about
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sixty years old.
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When you think about the old spark plug in this way you have
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just been making the beginnings of what we call an archeological
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_interpretation_; you have been making the spark plug tell a story.
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It is the same way with the man-made things we archeologists find
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and put in museums. Usually, only a few of these objects are pretty
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to look at; but each of them has some sort of story to tell. Making
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the interpretation of his finds is the most important part of the
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archeologist<EFBFBD>s job. It is the way he gets at the <20>sort of history of
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human activity<74> which is expected of archeology.
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SOME OTHER SCIENTISTS
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There are many other scientists who help the archeologist and the
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physical anthropologist find out about prehistoric men. The geologists
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help us tell the age of the rocks or caves or gravel beds in which
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human bones or man-made objects are found. There are other scientists
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with names which all begin with <20>paleo<65> (the Greek word for <20>old<6C>). The
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_paleontologists_ study fossil animals. There are also, for example,
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such scientists as _paleobotanists_ and _paleoclimatologists_, who
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study ancient plants and climates. These scientists help us to know
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the kinds of animals and plants that were living in prehistoric times
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and so could be used for food by ancient man; what the weather was
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like; and whether there were glaciers. Also, when I tell you that
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prehistoric men did not appear until long after the great dinosaurs had
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disappeared, I go on the say-so of the paleontologists. They know that
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fossils of men and of dinosaurs are not found in the same geological
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period. The dinosaur fossils come in early periods, the fossils of men
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much later.
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Since World War II even the atomic scientists have been helping the
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archeologists. By testing the amount of radioactivity left in charcoal,
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wood, or other vegetable matter obtained from archeological sites, they
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have been able to date the sites. Shell has been used also, and even
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the hair of Egyptian mummies. The dates of geological and climatic
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events have also been discovered. Some of this work has been done from
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drillings taken from the bottom of the sea.
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This dating by radioactivity has considerably shortened the dates which
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the archeologists used to give. If you find that some of the dates
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I give here are more recent than the dates you see in other books
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on prehistory, it is because I am using one of the new lower dating
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systems.
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[Illustration: RADIOCARBON CHART
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The rate of disappearance of radioactivity as time passes.[1]]
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[1] It is important that the limitations of the radioactive carbon
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<20>dating<6E> system be held in mind. As the statistics involved in
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the system are used, there are two chances in three that the
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<20>date<74> of the sample falls within the range given as plus or
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minus an added number of years. For example, the <20>date<74> for the
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Jarmo village (see chart), given as 6750 <20> 200 B.C., really
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means that there are only two chances in three that the real
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date of the charcoal sampled fell between 6950 and 6550 B.C.
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We have also begun to suspect that there are ways in which the
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samples themselves may have become <20>contaminated,<2C> either on
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the early or on the late side. We now tend to be suspicious of
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single radioactive carbon determinations, or of determinations
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from one site alone. But as a fabric of consistent
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determinations for several or more sites of one archeological
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period, we gain confidence in the dates.
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HOW THE SCIENTISTS FIND OUT
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So far, this chapter has been mainly about the people who find out
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about prehistoric men. We also need a word about _how_ they find out.
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All our finds came by accident until about a hundred years ago. Men
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digging wells, or digging in caves for fertilizer, often turned up
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ancient swords or pots or stone arrowheads. People also found some odd
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pieces of stone that didn<64>t look like natural forms, but they also
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didn<EFBFBD>t look like any known tool. As a result, the people who found them
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gave them queer names; for example, <20>thunderbolts.<2E> The people thought
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the strange stones came to earth as bolts of lightning. We know now
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that these strange stones were prehistoric stone tools.
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Many important finds still come to us by accident. In 1935, a British
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dentist, A. T. Marston, found the first of two fragments of a very
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important fossil human skull, in a gravel pit at Swanscombe, on the
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River Thames, England. He had to wait nine months, until the face of
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the gravel pit had been dug eight yards farther back, before the second
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fragment appeared. They fitted! Then, twenty years later, still another
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piece appeared. In 1928 workmen who were blasting out rock for the
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breakwater in the port of Haifa began to notice flint tools. Thus the
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story of cave men on Mount Carmel, in Palestine, began to be known.
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Planned archeological digging is only about a century old. Even before
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this, however, a few men realized the significance of objects they dug
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from the ground; one of these early archeologists was our own Thomas
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Jefferson. The first real mound-digger was a German grocer<65>s clerk,
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Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann made a fortune as a merchant, first
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in Europe and then in the California gold-rush of 1849. He became an
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American citizen. Then he retired and had both money and time to test
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an old idea of his. He believed that the heroes of ancient Troy and
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Mycenae were once real Trojans and Greeks. He proved it by going to
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Turkey and Greece and digging up the remains of both cities.
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Schliemann had the great good fortune to find rich and spectacular
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treasures, and he also had the common sense to keep notes and make
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descriptions of what he found. He proved beyond doubt that many ancient
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city mounds can be _stratified_. This means that there may be the
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remains of many towns in a mound, one above another, like layers in a
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cake.
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You might like to have an idea of how mounds come to be in layers.
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The original settlers may have chosen the spot because it had a good
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spring and there were good fertile lands nearby, or perhaps because
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it was close to some road or river or harbor. These settlers probably
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built their town of stone and mud-brick. Finally, something would have
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happened to the town--a flood, or a burning, or a raid by enemies--and
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the walls of the houses would have fallen in or would have melted down
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as mud in the rain. Nothing would have remained but the mud and debris
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of a low mound of _one_ layer.
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The second settlers would have wanted the spot for the same reasons
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the first settlers did--good water, land, and roads. Also, the second
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settlers would have found a nice low mound to build their houses on,
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a protection from floods. But again, something would finally have
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happened to the second town, and the walls of _its_ houses would have
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come tumbling down. This makes the _second_ layer. And so on....
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In Syria I once had the good fortune to dig on a large mound that had
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no less than fifteen layers. Also, most of the layers were thick, and
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there were signs of rebuilding and repairs within each layer. The mound
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was more than a hundred feet high. In each layer, the building material
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used had been a soft, unbaked mud-brick, and most of the debris
|
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consisted of fallen or rain-melted mud from these mud-bricks.
|
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|
||
This idea of _stratification_, like the cake layers, was already a
|
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familiar one to the geologists by Schliemann<6E>s time. They could show
|
||
that their lowest layer of rock was oldest or earliest, and that the
|
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overlying layers became more recent as one moved upward. Schliemann<6E>s
|
||
digging proved the same thing at Troy. His first (lowest and earliest)
|
||
city had at least nine layers above it; he thought that the second
|
||
layer contained the remains of Homer<65>s Troy. We now know that Homeric
|
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Troy was layer VIIa from the bottom; also, we count eleven layers or
|
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sub-layers in total.
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||
|
||
Schliemann<EFBFBD>s work marks the beginnings of modern archeology. Scholars
|
||
soon set out to dig on ancient sites, from Egypt to Central America.
|
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|
||
|
||
ARCHEOLOGICAL INFORMATION
|
||
|
||
As time went on, the study of archeological materials--found either
|
||
by accident or by digging on purpose--began to show certain things.
|
||
Archeologists began to get ideas as to the kinds of objects that
|
||
belonged together. If you compared a mail-order catalogue of 1890 with
|
||
one of today, you would see a lot of differences. If you really studied
|
||
the two catalogues hard, you would also begin to see that certain
|
||
objects <20>go together.<2E> Horseshoes and metal buggy tires and pieces of
|
||
harness would begin to fit into a picture with certain kinds of coal
|
||
stoves and furniture and china dishes and kerosene lamps. Our friend
|
||
the spark plug, and radios and electric refrigerators and light bulbs
|
||
would fit into a picture with different kinds of furniture and dishes
|
||
and tools. You won<6F>t be old enough to remember the kind of hats that
|
||
women wore in 1890, but you<6F>ve probably seen pictures of them, and you
|
||
know very well they couldn<64>t be worn with the fashions of today.
|
||
|
||
This is one of the ways that archeologists study their materials.
|
||
The various tools and weapons and jewelry, the pottery, the kinds
|
||
of houses, and even the ways of burying the dead tend to fit into
|
||
pictures. Some archeologists call all of the things that go together to
|
||
make such a picture an _assemblage_. The assemblage of the first layer
|
||
of Schliemann<6E>s Troy was as different from that of the seventh layer as
|
||
our 1900 mail-order catalogue is from the one of today.
|
||
|
||
The archeologists who came after Schliemann began to notice other
|
||
things and to compare them with occurrences in modern times. The
|
||
idea that people will buy better mousetraps goes back into very
|
||
ancient times. Today, if we make good automobiles or radios, we can
|
||
sell some of them in Turkey or even in Timbuktu. This means that a
|
||
few present-day types of American automobiles and radios form part
|
||
of present-day <20>assemblages<65> in both Turkey and Timbuktu. The total
|
||
present-day <20>assemblage<67> of Turkey is quite different from that of
|
||
Timbuktu or that of America, but they have at least some automobiles
|
||
and some radios in common.
|
||
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||
Now these automobiles and radios will eventually wear out. Let us
|
||
suppose we could go to some remote part of Turkey or to Timbuktu in a
|
||
dream. We don<6F>t know what the date is, in our dream, but we see all
|
||
sorts of strange things and ways of living in both places. Nobody
|
||
tells us what the date is. But suddenly we see a 1936 Ford; so we
|
||
know that in our dream it has to be at least the year 1936, and only
|
||
as many years after that as we could reasonably expect a Ford to keep
|
||
in running order. The Ford would probably break down in twenty years<72>
|
||
time, so the Turkish or Timbuktu <20>assemblage<67> we<77>re seeing in our dream
|
||
has to date at about A.D. 1936-56.
|
||
|
||
Archeologists not only <20>date<74> their ancient materials in this way; they
|
||
also see over what distances and between which peoples trading was
|
||
done. It turns out that there was a good deal of trading in ancient
|
||
times, probably all on a barter and exchange basis.
|
||
|
||
|
||
EVERYTHING BEGINS TO FIT TOGETHER
|
||
|
||
Now we need to pull these ideas all together and see the complicated
|
||
structure the archeologists can build with their materials.
|
||
|
||
Even the earliest archeologists soon found that there was a very long
|
||
range of prehistoric time which would yield only very simple things.
|
||
For this very long early part of prehistory, there was little to be
|
||
found but the flint tools which wandering, hunting and gathering
|
||
people made, and the bones of the wild animals they ate. Toward the
|
||
end of prehistoric time there was a general settling down with the
|
||
coming of agriculture, and all sorts of new things began to be made.
|
||
Archeologists soon got a general notion of what ought to appear with
|
||
what. Thus, it would upset a French prehistorian digging at the bottom
|
||
of a very early cave if he found a fine bronze sword, just as much as
|
||
it would upset him if he found a beer bottle. The people of his very
|
||
early cave layer simply could not have made bronze swords, which came
|
||
later, just as do beer bottles. Some accidental disturbance of the
|
||
layers of his cave must have happened.
|
||
|
||
With any luck, archeologists do their digging in a layered, stratified
|
||
site. They find the remains of everything that would last through
|
||
time, in several different layers. They know that the assemblage in
|
||
the bottom layer was laid down earlier than the assemblage in the next
|
||
layer above, and so on up to the topmost layer, which is the latest.
|
||
They look at the results of other <20>digs<67> and find that some other
|
||
archeologist 900 miles away has found ax-heads in his lowest layer,
|
||
exactly like the ax-heads of their fifth layer. This means that their
|
||
fifth layer must have been lived in at about the same time as was the
|
||
first layer in the site 200 miles away. It also may mean that the
|
||
people who lived in the two layers knew and traded with each other. Or
|
||
it could mean that they didn<64>t necessarily know each other, but simply
|
||
that both traded with a third group at about the same time.
|
||
|
||
You can see that the more we dig and find, the more clearly the main
|
||
facts begin to stand out. We begin to be more sure of which people
|
||
lived at the same time, which earlier and which later. We begin to
|
||
know who traded with whom, and which peoples seemed to live off by
|
||
themselves. We begin to find enough skeletons in burials so that the
|
||
physical anthropologists can tell us what the people looked like. We
|
||
get animal bones, and a paleontologist may tell us they are all bones
|
||
of wild animals; or he may tell us that some or most of the bones are
|
||
those of domesticated animals, for instance, sheep or cattle, and
|
||
therefore the people must have kept herds.
|
||
|
||
More important than anything else--as our structure grows more
|
||
complicated and our materials increase--is the fact that <20>a sort
|
||
of history of human activity<74> does begin to appear. The habits or
|
||
traditions that men formed in the making of their tools and in the
|
||
ways they did things, begin to stand out for us. How characteristic
|
||
were these habits and traditions? What areas did they spread over?
|
||
How long did they last? We watch the different tools and the traces
|
||
of the way things were done--how the burials were arranged, what
|
||
the living-places were like, and so on. We wonder about the people
|
||
themselves, for the traces of habits and traditions are useful to us
|
||
only as clues to the men who once had them. So we ask the physical
|
||
anthropologists about the skeletons that we found in the burials. The
|
||
physical anthropologists tell us about the anatomy and the similarities
|
||
and differences which the skeletons show when compared with other
|
||
skeletons. The physical anthropologists are even working on a
|
||
method--chemical tests of the bones--that will enable them to discover
|
||
what the blood-type may have been. One thing is sure. We have never
|
||
found a group of skeletons so absolutely similar among themselves--so
|
||
cast from a single mould, so to speak--that we could claim to have a
|
||
<EFBFBD>pure<EFBFBD> race. I am sure we never shall.
|
||
|
||
We become particularly interested in any signs of change--when new
|
||
materials and tool types and ways of doing things replace old ones. We
|
||
watch for signs of social change and progress in one way or another.
|
||
|
||
We must do all this without one word of written history to aid us.
|
||
Everything we are concerned with goes back to the time _before_ men
|
||
learned to write. That is the prehistorian<61>s job--to find out what
|
||
happened before history began.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE CHANGING WORLD in which Prehistoric Men Lived
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
Mankind, we<77>ll say, is at least a half million years old. It is very
|
||
hard to understand how long a time half a million years really is.
|
||
If we were to compare this whole length of time to one day, we<77>d get
|
||
something like this: The present time is midnight, and Jesus was
|
||
born just five minutes and thirty-six seconds ago. Earliest history
|
||
began less than fifteen minutes ago. Everything before 11:45 was in
|
||
prehistoric time.
|
||
|
||
Or maybe we can grasp the length of time better in terms of
|
||
generations. As you know, primitive peoples tend to marry and have
|
||
children rather early in life. So suppose we say that twenty years
|
||
will make an average generation. At this rate there would be 25,000
|
||
generations in a half-million years. But our United States is much less
|
||
than ten generations old, twenty-five generations take us back before
|
||
the time of Columbus, Julius Caesar was alive just 100 generations ago,
|
||
David was king of Israel less than 150 generations ago, 250 generations
|
||
take us back to the beginning of written history. And there were 24,750
|
||
generations of men before written history began!
|
||
|
||
I should probably tell you that there is a new method of prehistoric
|
||
dating which would cut the earliest dates in my reckoning almost
|
||
in half. Dr. Cesare Emiliani, combining radioactive (C14) and
|
||
chemical (oxygen isotope) methods in the study of deep-sea borings,
|
||
has developed a system which would lower the total range of human
|
||
prehistory to about 300,000 years. The system is still too new to have
|
||
had general examination and testing. Hence, I have not used it in this
|
||
book; it would mainly affect the dates earlier than 25,000 years ago.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENT
|
||
|
||
The earth probably hasn<73>t changed much in the last 5,000 years (250
|
||
generations). Men have built things on its surface and dug into it and
|
||
drawn boundaries on maps of it, but the places where rivers, lakes,
|
||
seas, and mountains now stand have changed very little.
|
||
|
||
In earlier times the earth looked very different. Geologists call the
|
||
last great geological period the _Pleistocene_. It began somewhere
|
||
between a half million and a million years ago, and was a time of great
|
||
changes. Sometimes we call it the Ice Age, for in the Pleistocene
|
||
there were at least three or four times when large areas of earth
|
||
were covered with glaciers. The reason for my uncertainty is that
|
||
while there seem to have been four major mountain or alpine phases of
|
||
glaciation, there may only have been three general continental phases
|
||
in the Old World.[2]
|
||
|
||
[2] This is a complicated affair and I do not want to bother you
|
||
with its details. Both the alpine and the continental ice sheets
|
||
seem to have had minor fluctuations during their _main_ phases,
|
||
and the advances of the later phases destroyed many of the
|
||
traces of the earlier phases. The general textbooks have tended
|
||
to follow the names and numbers established for the Alps early
|
||
in this century by two German geologists. I will not bother you
|
||
with the names, but there were _four_ major phases. It is the
|
||
second of these alpine phases which seems to fit the traces of
|
||
the earliest of the great continental glaciations. In this book,
|
||
I will use the four-part system, since it is the most familiar,
|
||
but will add the word _alpine_ so you may remember to make the
|
||
transition to the continental system if you wish to do so.
|
||
|
||
Glaciers are great sheets of ice, sometimes over a thousand feet
|
||
thick, which are now known only in Greenland and Antarctica and in
|
||
high mountains. During several of the glacial periods in the Ice Age,
|
||
the glaciers covered most of Canada and the northern United States and
|
||
reached down to southern England and France in Europe. Smaller ice
|
||
sheets sat like caps on the Rockies, the Alps, and the Himalayas. The
|
||
continental glaciation only happened north of the equator, however, so
|
||
remember that <20>Ice Age<67> is only half true.
|
||
|
||
As you know, the amount of water on and about the earth does not vary.
|
||
These large glaciers contained millions of tons of water frozen into
|
||
ice. Because so much water was frozen and contained in the glaciers,
|
||
the water level of lakes and oceans was lowered. Flooded areas were
|
||
drained and appeared as dry land. There were times in the Ice Age when
|
||
there was no English Channel, so that England was not an island, and a
|
||
land bridge at the Dardanelles probably divided the Mediterranean from
|
||
the Black Sea.
|
||
|
||
A very important thing for people living during the time of a
|
||
glaciation was the region adjacent to the glacier. They could not, of
|
||
course, live on the ice itself. The questions would be how close could
|
||
they live to it, and how would they have had to change their way of
|
||
life to do so.
|
||
|
||
|
||
GLACIERS CHANGE THE WEATHER
|
||
|
||
Great sheets of ice change the weather. When the front of a glacier
|
||
stood at Milwaukee, the weather must have been bitterly cold in
|
||
Chicago. The climate of the whole world would have been different, and
|
||
you can see how animals and men would have been forced to move from one
|
||
place to another in search of food and warmth.
|
||
|
||
On the other hand, it looks as if only a minor proportion of the whole
|
||
Ice Age was really taken up by times of glaciation. In between came
|
||
the _interglacial_ periods. During these times the climate around
|
||
Chicago was as warm as it is now, and sometimes even warmer. It may
|
||
interest you to know that the last great glacier melted away less than
|
||
10,000 years ago. Professor Ernst Antevs thinks we may be living in an
|
||
interglacial period and that the Ice Age may not be over yet. So if you
|
||
want to make a killing in real estate for your several hundred times
|
||
great-grandchildren, you might buy some land in the Arizona desert or
|
||
the Sahara.
|
||
|
||
We do not yet know just why the glaciers appeared and disappeared, as
|
||
they did. It surely had something to do with an increase in rainfall
|
||
and a fall in temperature. It probably also had to do with a general
|
||
tendency for the land to rise at the beginning of the Pleistocene. We
|
||
know there was some mountain-building at that time. Hence, rain-bearing
|
||
winds nourished the rising and cooler uplands with snow. An increase
|
||
in all three of these factors--if they came together--would only have
|
||
needed to be slight. But exactly why this happened we do not know.
|
||
|
||
The reason I tell you about the glaciers is simply to remind you of the
|
||
changing world in which prehistoric men lived. Their surroundings--the
|
||
animals and plants they used for food, and the weather they had to
|
||
protect themselves from--were always changing. On the other hand, this
|
||
change happened over so long a period of time and was so slow that
|
||
individual people could not have noticed it. Glaciers, about which they
|
||
probably knew nothing, moved in hundreds of miles to the north of them.
|
||
The people must simply have wandered ever more southward in search
|
||
of the plants and animals on which they lived. Or some men may have
|
||
stayed where they were and learned to hunt different animals and eat
|
||
different foods. Prehistoric men had to keep adapting themselves to new
|
||
environments and those who were most adaptive were most successful.
|
||
|
||
|
||
OTHER CHANGES
|
||
|
||
Changes took place in the men themselves as well as in the ways they
|
||
lived. As time went on, they made better tools and weapons. Then, too,
|
||
we begin to find signs of how they started thinking of other things
|
||
than food and the tools to get it with. We find that they painted on
|
||
the walls of caves, and decorated their tools; we find that they buried
|
||
their dead.
|
||
|
||
At about the time when the last great glacier was finally melting away,
|
||
men in the Near East made the first basic change in human economy.
|
||
They began to plant grain, and they learned to raise and herd certain
|
||
animals. This meant that they could store food in granaries and <20>on the
|
||
hoof<EFBFBD> against the bad times of the year. This first really basic change
|
||
in man<61>s way of living has been called the <20>food-producing revolution.<2E>
|
||
By the time it happened, a modern kind of climate was beginning. Men
|
||
had already grown to look as they do now. Know-how in ways of living
|
||
had developed and progressed, slowly but surely, up to a point. It was
|
||
impossible for men to go beyond that point if they only hunted and
|
||
fished and gathered wild foods. Once the basic change was made--once
|
||
the food-producing revolution became effective--technology leaped ahead
|
||
and civilization and written history soon began.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Prehistoric Men THEMSELVES
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
DO WE KNOW WHERE MAN ORIGINATED?
|
||
|
||
For a long time some scientists thought the <20>cradle of mankind<6E> was in
|
||
central Asia. Other scientists insisted it was in Africa, and still
|
||
others said it might have been in Europe. Actually, we don<6F>t know
|
||
where it was. We don<6F>t even know that there was only _one_ <20>cradle.<2E>
|
||
If we had to choose a <20>cradle<6C> at this moment, we would probably say
|
||
Africa. But the southern portions of Asia and Europe may also have been
|
||
included in the general area. The scene of the early development of
|
||
mankind was certainly the Old World. It is pretty certain men didn<64>t
|
||
reach North or South America until almost the end of the Ice Age--had
|
||
they done so earlier we would certainly have found some trace of them
|
||
by now.
|
||
|
||
The earliest tools we have yet found come from central and south
|
||
Africa. By the dating system I<>m using, these tools must be over
|
||
500,000 years old. There are now reports that a few such early tools
|
||
have been found--at the Sterkfontein cave in South Africa--along with
|
||
the bones of small fossil men called <20>australopithecines.<2E>
|
||
|
||
Not all scientists would agree that the australopithecines were <20>men,<2C>
|
||
or would agree that the tools were made by the australopithecines
|
||
themselves. For these sticklers, the earliest bones of men come from
|
||
the island of Java. The date would be about 450,000 years ago. So far,
|
||
we have not yet found the tools which we suppose these earliest men in
|
||
the Far East must have made.
|
||
|
||
Let me say it another way. How old are the earliest traces of men we
|
||
now have? Over half a million years. This was a time when the first
|
||
alpine glaciation was happening in the north. What has been found so
|
||
far? The tools which the men of those times made, in different parts
|
||
of Africa. It is now fairly generally agreed that the <20>men<65> who made
|
||
the tools were the australopithecines. There is also a more <20>man-like<6B>
|
||
jawbone at Kanam in Kenya, but its find-spot has been questioned. The
|
||
next earliest bones we have were found in Java, and they may be almost
|
||
a hundred thousand years younger than the earliest African finds. We
|
||
haven<EFBFBD>t yet found the tools of these early Javanese. Our knowledge of
|
||
tool-using in Africa spreads quickly as time goes on: soon after the
|
||
appearance of tools in the south we shall have them from as far north
|
||
as Algeria.
|
||
|
||
Very soon after the earliest Javanese come the bones of slightly more
|
||
developed people in Java, and the jawbone of a man who once lived in
|
||
what is now Germany. The same general glacial beds which yielded the
|
||
later Javanese bones and the German jawbone also include tools. These
|
||
finds come from the time of the second alpine glaciation.
|
||
|
||
So this is the situation. By the time of the end of the second alpine
|
||
or first continental glaciation (say 400,000 years ago) we have traces
|
||
of men from the extremes of the more southerly portions of the Old
|
||
World--South Africa, eastern Asia, and western Europe. There are also
|
||
some traces of men in the middle ground. In fact, Professor Franz
|
||
Weidenreich believed that creatures who were the immediate ancestors
|
||
of men had already spread over Europe, Africa, and Asia by the time
|
||
the Ice Age began. We certainly have no reason to disbelieve this, but
|
||
fortunate accidents of discovery have not yet given us the evidence to
|
||
prove it.
|
||
|
||
|
||
MEN AND APES
|
||
|
||
Many people used to get extremely upset at the ill-formed notion
|
||
that <20>man descended from the apes.<2E> Such words were much more likely
|
||
to start fights or <20>monkey trials<6C> than the correct notion that all
|
||
living animals, including man, ascended or evolved from a single-celled
|
||
organism which lived in the primeval seas hundreds of millions of years
|
||
ago. Men are mammals, of the order called Primates, and man<61>s living
|
||
relatives are the great apes. Men didn<64>t <20>descend<6E> from the apes or
|
||
apes from men, and mankind must have had much closer relatives who have
|
||
since become extinct.
|
||
|
||
Men stand erect. They also walk and run on their two feet. Apes are
|
||
happiest in trees, swinging with their arms from branch to branch.
|
||
Few branches of trees will hold the mighty gorilla, although he still
|
||
manages to sleep in trees. Apes can<61>t stand really erect in our sense,
|
||
and when they have to run on the ground, they use the knuckles of their
|
||
hands as well as their feet.
|
||
|
||
A key group of fossil bones here are the south African
|
||
australopithecines. These are called the _Australopithecinae_ or
|
||
<EFBFBD>man-apes<65> or sometimes even <20>ape-men.<2E> We do not _know_ that they were
|
||
directly ancestral to men but they can hardly have been so to apes.
|
||
Presently I<>ll describe them a bit more. The reason I mention them
|
||
here is that while they had brains no larger than those of apes, their
|
||
hipbones were enough like ours so that they must have stood erect.
|
||
There is no good reason to think they couldn<64>t have walked as we do.
|
||
|
||
|
||
BRAINS, HANDS, AND TOOLS
|
||
|
||
Whether the australopithecines were our ancestors or not, the proper
|
||
ancestors of men must have been able to stand erect and to walk on
|
||
their two feet. Three further important things probably were involved,
|
||
next, before they could become men proper. These are:
|
||
|
||
1. The increasing size and development of the brain.
|
||
|
||
2. The increasing usefulness (specialization) of the thumb and hand.
|
||
|
||
3. The use of tools.
|
||
|
||
Nobody knows which of these three is most important, or which came
|
||
first. Most probably the growth of all three things was very much
|
||
blended together. If you think about each of the things, you will see
|
||
what I mean. Unless your hand is more flexible than a paw, and your
|
||
thumb will work against (or oppose) your fingers, you can<61>t hold a tool
|
||
very well. But you wouldn<64>t get the idea of using a tool unless you had
|
||
enough brain to help you see cause and effect. And it is rather hard to
|
||
see how your hand and brain would develop unless they had something to
|
||
practice on--like using tools. In Professor Krogman<61>s words, <20>the hand
|
||
must become the obedient servant of the eye and the brain.<2E> It is the
|
||
_co-ordination_ of these things that counts.
|
||
|
||
Many other things must have been happening to the bodies of the
|
||
creatures who were the ancestors of men. Our ancestors had to develop
|
||
organs of speech. More than that, they had to get the idea of letting
|
||
_certain sounds_ made with these speech organs have _certain meanings_.
|
||
|
||
All this must have gone very slowly. Probably everything was developing
|
||
little by little, all together. Men became men very slowly.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHEN SHALL WE CALL MEN MEN?
|
||
|
||
What do I mean when I say <20>men<65>? People who looked pretty much as we
|
||
do, and who used different tools to do different things, are men to me.
|
||
We<EFBFBD>ll probably never know whether the earliest ones talked or not. They
|
||
probably had vocal cords, so they could make sounds, but did they know
|
||
how to make sounds work as symbols to carry meanings? But if the fossil
|
||
bones look like our skeletons, and if we find tools which we<77>ll agree
|
||
couldn<EFBFBD>t have been made by nature or by animals, then I<>d say we had
|
||
traces of _men_.
|
||
|
||
The australopithecine finds of the Transvaal and Bechuanaland, in
|
||
south Africa, are bound to come into the discussion here. I<>ve already
|
||
told you that the australopithecines could have stood upright and
|
||
walked on their two hind legs. They come from the very base of the
|
||
Pleistocene or Ice Age, and a few coarse stone tools have been found
|
||
with the australopithecine fossils. But there are three varieties
|
||
of the australopithecines and they last on until a time equal to
|
||
that of the second alpine glaciation. They are the best suggestion
|
||
we have yet as to what the ancestors of men _may_ have looked like.
|
||
They were certainly closer to men than to apes. Although their brain
|
||
size was no larger than the brains of modern apes their body size and
|
||
stature were quite small; hence, relative to their small size, their
|
||
brains were large. We have not been able to prove without doubt that
|
||
the australopithecines were _tool-making_ creatures, even though the
|
||
recent news has it that tools have been found with australopithecine
|
||
bones. The doubt as to whether the australopithecines used the tools
|
||
themselves goes like this--just suppose some man-like creature (whose
|
||
bones we have not yet found) made the tools and used them to kill
|
||
and butcher australopithecines. Hence a few experts tend to let
|
||
australopithecines still hang in limbo as <20>man-apes.<2E>
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE EARLIEST MEN WE KNOW
|
||
|
||
I<EFBFBD>ll postpone talking about the tools of early men until the next
|
||
chapter. The men whose bones were the earliest of the Java lot have
|
||
been given the name _Meganthropus_. The bones are very fragmentary. We
|
||
would not understand them very well unless we had the somewhat later
|
||
Javanese lot--the more commonly known _Pithecanthropus_ or <20>Java
|
||
man<EFBFBD>--against which to refer them for study. One of the less well-known
|
||
and earliest fragments, a piece of lower jaw and some teeth, rather
|
||
strongly resembles the lower jaws and teeth of the australopithecine
|
||
type. Was _Meganthropus_ a sort of half-way point between the
|
||
australopithecines and _Pithecanthropus_? It is still too early to say.
|
||
We shall need more finds before we can be definite one way or the other.
|
||
|
||
Java man, _Pithecanthropus_, comes from geological beds equal in age
|
||
to the latter part of the second alpine glaciation; the _Meganthropus_
|
||
finds refer to beds of the beginning of this glaciation. The first
|
||
finds of Java man were made in 1891-92 by Dr. Eugene Dubois, a Dutch
|
||
doctor in the colonial service. Finds have continued to be made. There
|
||
are now bones enough to account for four skulls. There are also four
|
||
jaws and some odd teeth and thigh bones. Java man, generally speaking,
|
||
was about five feet six inches tall, and didn<64>t hold his head very
|
||
erect. His skull was very thick and heavy and had room for little more
|
||
than two-thirds as large a brain as we have. He had big teeth and a big
|
||
jaw and enormous eyebrow ridges.
|
||
|
||
No tools were found in the geological deposits where bones of Java man
|
||
appeared. There are some tools in the same general area, but they come
|
||
a bit later in time. One reason we accept the Java man as man--aside
|
||
from his general anatomical appearance--is that these tools probably
|
||
belonged to his near descendants.
|
||
|
||
Remember that there are several varieties of men in the whole early
|
||
Java lot, at least two of which are earlier than the _Pithecanthropus_,
|
||
<EFBFBD>Java man.<2E> Some of the earlier ones seem to have gone in for
|
||
bigness, in tooth-size at least. _Meganthropus_ is one of these
|
||
earlier varieties. As we said, he _may_ turn out to be a link to
|
||
the australopithecines, who _may_ or _may not_ be ancestral to men.
|
||
_Meganthropus_ is best understandable in terms of _Pithecanthropus_,
|
||
who appeared later in the same general area. _Pithecanthropus_ is
|
||
pretty well understandable from the bones he left us, and also because
|
||
of his strong resemblance to the fully tool-using cave-dwelling <20>Peking
|
||
man,<2C> _Sinanthropus_, about whom we shall talk next. But you can see
|
||
that the physical anthropologists and prehistoric archeologists still
|
||
have a lot of work to do on the problem of earliest men.
|
||
|
||
|
||
PEKING MEN AND SOME EARLY WESTERNERS
|
||
|
||
The earliest known Chinese are called _Sinanthropus_, or <20>Peking man,<2C>
|
||
because the finds were made near that city. In World War II, the United
|
||
States Marine guard at our Embassy in Peking tried to help get the
|
||
bones out of the city before the Japanese attack. Nobody knows where
|
||
these bones are now. The Red Chinese accuse us of having stolen them.
|
||
They were last seen on a dock-side at a Chinese port. But should you
|
||
catch a Marine with a sack of old bones, perhaps we could achieve peace
|
||
in Asia by returning them! Fortunately, there is a complete set of
|
||
casts of the bones.
|
||
|
||
Peking man lived in a cave in a limestone hill, made tools, cracked
|
||
animal bones to get the marrow out, and used fire. Incidentally, the
|
||
bones of Peking man were found because Chinese dig for what they call
|
||
<EFBFBD>dragon bones<65> and <20>dragon teeth.<2E> Uneducated Chinese buy these things
|
||
in their drug stores and grind them into powder for medicine. The
|
||
<EFBFBD>dragon teeth<74> and <20>bones<65> are really fossils of ancient animals, and
|
||
sometimes of men. The people who supply the drug stores have learned
|
||
where to dig for strange bones and teeth. Paleontologists who get to
|
||
China go to the drug stores to buy fossils. In a roundabout way, this
|
||
is how the fallen-in cave of Peking man at Choukoutien was discovered.
|
||
|
||
Peking man was not quite as tall as Java man but he probably stood
|
||
straighter. His skull looked very much like that of the Java skull
|
||
except that it had room for a slightly larger brain. His face was less
|
||
brutish than was Java man<61>s face, but this isn<73>t saying much.
|
||
|
||
Peking man dates from early in the interglacial period following the
|
||
second alpine glaciation. He probably lived close to 350,000 years
|
||
ago. There are several finds to account for in Europe by about this
|
||
time, and one from northwest Africa. The very large jawbone found
|
||
near Heidelberg in Germany is doubtless even earlier than Peking man.
|
||
The beds where it was found are of second alpine glacial times, and
|
||
recently some tools have been said to have come from the same beds.
|
||
There is not much I need tell you about the Heidelberg jaw save that it
|
||
seems certainly to have belonged to an early man, and that it is very
|
||
big.
|
||
|
||
Another find in Germany was made at Steinheim. It consists of the
|
||
fragmentary skull of a man. It is very important because of its
|
||
relative completeness, but it has not yet been fully studied. The bone
|
||
is thick, but the back of the head is neither very low nor primitive,
|
||
and the face is also not primitive. The forehead does, however, have
|
||
big ridges over the eyes. The more fragmentary skull from Swanscombe in
|
||
England (p. 11) has been much more carefully studied. Only the top and
|
||
back of that skull have been found. Since the skull rounds up nicely,
|
||
it has been assumed that the face and forehead must have been quite
|
||
<EFBFBD>modern.<2E> Careful comparison with Steinheim shows that this was not
|
||
necessarily so. This is important because it bears on the question of
|
||
how early truly <20>modern<72> man appeared.
|
||
|
||
Recently two fragmentary jaws were found at Ternafine in Algeria,
|
||
northwest Africa. They look like the jaws of Peking man. Tools were
|
||
found with them. Since no jaws have yet been found at Steinheim or
|
||
Swanscombe, but the time is the same, one wonders if these people had
|
||
jaws like those of Ternafine.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHAT HAPPENED TO JAVA AND PEKING MEN
|
||
|
||
Professor Weidenreich thought that there were at least a dozen ways in
|
||
which the Peking man resembled the modern Mongoloids. This would seem
|
||
to indicate that Peking man was really just a very early Chinese.
|
||
|
||
Several later fossil men have been found in the Java-Australian area.
|
||
The best known of these is the so-called Solo man. There are some finds
|
||
from Australia itself which we now know to be quite late. But it looks
|
||
as if we may assume a line of evolution from Java man down to the
|
||
modern Australian natives. During parts of the Ice Age there was a land
|
||
bridge all the way from Java to Australia.
|
||
|
||
|
||
TWO ENGLISHMEN WHO WEREN<45>T OLD
|
||
|
||
The older textbooks contain descriptions of two English finds which
|
||
were thought to be very old. These were called Piltdown (_Eoanthropus
|
||
dawsoni_) and Galley Hill. The skulls were very modern in appearance.
|
||
In 1948-49, British scientists began making chemical tests which proved
|
||
that neither of these finds is very old. It is now known that both
|
||
<EFBFBD>Piltdown man<61> and the tools which were said to have been found with
|
||
him were part of an elaborate fake!
|
||
|
||
|
||
TYPICAL <20>CAVE MEN<45>
|
||
|
||
The next men we have to talk about are all members of a related group.
|
||
These are the Neanderthal group. <20>Neanderthal man<61> himself was found in
|
||
the Neander Valley, near D<>sseldorf, Germany, in 1856. He was the first
|
||
human fossil to be recognized as such.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: PRINCIPAL KNOWN TYPES OF FOSSIL MEN
|
||
|
||
CRO-MAGNON
|
||
NEANDERTHAL
|
||
MODERN SKULL
|
||
COMBE-CAPELLE
|
||
SINANTHROPUS
|
||
PITHECANTHROPUS]
|
||
|
||
Some of us think that the neanderthaloids proper are only those people
|
||
of western Europe who didn<64>t get out before the beginning of the last
|
||
great glaciation, and who found themselves hemmed in by the glaciers
|
||
in the Alps and northern Europe. Being hemmed in, they intermarried
|
||
a bit too much and developed into a special type. Professor F. Clark
|
||
Howell sees it this way. In Europe, the earliest trace of men we
|
||
now know is the Heidelberg jaw. Evolution continued in Europe, from
|
||
Heidelberg through the Swanscombe and Steinheim types to a group of
|
||
pre-neanderthaloids. There are traces of these pre-neanderthaloids
|
||
pretty much throughout Europe during the third interglacial period--say
|
||
100,000 years ago. The pre-neanderthaloids are represented by such
|
||
finds as the ones at Ehringsdorf in Germany and Saccopastore in Italy.
|
||
I won<6F>t describe them for you, since they are simply less extreme than
|
||
the neanderthaloids proper--about half way between Steinheim and the
|
||
classic Neanderthal people.
|
||
|
||
Professor Howell believes that the pre-neanderthaloids who happened to
|
||
get caught in the pocket of the southwest corner of Europe at the onset
|
||
of the last great glaciation became the classic Neanderthalers. Out in
|
||
the Near East, Howell thinks, it is possible to see traces of people
|
||
evolving from the pre-neanderthaloid type toward that of fully modern
|
||
man. Certainly, we don<6F>t see such extreme cases of <20>neanderthaloidism<73>
|
||
outside of western Europe.
|
||
|
||
There are at least a dozen good examples in the main or classic
|
||
Neanderthal group in Europe. They date to just before and in the
|
||
earlier part of the last great glaciation (85,000 to 40,000 years ago).
|
||
Many of the finds have been made in caves. The <20>cave men<65> the movies
|
||
and the cartoonists show you are probably meant to be Neanderthalers.
|
||
I<EFBFBD>m not at all sure they dragged their women by the hair; the women
|
||
were probably pretty tough, too!
|
||
|
||
Neanderthal men had large bony heads, but plenty of room for brains.
|
||
Some had brain cases even larger than the average for modern man. Their
|
||
faces were heavy, and they had eyebrow ridges of bone, but the ridges
|
||
were not as big as those of Java man. Their foreheads were very low,
|
||
and they didn<64>t have much chin. They were about five feet three inches
|
||
tall, but were heavy and barrel-chested. But the Neanderthalers didn<64>t
|
||
slouch as much as they<65>ve been blamed for, either.
|
||
|
||
One important thing about the Neanderthal group is that there is a fair
|
||
number of them to study. Just as important is the fact that we know
|
||
something about how they lived, and about some of the tools they made.
|
||
|
||
|
||
OTHER MEN CONTEMPORARY WITH THE NEANDERTHALOIDS
|
||
|
||
We have seen that the neanderthaloids seem to be a specialization
|
||
in a corner of Europe. What was going on elsewhere? We think that
|
||
the pre-neanderthaloid type was a generally widespread form of men.
|
||
From this type evolved other more or less extreme although generally
|
||
related men. The Solo finds in Java form one such case. Another was the
|
||
Rhodesian man of Africa, and the more recent Hopefield finds show more
|
||
of the general Rhodesian type. It is more confusing than it needs to be
|
||
if these cases outside western Europe are called neanderthaloids. They
|
||
lived during the same approximate time range but they were all somewhat
|
||
different-looking people.
|
||
|
||
|
||
EARLY MODERN MEN
|
||
|
||
How early is modern man (_Homo sapiens_), the <20>wise man<61>? Some people
|
||
have thought that he was very early, a few still think so. Piltdown
|
||
and Galley Hill, which were quite modern in anatomical appearance and
|
||
_supposedly_ very early in date, were the best <20>evidence<63> for very
|
||
early modern men. Now that Piltdown has been liquidated and Galley Hill
|
||
is known to be very late, what is left of the idea?
|
||
|
||
The backs of the skulls of the Swanscombe and Steinheim finds look
|
||
rather modern. Unless you pay attention to the face and forehead of the
|
||
Steinheim find--which not many people have--and perhaps also consider
|
||
the Ternafine jaws, you might come to the conclusion that the crown of
|
||
the Swanscombe head was that of a modern-like man.
|
||
|
||
Two more skulls, again without faces, are available from a French
|
||
cave site, Font<6E>chevade. They come from the time of the last great
|
||
interglacial, as did the pre-neanderthaloids. The crowns of the
|
||
Font<EFBFBD>chevade skulls also look quite modern. There is a bit of the
|
||
forehead preserved on one of these skulls and the brow-ridge is not
|
||
heavy. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that the bones belonged to
|
||
an immature individual. In this case, his (or even more so, if _her_)
|
||
brow-ridges would have been weak anyway. The case for the Font<6E>chevade
|
||
fossils, as modern type men, is little stronger than that for
|
||
Swanscombe, although Professor Vallois believes it a good case.
|
||
|
||
It seems to add up to the fact that there were people living in
|
||
Europe--before the classic neanderthaloids--who looked more modern,
|
||
in some features, than the classic western neanderthaloids did. Our
|
||
best suggestion of what men looked like--just before they became fully
|
||
modern--comes from a cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE FIRST MODERNS
|
||
|
||
Professor T. D. McCown and the late Sir Arthur Keith, who studied the
|
||
Mount Carmel bones, figured out that one of the two groups involved
|
||
was as much as 70 per cent modern. There were, in fact, two groups or
|
||
varieties of men in the Mount Carmel caves and in at least two other
|
||
Palestinian caves of about the same time. The time would be about that
|
||
of the onset of colder weather, when the last glaciation was beginning
|
||
in the north--say 75,000 years ago.
|
||
|
||
The 70 per cent modern group came from only one cave, Mugharet es-Skhul
|
||
(<28>cave of the kids<64>). The other group, from several caves, had bones of
|
||
men of the type we<77>ve been calling pre-neanderthaloid which we noted
|
||
were widespread in Europe and beyond. The tools which came with each
|
||
of these finds were generally similar, and McCown and Keith, and other
|
||
scholars since their study, have tended to assume that both the Skhul
|
||
group and the pre-neanderthaloid group came from exactly the same time.
|
||
The conclusion was quite natural: here was a population of men in the
|
||
act of evolving in two different directions. But the time may not be
|
||
exactly the same. It is very difficult to be precise, within say 10,000
|
||
years, for a time some 75,000 years ago. If the Skhul men are in fact
|
||
later than the pre-neanderthaloid group of Palestine, as some of us
|
||
think, then they show how relatively modern some men were--men who
|
||
lived at the same time as the classic Neanderthalers of the European
|
||
pocket.
|
||
|
||
Soon after the first extremely cold phase of the last glaciation, we
|
||
begin to get a number of bones of completely modern men in Europe.
|
||
We also get great numbers of the tools they made, and their living
|
||
places in caves. Completely modern skeletons begin turning up in caves
|
||
dating back to toward 40,000 years ago. The time is about that of the
|
||
beginning of the second phase of the last glaciation. These skeletons
|
||
belonged to people no different from many people we see today. Like
|
||
people today, not everybody looked alike. (The positions of the more
|
||
important fossil men of later Europe are shown in the chart on page
|
||
72.)
|
||
|
||
|
||
DIFFERENCES IN THE EARLY MODERNS
|
||
|
||
The main early European moderns have been divided into two groups, the
|
||
Cro-Magnon group and the Combe Capelle-Br<42>nn group. Cro-Magnon people
|
||
were tall and big-boned, with large, long, and rugged heads. They
|
||
must have been built like many present-day Scandinavians. The Combe
|
||
Capelle-Br<42>nn people were shorter; they had narrow heads and faces, and
|
||
big eyebrow-ridges. Of course we don<6F>t find the skin or hair of these
|
||
people. But there is little doubt they were Caucasoids (<28>Whites<65>).
|
||
|
||
Another important find came in the Italian Riviera, near Monte Carlo.
|
||
Here, in a cave near Grimaldi, there was a grave containing a woman
|
||
and a young boy, buried together. The two skeletons were first called
|
||
<EFBFBD>Negroid<EFBFBD> because some features of their bones were thought to resemble
|
||
certain features of modern African Negro bones. But more recently,
|
||
Professor E. A. Hooton and other experts questioned the use of the word
|
||
<EFBFBD>Negroid<EFBFBD> in describing the Grimaldi skeletons. It is true that nothing
|
||
is known of the skin color, hair form, or any other fleshy feature of
|
||
the Grimaldi people, so that the word <20>Negroid<69> in its usual meaning is
|
||
not proper here. It is also not clear whether the features of the bones
|
||
claimed to be <20>Negroid<69> are really so at all.
|
||
|
||
From a place called Wadjak, in Java, we have <20>proto-Australoid<69> skulls
|
||
which closely resemble those of modern Australian natives. Some of
|
||
the skulls found in South Africa, especially the Boskop skull, look
|
||
like those of modern Bushmen, but are much bigger. The ancestors of
|
||
the Bushmen seem to have once been very widespread south of the Sahara
|
||
Desert. True African Negroes were forest people who apparently expanded
|
||
out of the west central African area only in the last several thousand
|
||
years. Although dark in skin color, neither the Australians nor the
|
||
Bushmen are Negroes; neither the Wadjak nor the Boskop skulls are
|
||
<EFBFBD>Negroid.<2E>
|
||
|
||
As we<77>ve already mentioned, Professor Weidenreich believed that Peking
|
||
man was already on the way to becoming a Mongoloid. Anyway, the
|
||
Mongoloids would seem to have been present by the time of the <20>Upper
|
||
Cave<EFBFBD> at Choukoutien, the _Sinanthropus_ find-spot.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHAT THE DIFFERENCES MEAN
|
||
|
||
What does all this difference mean? It means that, at one moment in
|
||
time, within each different area, men tended to look somewhat alike.
|
||
From area to area, men tended to look somewhat different, just as
|
||
they do today. This is all quite natural. People _tended_ to mate
|
||
near home; in the anthropological jargon, they made up geographically
|
||
localized breeding populations. The simple continental division of
|
||
<EFBFBD>stocks<EFBFBD>--black = Africa, yellow = Asia, white = Europe--is too simple
|
||
a picture to fit the facts. People became accustomed to life in some
|
||
particular area within a continent (we might call it a <20>natural area<65>).
|
||
As they went on living there, they evolved towards some particular
|
||
physical variety. It would, of course, have been difficult to draw
|
||
a clear boundary between two adjacent areas. There must always have
|
||
been some mating across the boundaries in every case. One thing human
|
||
beings don<6F>t do, and never have done, is to mate for <20>purity.<2E> It is
|
||
self-righteous nonsense when we try to kid ourselves into thinking that
|
||
they do.
|
||
|
||
I am not going to struggle with the whole business of modern stocks and
|
||
races. This is a book about prehistoric men, not recent historic or
|
||
modern men. My physical anthropologist friends have been very patient
|
||
in helping me to write and rewrite this chapter--I am not going to
|
||
break their patience completely. Races are their business, not mine,
|
||
and they must do the writing about races. I shall, however, give two
|
||
modern definitions of race, and then make one comment.
|
||
|
||
Dr. William G. Boyd, professor of Immunochemistry, School of
|
||
Medicine, Boston University: <20>We may define a human race as a
|
||
population which differs significantly from other human populations
|
||
in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it
|
||
possesses.<2E>
|
||
|
||
Professor Sherwood L. Washburn, professor of Physical Anthropology,
|
||
Department of Anthropology, the University of California: <20>A <20>race<63>
|
||
is a group of genetically similar populations, and races intergrade
|
||
because there are always intermediate populations.<2E>
|
||
|
||
My comment is that the ideas involved here are all biological: they
|
||
concern groups, _not_ individuals. Boyd and Washburn may differ a bit
|
||
on what they want to consider a <20>population,<2C> but a population is a
|
||
group nevertheless, and genetics is biology to the hilt. Now a lot of
|
||
people still think of race in terms of how people dress or fix their
|
||
food or of other habits or customs they have. The next step is to talk
|
||
about racial <20>purity.<2E> None of this has anything whatever to do with
|
||
race proper, which is a matter of the biology of groups.
|
||
|
||
Incidentally, I<>m told that if man very carefully _controls_
|
||
the breeding of certain animals over generations--dogs, cattle,
|
||
chickens--he might achieve a <20>pure<72> race of animals. But he doesn<73>t do
|
||
it. Some unfortunate genetic trait soon turns up, so this has just as
|
||
carefully to be bred out again, and so on.
|
||
|
||
|
||
SUMMARY OF PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF FOSSIL MEN
|
||
|
||
The earliest bones of men we now have--upon which all the experts
|
||
would probably agree--are those of _Meganthropus_, from Java, of about
|
||
450,000 years ago. The earlier australopithecines of Africa were
|
||
possibly not tool-users and may not have been ancestral to men at all.
|
||
But there is an alternate and evidently increasingly stronger chance
|
||
that some of them may have been. The Kanam jaw from Kenya, another
|
||
early possibility, is not only very incomplete but its find-spot is
|
||
very questionable.
|
||
|
||
Java man proper, _Pithecanthropus_, comes next, at about 400,000 years
|
||
ago, and the big Heidelberg jaw in Germany must be of about the same
|
||
date. Next comes Swanscombe in England, Steinheim in Germany, the
|
||
Ternafine jaws in Algeria, and Peking man, _Sinanthropus_. They all
|
||
date to the second great interglacial period, about 350,000 years ago.
|
||
|
||
Piltdown and Galley Hill are out, and with them, much of the starch
|
||
in the old idea that there were two distinct lines of development
|
||
in human evolution: (1) a line of <20>paleoanthropic<69> development from
|
||
Heidelberg to the Neanderthalers where it became extinct, and (2) a
|
||
very early <20>modern<72> line, through Piltdown, Galley Hill, Swanscombe, to
|
||
us. Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Ternafine are just as easily cases of
|
||
very early pre-neanderthaloids.
|
||
|
||
The pre-neanderthaloids were very widespread during the third
|
||
interglacial: Ehringsdorf, Saccopastore, some of the Mount Carmel
|
||
people, and probably Font<6E>chevade are cases in point. A variety of
|
||
their descendants can be seen, from Java (Solo), Africa (Rhodesian
|
||
man), and about the Mediterranean and in western Europe. As the acute
|
||
cold of the last glaciation set in, the western Europeans found
|
||
themselves surrounded by water, ice, or bitter cold tundra. To vastly
|
||
over-simplify it, they <20>bred in<69> and became classic neanderthaloids.
|
||
But on Mount Carmel, the Skhul cave-find with its 70 per cent modern
|
||
features shows what could happen elsewhere at the same time.
|
||
|
||
Lastly, from about 40,000 or 35,000 years ago--the time of the onset
|
||
of the second phase of the last glaciation--we begin to find the fully
|
||
modern skeletons of men. The modern skeletons differ from place to
|
||
place, just as different groups of men living in different places still
|
||
look different.
|
||
|
||
What became of the Neanderthalers? Nobody can tell me for sure. I<>ve a
|
||
hunch they were simply <20>bred out<75> again when the cold weather was over.
|
||
Many Americans, as the years go by, are no longer ashamed to claim they
|
||
have <20>Indian blood in their veins.<2E> Give us a few more generations
|
||
and there will not be very many other Americans left to whom we can
|
||
brag about it. It certainly isn<73>t inconceivable to me to imagine a
|
||
little Cro-Magnon boy bragging to his friends about his tough, strong,
|
||
Neanderthaler great-great-great-great-grandfather!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Cultural BEGINNINGS
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
Men, unlike the lower animals, are made up of much more than flesh and
|
||
blood and bones; for men have <20>culture.<2E>
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHAT IS CULTURE?
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD>Culture<EFBFBD> is a word with many meanings. The doctors speak of making a
|
||
<EFBFBD>culture<EFBFBD> of a certain kind of bacteria, and ants are said to have a
|
||
<EFBFBD>culture.<2E> Then there is the Emily Post kind of <20>culture<72>--you say a
|
||
person is <20>cultured,<2C> or that he isn<73>t, depending on such things as
|
||
whether or not he eats peas with his knife.
|
||
|
||
The anthropologists use the word too, and argue heatedly over its finer
|
||
meanings; but they all agree that every human being is part of or has
|
||
some kind of culture. Each particular human group has a particular
|
||
culture; that is one of the ways in which we can tell one group of
|
||
men from another. In this sense, a CULTURE means the way the members
|
||
of a group of people think and believe and live, the tools they make,
|
||
and the way they do things. Professor Robert Redfield says a culture
|
||
is an organized or formalized body of conventional understandings.
|
||
<EFBFBD>Conventional understandings<67> means the whole set of rules, beliefs,
|
||
and standards which a group of people lives by. These understandings
|
||
show themselves in art, and in the other things a people may make and
|
||
do. The understandings continue to last, through tradition, from one
|
||
generation to another. They are what really characterize different
|
||
human groups.
|
||
|
||
|
||
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE
|
||
|
||
A culture lasts, although individual men in the group die off. On
|
||
the other hand, a culture changes as the different conventions and
|
||
understandings change. You could almost say that a culture lives in the
|
||
minds of the men who have it. But people are not born with it; they
|
||
get it as they grow up. Suppose a day-old Hungarian baby is adopted by
|
||
a family in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and the child is not told that he is
|
||
Hungarian. He will grow up with no more idea of Hungarian culture than
|
||
anyone else in Oshkosh.
|
||
|
||
So when I speak of ancient Egyptian culture, I mean the whole body
|
||
of understandings and beliefs and knowledge possessed by the ancient
|
||
Egyptians. I mean their beliefs as to why grain grew, as well as their
|
||
ability to make tools with which to reap the grain. I mean their
|
||
beliefs about life after death. What I am thinking about as culture is
|
||
a thing which lasted in time. If any one Egyptian, even the Pharaoh,
|
||
died, it didn<64>t affect the Egyptian culture of that particular moment.
|
||
|
||
|
||
PREHISTORIC CULTURES
|
||
|
||
For that long period of man<61>s history that is all prehistory, we have
|
||
no written descriptions of cultures. We find only the tools men made,
|
||
the places where they lived, the graves in which they buried their
|
||
dead. Fortunately for us, these tools and living places and graves all
|
||
tell us something about the ways these men lived and the things they
|
||
believed. But the story we learn of the very early cultures must be
|
||
only a very small part of the whole, for we find so few things. The
|
||
rest of the story is gone forever. We have to do what we can with what
|
||
we find.
|
||
|
||
For all of the time up to about 75,000 years ago, which was the time
|
||
of the classic European Neanderthal group of men, we have found few
|
||
cave-dwelling places of very early prehistoric men. First, there is the
|
||
fallen-in cave where Peking man was found, near Peking. Then there are
|
||
two or three other _early_, but not _very early_, possibilities. The
|
||
finds at the base of the French cave of Font<6E>chevade, those in one of
|
||
the Makapan caves in South Africa, and several open sites such as Dr.
|
||
L. S. B. Leakey<65>s Olorgesailie in Kenya doubtless all lie earlier than
|
||
the time of the main European Neanderthal group, but none are so early
|
||
as the Peking finds.
|
||
|
||
You can see that we know very little about the home life of earlier
|
||
prehistoric men. We find different kinds of early stone tools, but we
|
||
can<EFBFBD>t even be really sure which tools may have been used together.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHY LITTLE HAS LASTED FROM EARLY TIMES
|
||
|
||
Except for the rare find-spots mentioned above, all our very early
|
||
finds come from geological deposits, or from the wind-blown surfaces
|
||
of deserts. Here is what the business of geological deposits really
|
||
means. Let us say that a group of people was living in England about
|
||
300,000 years ago. They made the tools they needed, lived in some sort
|
||
of camp, almost certainly built fires, and perhaps buried their dead.
|
||
While the climate was still warm, many generations may have lived in
|
||
the same place, hunting, and gathering nuts and berries; but after some
|
||
few thousand years, the weather began very gradually to grow colder.
|
||
These early Englishmen would not have known that a glacier was forming
|
||
over northern Europe. They would only have noticed that the animals
|
||
they hunted seemed to be moving south, and that the berries grew larger
|
||
toward the south. So they would have moved south, too.
|
||
|
||
The camp site they left is the place we archeologists would really have
|
||
liked to find. All of the different tools the people used would have
|
||
been there together--many broken, some whole. The graves, and traces
|
||
of fire, and the tools would have been there. But the glacier got
|
||
there first! The front of this enormous sheet of ice moved down over
|
||
the country, crushing and breaking and plowing up everything, like a
|
||
gigantic bulldozer. You can see what happened to our camp site.
|
||
|
||
Everything the glacier couldn<64>t break, it pushed along in front of it
|
||
or plowed beneath it. Rocks were ground to gravel, and soil was caught
|
||
into the ice, which afterwards melted and ran off as muddy water. Hard
|
||
tools of flint sometimes remained whole. Human bones weren<65>t so hard;
|
||
it<EFBFBD>s a wonder _any_ of them lasted. Gushing streams of melt water
|
||
flushed out the debris from underneath the glacier, and water flowed
|
||
off the surface and through great crevasses. The hard materials these
|
||
waters carried were even more rolled and ground up. Finally, such
|
||
materials were dropped by the rushing waters as gravels, miles from
|
||
the front of the glacier. At last the glacier reached its greatest
|
||
extent; then it melted backward toward the north. Debris held in the
|
||
ice was dropped where the ice melted, or was flushed off by more melt
|
||
water. When the glacier, leaving the land, had withdrawn to the sea,
|
||
great hunks of ice were broken off as icebergs. These icebergs probably
|
||
dropped the materials held in their ice wherever they floated and
|
||
melted. There must be many tools and fragmentary bones of prehistoric
|
||
men on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.
|
||
|
||
Remember, too, that these glaciers came and went at least three or four
|
||
times during the Ice Age. Then you will realize why the earlier things
|
||
we find are all mixed up. Stone tools from one camp site got mixed up
|
||
with stone tools from many other camp sites--tools which may have been
|
||
made tens of thousands or more years apart. The glaciers mixed them
|
||
all up, and so we cannot say which particular sets of tools belonged
|
||
together in the first place.
|
||
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD>EOLITHS<EFBFBD>
|
||
|
||
But what sort of tools do we find earliest? For almost a century,
|
||
people have been picking up odd bits of flint and other stone in the
|
||
oldest Ice Age gravels in England and France. It is now thought these
|
||
odd bits of stone weren<65>t actually worked by prehistoric men. The
|
||
stones were given a name, _eoliths_, or <20>dawn stones.<2E> You can see them
|
||
in many museums; but you can be pretty sure that very few of them were
|
||
actually fashioned by men.
|
||
|
||
It is impossible to pick out <20>eoliths<68> that seem to be made in any
|
||
one _tradition_. By <20>tradition<6F> I mean a set of habits for making one
|
||
kind of tool for some particular job. No two <20>eoliths<68> look very much
|
||
alike: tools made as part of some one tradition all look much alike.
|
||
Now it<69>s easy to suppose that the very earliest prehistoric men picked
|
||
up and used almost any sort of stone. This wouldn<64>t be surprising; you
|
||
and I do it when we go camping. In other words, some of these <20>eoliths<68>
|
||
may actually have been used by prehistoric men. They must have used
|
||
anything that might be handy when they needed it. We could have figured
|
||
that out without the <20>eoliths.<2E>
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE ROAD TO STANDARDIZATION
|
||
|
||
Reasoning from what we know or can easily imagine, there should have
|
||
been three major steps in the prehistory of tool-making. The first step
|
||
would have been simple _utilization_ of what was at hand. This is the
|
||
step into which the <20>eoliths<68> would fall. The second step would have
|
||
been _fashioning_--the haphazard preparation of a tool when there was a
|
||
need for it. Probably many of the earlier pebble tools, which I shall
|
||
describe next, fall into this group. The third step would have been
|
||
_standardization_. Here, men began to make tools according to certain
|
||
set traditions. Counting the better-made pebble tools, there are four
|
||
such traditions or sets of habits for the production of stone tools in
|
||
earliest prehistoric times. Toward the end of the Pleistocene, a fifth
|
||
tradition appears.
|
||
|
||
|
||
PEBBLE TOOLS
|
||
|
||
At the beginning of the last chapter, you<6F>ll remember that I said there
|
||
were tools from very early geological beds. The earliest bones of men
|
||
have not yet been found in such early beds although the Sterkfontein
|
||
australopithecine cave approaches this early date. The earliest tools
|
||
come from Africa. They date back to the time of the first great
|
||
alpine glaciation and are at least 500,000 years old. The earliest
|
||
ones are made of split pebbles, about the size of your fist or a bit
|
||
bigger. They go under the name of pebble tools. There are many natural
|
||
exposures of early Pleistocene geological beds in Africa, and the
|
||
prehistoric archeologists of south and central Africa have concentrated
|
||
on searching for early tools. Other finds of early pebble tools have
|
||
recently been made in Algeria and Morocco.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SOUTH AFRICAN PEBBLE TOOL]
|
||
|
||
There are probably early pebble tools to be found in areas of the
|
||
Old World besides Africa; in fact, some prehistorians already claim
|
||
to have identified a few. Since the forms and the distinct ways of
|
||
making the earlier pebble tools had not yet sufficiently jelled into
|
||
a set tradition, they are difficult for us to recognize. It is not
|
||
so difficult, however, if there are great numbers of <20>possibles<65>
|
||
available. A little later in time the tradition becomes more clearly
|
||
set, and pebble tools are easier to recognize. So far, really large
|
||
collections of pebble tools have only been found and examined in Africa.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CORE-BIFACE TOOLS
|
||
|
||
The next tradition we<77>ll look at is the _core_ or biface one. The tools
|
||
are large pear-shaped pieces of stone trimmed flat on the two opposite
|
||
sides or <20>faces.<2E> Hence <20>biface<63> has been used to describe these tools.
|
||
The front view is like that of a pear with a rather pointed top, and
|
||
the back view looks almost exactly the same. Look at them side on, and
|
||
you can see that the front and back faces are the same and have been
|
||
trimmed to a thin tip. The real purpose in trimming down the two faces
|
||
was to get a good cutting edge all around. You can see all this in the
|
||
illustration.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: ABBEVILLIAN BIFACE]
|
||
|
||
We have very little idea of the way in which these core-bifaces were
|
||
used. They have been called <20>hand axes,<2C> but this probably gives the
|
||
wrong idea, for an ax, to us, is not a pointed tool. All of these early
|
||
tools must have been used for a number of jobs--chopping, scraping,
|
||
cutting, hitting, picking, and prying. Since the core-bifaces tend to
|
||
be pointed, it seems likely that they were used for hitting, picking,
|
||
and prying. But they have rough cutting edges, so they could have been
|
||
used for chopping, scraping, and cutting.
|
||
|
||
|
||
FLAKE TOOLS
|
||
|
||
The third tradition is the _flake_ tradition. The idea was to get a
|
||
tool with a good cutting edge by simply knocking a nice large flake off
|
||
a big block of stone. You had to break off the flake in such a way that
|
||
it was broad and thin, and also had a good sharp cutting edge. Once you
|
||
really got on to the trick of doing it, this was probably a simpler way
|
||
to make a good cutting tool than preparing a biface. You have to know
|
||
how, though; I<>ve tried it and have mashed my fingers more than once.
|
||
|
||
The flake tools look as if they were meant mainly for chopping,
|
||
scraping, and cutting jobs. When one made a flake tool, the idea seems
|
||
to have been to produce a broad, sharp, cutting edge.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: CLACTONIAN FLAKE]
|
||
|
||
The core-biface and the flake traditions were spread, from earliest
|
||
times, over much of Europe, Africa, and western Asia. The map on page
|
||
52 shows the general area. Over much of this great region there was
|
||
flint. Both of these traditions seem well adapted to flint, although
|
||
good core-bifaces and flakes were made from other kinds of stone,
|
||
especially in Africa south of the Sahara.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHOPPERS AND ADZE-LIKE TOOLS
|
||
|
||
The fourth early tradition is found in southern and eastern Asia, from
|
||
northwestern India through Java and Burma into China. Father Maringer
|
||
recently reported an early group of tools in Japan, which most resemble
|
||
those of Java, called Patjitanian. The prehistoric men in this general
|
||
area mostly used quartz and tuff and even petrified wood for their
|
||
stone tools (see illustration, p. 46).
|
||
|
||
This fourth early tradition is called the _chopper-chopping tool_
|
||
tradition. It probably has its earliest roots in the pebble tool
|
||
tradition of African type. There are several kinds of tools in this
|
||
tradition, but all differ from the western core-bifaces and flakes.
|
||
There are broad, heavy scrapers or cleavers, and tools with an
|
||
adze-like cutting edge. These last-named tools are called <20>hand adzes,<2C>
|
||
just as the core-bifaces of the west have often been called <20>hand
|
||
axes.<2E> The section of an adze cutting edge is ? shaped; the section of
|
||
an ax is < shaped.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: ANYATHIAN ADZE-LIKE TOOL]
|
||
|
||
There are also pointed pebble tools. Thus the tool kit of these early
|
||
south and east Asiatic peoples seems to have included tools for doing
|
||
as many different jobs as did the tools of the Western traditions.
|
||
|
||
Dr. H. L. Movius has emphasized that the tools which were found in the
|
||
Peking cave with Peking man belong to the chopper-tool tradition. This
|
||
is the only case as yet where the tools and the man have been found
|
||
together from very earliest times--if we except Sterkfontein.
|
||
|
||
|
||
DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE TOOL-MAKING TRADITIONS
|
||
|
||
The latter three great traditions in the manufacture of stone
|
||
tools--and the less clear-cut pebble tools before them--are all we have
|
||
to show of the cultures of the men of those times. Changes happened in
|
||
each of the traditions. As time went on, the tools in each tradition
|
||
were better made. There could also be slight regional differences in
|
||
the tools within one tradition. Thus, tools with small differences, but
|
||
all belonging to one tradition, can be given special group (facies)
|
||
names.
|
||
|
||
This naming of special groups has been going on for some time. Here are
|
||
some of these names, since you may see them used in museum displays
|
||
of flint tools, or in books. Within each tradition of tool-making
|
||
(save the chopper tools), the earliest tool type is at the bottom
|
||
of the list, just as it appears in the lowest beds of a geological
|
||
stratification.[3]
|
||
|
||
[3] Archeologists usually make their charts and lists with the
|
||
earliest materials at the bottom and the latest on top, since
|
||
this is the way they find them in the ground.
|
||
|
||
Chopper tool (all about equally early):
|
||
Anyathian (Burma)
|
||
Choukoutienian (China)
|
||
Patjitanian (Java)
|
||
Soan (India)
|
||
|
||
Flake:
|
||
<20>Typical Mousterian<61>
|
||
Levalloiso-Mousterian
|
||
Levalloisian
|
||
Tayacian
|
||
Clactonian (localized in England)
|
||
|
||
Core-biface:
|
||
Some blended elements in <20>Mousterian<61>
|
||
Micoquian (= Acheulean 6 and 7)
|
||
Acheulean
|
||
Abbevillian (once called <20>Chellean<61>)
|
||
|
||
Pebble tool:
|
||
Oldowan
|
||
Ain Hanech
|
||
pre-Stellenbosch
|
||
Kafuan
|
||
|
||
The core-biface and the flake traditions appear in the chart (p. 65).
|
||
|
||
The early archeologists had many of the tool groups named before they
|
||
ever realized that there were broader tool preparation traditions. This
|
||
was understandable, for in dealing with the mixture of things that come
|
||
out of glacial gravels the easiest thing to do first is to isolate
|
||
individual types of tools into groups. First you put a bushel-basketful
|
||
of tools on a table and begin matching up types. Then you give names to
|
||
the groups of each type. The groups and the types are really matters of
|
||
the archeologists<74> choice; in real life, they were probably less exact
|
||
than the archeologists<74> lists of them. We now know pretty well in which
|
||
of the early traditions the various early groups belong.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE MEANING OF THE DIFFERENT TRADITIONS
|
||
|
||
What do the traditions really mean? I see them as the standardization
|
||
of ways to make tools for particular jobs. We may not know exactly what
|
||
job the maker of a particular core-biface or flake tool had in mind. We
|
||
can easily see, however, that he already enjoyed a know-how, a set of
|
||
persistent habits of tool preparation, which would always give him the
|
||
same type of tool when he wanted to make it. Therefore, the traditions
|
||
show us that persistent habits already existed for the preparation of
|
||
one type of tool or another.
|
||
|
||
This tells us that one of the characteristic aspects of human culture
|
||
was already present. There must have been, in the minds of these
|
||
early men, a notion of the ideal type of tool for a particular job.
|
||
Furthermore, since we find so many thousands upon thousands of tools
|
||
of one type or another, the notion of the ideal types of tools _and_
|
||
the know-how for the making of each type must have been held in common
|
||
by many men. The notions of the ideal types and the know-how for their
|
||
production must have been passed on from one generation to another.
|
||
|
||
I could even guess that the notions of the ideal type of one or the
|
||
other of these tools stood out in the minds of men of those times
|
||
somewhat like a symbol of <20>perfect tool for good job.<2E> If this were
|
||
so--remember it<69>s only a wild guess of mine--then men were already
|
||
symbol users. Now let<65>s go on a further step to the fact that the words
|
||
men speak are simply sounds, each different sound being a symbol for a
|
||
different meaning. If standardized tool-making suggests symbol-making,
|
||
is it also possible that crude word-symbols were also being made? I
|
||
suppose that it is not impossible.
|
||
|
||
There may, of course, be a real question whether tool-utilizing
|
||
creatures--our first step, on page 42--were actually men. Other
|
||
animals utilize things at hand as tools. The tool-fashioning creature
|
||
of our second step is more suggestive, although we may not yet feel
|
||
sure that many of the earlier pebble tools were man-made products. But
|
||
with the step to standardization and the appearance of the traditions,
|
||
I believe we must surely be dealing with the traces of culture-bearing
|
||
_men_. The <20>conventional understandings<67> which Professor Redfield<6C>s
|
||
definition of culture suggests are now evidenced for us in the
|
||
persistent habits for the preparation of stone tools. Were we able to
|
||
see the other things these prehistoric men must have made--in materials
|
||
no longer preserved for the archeologist to find--I believe there would
|
||
be clear signs of further conventional understandings. The men may have
|
||
been physically primitive and pretty shaggy in appearance, but I think
|
||
we must surely call them men.
|
||
|
||
|
||
AN OLDER INTERPRETATION OF THE WESTERN TRADITIONS
|
||
|
||
In the last chapter, I told you that many of the older archeologists
|
||
and human paleontologists used to think that modern man was very old.
|
||
The supposed ages of Piltdown and Galley Hill were given as evidence
|
||
of the great age of anatomically modern man, and some interpretations
|
||
of the Swanscombe and Font<6E>chevade fossils were taken to support
|
||
this view. The conclusion was that there were two parallel lines or
|
||
<EFBFBD>phyla<EFBFBD> of men already present well back in the Pleistocene. The
|
||
first of these, the more primitive or <20>paleoanthropic<69> line, was
|
||
said to include Heidelberg, the proto-neanderthaloids and classic
|
||
Neanderthal. The more anatomically modern or <20>neanthropic<69> line was
|
||
thought to consist of Piltdown and the others mentioned above. The
|
||
Neanderthaler or paleoanthropic line was thought to have become extinct
|
||
after the first phase of the last great glaciation. Of course, the
|
||
modern or neanthropic line was believed to have persisted into the
|
||
present, as the basis for the world<6C>s population today. But with
|
||
Piltdown liquidated, Galley Hill known to be very late, and Swanscombe
|
||
and Font<6E>chevade otherwise interpreted, there is little left of the
|
||
so-called parallel phyla theory.
|
||
|
||
While the theory was in vogue, however, and as long as the European
|
||
archeological evidence was looked at in one short-sighted way, the
|
||
archeological materials _seemed_ to fit the parallel phyla theory. It
|
||
was simply necessary to believe that the flake tools were made only
|
||
by the paleoanthropic Neanderthaler line, and that the more handsome
|
||
core-biface tools were the product of the neanthropic modern-man line.
|
||
|
||
Remember that _almost_ all of the early prehistoric European tools
|
||
came only from the redeposited gravel beds. This means that the tools
|
||
were not normally found in the remains of camp sites or work shops
|
||
where they had actually been dropped by the men who made and used
|
||
them. The tools came, rather, from the secondary hodge-podge of the
|
||
glacial gravels. I tried to give you a picture of the bulldozing action
|
||
of glaciers (p. 40) and of the erosion and weathering that were
|
||
side-effects of a glacially conditioned climate on the earth<74>s surface.
|
||
As we said above, if one simply plucks tools out of the redeposited
|
||
gravels, his natural tendency is to <20>type<70> the tools by groups, and to
|
||
think that the groups stand for something _on their own_.
|
||
|
||
In 1906, M. Victor Commont actually made a rare find of what seems
|
||
to have been a kind of workshop site, on a terrace above the Somme
|
||
river in France. Here, Commont realized, flake tools appeared clearly
|
||
in direct association with core-biface tools. Few prehistorians paid
|
||
attention to Commont or his site, however. It was easier to believe
|
||
that flake tools represented a distinct <20>culture<72> and that this
|
||
<EFBFBD>culture<EFBFBD> was that of the Neanderthaler or paleoanthropic line, and
|
||
that the core-bifaces stood for another <20>culture<72> which was that of the
|
||
supposed early modern or neanthropic line. Of course, I am obviously
|
||
skipping many details here. Some later sites with Neanderthal fossils
|
||
do seem to have only flake tools, but other such sites have both types
|
||
of tools. The flake tools which appeared _with_ the core-bifaces
|
||
in the Swanscombe gravels were never made much of, although it
|
||
was embarrassing for the parallel phyla people that Font<6E>chevade
|
||
ran heavily to flake tools. All in all, the parallel phyla theory
|
||
flourished because it seemed so neat and easy to understand.
|
||
|
||
|
||
TRADITIONS ARE TOOL-MAKING HABITS, NOT CULTURES
|
||
|
||
In case you think I simply enjoy beating a dead horse, look in any
|
||
standard book on prehistory written twenty (or even ten) years ago, or
|
||
in most encyclopedias. You<6F>ll find that each of the individual tool
|
||
types, of the West, at least, was supposed to represent a <20>culture.<2E>
|
||
The <20>cultures<65> were believed to correspond to parallel lines of human
|
||
evolution.
|
||
|
||
In 1937, Mr. Harper Kelley strongly re-emphasized the importance
|
||
of Commont<6E>s workshop site and the presence of flake tools with
|
||
core-bifaces. Next followed Dr. Movius<75> clear delineation of the
|
||
chopper-chopping tool tradition of the Far East. This spoiled the nice
|
||
symmetry of the flake-tool = paleoanthropic, core-biface = neanthropic
|
||
equations. Then came increasing understanding of the importance of
|
||
the pebble tools in Africa, and the location of several more workshop
|
||
sites there, especially at Olorgesailie in Kenya. Finally came the
|
||
liquidation of Piltdown and the deflation of Galley Hill<6C>s date. So it
|
||
is at last possible to picture an individual prehistoric man making a
|
||
flake tool to do one job and a core-biface tool to do another. Commont
|
||
showed us this picture in 1906, but few believed him.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF TOOL-PREPARATION TRADITIONS
|
||
|
||
Time approximately 100,000 years ago]
|
||
|
||
There are certainly a few cases in which flake tools did appear with
|
||
few or no core-bifaces. The flake-tool group called Clactonian in
|
||
England is such a case. Another good, but certainly later case is
|
||
that of the cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine, where the blended
|
||
pre-neanderthaloid, 70 per cent modern-type skulls were found. Here, in
|
||
the same level with the skulls, were 9,784 flint tools. Of these, only
|
||
three--doubtless strays--were core-bifaces; all the rest were flake
|
||
tools or flake chips. We noted above how the Font<6E>chevade cave ran to
|
||
flake tools. The only conclusion I would draw from this is that times
|
||
and circumstances did exist in which prehistoric men needed only flake
|
||
tools. So they only made flake tools for those particular times and
|
||
circumstances.
|
||
|
||
|
||
LIFE IN EARLIEST TIMES
|
||
|
||
What do we actually know of life in these earliest times? In the
|
||
glacial gravels, or in the terrace gravels of rivers once swollen by
|
||
floods of melt water or heavy rains, or on the windswept deserts, we
|
||
find stone tools. The earliest and coarsest of these are the pebble
|
||
tools. We do not yet know what the men who made them looked like,
|
||
although the Sterkfontein australopithecines probably give us a good
|
||
hint. Then begin the more formal tool preparation traditions of the
|
||
west--the core-bifaces and the flake tools--and the chopper-chopping
|
||
tool series of the farther east. There is an occasional roughly worked
|
||
piece of bone. From the gravels which yield the Clactonian flakes of
|
||
England comes the fire-hardened point of a wooden spear. There are
|
||
also the chance finds of the fossil human bones themselves, of which
|
||
we spoke in the last chapter. Aside from the cave of Peking man, none
|
||
of the earliest tools have been found in caves. Open air or <20>workshop<6F>
|
||
sites which do not seem to have been disturbed later by some geological
|
||
agency are very rare.
|
||
|
||
The chart on page 65 shows graphically what the situation in
|
||
west-central Europe seems to have been. It is not yet certain whether
|
||
there were pebble tools there or not. The Font<6E>chevade cave comes
|
||
into the picture about 100,000 years ago or more. But for the earlier
|
||
hundreds of thousands of years--below the red-dotted line on the
|
||
chart--the tools we find come almost entirely from the haphazard
|
||
mixture within the geological contexts.
|
||
|
||
The stone tools of each of the earlier traditions are the simplest
|
||
kinds of all-purpose tools. Almost any one of them could be used for
|
||
hacking, chopping, cutting, and scraping; so the men who used them must
|
||
have been living in a rough and ready sort of way. They found or hunted
|
||
their food wherever they could. In the anthropological jargon, they
|
||
were <20>food-gatherers,<2C> pure and simple.
|
||
|
||
Because of the mixture in the gravels and in the materials they
|
||
carried, we can<61>t be sure which animals these men hunted. Bones of
|
||
the larger animals turn up in the gravels, but they could just as
|
||
well belong to the animals who hunted the men, rather than the other
|
||
way about. We don<6F>t know. This is why camp sites like Commont<6E>s and
|
||
Olorgesailie in Kenya are so important when we do find them. The animal
|
||
bones at Olorgesailie belonged to various mammals of extremely large
|
||
size. Probably they were taken in pit-traps, but there are a number of
|
||
groups of three round stones on the site which suggest that the people
|
||
used bolas. The South American Indians used three-ball bolas, with the
|
||
stones in separate leather bags connected by thongs. These were whirled
|
||
and then thrown through the air so as to entangle the feet of a fleeing
|
||
animal.
|
||
|
||
Professor F. Clark Howell recently returned from excavating another
|
||
important open air site at Isimila in Tanganyika. The site yielded
|
||
the bones of many fossil animals and also thousands of core-bifaces,
|
||
flakes, and choppers. But Howell<6C>s reconstruction of the food-getting
|
||
habits of the Isimila people certainly suggests that the word <20>hunting<6E>
|
||
is too dignified for what they did; <20>scavenging<6E> would be much nearer
|
||
the mark.
|
||
|
||
During a great part of this time the climate was warm and pleasant. The
|
||
second interglacial period (the time between the second and third great
|
||
alpine glaciations) lasted a long time, and during much of this time
|
||
the climate may have been even better than ours is now. We don<6F>t know
|
||
that earlier prehistoric men in Europe or Africa lived in caves. They
|
||
may not have needed to; much of the weather may have been so nice that
|
||
they lived in the open. Perhaps they didn<64>t wear clothes, either.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHAT THE PEKING CAVE-FINDS TELL US
|
||
|
||
The one early cave-dwelling we have found is that of Peking man, in
|
||
China. Peking man had fire. He probably cooked his meat, or used
|
||
the fire to keep dangerous animals away from his den. In the cave
|
||
were bones of dangerous animals, members of the wolf, bear, and cat
|
||
families. Some of the cat bones belonged to beasts larger than tigers.
|
||
There were also bones of other wild animals: buffalo, camel, deer,
|
||
elephants, horses, sheep, and even ostriches. Seventy per cent of the
|
||
animals Peking man killed were fallow deer. It<49>s much too cold and dry
|
||
in north China for all these animals to live there today. So this list
|
||
helps us know that the weather was reasonably warm, and that there was
|
||
enough rain to grow grass for the grazing animals. The list also helps
|
||
the paleontologists to date the find.
|
||
|
||
Peking man also seems to have eaten plant food, for there are hackberry
|
||
seeds in the debris of the cave. His tools were made of sandstone and
|
||
quartz and sometimes of a rather bad flint. As we<77>ve already seen, they
|
||
belong in the chopper-tool tradition. It seems fairly clear that some
|
||
of the edges were chipped by right-handed people. There are also many
|
||
split pieces of heavy bone. Peking man probably split them so he could
|
||
eat the bone marrow, but he may have used some of them as tools.
|
||
|
||
Many of these split bones were the bones of Peking men. Each one of the
|
||
skulls had already had the base broken out of it. In no case were any
|
||
of the bones resting together in their natural relation to one another.
|
||
There is nothing like a burial; all of the bones are scattered. Now
|
||
it<EFBFBD>s true that animals could have scattered bodies that were not cared
|
||
for or buried. But splitting bones lengthwise and carefully removing
|
||
the base of a skull call for both the tools and the people to use them.
|
||
It<EFBFBD>s pretty clear who the people were. Peking man was a cannibal.
|
||
|
||
* * * * *
|
||
|
||
This rounds out about all we can say of the life and times of early
|
||
prehistoric men. In those days life was rough. You evidently had to
|
||
watch out not only for dangerous animals but also for your fellow men.
|
||
You ate whatever you could catch or find growing. But you had sense
|
||
enough to build fires, and you had already formed certain habits for
|
||
making the kinds of stone tools you needed. That<61>s about all we know.
|
||
But I think we<77>ll have to admit that cultural beginnings had been made,
|
||
and that these early people were really _men_.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
MORE EVIDENCE of Culture
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
While the dating is not yet sure, the material that we get from caves
|
||
in Europe must go back to about 100,000 years ago; the time of the
|
||
classic Neanderthal group followed soon afterwards. We don<6F>t know why
|
||
there is no earlier material in the caves; apparently they were not
|
||
used before the last interglacial phase (the period just before the
|
||
last great glaciation). We know that men of the classic Neanderthal
|
||
group were living in caves from about 75,000 to 45,000 years ago.
|
||
New radioactive carbon dates even suggest that some of the traces of
|
||
culture we<77>ll describe in this chapter may have lasted to about 35,000
|
||
years ago. Probably some of the pre-neanderthaloid types of men had
|
||
also lived in caves. But we have so far found their bones in caves only
|
||
in Palestine and at Font<6E>chevade.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE CAVE LAYERS
|
||
|
||
In parts of France, some peasants still live in caves. In prehistoric
|
||
time, many generations of people lived in them. As a result, many
|
||
caves have deep layers of debris. The first people moved in and lived
|
||
on the rock floor. They threw on the floor whatever they didn<64>t want,
|
||
and they tracked in mud; nobody bothered to clean house in those days.
|
||
Their debris--junk and mud and garbage and what not--became packed
|
||
into a layer. As time went on, and generations passed, the layer grew
|
||
thicker. Then there might have been a break in the occupation of the
|
||
cave for a while. Perhaps the game animals got scarce and the people
|
||
moved away; or maybe the cave became flooded. Later on, other people
|
||
moved in and began making a new layer of their own on top of the first
|
||
layer. Perhaps this process of layering went on in the same cave for a
|
||
hundred thousand years; you can see what happened. The drawing on this
|
||
page shows a section through such a cave. The earliest layer is on the
|
||
bottom, the latest one on top. They go in order from bottom to top,
|
||
earliest to latest. This is the _stratification_ we talked about (p.
|
||
12).
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SECTION OF SHELTER ON LOWER TERRACE, LE MOUSTIER]
|
||
|
||
While we may find a mix-up in caves, it<69>s not nearly as bad as the
|
||
mixing up that was done by glaciers. The animal bones and shells, the
|
||
fireplaces, the bones of men, and the tools the men made all belong
|
||
together, if they come from one layer. That<61>s the reason why the cave
|
||
of Peking man is so important. It is also the reason why the caves in
|
||
Europe and the Near East are so important. We can get an idea of which
|
||
things belong together and which lot came earliest and which latest.
|
||
|
||
In most cases, prehistoric men lived only in the mouths of caves.
|
||
They didn<64>t like the dark inner chambers as places to live in. They
|
||
preferred rock-shelters, at the bases of overhanging cliffs, if there
|
||
was enough overhang to give shelter. When the weather was good, they no
|
||
doubt lived in the open air as well. I<>ll go on using the term <20>cave<76>
|
||
since it<69>s more familiar, but remember that I really mean rock-shelter,
|
||
as a place in which people actually lived.
|
||
|
||
The most important European cave sites are in Spain, France, and
|
||
central Europe; there are also sites in England and Italy. A few caves
|
||
are known in the Near East and Africa, and no doubt more sites will be
|
||
found when the out-of-the-way parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia are
|
||
studied.
|
||
|
||
|
||
AN <20>INDUSTRY<52> DEFINED
|
||
|
||
We have already seen that the earliest European cave materials are
|
||
those from the cave of Font<6E>chevade. Movius feels certain that the
|
||
lowest materials here date back well into the third interglacial stage,
|
||
that which lay between the Riss (next to the last) and the W<>rm I
|
||
(first stage of the last) alpine glaciations. This material consists
|
||
of an _industry_ of stone tools, apparently all made in the flake
|
||
tradition. This is the first time we have used the word <20>industry.<2E>
|
||
It is useful to call all of the different tools found together in one
|
||
layer and made of _one kind of material_ an industry; that is, the
|
||
tools must be found together as men left them. Tools taken from the
|
||
glacial gravels (or from windswept desert surfaces or river gravels
|
||
or any geological deposit) are not <20>together<65> in this sense. We might
|
||
say the latter have only <20>geological,<2C> not <20>archeological<61> context.
|
||
Archeological context means finding things just as men left them. We
|
||
can tell what tools go together in an <20>industrial<61> sense only if we
|
||
have archeological context.
|
||
|
||
Up to now, the only things we could have called <20>industries<65> were the
|
||
worked stone industry and perhaps the worked (?) bone industry of the
|
||
Peking cave. We could add some of the very clear cases of open air
|
||
sites, like Olorgesailie. We couldn<64>t use the term for the stone tools
|
||
from the glacial gravels, because we do not know which tools belonged
|
||
together. But when the cave materials begin to appear in Europe, we can
|
||
begin to speak of industries. Most of the European caves of this time
|
||
contain industries of flint tools alone.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE EARLIEST EUROPEAN CAVE LAYERS
|
||
|
||
We<EFBFBD>ve just mentioned the industry from what is said to be the oldest
|
||
inhabited cave in Europe; that is, the industry from the deepest layer
|
||
of the site at Font<6E>chevade. Apparently it doesn<73>t amount to much. The
|
||
tools are made of stone, in the flake tradition, and are very poorly
|
||
worked. This industry is called _Tayacian_. Its type tool seems to be
|
||
a smallish flake tool, but there are also larger flakes which seem to
|
||
have been fashioned for hacking. In fact, the type tool seems to be
|
||
simply a smaller edition of the Clactonian tool (pictured on p. 45).
|
||
|
||
None of the Font<6E>chevade tools are really good. There are scrapers,
|
||
and more or less pointed tools, and tools that may have been used
|
||
for hacking and chopping. Many of the tools from the earlier glacial
|
||
gravels are better made than those of this first industry we see in
|
||
a European cave. There is so little of this material available that
|
||
we do not know which is really typical and which is not. You would
|
||
probably find it hard to see much difference between this industry and
|
||
a collection of tools of the type called Clactonian, taken from the
|
||
glacial gravels, especially if the Clactonian tools were small-sized.
|
||
|
||
The stone industry of the bottommost layer of the Mount Carmel cave,
|
||
in Palestine, where somewhat similar tools were found, has also been
|
||
called Tayacian.
|
||
|
||
I shall have to bring in many unfamiliar words for the names of the
|
||
industries. The industries are usually named after the places where
|
||
they were first found, and since these were in most cases in France,
|
||
most of the names which follow will be of French origin. However,
|
||
the names have simply become handles and are in use far beyond the
|
||
boundaries of France. It would be better if we had a non-place-name
|
||
terminology, but archeologists have not yet been able to agree on such
|
||
a terminology.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE ACHEULEAN INDUSTRY
|
||
|
||
Both in France and in Palestine, as well as in some African cave
|
||
sites, the next layers in the deep caves have an industry in both the
|
||
core-biface and the flake traditions. The core-biface tools usually
|
||
make up less than half of all the tools in the industry. However,
|
||
the name of the biface type of tool is generally given to the whole
|
||
industry. It is called the _Acheulean_, actually a late form of it, as
|
||
<EFBFBD>Acheulean<EFBFBD> is also used for earlier core-biface tools taken from the
|
||
glacial gravels. In western Europe, the name used is _Upper Acheulean_
|
||
or _Micoquian_. The same terms have been borrowed to name layers E and
|
||
F in the Tabun cave, on Mount Carmel in Palestine.
|
||
|
||
The Acheulean core-biface type of tool is worked on two faces so as
|
||
to give a cutting edge all around. The outline of its front view may
|
||
be oval, or egg-shaped, or a quite pointed pear shape. The large
|
||
chip-scars of the Acheulean core-bifaces are shallow and flat. It is
|
||
suspected that this resulted from the removal of the chips with a
|
||
wooden club; the deep chip-scars of the earlier Abbevillian core-biface
|
||
came from beating the tool against a stone anvil. These tools are
|
||
really the best and also the final products of the core-biface
|
||
tradition. We first noticed the tradition in the early glacial gravels
|
||
(p. 43); now we see its end, but also its finest examples, in the
|
||
deeper cave levels.
|
||
|
||
The flake tools, which really make up the greater bulk of this
|
||
industry, are simple scrapers and chips with sharp cutting edges. The
|
||
habits used to prepare them must have been pretty much the same as
|
||
those used for at least one of the flake industries we shall mention
|
||
presently.
|
||
|
||
There is very little else in these early cave layers. We do not have
|
||
a proper <20>industry<72> of bone tools. There are traces of fire, and of
|
||
animal bones, and a few shells. In Palestine, there are many more
|
||
bones of deer than of gazelle in these layers; the deer lives in a
|
||
wetter climate than does the gazelle. In the European cave layers, the
|
||
animal bones are those of beasts that live in a warm climate. They
|
||
belonged in the last interglacial period. We have not yet found the
|
||
bones of fossil men definitely in place with this industry.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: ACHEULEAN BIFACE]
|
||
|
||
|
||
FLAKE INDUSTRIES FROM THE CAVES
|
||
|
||
Two more stone industries--the _Levalloisian_ and the
|
||
<EFBFBD>_Mousterian_<EFBFBD>--turn up at approximately the same time in the European
|
||
cave layers. Their tools seem to be mainly in the flake tradition,
|
||
but according to some of the authorities their preparation also shows
|
||
some combination with the habits by which the core-biface tools were
|
||
prepared.
|
||
|
||
Now notice that I don<6F>t tell you the Levalloisian and the <20>Mousterian<61>
|
||
layers are both above the late Acheulean layers. Look at the cave
|
||
section (p. 57) and you<6F>ll find that some <20>Mousterian of Acheulean
|
||
tradition<EFBFBD> appears above some <20>typical Mousterian.<2E> This means that
|
||
there may be some kinds of Acheulean industries that are later than
|
||
some kinds of <20>Mousterian.<2E> The same is true of the Levalloisian.
|
||
|
||
There were now several different kinds of habits that men used in
|
||
making stone tools. These habits were based on either one or the other
|
||
of the two traditions--core-biface or flake--or on combinations of
|
||
the habits used in the preparation techniques of both traditions. All
|
||
were popular at about the same time. So we find that people who made
|
||
one kind of stone tool industry lived in a cave for a while. Then they
|
||
gave up the cave for some reason, and people with another industry
|
||
moved in. Then the first people came back--or at least somebody with
|
||
the same tool-making habits as the first people. Or maybe a third group
|
||
of tool-makers moved in. The people who had these different habits for
|
||
making their stone tools seem to have moved around a good deal. They no
|
||
doubt borrowed and exchanged tricks of the trade with each other. There
|
||
were no patent laws in those days.
|
||
|
||
The extremely complicated interrelationships of the different habits
|
||
used by the tool-makers of this range of time are at last being
|
||
systematically studied. M. Fran<61>ois Bordes has developed a statistical
|
||
method of great importance for understanding these tool preparation
|
||
habits.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE LEVALLOISIAN AND MOUSTERIAN
|
||
|
||
The easiest Levalloisian tool to spot is a big flake tool. The trick
|
||
in making it was to fashion carefully a big chunk of stone (called
|
||
the Levalloisian <20>tortoise core,<2C> because it resembles the shape of
|
||
a turtle-shell) and then to whack this in such a way that a large
|
||
flake flew off. This large thin flake, with sharp cutting edges, is
|
||
the finished Levalloisian tool. There were various other tools in a
|
||
Levalloisian industry, but this is the characteristic _Levalloisian_
|
||
tool.
|
||
|
||
There are several <20>typical Mousterian<61> stone tools. Different from
|
||
the tools of the Levalloisian type, these were made from <20>disc-like
|
||
cores.<2E> There are medium-sized flake <20>side scrapers.<2E> There are also
|
||
some small pointed tools and some small <20>hand axes.<2E> The last of these
|
||
tool types is often a flake worked on both of the flat sides (that
|
||
is, bifacially). There are also pieces of flint worked into the form
|
||
of crude balls. The pointed tools may have been fixed on shafts to
|
||
make short jabbing spears; the round flint balls may have been used as
|
||
bolas. Actually, we don<6F>t _know_ what either tool was used for. The
|
||
points and side scrapers are illustrated (pp. 64 and 66).
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: LEVALLOIS FLAKE]
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE MIXING OF TRADITIONS
|
||
|
||
Nowadays the archeologists are less and less sure of the importance
|
||
of any one specific tool type and name. Twenty years ago, they used
|
||
to speak simply of Acheulean or Levalloisian or Mousterian tools.
|
||
Now, more and more, _all_ of the tools from some one layer in a
|
||
cave are called an <20>industry,<2C> which is given a mixed name. Thus we
|
||
have <20>Levalloiso-Mousterian,<2C> and <20>Acheuleo-Levalloisian,<2C> and even
|
||
<EFBFBD>Acheuleo-Mousterian<61> (or <20>Mousterian of Acheulean tradition<6F>). Bordes<65>
|
||
systematic work is beginning to clear up some of our confusion.
|
||
|
||
The time of these late Acheuleo-Levalloiso-Mousterioid industries
|
||
is from perhaps as early as 100,000 years ago. It may have lasted
|
||
until well past 50,000 years ago. This was the time of the first
|
||
phase of the last great glaciation. It was also the time that the
|
||
classic group of Neanderthal men was living in Europe. A number of
|
||
the Neanderthal fossil finds come from these cave layers. Before the
|
||
different habits of tool preparation were understood it used to be
|
||
popular to say Neanderthal man was <20>Mousterian man.<2E> I think this is
|
||
wrong. What used to be called <20>Mousterian<61> is now known to be a variety
|
||
of industries with tools of both core-biface and flake habits, and
|
||
so mixed that the word <20>Mousterian<61> used alone really doesn<73>t mean
|
||
anything. The Neanderthalers doubtless understood the tool preparation
|
||
habits by means of which Acheulean, Levalloisian and Mousterian type
|
||
tools were produced. We also have the more modern-like Mount Carmel
|
||
people, found in a cave layer of Palestine with tools almost entirely
|
||
in the flake tradition, called <20>Levalloiso-Mousterian,<2C> and the
|
||
Font<EFBFBD>chevade-Tayacian (p. 59).
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: MOUSTERIAN POINT]
|
||
|
||
|
||
OTHER SUGGESTIONS OF LIFE IN THE EARLY CAVE LAYERS
|
||
|
||
Except for the stone tools, what do we know of the way men lived in the
|
||
time range after 100,000 to perhaps 40,000 years ago or even later?
|
||
We know that in the area from Europe to Palestine, at least some of
|
||
the people (some of the time) lived in the fronts of caves and warmed
|
||
themselves over fires. In Europe, in the cave layers of these times,
|
||
we find the bones of different animals; the bones in the lowest layers
|
||
belong to animals that lived in a warm climate; above them are the
|
||
bones of those who could stand the cold, like the reindeer and mammoth.
|
||
Thus, the meat diet must have been changing, as the glacier crept
|
||
farther south. Shells and possibly fish bones have lasted in these
|
||
cave layers, but there is not a trace of the vegetable foods and the
|
||
nuts and berries and other wild fruits that must have been eaten when
|
||
they could be found.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: CHART SHOWING PRESENT UNDERSTANDING OF RELATIONSHIPS AND
|
||
SUCCESSION OF TOOL-PREPARATION TRADITIONS, INDUSTRIES, AND ASSEMBLAGES
|
||
OF WEST-CENTRAL EUROPE
|
||
|
||
Wavy lines indicate transitions in industrial habits. These transitions
|
||
are not yet understood in detail. The glacial and climatic scheme shown
|
||
is the alpine one.]
|
||
|
||
Bone tools have also been found from this period. Some are called
|
||
scrapers, and there are also long chisel-like leg-bone fragments
|
||
believed to have been used for skinning animals. Larger hunks of bone,
|
||
which seem to have served as anvils or chopping blocks, are fairly
|
||
common.
|
||
|
||
Bits of mineral, used as coloring matter, have also been found. We
|
||
don<EFBFBD>t know what the color was used for.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: MOUSTERIAN SIDE SCRAPER]
|
||
|
||
There is a small but certain number of cases of intentional burials.
|
||
These burials have been found on the floors of the caves; in other
|
||
words, the people dug graves in the places where they lived. The holes
|
||
made for the graves were small. For this reason (or perhaps for some
|
||
other?) the bodies were in a curled-up or contracted position. Flint or
|
||
bone tools or pieces of meat seem to have been put in with some of the
|
||
bodies. In several cases, flat stones had been laid over the graves.
|
||
|
||
|
||
TOOLS FROM AFRICA AND ASIA ABOUT 100,000 YEARS AGO
|
||
|
||
Professor Movius characterizes early prehistoric Africa as a continent
|
||
showing a variety of stone industries. Some of these industries were
|
||
purely local developments and some were practically identical with
|
||
industries found in Europe at the same time. From northwest Africa
|
||
to Capetown--excepting the tropical rain forest region of the west
|
||
center--tools of developed Acheulean, Levalloisian, and Mousterian
|
||
types have been recognized. Often they are named after African place
|
||
names.
|
||
|
||
In east and south Africa lived people whose industries show a
|
||
development of the Levalloisian technique. Such industries are
|
||
called Stillbay. Another industry, developed on the basis of the
|
||
Acheulean technique, is called Fauresmith. From the northwest comes
|
||
an industry with tanged points and flake-blades; this is called the
|
||
Aterian. The tropical rain forest region contained people whose stone
|
||
tools apparently show adjustment to this peculiar environment; the
|
||
so-called Sangoan industry includes stone picks, adzes, core-bifaces
|
||
of specialized Acheulean type, and bifacial points which were probably
|
||
spearheads.
|
||
|
||
In western Asia, even as far as the east coast of India, the tools of
|
||
the Eurafrican core-biface and flake tool traditions continued to be
|
||
used. But in the Far East, as we noted in the last chapter, men had
|
||
developed characteristic stone chopper and chopping tools. This tool
|
||
preparation tradition--basically a pebble tool tradition--lasted to the
|
||
very end of the Ice Age.
|
||
|
||
When more intact open air sites such as that of an earlier time at
|
||
Olorgesailie, and more stratified cave sites are found and excavated
|
||
in Asia and Africa, we shall be able to get a more complete picture.
|
||
So far, our picture of the general cultural level of the Old World at
|
||
about 100,000 years ago--and soon afterwards--is best from Europe, but
|
||
it is still far from complete there, too.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CULTURE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE LAST GREAT GLACIAL PERIOD
|
||
|
||
The few things we have found must indicate only a very small part
|
||
of the total activities of the people who lived at the time. All of
|
||
the things they made of wood and bark, of skins, of anything soft,
|
||
are gone. The fact that burials were made, at least in Europe and
|
||
Palestine, is pretty clear proof that the people had some notion of a
|
||
life after death. But what this notion really was, or what gods (if
|
||
any) men believed in, we cannot know. Dr. Movius has also reminded me
|
||
of the so-called bear cults--cases in which caves have been found which
|
||
contain the skulls of bears in apparently purposeful arrangement. This
|
||
might suggest some notion of hoarding up the spirits or the strength of
|
||
bears killed in the hunt. Probably the people lived in small groups,
|
||
as hunting and food-gathering seldom provide enough food for large
|
||
groups of people. These groups probably had some kind of leader or
|
||
<EFBFBD>chief.<2E> Very likely the rude beginnings of rules for community life
|
||
and politics, and even law, were being made. But what these were, we
|
||
do not know. We can only guess about such things, as we can only guess
|
||
about many others; for example, how the idea of a family must have been
|
||
growing, and how there may have been witch doctors who made beginnings
|
||
in medicine or in art, in the materials they gathered for their trade.
|
||
|
||
The stone tools help us most. They have lasted, and we can find
|
||
them. As they come to us, from this cave or that, and from this
|
||
layer or that, the tool industries show a variety of combinations
|
||
of the different basic habits or traditions of tool preparation.
|
||
This seems only natural, as the groups of people must have been very
|
||
small. The mixtures and blendings of the habits used in making stone
|
||
tools must mean that there were also mixtures and blends in many of
|
||
the other ideas and beliefs of these small groups. And what this
|
||
probably means is that there was no one _culture_ of the time. It is
|
||
certainly unlikely that there were simply three cultures, <20>Acheulean,<2C>
|
||
<EFBFBD>Levalloisian,<2C> and <20>Mousterian,<2C> as has been thought in the past.
|
||
Rather there must have been a great variety of loosely related cultures
|
||
at about the same stage of advancement. We could say, too, that here
|
||
we really begin to see, for the first time, that remarkable ability
|
||
of men to adapt themselves to a variety of conditions. We shall see
|
||
this adaptive ability even more clearly as time goes on and the record
|
||
becomes more complete.
|
||
|
||
Over how great an area did these loosely related cultures reach in
|
||
the time 75,000 to 45,000 or even as late as 35,000 years ago? We
|
||
have described stone tools made in one or another of the flake and
|
||
core-biface habits, for an enormous area. It covers all of Europe, all
|
||
of Africa, the Near East, and parts of India. It is perfectly possible
|
||
that the flake and core-biface habits lasted on after 35,000 years ago,
|
||
in some places outside of Europe. In northern Africa, for example, we
|
||
are certain that they did (see chart, p. 72).
|
||
|
||
On the other hand, in the Far East (China, Burma, Java) and in northern
|
||
India, the tools of the old chopper-tool tradition were still being
|
||
made. Out there, we must assume, there was a different set of loosely
|
||
related cultures. At least, there was a different set of loosely
|
||
related habits for the making of tools. But the men who made them must
|
||
have looked much like the men of the West. Their tools were different,
|
||
but just as useful.
|
||
|
||
As to what the men of the West looked like, I<>ve already hinted at all
|
||
we know so far (pp. 29 ff.). The Neanderthalers were present at
|
||
the time. Some more modern-like men must have been about, too, since
|
||
fossils of them have turned up at Mount Carmel in Palestine, and at
|
||
Teshik Tash, in Trans-caspian Russia. It is still too soon to know
|
||
whether certain combinations of tools within industries were made
|
||
only by certain physical types of men. But since tools of both the
|
||
core-biface and the flake traditions, and their blends, turn up from
|
||
South Africa to England to India, it is most unlikely that only one
|
||
type of man used only one particular habit in the preparation of tools.
|
||
What seems perfectly clear is that men in Africa and men in India were
|
||
making just as good tools as the men who lived in western Europe.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
EARLY MODERNS
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
From some time during the first inter-stadial of the last great
|
||
glaciation (say some time after about 40,000 years ago), we have
|
||
more accurate dates for the European-Mediterranean area and less
|
||
accurate ones for the rest of the Old World. This is probably
|
||
because the effects of the last glaciation have been studied in the
|
||
European-Mediterranean area more than they have been elsewhere.
|
||
|
||
|
||
A NEW TRADITION APPEARS
|
||
|
||
Something new was probably beginning to happen in the
|
||
European-Mediterranean area about 40,000 years ago, though all the
|
||
rest of the Old World seems to have been going on as it had been. I
|
||
can<EFBFBD>t be sure of this because the information we are using as a basis
|
||
for dates is very inaccurate for the areas outside of Europe and the
|
||
Mediterranean.
|
||
|
||
We can at least make a guess. In Egypt and north Africa, men were still
|
||
using the old methods of making stone tools. This was especially true
|
||
of flake tools of the Levalloisian type, save that they were growing
|
||
smaller and smaller as time went on. But at the same time, a new
|
||
tradition was becoming popular in westernmost Asia and in Europe. This
|
||
was the blade-tool tradition.
|
||
|
||
|
||
BLADE TOOLS
|
||
|
||
A stone blade is really just a long parallel-sided flake, as the
|
||
drawing shows. It has sharp cutting edges, and makes a very useful
|
||
knife. The real trick is to be able to make one. It is almost
|
||
impossible to make a blade out of any stone but flint or a natural
|
||
volcanic glass called obsidian. And even if you have flint or obsidian,
|
||
you first have to work up a special cone-shaped <20>blade-core,<2C> from
|
||
which to whack off blades.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: PLAIN BLADE]
|
||
|
||
You whack with a hammer stone against a bone or antler punch which is
|
||
directed at the proper place on the blade-core. The blade-core has to
|
||
be well supported or gripped while this is going on. To get a good
|
||
flint blade tool takes a great deal of know-how.
|
||
|
||
Remember that a tradition in stone tools means no more than that some
|
||
particular way of making the tools got started and lasted a long time.
|
||
Men who made some tools in one tradition or set of habits would also
|
||
make other tools for different purposes by means of another tradition
|
||
or set of habits. It was even possible for the two sets of habits to
|
||
become combined.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE EARLIEST BLADE TOOLS
|
||
|
||
The oldest blade tools we have found were deep down in the layers of
|
||
the Mount Carmel caves, in Tabun Eb and Ea. Similar tools have been
|
||
found in equally early cave levels in Syria; their popularity there
|
||
seems to fluctuate a bit. Some more or less parallel-sided flakes are
|
||
known in the Levalloisian industry in France, but they are probably
|
||
no earlier than Tabun E. The Tabun blades are part of a local late
|
||
<EFBFBD>Acheulean<EFBFBD> industry, which is characterized by core-biface <20>hand
|
||
axes,<2C> but which has many flake tools as well. Professor F. E.
|
||
Zeuner believes that this industry may be more than 120,000 years old;
|
||
actually its date has not yet been fixed, but it is very old--older
|
||
than the fossil finds of modern-like men in the same caves.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SUCCESSION OF ICE AGE FLINT TYPES, INDUSTRIES, AND
|
||
ASSEMBLAGES, AND OF FOSSIL MEN, IN NORTHWESTERN EURAFRASIA]
|
||
|
||
For some reason, the habit of making blades in Palestine and Syria was
|
||
interrupted. Blades only reappeared there at about the same time they
|
||
were first made in Europe, some time after 45,000 years ago; that is,
|
||
after the first phase of the last glaciation was ended.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: BACKED BLADE]
|
||
|
||
We are not sure just where the earliest _persisting_ habits for the
|
||
production of blade tools developed. Impressed by the very early
|
||
momentary appearance of blades at Tabun on Mount Carmel, Professor
|
||
Dorothy A. Garrod first favored the Near East as a center of origin.
|
||
She spoke of <20>some as yet unidentified Asiatic centre,<2C> which she
|
||
thought might be in the highlands of Iran or just beyond. But more
|
||
recent work has been done in this area, especially by Professor Coon,
|
||
and the blade tools do not seem to have an early appearance there. When
|
||
the blade tools reappear in the Syro-Palestinian area, they do so in
|
||
industries which also include Levalloiso-Mousterian flake tools. From
|
||
the point of view of form and workmanship, the blade tools themselves
|
||
are not so fine as those which seem to be making their appearance
|
||
in western Europe about the same time. There is a characteristic
|
||
Syro-Palestinian flake point, possibly a projectile tip, called the
|
||
Emiran, which is not known from Europe. The appearance of blade tools,
|
||
together with Levalloiso-Mousterian flakes, continues even after the
|
||
Emiran point has gone out of use.
|
||
|
||
It seems clear that the production of blade tools did not immediately
|
||
swamp the set of older habits in Europe, too; the use of flake
|
||
tools also continued there. This was not so apparent to the older
|
||
archeologists, whose attention was focused on individual tool types. It
|
||
is not, in fact, impossible--although it is certainly not proved--that
|
||
the technique developed in the preparation of the Levalloisian tortoise
|
||
core (and the striking of the Levalloisian flake from it) might have
|
||
followed through to the conical core and punch technique for the
|
||
production of blades. Professor Garrod is much impressed with the speed
|
||
of change during the later phases of the last glaciation, and its
|
||
probable consequences. She speaks of <20>the greater number of industries
|
||
having enough individual character to be classified as distinct ...
|
||
since evolution now starts to outstrip diffusion.<2E> Her <20>evolution<6F> here
|
||
is of course an industrial evolution rather than a biological one.
|
||
Certainly the people of Europe had begun to make blade tools during
|
||
the warm spell after the first phase of the last glaciation. By about
|
||
40,000 years ago blades were well established. The bones of the blade
|
||
tool makers we<77>ve found so far indicate that anatomically modern men
|
||
had now certainly appeared. Unfortunately, only a few fossil men have
|
||
so far been found from the very beginning of the blade tool range in
|
||
Europe (or elsewhere). What I certainly shall _not_ tell you is that
|
||
conquering bands of fine, strong, anatomically modern men, armed with
|
||
superior blade tools, came sweeping out of the East to exterminate the
|
||
lowly Neanderthalers. Even if we don<6F>t know exactly what happened, I<>d
|
||
lay a good bet it wasn<73>t that simple.
|
||
|
||
We do know a good deal about different blade industries in Europe.
|
||
Almost all of them come from cave layers. There is a great deal of
|
||
complication in what we find. The chart (p. 72) tries to simplify
|
||
this complication; in fact, it doubtless simplifies it too much. But
|
||
it may suggest all the complication of industries which is going
|
||
on at this time. You will note that the upper portion of my much
|
||
simpler chart (p. 65) covers the same material (in the section
|
||
marked <20>Various Blade-Tool Industries<65>). That chart is certainly too
|
||
simplified.
|
||
|
||
You will realize that all this complication comes not only from
|
||
the fact that we are finding more material. It is due also to the
|
||
increasing ability of men to adapt themselves to a great variety of
|
||
situations. Their tools indicate this adaptiveness. We know there was
|
||
a good deal of climatic change at this time. The plants and animals
|
||
that men used for food were changing, too. The great variety of tools
|
||
and industries we now find reflect these changes and the ability of men
|
||
to keep up with the times. Now, for example, is the first time we are
|
||
sure that there are tools to _make_ other tools. They also show men<65>s
|
||
increasing ability to adapt themselves.
|
||
|
||
|
||
SPECIAL TYPES OF BLADE TOOLS
|
||
|
||
The most useful tools that appear at this time were made from blades.
|
||
|
||
1. The <20>backed<65> blade. This is a knife made of a flint blade, with
|
||
one edge purposely blunted, probably to save the user<65>s fingers
|
||
from being cut. There are several shapes of backed blades (p.
|
||
73).
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: TWO BURINS]
|
||
|
||
2. The _burin_ or <20>graver.<2E> The burin was the original chisel. Its
|
||
cutting edge is _transverse_, like a chisel<65>s. Some burins are
|
||
made like a screw-driver, save that burins are sharp. Others have
|
||
edges more like the blade of a chisel or a push plane, with
|
||
only one bevel. Burins were probably used to make slots in wood
|
||
and bone; that is, to make handles or shafts for other tools.
|
||
They must also be the tools with which much of the engraving on
|
||
bone (see p. 83) was done. There is a bewildering variety of
|
||
different kinds of burins.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: TANGED POINT]
|
||
|
||
3. The <20>tanged<65> point. These stone points were used to tip arrows or
|
||
light spears. They were made from blades, and they had a long tang
|
||
at the bottom where they were fixed to the shaft. At the place
|
||
where the tang met the main body of the stone point, there was
|
||
a marked <20>shoulder,<2C> the beginnings of a barb. Such points had
|
||
either one or two shoulders.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: NOTCHED BLADE]
|
||
|
||
4. The <20>notched<65> or <20>strangulated<65> blade. Along with the points for
|
||
arrows or light spears must go a tool to prepare the arrow or
|
||
spear shaft. Today, such a tool would be called a <20>draw-knife<66> or
|
||
a <20>spoke-shave,<2C> and this is what the notched blades probably are.
|
||
Our spoke-shaves have sharp straight cutting blades and really
|
||
<20>shave.<2E> Notched blades of flint probably scraped rather than cut.
|
||
|
||
5. The <20>awl,<2C> <20>drill,<2C> or <20>borer.<2E> These blade tools are worked out
|
||
to a spike-like point. They must have been used for making holes
|
||
in wood, bone, shell, skin, or other things.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: DRILL OR AWL]
|
||
|
||
6. The <20>end-scraper on a blade<64> is a tool with one or both ends
|
||
worked so as to give a good scraping edge. It could have been used
|
||
to hollow out wood or bone, scrape hides, remove bark from trees,
|
||
and a number of other things (p. 78).
|
||
|
||
There is one very special type of flint tool, which is best known from
|
||
western Europe in an industry called the Solutrean. These tools were
|
||
usually made of blades, but the best examples are so carefully worked
|
||
on both sides (bifacially) that it is impossible to see the original
|
||
blade. This tool is
|
||
|
||
7. The <20>laurel leaf<61> point. Some of these tools were long and
|
||
dagger-like, and must have been used as knives or daggers. Others
|
||
were small, called <20>willow leaf,<2C> and must have been mounted on
|
||
spear or arrow shafts. Another typical Solutrean tool is the
|
||
<20>shouldered<65> point. Both the <20>laurel leaf<61> and <20>shouldered<65> point
|
||
types are illustrated (see above and p. 79).
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: END-SCRAPER ON A BLADE]
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: LAUREL LEAF POINT]
|
||
|
||
The industries characterized by tools in the blade tradition also
|
||
yield some flake and core tools. We will end this list with two types
|
||
of tools that appear at this time. The first is made of a flake; the
|
||
second is a core tool.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SHOULDERED POINT]
|
||
|
||
8. The <20>keel-shaped round scraper<65> is usually small and quite round,
|
||
and has had chips removed up to a peak in the center. It is called
|
||
<20>keel-shaped<65> because it is supposed to look (when upside down)
|
||
like a section through a boat. Actually, it looks more like a tent
|
||
or an umbrella. Its outer edges are sharp all the way around, and
|
||
it was probably a general purpose scraping tool (see illustration,
|
||
p. 81).
|
||
|
||
9. The <20>keel-shaped nosed scraper<65> is a much larger and heavier tool
|
||
than the round scraper. It was made on a core with a flat bottom,
|
||
and has one nicely worked end or <20>nose.<2E> Such tools are usually
|
||
large enough to be easily grasped, and probably were used like
|
||
push planes (see illustration, p. 81).
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: KEEL-SHAPED ROUND SCRAPER]
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: KEEL-SHAPED NOSED SCRAPER]
|
||
|
||
The stone tools (usually made of flint) we have just listed are among
|
||
the most easily recognized blade tools, although they show differences
|
||
in detail at different times. There are also many other kinds. Not
|
||
all of these tools appear in any one industry at one time. Thus the
|
||
different industries shown in the chart (p. 72) each have only some
|
||
of the blade tools we<77>ve just listed, and also a few flake tools. Some
|
||
industries even have a few core tools. The particular types of blade
|
||
tools appearing in one cave layer or another, and the frequency of
|
||
appearance of the different types, tell which industry we have in each
|
||
layer.
|
||
|
||
|
||
OTHER KINDS OF TOOLS
|
||
|
||
By this time in Europe--say from about 40,000 to about 10,000 years
|
||
ago--we begin to find other kinds of material too. Bone tools begin
|
||
to appear. There are knives, pins, needles with eyes, and little
|
||
double-pointed straight bars of bone that were probably fish-hooks. The
|
||
fish-line would have been fastened in the center of the bar; when the
|
||
fish swallowed the bait, the bar would have caught cross-wise in the
|
||
fish<EFBFBD>s mouth.
|
||
|
||
One quite special kind of bone tool is a long flat point for a light
|
||
spear. It has a deep notch cut up into the breadth of its base, and is
|
||
called a <20>split-based bone point<6E> (p. 82). We know examples of bone
|
||
beads from these times, and of bone handles for flint tools. Pierced
|
||
teeth of some animals were worn as beads or pendants, but I am not sure
|
||
that elks<6B> teeth were worn this early. There are even spool-shaped
|
||
<EFBFBD>buttons<EFBFBD> or toggles.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SPLIT-BASED BONE POINT]
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SPEAR-THROWER]
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: BONE HARPOON]
|
||
|
||
Antler came into use for tools, especially in central and western
|
||
Europe. We do not know the use of one particular antler tool that
|
||
has a large hole bored in one end. One suggestion is that it was
|
||
a thong-stropper used to strop or work up hide thongs (see
|
||
illustration, below); another suggestion is that it was an arrow-shaft
|
||
straightener.
|
||
|
||
Another interesting tool, usually of antler, is the spear-thrower,
|
||
which is little more than a stick with a notch or hook on one end.
|
||
The hook fits into the butt end of the spear, and the length of the
|
||
spear-thrower allows you to put much more power into the throw (p.
|
||
82). It works on pretty much the same principle as the sling.
|
||
|
||
Very fancy harpoons of antler were also made in the latter half of
|
||
the period in western Europe. These harpoons had barbs on one or both
|
||
sides and a base which would slip out of the shaft (p. 82). Some have
|
||
engraved decoration.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE BEGINNING OF ART
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: THONG-STROPPER]
|
||
|
||
In western Europe, at least, the period saw the beginning of several
|
||
kinds of art work. It is handy to break the art down into two great
|
||
groups: the movable art, and the cave paintings and sculpture. The
|
||
movable art group includes the scratchings, engravings, and modeling
|
||
which decorate tools and weapons. Knives, stroppers, spear-throwers,
|
||
harpoons, and sometimes just plain fragments of bone or antler are
|
||
often carved. There is also a group of large flat pebbles which seem
|
||
almost to have served as sketch blocks. The surfaces of these various
|
||
objects may show animals, or rather abstract floral designs, or
|
||
geometric designs.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: <20>VENUS<55> FIGURINE FROM WILLENDORF]
|
||
|
||
Some of the movable art is not done on tools. The most remarkable
|
||
examples of this class are little figures of women. These women seem to
|
||
be pregnant, and their most female characteristics are much emphasized.
|
||
It is thought that these <20>Venus<75> or <20>Mother-goddess<73> figurines may be
|
||
meant to show the great forces of nature--fertility and the birth of
|
||
life.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CAVE PAINTINGS
|
||
|
||
In the paintings on walls and ceilings of caves we have some examples
|
||
that compare with the best art of any time. The subjects were usually
|
||
animals, the great cold-weather beasts of the end of the Ice Age: the
|
||
mammoth, the wooly rhinoceros, the bison, the reindeer, the wild horse,
|
||
the bear, the wild boar, and wild cattle. As in the movable art, there
|
||
are different styles in the cave art. The really great cave art is
|
||
pretty well restricted to southern France and Cantabrian (northwestern)
|
||
Spain.
|
||
|
||
There are several interesting things about the <20>Franco-Cantabrian<61> cave
|
||
art. It was done deep down in the darkest and most dangerous parts of
|
||
the caves, although the men lived only in the openings of caves. If you
|
||
think what they must have had for lights--crude lamps of hollowed stone
|
||
have been found, which must have burned some kind of oil or grease,
|
||
with a matted hair or fiber wick--and of the animals that may have
|
||
lurked in the caves, you<6F>ll understand the part about danger. Then,
|
||
too, we<77>re sure the pictures these people painted were not simply to be
|
||
looked at and admired, for they painted one picture right over other
|
||
pictures which had been done earlier. Clearly, it was the _act_ of
|
||
_painting_ that counted. The painter had to go way down into the most
|
||
mysterious depths of the earth and create an animal in paint. Possibly
|
||
he believed that by doing this he gained some sort of magic power over
|
||
the same kind of animal when he hunted it in the open air. It certainly
|
||
doesn<EFBFBD>t look as if he cared very much about the picture he painted--as
|
||
a finished product to be admired--for he or somebody else soon went
|
||
down and painted another animal right over the one he had done.
|
||
|
||
The cave art of the Franco-Cantabrian style is one of the great
|
||
artistic achievements of all time. The subjects drawn are almost always
|
||
the larger animals of the time: the bison, wild cattle and horses, the
|
||
wooly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the wild boar, and the bear. In some of
|
||
the best examples, the beasts are drawn in full color and the paintings
|
||
are remarkably alive and charged with energy. They come from the hands
|
||
of men who knew the great animals well--knew the feel of their fur, the
|
||
tremendous drive of their muscles, and the danger one faced when he
|
||
hunted them.
|
||
|
||
Another artistic style has been found in eastern Spain. It includes
|
||
lively drawings, often of people hunting with bow and arrow. The East
|
||
Spanish art is found on open rock faces and in rock-shelters. It is
|
||
less spectacular and apparently more recent than the Franco-Cantabrian
|
||
cave art.
|
||
|
||
|
||
LIFE AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE IN EUROPE
|
||
|
||
Life in these times was probably as good as a hunter could expect it
|
||
to be. Game and fish seem to have been plentiful; berries and wild
|
||
fruits probably were, too. From France to Russia, great pits or
|
||
piles of animal bones have been found. Some of this killing was done
|
||
as our Plains Indians killed the buffalo--by stampeding them over
|
||
steep river banks or cliffs. There were also good tools for hunting,
|
||
however. In western Europe, people lived in the openings of caves and
|
||
under overhanging rocks. On the great plains of eastern Europe, very
|
||
crude huts were being built, half underground. The first part of this
|
||
time must have been cold, for it was the middle and end phases of the
|
||
last great glaciation. Northern Europe from Scotland to Scandinavia,
|
||
northern Germany and Russia, and also the higher mountains to the
|
||
south, were certainly covered with ice. But people had fire, and the
|
||
needles and tools that were used for scraping hides must mean that they
|
||
wore clothing.
|
||
|
||
It is clear that men were thinking of a great variety of things beside
|
||
the tools that helped them get food and shelter. Such burials as we
|
||
find have more grave-gifts than before. Beads and ornaments and often
|
||
flint, bone, or antler tools are included in the grave, and sometimes
|
||
the body is sprinkled with red ochre. Red is the color of blood, which
|
||
means life, and of fire, which means heat. Professor Childe wonders if
|
||
the red ochre was a pathetic attempt at magic--to give back to the body
|
||
the heat that had gone from it. But pathetic or not, it is sure proof
|
||
that these people were already moved by death as men still are moved by
|
||
it.
|
||
|
||
Their art is another example of the direction the human mind was
|
||
taking. And when I say human, I mean it in the fullest sense, for this
|
||
is the time in which fully modern man has appeared. On page 34, we
|
||
spoke of the Cro-Magnon group and of the Combe Capelle-Br<42>nn group of
|
||
Caucasoids and of the Grimaldi <20>Negroids,<2C> who are no longer believed
|
||
to be Negroid. I doubt that any one of these groups produced most of
|
||
the achievements of the times. It<49>s not yet absolutely sure which
|
||
particular group produced the great cave art. The artists were almost
|
||
certainly a blend of several (no doubt already mixed) groups. The pair
|
||
of Grimaldians were buried in a grave with a sprinkling of red ochre,
|
||
and were provided with shell beads and ornaments and with some blade
|
||
tools of flint. Regardless of the different names once given them by
|
||
the human paleontologists, each of these groups seems to have shared
|
||
equally in the cultural achievements of the times, for all that the
|
||
archeologists can say.
|
||
|
||
|
||
MICROLITHS
|
||
|
||
One peculiar set of tools seems to serve as a marker for the very last
|
||
phase of the Ice Age in southwestern Europe. This tool-making habit is
|
||
also found about the shore of the Mediterranean basin, and it moved
|
||
into northern Europe as the last glaciation pulled northward. People
|
||
began making blade tools of very small size. They learned how to chip
|
||
very slender and tiny blades from a prepared core. Then they made these
|
||
little blades into tiny triangles, half-moons (<28>lunates<65>), trapezoids,
|
||
and several other geometric forms. These little tools are called
|
||
<EFBFBD>microliths.<2E> They are so small that most of them must have been fixed
|
||
in handles or shafts.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: MICROLITHS
|
||
|
||
BLADE FRAGMENT
|
||
BURIN
|
||
LUNATE
|
||
TRAPEZOID
|
||
SCALENE TRIANGLE
|
||
ARROWHEAD]
|
||
|
||
We have found several examples of microliths mounted in shafts. In
|
||
northern Europe, where their use soon spread, the microlithic triangles
|
||
or lunates were set in rows down each side of a bone or wood point.
|
||
One corner of each little triangle stuck out, and the whole thing
|
||
made a fine barbed harpoon. In historic times in Egypt, geometric
|
||
trapezoidal microliths were still in use as arrowheads. They were
|
||
fastened--broad end out--on the end of an arrow shaft. It seems queer
|
||
to give an arrow a point shaped like a <20>T.<2E> Actually, the little points
|
||
were very sharp, and must have pierced the hides of animals very
|
||
easily. We also think that the broader cutting edge of the point may
|
||
have caused more bleeding than a pointed arrowhead would. In hunting
|
||
fleet-footed animals like the gazelle, which might run for miles after
|
||
being shot with an arrow, it was an advantage to cause as much bleeding
|
||
as possible, for the animal would drop sooner.
|
||
|
||
We are not really sure where the microliths were first invented. There
|
||
is some evidence that they appear early in the Near East. Their use
|
||
was very common in northwest Africa but this came later. The microlith
|
||
makers who reached south Russia and central Europe possibly moved up
|
||
out of the Near East. Or it may have been the other way around; we
|
||
simply don<6F>t yet know.
|
||
|
||
Remember that the microliths we are talking about here were made from
|
||
carefully prepared little blades, and are often geometric in outline.
|
||
Each microlithic industry proper was made up, in good part, of such
|
||
tiny blade tools. But there were also some normal-sized blade tools and
|
||
even some flake scrapers, in most microlithic industries. I emphasize
|
||
this bladelet and the geometric character of the microlithic industries
|
||
of the western Old World, since there has sometimes been confusion in
|
||
the matter. Sometimes small flake chips, utilized as minute pointed
|
||
tools, have been called <20>microliths.<2E> They may be _microlithic_ in size
|
||
in terms of the general meaning of the word, but they do not seem to
|
||
belong to the sub-tradition of the blade tool preparation habits which
|
||
we have been discussing here.
|
||
|
||
|
||
LATER BLADE-TOOL INDUSTRIES OF THE NEAR EAST AND AFRICA
|
||
|
||
The blade-tool industries of normal size we talked about earlier spread
|
||
from Europe to central Siberia. We noted that blade tools were made
|
||
in western Asia too, and early, although Professor Garrod is no longer
|
||
sure that the whole tradition originated in the Near East. If you look
|
||
again at my chart (p. 72) you will note that in western Asia I list
|
||
some of the names of the western European industries, but with the
|
||
qualification <20>-like<6B> (for example, <20>Gravettian-like<6B>). The western
|
||
Asiatic blade-tool industries do vaguely recall some aspects of those
|
||
of western Europe, but we would probably be better off if we used
|
||
completely local names for them. The <20>Emiran<61> of my chart is such an
|
||
example; its industry includes a long spike-like blade point which has
|
||
no western European counterpart.
|
||
|
||
When we last spoke of Africa (p. 66), I told you that stone tools
|
||
there were continuing in the Levalloisian flake tradition, and were
|
||
becoming smaller. At some time during this process, two new tool
|
||
types appeared in northern Africa: one was the Aterian point with
|
||
a tang (p. 67), and the other was a sort of <20>laurel leaf<61> point,
|
||
called the <20>Sbaikian.<2E> These two tool types were both produced from
|
||
flakes. The Sbaikian points, especially, are roughly similar to some
|
||
of the Solutrean points of Europe. It has been suggested that both the
|
||
Sbaikian and Aterian points may be seen on their way to France through
|
||
their appearance in the Spanish cave deposits of Parpallo, but there is
|
||
also a rival <20>pre-Solutrean<61> in central Europe. We still do not know
|
||
whether there was any contact between the makers of these north African
|
||
tools and the Solutrean tool-makers. What does seem clear is that the
|
||
blade-tool tradition itself arrived late in northern Africa.
|
||
|
||
|
||
NETHER AFRICA
|
||
|
||
Blade tools and <20>laurel leaf<61> points and some other probably late
|
||
stone tool types also appear in central and southern Africa. There
|
||
are geometric microliths on bladelets and even some coarse pottery in
|
||
east Africa. There is as yet no good way of telling just where these
|
||
items belong in time; in broad geological terms they are <20>late.<2E>
|
||
Some people have guessed that they are as early as similar European
|
||
and Near Eastern examples, but I doubt it. The makers of small-sized
|
||
Levalloisian flake tools occupied much of Africa until very late in
|
||
time.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE FAR EAST
|
||
|
||
India and the Far East still seem to be going their own way. In India,
|
||
some blade tools have been found. These are not well dated, save that
|
||
we believe they must be post-Pleistocene. In the Far East it looks as
|
||
if the old chopper-tool tradition was still continuing. For Burma,
|
||
Dr. Movius feels this is fairly certain; for China he feels even more
|
||
certain. Actually, we know very little about the Far East at about the
|
||
time of the last glaciation. This is a shame, too, as you will soon
|
||
agree.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE NEW WORLD BECOMES INHABITED
|
||
|
||
At some time toward the end of the last great glaciation--almost
|
||
certainly after 20,000 years ago--people began to move over Bering
|
||
Strait, from Asia into America. As you know, the American Indians have
|
||
been assumed to be basically Mongoloids. New studies of blood group
|
||
types make this somewhat uncertain, but there is no doubt that the
|
||
ancestors of the American Indians came from Asia.
|
||
|
||
The stone-tool traditions of Europe, Africa, the Near and Middle East,
|
||
and central Siberia, did _not_ move into the New World. With only a
|
||
very few special or late exceptions, there are _no_ core-bifaces,
|
||
flakes, or blade tools of the Old World. Such things just haven<65>t been
|
||
found here.
|
||
|
||
This is why I say it<69>s a shame we don<6F>t know more of the end of the
|
||
chopper-tool tradition in the Far East. According to Weidenreich,
|
||
the Mongoloids were in the Far East long before the end of the last
|
||
glaciation. If the genetics of the blood group types do demand a
|
||
non-Mongoloid ancestry for the American Indians, who else may have been
|
||
in the Far East 25,000 years ago? We know a little about the habits
|
||
for making stone tools which these first people brought with them,
|
||
and these habits don<6F>t conform with those of the western Old World.
|
||
We<EFBFBD>d better keep our eyes open for whatever happened to the end of
|
||
the chopper-tool tradition in northern China; already there are hints
|
||
that it lasted late there. Also we should watch future excavations
|
||
in eastern Siberia. Perhaps we shall find the chopper-tool tradition
|
||
spreading up that far.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE NEW ERA
|
||
|
||
Perhaps it comes in part from the way I read the evidence and perhaps
|
||
in part it is only intuition, but I feel that the materials of this
|
||
chapter suggest a new era in the ways of life. Before about 40,000
|
||
years ago, people simply <20>gathered<65> their food, wandering over large
|
||
areas to scavenge or to hunt in a simple sort of way. But here we
|
||
have seen them <20>settling-in<69> more, perhaps restricting themselves in
|
||
their wanderings and adapting themselves to a given locality in more
|
||
intensive ways. This intensification might be suggested by the word
|
||
<EFBFBD>collecting.<2E> The ways of life we described in the earlier chapters
|
||
were <20>food-gathering<6E> ways, but now an era of <20>food-collecting<6E> has
|
||
begun. We shall see further intensifications of it in the next chapter.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
End and PRELUDE
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
Up to the end of the last glaciation, we prehistorians have a
|
||
relatively comfortable time schedule. The farther back we go the less
|
||
exact we can be about time and details. Elbow-room of five, ten,
|
||
even fifty or more thousands of years becomes available for us to
|
||
maneuver in as we work backward in time. But now our story has come
|
||
forward to the point where more exact methods of dating are at hand.
|
||
The radioactive carbon method reaches back into the span of the last
|
||
glaciation. There are other methods, developed by the geologists and
|
||
paleobotanists, which supplement and extend the usefulness of the
|
||
radioactive carbon dates. And, happily, as our means of being more
|
||
exact increases, our story grows more exciting. There are also more
|
||
details of culture for us to deal with, which add to the interest.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHANGES AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE
|
||
|
||
The last great glaciation of the Ice Age was a two-part affair, with a
|
||
sub-phase at the end of the second part. In Europe the last sub-phase
|
||
of this glaciation commenced somewhere around 15,000 years ago. Then
|
||
the glaciers began to melt back, for the last time. Remember that
|
||
Professor Antevs (p. 19) isn<73>t sure the Ice Age is over yet! This
|
||
melting sometimes went by fits and starts, and the weather wasn<73>t
|
||
always changing for the better; but there was at least one time when
|
||
European weather was even better than it is now.
|
||
|
||
The melting back of the glaciers and the weather fluctuations caused
|
||
other changes, too. We know a fair amount about these changes in
|
||
Europe. In an earlier chapter, we said that the whole Ice Age was a
|
||
matter of continual change over long periods of time. As the last
|
||
glaciers began to melt back some interesting things happened to mankind.
|
||
|
||
In Europe, along with the melting of the last glaciers, geography
|
||
itself was changing. Britain and Ireland had certainly become islands
|
||
by 5000 B.C. The Baltic was sometimes a salt sea, sometimes a large
|
||
fresh-water lake. Forests began to grow where the glaciers had been,
|
||
and in what had once been the cold tundra areas in front of the
|
||
glaciers. The great cold-weather animals--the mammoth and the wooly
|
||
rhinoceros--retreated northward and finally died out. It is probable
|
||
that the efficient hunting of the earlier people of 20,000 or 25,000
|
||
to about 12,000 years ago had helped this process along (see p. 86).
|
||
Europeans, especially those of the post-glacial period, had to keep
|
||
changing to keep up with the times.
|
||
|
||
The archeological materials for the time from 10,000 to 6000 B.C. seem
|
||
simpler than those of the previous five thousand years. The great cave
|
||
art of France and Spain had gone; so had the fine carving in bone and
|
||
antler. Smaller, speedier animals were moving into the new forests. New
|
||
ways of hunting them, or ways of getting other food, had to be found.
|
||
Hence, new tools and weapons were necessary. Some of the people who
|
||
moved into northern Germany were successful reindeer hunters. Then the
|
||
reindeer moved off to the north, and again new sources of food had to
|
||
be found.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE READJUSTMENTS COMPLETED IN EUROPE
|
||
|
||
After a few thousand years, things began to look better. Or at least
|
||
we can say this: By about 6000 B.C. we again get hotter archeological
|
||
materials. The best of these come from the north European area:
|
||
Britain, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, north Germany, southern Norway and
|
||
Sweden. Much of this north European material comes from bogs and swamps
|
||
where it had become water-logged and has kept very well. Thus we have
|
||
much more complete _assemblages_[4] than for any time earlier.
|
||
|
||
[4] <20>Assemblage<67> is a useful word when there are different kinds of
|
||
archeological materials belonging together, from one area and of
|
||
one time. An assemblage is made up of a number of <20>industries<65>
|
||
(that is, all the tools in chipped stone, all the tools in
|
||
bone, all the tools in wood, the traces of houses, etc.) and
|
||
everything else that manages to survive, such as the art, the
|
||
burials, the bones of the animals used as food, and the traces
|
||
of plant foods; in fact, everything that has been left to us
|
||
and can be used to help reconstruct the lives of the people to
|
||
whom it once belonged. Our own present-day <20>assemblage<67> would be
|
||
the sum total of all the objects in our mail-order catalogues,
|
||
department stores and supply houses of every sort, our churches,
|
||
our art galleries and other buildings, together with our roads,
|
||
canals, dams, irrigation ditches, and any other traces we might
|
||
leave of ourselves, from graves to garbage dumps. Not everything
|
||
would last, so that an archeologist digging us up--say 2,000
|
||
years from now--would find only the most durable items in our
|
||
assemblage.
|
||
|
||
The best known of these assemblages is the _Maglemosian_, named after a
|
||
great Danish peat-swamp where much has been found.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SKETCH OF MAGLEMOSIAN ASSEMBLAGE
|
||
|
||
CHIPPED STONE
|
||
HEMP
|
||
GROUND STONE
|
||
BONE AND ANTLER
|
||
WOOD]
|
||
|
||
In the Maglemosian assemblage the flint industry was still very
|
||
important. Blade tools, tanged arrow points, and burins were still
|
||
made, but there were also axes for cutting the trees in the new
|
||
forests. Moreover, the tiny microlithic blades, in a variety of
|
||
geometric forms, are also found. Thus, a specialized tradition that
|
||
possibly began east of the Mediterranean had reached northern Europe.
|
||
There was also a ground stone industry; some axes and club-heads were
|
||
made by grinding and polishing rather than by chipping. The industries
|
||
in bone and antler show a great variety of tools: axes, fish-hooks,
|
||
fish spears, handles and hafts for other tools, harpoons, and clubs.
|
||
A remarkable industry in wood has been preserved. Paddles, sled
|
||
runners, handles for tools, and bark floats for fish-nets have been
|
||
found. There are even fish-nets made of plant fibers. Canoes of some
|
||
kind were no doubt made. Bone and antler tools were decorated with
|
||
simple patterns, and amber was collected. Wooden bows and arrows are
|
||
found.
|
||
|
||
It seems likely that the Maglemosian bog finds are remains of summer
|
||
camps, and that in winter the people moved to higher and drier regions.
|
||
Childe calls them the <20>Forest folk<6C>; they probably lived much the
|
||
same sort of life as did our pre-agricultural Indians of the north
|
||
central states. They hunted small game or deer; they did a great deal
|
||
of fishing; they collected what plant food they could find. In fact,
|
||
their assemblage shows us again that remarkable ability of men to adapt
|
||
themselves to change. They had succeeded in domesticating the dog; he
|
||
was still a very wolf-like dog, but his long association with mankind
|
||
had now begun. Professor Coon believes that these people were direct
|
||
descendants of the men of the glacial age and that they had much the
|
||
same appearance. He believes that most of the Ice Age survivors still
|
||
extant are living today in the northwestern European area.
|
||
|
||
|
||
SOUTH AND CENTRAL EUROPE PERHAPS AS READJUSTED AS THE NORTH
|
||
|
||
There is always one trouble with things that come from areas where
|
||
preservation is exceptionally good: The very quantity of materials in
|
||
such an assemblage tends to make things from other areas look poor
|
||
and simple, although they may not have been so originally at all. The
|
||
assemblages of the people who lived to the south of the Maglemosian
|
||
area may also have been quite large and varied; but, unfortunately,
|
||
relatively little of the southern assemblages has lasted. The
|
||
water-logged sites of the Maglemosian area preserved a great deal
|
||
more. Hence the Maglemosian itself _looks_ quite advanced to us, when
|
||
we compare it with the few things that have happened to last in other
|
||
areas. If we could go back and wander over the Europe of eight thousand
|
||
years ago, we would probably find that the peoples of France, central
|
||
Europe, and south central Russia were just as advanced as those of the
|
||
north European-Baltic belt.
|
||
|
||
South of the north European belt the hunting-food-collecting peoples
|
||
were living on as best they could during this time. One interesting
|
||
group, which seems to have kept to the regions of sandy soil and scrub
|
||
forest, made great quantities of geometric microliths. These are the
|
||
materials called _Tardenoisian_. The materials of the <20>Forest folk<6C> of
|
||
France and central Europe generally are called _Azilian_; Dr. Movius
|
||
believes the term might best be restricted to the area south of the
|
||
Loire River.
|
||
|
||
|
||
HOW MUCH REAL CHANGE WAS THERE?
|
||
|
||
You can see that no really _basic_ change in the way of life has yet
|
||
been described. Childe sees the problem that faced the Europeans of
|
||
10,000 to 3000 B.C. as a problem in readaptation to the post-glacial
|
||
forest environment. By 6000 B.C. some quite successful solutions of
|
||
the problem--like the Maglemosian--had been made. The upsets that came
|
||
with the melting of the last ice gradually brought about all sorts of
|
||
changes in the tools and food-getting habits, but the people themselves
|
||
were still just as much simple hunters, fishers, and food-collectors as
|
||
they had been in 25,000 B.C. It could be said that they changed just
|
||
enough so that they would not have to change. But there is a bit more
|
||
to it than this.
|
||
|
||
Professor Mathiassen of Copenhagen, who knows the archeological remains
|
||
of this time very well, poses a question. He speaks of the material
|
||
as being neither rich nor progressive, in fact <20>rather stagnant,<2C> but
|
||
he goes on to add that the people had a certain <20>receptiveness<73> and
|
||
were able to adapt themselves quickly when the next change did come.
|
||
My own understanding of the situation is that the <20>Forest folk<6C> made
|
||
nothing as spectacular as had the producers of the earlier Magdalenian
|
||
assemblage and the Franco-Cantabrian art. On the other hand, they
|
||
_seem_ to have been making many more different kinds of tools for many
|
||
more different kinds of tasks than had their Ice Age forerunners. I
|
||
emphasize <20>seem<65> because the preservation in the Maglemosian bogs
|
||
is very complete; certainly we cannot list anywhere near as many
|
||
different things for earlier times as we did for the Maglemosians
|
||
(p. 94). I believe this experimentation with all kinds of new tools
|
||
and gadgets, this intensification of adaptiveness (p. 91), this
|
||
<EFBFBD>receptiveness,<2C> even if it is still only pointed toward hunting,
|
||
fishing, and food-collecting, is an important thing.
|
||
|
||
Remember that the only marker we have handy for the _beginning_ of
|
||
this tendency toward <20>receptiveness<73> and experimentation is the
|
||
little microlithic blade tools of various geometric forms. These, we
|
||
saw, began before the last ice had melted away, and they lasted on
|
||
in use for a very long time. I wish there were a better marker than
|
||
the microliths but I do not know of one. Remember, too, that as yet
|
||
we can only use the microliths as a marker in Europe and about the
|
||
Mediterranean.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHANGES IN OTHER AREAS?
|
||
|
||
All this last section was about Europe. How about the rest of the world
|
||
when the last glaciers were melting away?
|
||
|
||
We simply don<6F>t know much about this particular time in other parts
|
||
of the world except in Europe, the Mediterranean basin and the Middle
|
||
East. People were certainly continuing to move into the New World by
|
||
way of Siberia and the Bering Strait about this time. But for the
|
||
greater part of Africa and Asia, we do not know exactly what was
|
||
happening. Some day, we shall no doubt find out; today we are without
|
||
clear information.
|
||
|
||
|
||
REAL CHANGE AND PRELUDE IN THE NEAR EAST
|
||
|
||
The appearance of the microliths and the developments made by the
|
||
<EFBFBD>Forest folk<6C> of northwestern Europe also mark an end. They show us
|
||
the terminal phase of the old food-collecting way of life. It grows
|
||
increasingly clear that at about the same time that the Maglemosian and
|
||
other <20>Forest folk<6C> were adapting themselves to hunting, fishing, and
|
||
collecting in new ways to fit the post-glacial environment, something
|
||
completely new was being made ready in western Asia.
|
||
|
||
Unfortunately, we do not have as much understanding of the climate and
|
||
environment of the late Ice Age in western Asia as we have for most
|
||
of Europe. Probably the weather was never so violent or life quite
|
||
so rugged as it was in northern Europe. We know that the microliths
|
||
made their appearance in western Asia at least by 10,000 B.C. and
|
||
possibly earlier, marking the beginning of the terminal phase of
|
||
food-collecting. Then, gradually, we begin to see the build-up towards
|
||
the first _basic change_ in human life.
|
||
|
||
This change amounted to a revolution just as important as the
|
||
Industrial Revolution. In it, men first learned to domesticate
|
||
plants and animals. They began _producing_ their food instead of
|
||
simply gathering or collecting it. When their food-production
|
||
became reasonably effective, people could and did settle down in
|
||
village-farming communities. With the appearance of the little farming
|
||
villages, a new way of life was actually under way. Professor Childe
|
||
has good reason to speak of the <20>food-producing revolution,<2C> for it was
|
||
indeed a revolution.
|
||
|
||
|
||
QUESTIONS ABOUT CAUSE
|
||
|
||
We do not yet know _how_ and _why_ this great revolution took place. We
|
||
are only just beginning to put the questions properly. I suspect the
|
||
answers will concern some delicate and subtle interplay between man and
|
||
nature. Clearly, both the level of culture and the natural condition of
|
||
the environment must have been ready for the great change, before the
|
||
change itself could come about.
|
||
|
||
It is going to take years of co-operative field work by both
|
||
archeologists and the natural scientists who are most helpful to them
|
||
before the _how_ and _why_ answers begin to appear. Anthropologically
|
||
trained archeologists are fascinated with the cultures of men in times
|
||
of great change. About ten or twelve thousand years ago, the general
|
||
level of culture in many parts of the world seems to have been ready
|
||
for change. In northwestern Europe, we saw that cultures <20>changed
|
||
just enough so that they would not have to change.<2E> We linked this to
|
||
environmental changes with the coming of post-glacial times.
|
||
|
||
In western Asia, we archeologists can prove that the food-producing
|
||
revolution actually took place. We can see _the_ important consequence
|
||
of effective domestication of plants and animals in the appearance of
|
||
the settled village-farming community. And within the village-farming
|
||
community was the seed of civilization. The way in which effective
|
||
domestication of plants and animals came about, however, must also be
|
||
linked closely with the natural environment. Thus the archeologists
|
||
will not solve the _how_ and _why_ questions alone--they will need the
|
||
help of interested natural scientists in the field itself.
|
||
|
||
|
||
PRECONDITIONS FOR THE REVOLUTION
|
||
|
||
Especially at this point in our story, we must remember how culture and
|
||
environment go hand in hand. Neither plants nor animals domesticate
|
||
themselves; men domesticate them. Furthermore, men usually domesticate
|
||
only those plants and animals which are useful. There is a good
|
||
question here: What is cultural usefulness? But I shall side-step it to
|
||
save time. Men cannot domesticate plants and animals that do not exist
|
||
in the environment where the men live. Also, there are certainly some
|
||
animals and probably some plants that resist domestication, although
|
||
they might be useful.
|
||
|
||
This brings me back again to the point that _both_ the level of culture
|
||
and the natural condition of the environment--with the proper plants
|
||
and animals in it--must have been ready before domestication could
|
||
have happened. But this is precondition, not cause. Why did effective
|
||
food-production happen first in the Near East? Why did it happen
|
||
independently in the New World slightly later? Why also in the Far
|
||
East? Why did it happen at all? Why are all human beings not still
|
||
living as the Maglemosians did? These are the questions we still have
|
||
to face.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CULTURAL <20>RECEPTIVENESS<53> AND PROMISING ENVIRONMENTS
|
||
|
||
Until the archeologists and the natural scientists--botanists,
|
||
geologists, zoologists, and general ecologists--have spent many more
|
||
years on the problem, we shall not have full _how_ and _why_ answers. I
|
||
do think, however, that we are beginning to understand what to look for.
|
||
|
||
We shall have to learn much more of what makes the cultures of men
|
||
<EFBFBD>receptive<EFBFBD> and experimental. Did change in the environment alone
|
||
force it? Was it simply a case of Professor Toynbee<65>s <20>challenge and
|
||
response?<3F> I cannot believe the answer is quite that simple. Were it
|
||
so simple, we should want to know why the change hadn<64>t come earlier,
|
||
along with earlier environmental changes. We shall not know the answer,
|
||
however, until we have excavated the traces of many more cultures of
|
||
the time in question. We shall doubtless also have to learn more about,
|
||
and think imaginatively about, the simpler cultures still left today.
|
||
The <20>mechanics<63> of culture in general will be bound to interest us.
|
||
|
||
It will also be necessary to learn much more of the environments of
|
||
10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In which regions of the world were the
|
||
natural conditions most promising? Did this promise include plants and
|
||
animals which could be domesticated, or did it only offer new ways of
|
||
food-collecting? There is much work to do on this problem, but we are
|
||
beginning to get some general hints.
|
||
|
||
Before I begin to detail the hints we now have from western Asia, I
|
||
want to do two things. First, I shall tell you of an old theory as to
|
||
how food-production might have appeared. Second, I will bother you with
|
||
some definitions which should help us in our thinking as the story goes
|
||
on.
|
||
|
||
|
||
AN OLD THEORY AS TO THE CAUSE OF THE REVOLUTION
|
||
|
||
The idea that change would result, if the balance between nature
|
||
and culture became upset, is of course not a new one. For at least
|
||
twenty-five years, there has been a general theory as to _how_ the
|
||
food-producing revolution happened. This theory depends directly on the
|
||
idea of natural change in the environment.
|
||
|
||
The five thousand years following about 10,000 B.C. must have been
|
||
very difficult ones, the theory begins. These were the years when
|
||
the most marked melting of the last glaciers was going on. While the
|
||
glaciers were in place, the climate to the south of them must have been
|
||
different from the climate in those areas today. You have no doubt read
|
||
that people once lived in regions now covered by the Sahara Desert.
|
||
This is true; just when is not entirely clear. The theory is that
|
||
during the time of the glaciers, there was a broad belt of rain winds
|
||
south of the glaciers. These rain winds would have kept north Africa,
|
||
the Nile Valley, and the Middle East green and fertile. But when the
|
||
glaciers melted back to the north, the belt of rain winds is supposed
|
||
to have moved north too. Then the people living south and east of the
|
||
Mediterranean would have found that their water supply was drying up,
|
||
that the animals they hunted were dying or moving away, and that the
|
||
plant foods they collected were dried up and scarce.
|
||
|
||
According to the theory, all this would have been true except in the
|
||
valleys of rivers and in oases in the growing deserts. Here, in the
|
||
only places where water was left, the men and animals and plants would
|
||
have clustered. They would have been forced to live close to one
|
||
another, in order to live at all. Presently the men would have seen
|
||
that some animals were more useful or made better food than others,
|
||
and so they would have begun to protect these animals from their
|
||
natural enemies. The men would also have been forced to try new plant
|
||
foods--foods which possibly had to be prepared before they could be
|
||
eaten. Thus, with trials and errors, but by being forced to live close
|
||
to plants and animals, men would have learned to domesticate them.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE OLD THEORY TOO SIMPLE FOR THE FACTS
|
||
|
||
This theory was set up before we really knew anything in detail about
|
||
the later prehistory of the Near and Middle East. We now know that
|
||
the facts which have been found don<6F>t fit the old theory at all well.
|
||
Also, I have yet to find an American meteorologist who feels that we
|
||
know enough about the changes in the weather pattern to say that it can
|
||
have been so simple and direct. And, of course, the glacial ice which
|
||
began melting after 12,000 years ago was merely the last sub-phase of
|
||
the last great glaciation. There had also been three earlier periods
|
||
of great alpine glaciers, and long periods of warm weather in between.
|
||
If the rain belt moved north as the glaciers melted for the last time,
|
||
it must have moved in the same direction in earlier times. Thus, the
|
||
forced neighborliness of men, plants, and animals in river valleys and
|
||
oases must also have happened earlier. Why didn<64>t domestication happen
|
||
earlier, then?
|
||
|
||
Furthermore, it does not seem to be in the oases and river valleys
|
||
that we have our first or only traces of either food-production
|
||
or the earliest farming villages. These traces are also in the
|
||
hill-flanks of the mountains of western Asia. Our earliest sites of the
|
||
village-farmers do not seem to indicate a greatly different climate
|
||
from that which the same region now shows. In fact, everything we now
|
||
know suggests that the old theory was just too simple an explanation to
|
||
have been the true one. The only reason I mention it--beyond correcting
|
||
the ideas you may get in the general texts--is that it illustrates the
|
||
kind of thinking we shall have to do, even if it is doubtless wrong in
|
||
detail.
|
||
|
||
We archeologists shall have to depend much more than we ever have on
|
||
the natural scientists who can really help us. I can tell you this from
|
||
experience. I had the great good fortune to have on my expedition staff
|
||
in Iraq in 1954-55, a geologist, a botanist, and a zoologist. Their
|
||
studies added whole new bands of color to my spectrum of thinking about
|
||
_how_ and _why_ the revolution took place and how the village-farming
|
||
community began. But it was only a beginning; as I said earlier, we are
|
||
just now learning to ask the proper questions.
|
||
|
||
|
||
ABOUT STAGES AND ERAS
|
||
|
||
Now come some definitions, so I may describe my material more easily.
|
||
Archeologists have always loved to make divisions and subdivisions
|
||
within the long range of materials which they have found. They often
|
||
disagree violently about which particular assemblage of material
|
||
goes into which subdivision, about what the subdivisions should be
|
||
named, about what the subdivisions really mean culturally. Some
|
||
archeologists, probably through habit, favor an old scheme of Grecized
|
||
names for the subdivisions: paleolithic, mesolithic, neolithic. I
|
||
refuse to use these words myself. They have meant too many different
|
||
things to too many different people and have tended to hide some pretty
|
||
fuzzy thinking. Probably you haven<65>t even noticed my own scheme of
|
||
subdivision up to now, but I<>d better tell you in general what it is.
|
||
|
||
I think of the earliest great group of archeological materials, from
|
||
which we can deduce only a food-gathering way of culture, as the
|
||
_food-gathering stage_. I say <20>stage<67> rather than <20>age,<2C> because it
|
||
is not quite over yet; there are still a few primitive people in
|
||
out-of-the-way parts of the world who remain in the _food-gathering
|
||
stage_. In fact, Professor Julian Steward would probably prefer to call
|
||
it a food-gathering _level_ of existence, rather than a stage. This
|
||
would be perfectly acceptable to me. I also tend to find myself using
|
||
_collecting_, rather than _gathering_, for the more recent aspects or
|
||
era of the stage, as the word <20>collecting<6E> appears to have more sense
|
||
of purposefulness and specialization than does <20>gathering<6E> (see p.
|
||
91).
|
||
|
||
Now, while I think we could make several possible subdivisions of the
|
||
food-gathering stage--I call my subdivisions of stages _eras_[5]--I
|
||
believe the only one which means much to us here is the last or
|
||
_terminal sub-era of food-collecting_ of the whole food-gathering
|
||
stage. The microliths seem to mark its approach in the northwestern
|
||
part of the Old World. It is really shown best in the Old World by
|
||
the materials of the <20>Forest folk,<2C> the cultural adaptation to the
|
||
post-glacial environment in northwestern Europe. We talked about
|
||
the <20>Forest folk<6C> at the beginning of this chapter, and I used the
|
||
Maglemosian assemblage of Denmark as an example.
|
||
|
||
[5] It is difficult to find words which have a sequence or gradation
|
||
of meaning with respect to both development and a range of time
|
||
in the past, or with a range of time from somewhere in the past
|
||
which is perhaps not yet ended. One standard Webster definition
|
||
of _stage_ is: <20>One of the steps into which the material
|
||
development of man ... is divided.<2E> I cannot find any dictionary
|
||
definition that suggests which of the words, _stage_ or _era_,
|
||
has the meaning of a longer span of time. Therefore, I have
|
||
chosen to let my eras be shorter, and to subdivide my stages
|
||
into eras. Webster gives _era_ as: <20>A signal stage of history,
|
||
an epoch.<2E> When I want to subdivide my eras, I find myself using
|
||
_sub-eras_. Thus I speak of the _eras_ within a _stage_ and of
|
||
the _sub-eras_ within an _era_; that is, I do so when I feel
|
||
that I really have to, and when the evidence is clear enough to
|
||
allow it.
|
||
|
||
The food-producing revolution ushers in the _food-producing stage_.
|
||
This stage began to be replaced by the _industrial stage_ only about
|
||
two hundred years ago. Now notice that my stage divisions are in terms
|
||
of technology and economics. We must think sharply to be sure that the
|
||
subdivisions of the stages, the eras, are in the same terms. This does
|
||
not mean that I think technology and economics are the only important
|
||
realms of culture. It is rather that for most of prehistoric time the
|
||
materials left to the archeologists tend to limit our deductions to
|
||
technology and economics.
|
||
|
||
I<EFBFBD>m so soon out of my competence, as conventional ancient history
|
||
begins, that I shall only suggest the earlier eras of the
|
||
food-producing stage to you. This book is about prehistory, and I<>m not
|
||
a universal historian.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE TWO EARLIEST ERAS OF THE FOOD-PRODUCING STAGE
|
||
|
||
The food-producing stage seems to appear in western Asia with really
|
||
revolutionary suddenness. It is seen by the relative speed with which
|
||
the traces of new crafts appear in the earliest village-farming
|
||
community sites we<77>ve dug. It is seen by the spread and multiplication
|
||
of these sites themselves, and the remarkable growth in human
|
||
population we deduce from this increase in sites. We<57>ll look at some
|
||
of these sites and the archeological traces they yield in the next
|
||
chapter. When such village sites begin to appear, I believe we are in
|
||
the _era of the primary village-farming community_. I also believe this
|
||
is the second era of the food-producing stage.
|
||
|
||
The first era of the food-producing stage, I believe, was an _era of
|
||
incipient cultivation and animal domestication_. I keep saying <20>I
|
||
believe<EFBFBD> because the actual evidence for this earlier era is so slight
|
||
that one has to set it up mainly by playing a hunch for it. The reason
|
||
for playing the hunch goes about as follows.
|
||
|
||
One thing we seem to be able to see, in the food-collecting era in
|
||
general, is a tendency for people to begin to settle down. This
|
||
settling down seemed to become further intensified in the terminal
|
||
era. How this is connected with Professor Mathiassen<65>s <20>receptiveness<73>
|
||
and the tendency to be experimental, we do not exactly know. The
|
||
evidence from the New World comes into play here as well as that from
|
||
the Old World. With this settling down in one place, the people of the
|
||
terminal era--especially the <20>Forest folk<6C> whom we know best--began
|
||
making a great variety of new things. I remarked about this earlier in
|
||
the chapter. Dr. Robert M. Adams is of the opinion that this atmosphere
|
||
of experimentation with new tools--with new ways of collecting food--is
|
||
the kind of atmosphere in which one might expect trials at planting
|
||
and at animal domestication to have been made. We first begin to find
|
||
traces of more permanent life in outdoor camp sites, although caves
|
||
were still inhabited at the beginning of the terminal era. It is not
|
||
surprising at all that the <20>Forest folk<6C> had already domesticated the
|
||
dog. In this sense, the whole era of food-collecting was becoming ready
|
||
and almost <20>incipient<6E> for cultivation and animal domestication.
|
||
|
||
Northwestern Europe was not the place for really effective beginnings
|
||
in agriculture and animal domestication. These would have had to take
|
||
place in one of those natural environments of promise, where a variety
|
||
of plants and animals, each possible of domestication, was available in
|
||
the wild state. Let me spell this out. Really effective food-production
|
||
must include a variety of items to make up a reasonably well-rounded
|
||
diet. The food-supply so produced must be trustworthy, even though
|
||
the food-producing peoples themselves might be happy to supplement
|
||
it with fish and wild strawberries, just as we do when such things
|
||
are available. So, as we said earlier, part of our problem is that
|
||
of finding a region with a natural environment which includes--and
|
||
did include, some ten thousand years ago--a variety of possibly
|
||
domesticable wild plants and animals.
|
||
|
||
|
||
NUCLEAR AREAS
|
||
|
||
Now comes the last of my definitions. A region with a natural
|
||
environment which included a variety of wild plants and animals,
|
||
both possible and ready for domestication, would be a central
|
||
or core or _nuclear area_, that is, it would be when and _if_
|
||
food-production took place within it. It is pretty hard for me to
|
||
imagine food-production having ever made an independent start outside
|
||
such a nuclear area, although there may be some possible nuclear areas
|
||
in which food-production never took place (possibly in parts of Africa,
|
||
for example).
|
||
|
||
We know of several such nuclear areas. In the New World, Middle America
|
||
and the Andean highlands make up one or two; it is my understanding
|
||
that the evidence is not yet clear as to which. There seems to have
|
||
been a nuclear area somewhere in southeastern Asia, in the Malay
|
||
peninsula or Burma perhaps, connected with the early cultivation of
|
||
taro, breadfruit, the banana and the mango. Possibly the cultivation
|
||
of rice and the domestication of the chicken and of zebu cattle and
|
||
the water buffalo belong to this southeast Asiatic nuclear area. We
|
||
know relatively little about it archeologically, as yet. The nuclear
|
||
area which was the scene of the earliest experiment in effective
|
||
food-production was in western Asia. Since I know it best, I shall use
|
||
it as my example.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE NUCLEAR NEAR EAST
|
||
|
||
The nuclear area of western Asia is naturally the one of greatest
|
||
interest to people of the western cultural tradition. Our cultural
|
||
heritage began within it. The area itself is the region of the hilly
|
||
flanks of rain-watered grass-land which build up to the high mountain
|
||
ridges of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Palestine. The map on page
|
||
125 indicates the region. If you have a good atlas, try to locate the
|
||
zone which surrounds the drainage basin of the Tigris and Euphrates
|
||
Rivers at elevations of from approximately 2,000 to 5,000 feet. The
|
||
lower alluvial land of the Tigris-Euphrates basin itself has very
|
||
little rainfall. Some years ago Professor James Henry Breasted called
|
||
the alluvial lands of the Tigris-Euphrates a part of the <20>fertile
|
||
crescent.<2E> These alluvial lands are very fertile if irrigated. Breasted
|
||
was most interested in the oriental civilizations of conventional
|
||
ancient history, and irrigation had been discovered before they
|
||
appeared.
|
||
|
||
The country of hilly flanks above Breasted<65>s crescent receives from
|
||
10 to 20 or more inches of winter rainfall each year, which is about
|
||
what Kansas has. Above the hilly-flanks zone tower the peaks and ridges
|
||
of the Lebanon-Amanus chain bordering the coast-line from Palestine
|
||
to Turkey, the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey, and the Zagros
|
||
range of the Iraq-Iran borderland. This rugged mountain frame for our
|
||
hilly-flanks zone rises to some magnificent alpine scenery, with peaks
|
||
of from ten to fifteen thousand feet in elevation. There are several
|
||
gaps in the Mediterranean coastal portion of the frame, through which
|
||
the winter<65>s rain-bearing winds from the sea may break so as to carry
|
||
rain to the foothills of the Taurus and the Zagros.
|
||
|
||
The picture I hope you will have from this description is that of an
|
||
intermediate hilly-flanks zone lying between two regions of extremes.
|
||
The lower Tigris-Euphrates basin land is low and far too dry and hot
|
||
for agriculture based on rainfall alone; to the south and southwest, it
|
||
merges directly into the great desert of Arabia. The mountains which
|
||
lie above the hilly-flanks zone are much too high and rugged to have
|
||
encouraged farmers.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE NUCLEAR NEAR EAST
|
||
|
||
The more we learn of this hilly-flanks zone that I describe, the
|
||
more it seems surely to have been a nuclear area. This is where we
|
||
archeologists need, and are beginning to get, the help of natural
|
||
scientists. They are coming to the conclusion that the natural
|
||
environment of the hilly-flanks zone today is much as it was some eight
|
||
to ten thousand years ago. There are still two kinds of wild wheat and
|
||
a wild barley, and the wild sheep, goat, and pig. We have discovered
|
||
traces of each of these at about nine thousand years ago, also traces
|
||
of wild ox, horse, and dog, each of which appears to be the probable
|
||
ancestor of the domesticated form. In fact, at about nine thousand
|
||
years ago, the two wheats, the barley, and at least the goat, were
|
||
already well on the road to domestication.
|
||
|
||
The wild wheats give us an interesting clue. They are only available
|
||
together with the wild barley within the hilly-flanks zone. While the
|
||
wild barley grows in a variety of elevations and beyond the zone,
|
||
at least one of the wild wheats does not seem to grow below the hill
|
||
country. As things look at the moment, the domestication of both the
|
||
wheats together could _only_ have taken place within the hilly-flanks
|
||
zone. Barley seems to have first come into cultivation due to its
|
||
presence as a weed in already cultivated wheat fields. There is also
|
||
a suggestion--there is still much more to learn in the matter--that
|
||
the animals which were first domesticated were most at home up in the
|
||
hilly-flanks zone in their wild state.
|
||
|
||
With a single exception--that of the dog--the earliest positive
|
||
evidence of domestication includes the two forms of wheat, the barley,
|
||
and the goat. The evidence comes from within the hilly-flanks zone.
|
||
However, it comes from a settled village proper, Jarmo (which I<>ll
|
||
describe in the next chapter), and is thus from the era of the primary
|
||
village-farming community. We are still without positive evidence of
|
||
domesticated grain and animals in the first era of the food-producing
|
||
stage, that of incipient cultivation and animal domestication.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE ERA OF INCIPIENT CULTIVATION AND ANIMAL DOMESTICATION
|
||
|
||
I said above (p. 105) that my era of incipient cultivation and animal
|
||
domestication is mainly set up by playing a hunch. Although we cannot
|
||
really demonstrate it--and certainly not in the Near East--it would
|
||
be very strange for food-collectors not to have known a great deal
|
||
about the plants and animals most useful to them. They do seem to have
|
||
domesticated the dog. We can easily imagine them remembering to go
|
||
back, season after season, to a particular patch of ground where seeds
|
||
or acorns or berries grew particularly well. Most human beings, unless
|
||
they are extremely hungry, are attracted to baby animals, and many wild
|
||
pups or fawns or piglets must have been brought back alive by hunting
|
||
parties.
|
||
|
||
In this last sense, man has probably always been an incipient
|
||
cultivator and domesticator. But I believe that Adams is right in
|
||
suggesting that this would be doubly true with the experimenters of
|
||
the terminal era of food-collecting. We noticed that they also seem
|
||
to have had a tendency to settle down. Now my hunch goes that _when_
|
||
this experimentation and settling down took place within a potential
|
||
nuclear area--where a whole constellation of plants and animals
|
||
possible of domestication was available--the change was easily made.
|
||
Professor Charles A. Reed, our field colleague in zoology, agrees that
|
||
year-round settlement with plant domestication probably came before
|
||
there were important animal domestications.
|
||
|
||
|
||
INCIPIENT ERAS AND NUCLEAR AREAS
|
||
|
||
I have put this scheme into a simple chart (p. 111) with the names
|
||
of a few of the sites we are going to talk about. You will see that my
|
||
hunch means that there are eras of incipient cultivation _only_ within
|
||
nuclear areas. In a nuclear area, the terminal era of food-collecting
|
||
would probably have been quite short. I do not know for how long a time
|
||
the era of incipient cultivation and domestication would have lasted,
|
||
but perhaps for several thousand years. Then it passed on into the era
|
||
of the primary village-farming community.
|
||
|
||
Outside a nuclear area, the terminal era of food-collecting would last
|
||
for a long time; in a few out-of-the-way parts of the world, it still
|
||
hangs on. It would end in any particular place through contact with
|
||
and the spread of ideas of people who had passed on into one of the
|
||
more developed eras. In many cases, the terminal era of food-collecting
|
||
was ended by the incoming of the food-producing peoples themselves.
|
||
For example, the practices of food-production were carried into Europe
|
||
by the actual movement of some numbers of peoples (we don<6F>t know how
|
||
many) who had reached at least the level of the primary village-farming
|
||
community. The <20>Forest folk<6C> learned food-production from them. There
|
||
was never an era of incipient cultivation and domestication proper in
|
||
Europe, if my hunch is right.
|
||
|
||
|
||
ARCHEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES IN SEEING THE INCIPIENT ERA
|
||
|
||
The way I see it, two things were required in order that an era of
|
||
incipient cultivation and domestication could begin. First, there had
|
||
to be the natural environment of a nuclear area, with its whole group
|
||
of plants and animals capable of domestication. This is the aspect of
|
||
the matter which we<77>ve said is directly given by nature. But it is
|
||
quite possible that such an environment with such a group of plants
|
||
and animals in it may have existed well before ten thousand years ago
|
||
in the Near East. It is also quite possible that the same promising
|
||
condition may have existed in regions which never developed into
|
||
nuclear areas proper. Here, again, we come back to the cultural factor.
|
||
I think it was that <20>atmosphere of experimentation<6F> we<77>ve talked about
|
||
once or twice before. I can<61>t define it for you, other than to say that
|
||
by the end of the Ice Age, the general level of many cultures was ready
|
||
for change. Ask me how and why this was so, and I<>ll tell you we don<6F>t
|
||
know yet, and that if we did understand this kind of question, there
|
||
would be no need for me to go on being a prehistorian!
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIPS OF STAGES AND ERAS IN WESTERN
|
||
ASIA AND NORTHEASTERN AFRICA]
|
||
|
||
Now since this was an era of incipience, of the birth of new ideas,
|
||
and of experimentation, it is very difficult to see its traces
|
||
archeologically. New tools having to do with the new ways of getting
|
||
and, in fact, producing food would have taken some time to develop.
|
||
It need not surprise us too much if we cannot find hoes for planting
|
||
and sickles for reaping grain at the very beginning. We might expect
|
||
a time of making-do with some of the older tools, or with make-shift
|
||
tools, for some of the new jobs. The present-day wild cousin of the
|
||
domesticated sheep still lives in the mountains of western Asia. It has
|
||
no wool, only a fine down under hair like that of a deer, so it need
|
||
not surprise us to find neither the whorls used for spinning nor traces
|
||
of woolen cloth. It must have taken some time for a wool-bearing sheep
|
||
to develop and also time for the invention of the new tools which go
|
||
with weaving. It would have been the same with other kinds of tools for
|
||
the new way of life.
|
||
|
||
It is difficult even for an experienced comparative zoologist to tell
|
||
which are the bones of domesticated animals and which are those of
|
||
their wild cousins. This is especially so because the animal bones the
|
||
archeologists find are usually fragmentary. Furthermore, we do not have
|
||
a sort of library collection of the skeletons of the animals or an
|
||
herbarium of the plants of those times, against which the traces which
|
||
the archeologists find may be checked. We are only beginning to get
|
||
such collections for the modern wild forms of animals and plants from
|
||
some of our nuclear areas. In the nuclear area in the Near East, some
|
||
of the wild animals, at least, have already become extinct. There are
|
||
no longer wild cattle or wild horses in western Asia. We know they were
|
||
there from the finds we<77>ve made in caves of late Ice Age times, and
|
||
from some slightly later sites.
|
||
|
||
|
||
SITES WITH ANTIQUITIES OF THE INCIPIENT ERA
|
||
|
||
So far, we know only a very few sites which would suit my notion of the
|
||
incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication. I am closing
|
||
this chapter with descriptions of two of the best Near Eastern examples
|
||
I know of. You may not be satisfied that what I am able to describe
|
||
makes a full-bodied era of development at all. Remember, however, that
|
||
I<EFBFBD>ve told you I<>m largely playing a kind of a hunch, and also that the
|
||
archeological materials of this era will always be extremely difficult
|
||
to interpret. At the beginning of any new way of life, there will be a
|
||
great tendency for people to make-do, at first, with tools and habits
|
||
they are already used to. I would suspect that a great deal of this
|
||
making-do went on almost to the end of this era.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE NATUFIAN, AN ASSEMBLAGE OF THE INCIPIENT ERA
|
||
|
||
The assemblage called the Natufian comes from the upper layers of a
|
||
number of caves in Palestine. Traces of its flint industry have also
|
||
turned up in Syria and Lebanon. We don<6F>t know just how old it is. I
|
||
guess that it probably falls within five hundred years either way of
|
||
about 5000 B.C.
|
||
|
||
Until recently, the people who produced the Natufian assemblage were
|
||
thought to have been only cave dwellers, but now at least three open
|
||
air Natufian sites have been briefly described. In their best-known
|
||
dwelling place, on Mount Carmel, the Natufian folk lived in the open
|
||
mouth of a large rock-shelter and on the terrace in front of it. On the
|
||
terrace, they had set at least two short curving lines of stones; but
|
||
these were hardly architecture; they seem more like benches or perhaps
|
||
the low walls of open pens. There were also one or two small clusters
|
||
of stones laid like paving, and a ring of stones around a hearth or
|
||
fireplace. One very round and regular basin-shaped depression had been
|
||
cut into the rocky floor of the terrace, and there were other less
|
||
regular basin-like depressions. In the newly reported open air sites,
|
||
there seem to have been huts with rounded corners.
|
||
|
||
Most of the finds in the Natufian layer of the Mount Carmel cave were
|
||
flints. About 80 per cent of these flint tools were microliths made
|
||
by the regular working of tiny blades into various tools, some having
|
||
geometric forms. The larger flint tools included backed blades, burins,
|
||
scrapers, a few arrow points, some larger hacking or picking tools, and
|
||
one special type. This last was the sickle blade.
|
||
|
||
We know a sickle blade of flint when we see one, because of a strange
|
||
polish or sheen which seems to develop on the cutting edge when the
|
||
blade has been used to cut grasses or grain, or--perhaps--reeds. In
|
||
the Natufian, we have even found the straight bone handles in which a
|
||
number of flint sickle blades were set in a line.
|
||
|
||
There was a small industry in ground or pecked stone (that is, abraded
|
||
not chipped) in the Natufian. This included some pestle and mortar
|
||
fragments. The mortars are said to have a deep and narrow hole,
|
||
and some of the pestles show traces of red ochre. We are not sure
|
||
that these mortars and pestles were also used for grinding food. In
|
||
addition, there were one or two bits of carving in stone.
|
||
|
||
|
||
NATUFIAN ANTIQUITIES IN OTHER MATERIALS; BURIALS AND PEOPLE
|
||
|
||
The Natufian industry in bone was quite rich. It included, beside the
|
||
sickle hafts mentioned above, points and harpoons, straight and curved
|
||
types of fish-hooks, awls, pins and needles, and a variety of beads and
|
||
pendants. There were also beads and pendants of pierced teeth and shell.
|
||
|
||
A number of Natufian burials have been found in the caves; some burials
|
||
were grouped together in one grave. The people who were buried within
|
||
the Mount Carmel cave were laid on their backs in an extended position,
|
||
while those on the terrace seem to have been <20>flexed<65> (placed in their
|
||
graves in a curled-up position). This may mean no more than that it was
|
||
easier to dig a long hole in cave dirt than in the hard-packed dirt of
|
||
the terrace. The people often had some kind of object buried with them,
|
||
and several of the best collections of beads come from the burials. On
|
||
two of the skulls there were traces of elaborate head-dresses of shell
|
||
beads.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SKETCH OF NATUFIAN ASSEMBLAGE
|
||
|
||
MICROLITHS
|
||
ARCHITECTURE?
|
||
BURIAL
|
||
CHIPPED STONE
|
||
GROUND STONE
|
||
BONE]
|
||
|
||
The animal bones of the Natufian layers show beasts of a <20>modern<72> type,
|
||
but with some differences from those of present-day Palestine. The
|
||
bones of the gazelle far outnumber those of the deer; since gazelles
|
||
like a much drier climate than deer, Palestine must then have had much
|
||
the same climate that it has today. Some of the animal bones were those
|
||
of large or dangerous beasts: the hyena, the bear, the wild boar,
|
||
and the leopard. But the Natufian people may have had the help of a
|
||
large domesticated dog. If our guess at a date for the Natufian is
|
||
right (about 7750 B.C.), this is an earlier dog than was that in the
|
||
Maglemosian of northern Europe. More recently, it has been reported
|
||
that a domesticated goat is also part of the Natufian finds.
|
||
|
||
The study of the human bones from the Natufian burials is not yet
|
||
complete. Until Professor McCown<77>s study becomes available, we may note
|
||
Professor Coon<6F>s assessment that these people were of a <20>basically
|
||
Mediterranean type.<2E>
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE KARIM SHAHIR ASSEMBLAGE
|
||
|
||
Karim Shahir differs from the Natufian sites in that it shows traces
|
||
of a temporary open site or encampment. It lies on the top of a bluff
|
||
in the Kurdish hill-country of northeastern Iraq. It was dug by Dr.
|
||
Bruce Howe of the expedition I directed in 1950-51 for the Oriental
|
||
Institute and the American Schools of Oriental Research. In 1954-55,
|
||
our expedition located another site, M<>lefaat, with general resemblance
|
||
to Karim Shahir, but about a hundred miles north of it. In 1956, Dr.
|
||
Ralph Solecki located still another Karim Shahir type of site called
|
||
Zawi Chemi Shanidar. The Zawi Chemi site has a radiocarbon date of 8900
|
||
<EFBFBD> 300 B.C.
|
||
|
||
Karim Shahir has evidence of only one very shallow level of occupation.
|
||
It was probably not lived on very long, although the people who lived
|
||
on it spread out over about three acres of area. In spots, the single
|
||
layer yielded great numbers of fist-sized cracked pieces of limestone,
|
||
which had been carried up from the bed of a stream at the bottom of the
|
||
bluff. We think these cracked stones had something to do with a kind of
|
||
architecture, but we were unable to find positive traces of hut plans.
|
||
At M<>lefaat and Zawi Chemi, there were traces of rounded hut plans.
|
||
|
||
As in the Natufian, the great bulk of small objects of the Karim Shahir
|
||
assemblage was in chipped flint. A large proportion of the flint tools
|
||
were microlithic bladelets and geometric forms. The flint sickle blade
|
||
was almost non-existent, being far scarcer than in the Natufian. The
|
||
people of Karim Shahir did a modest amount of work in the grinding of
|
||
stone; there were milling stone fragments of both the mortar and the
|
||
quern type, and stone hoes or axes with polished bits. Beads, pendants,
|
||
rings, and bracelets were made of finer quality stone. We found a few
|
||
simple points and needles of bone, and even two rather formless unbaked
|
||
clay figurines which seemed to be of animal form.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SKETCH OF KARIM SHAHIR ASSEMBLAGE
|
||
|
||
CHIPPED STONE
|
||
GROUND STONE
|
||
UNBAKED CLAY
|
||
SHELL
|
||
BONE
|
||
<20>ARCHITECTURE<52>]
|
||
|
||
Karim Shahir did not yield direct evidence of the kind of vegetable
|
||
food its people ate. The animal bones showed a considerable
|
||
increase in the proportion of the bones of the species capable of
|
||
domestication--sheep, goat, cattle, horse, dog--as compared with animal
|
||
bones from the earlier cave sites of the area, which have a high
|
||
proportion of bones of wild forms like deer and gazelle. But we do not
|
||
know that any of the Karim Shahir animals were actually domesticated.
|
||
Some of them may have been, in an <20>incipient<6E> way, but we have no means
|
||
at the moment that will tell us from the bones alone.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WERE THE NATUFIAN AND KARIM SHAHIR PEOPLES FOOD-PRODUCERS?
|
||
|
||
It is clear that a great part of the food of the Natufian people
|
||
must have been hunted or collected. Shells of land, fresh-water, and
|
||
sea animals occur in their cave layers. The same is true as regards
|
||
Karim Shahir, save for sea shells. But on the other hand, we have
|
||
the sickles, the milling stones, the possible Natufian dog, and the
|
||
goat, and the general animal situation at Karim Shahir to hint at an
|
||
incipient approach to food-production. At Karim Shahir, there was the
|
||
tendency to settle down out in the open; this is echoed by the new
|
||
reports of open air Natufian sites. The large number of cracked stones
|
||
certainly indicates that it was worth the peoples<65> while to have some
|
||
kind of structure, even if the site as a whole was short-lived.
|
||
|
||
It is a part of my hunch that these things all point toward
|
||
food-production--that the hints we seek are there. But in the sense
|
||
that the peoples of the era of the primary village-farming community,
|
||
which we shall look at next, are fully food-producing, the Natufian
|
||
and Karim Shahir folk had not yet arrived. I think they were part of
|
||
a general build-up to full scale food-production. They were possibly
|
||
controlling a few animals of several kinds and perhaps one or two
|
||
plants, without realizing the full possibilities of this <20>control<6F> as a
|
||
new way of life.
|
||
|
||
This is why I think of the Karim Shahir and Natufian folk as being at
|
||
a level, or in an era, of incipient cultivation and domestication. But
|
||
we shall have to do a great deal more excavation in this range of time
|
||
before we<77>ll get the kind of positive information we need.
|
||
|
||
|
||
SUMMARY
|
||
|
||
I am sorry that this chapter has had to be so much more about ideas
|
||
than about the archeological traces of prehistoric men themselves.
|
||
But the antiquities of the incipient era of cultivation and animal
|
||
domestication will not be spectacular, even when we do have them
|
||
excavated in quantity. Few museums will be interested in these
|
||
antiquities for exhibition purposes. The charred bits or impressions
|
||
of plants, the fragments of animal bone and shell, and the varied
|
||
clues to climate and environment will be as important as the artifacts
|
||
themselves. It will be the ideas to which these traces lead us that
|
||
will be important. I am sure that this unspectacular material--when we
|
||
have much more of it, and learn how to understand what it says--will
|
||
lead us to how and why answers about the first great change in human
|
||
history.
|
||
|
||
We know the earliest village-farming communities appeared in western
|
||
Asia, in a nuclear area. We do not yet know why the Near Eastern
|
||
experiment came first, or why it didn<64>t happen earlier in some other
|
||
nuclear area. Apparently, the level of culture and the promise of the
|
||
natural environment were ready first in western Asia. The next sites
|
||
we look at will show a simple but effective food-production already
|
||
in existence. Without effective food-production and the settled
|
||
village-farming communities, civilization never could have followed.
|
||
How effective food-production came into being by the end of the
|
||
incipient era, is, I believe, one of the most fascinating questions any
|
||
archeologist could face.
|
||
|
||
It now seems probable--from possibly two of the Palestinian sites with
|
||
varieties of the Natufian (Jericho and Nahal Oren)--that there were
|
||
one or more local Palestinian developments out of the Natufian into
|
||
later times. In the same way, what followed after the Karim Shahir type
|
||
of assemblage in northeastern Iraq was in some ways a reflection of
|
||
beginnings made at Karim Shahir and Zawi Chemi.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE First Revolution
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
As the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication passed
|
||
onward into the era of the primary village-farming community, the first
|
||
basic change in human economy was fully achieved. In southwestern Asia,
|
||
this seems to have taken place about nine thousand years ago. I am
|
||
going to restrict my description to this earliest Near Eastern case--I
|
||
do not know enough about the later comparable experiments in the Far
|
||
East and in the New World. Let us first, once again, think of the
|
||
contrast between food-collecting and food-producing as ways of life.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOOD-COLLECTORS AND FOOD-PRODUCERS
|
||
|
||
Childe used the word <20>revolution<6F> because of the radical change that
|
||
took place in the habits and customs of man. Food-collectors--that is,
|
||
hunters, fishers, berry- and nut-gatherers--had to live in small groups
|
||
or bands, for they had to be ready to move wherever their food supply
|
||
moved. Not many people can be fed in this way in one area, and small
|
||
children and old folks are a burden. There is not enough food to store,
|
||
and it is not the kind that can be stored for long.
|
||
|
||
Do you see how this all fits into a picture? Small groups of people
|
||
living now in this cave, now in that--or out in the open--as they moved
|
||
after the animals they hunted; no permanent villages, a few half-buried
|
||
huts at best; no breakable utensils; no pottery; no signs of anything
|
||
for clothing beyond the tools that were probably used to dress the
|
||
skins of animals; no time to think of much of anything but food and
|
||
protection and disposal of the dead when death did come: an existence
|
||
which takes nature as it finds it, which does little or nothing to
|
||
modify nature--all in all, a savage<67>s existence, and a very tough one.
|
||
A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to
|
||
eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just
|
||
like an animal himself.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE FOOD-PRODUCING ECONOMY
|
||
|
||
Against this picture let me try to draw another--that of man<61>s life
|
||
after food-production had begun. His meat was stored <20>on the hoof,<2C>
|
||
his grain in silos or great pottery jars. He lived in a house: it was
|
||
worth his while to build one, because he couldn<64>t move far from his
|
||
fields and flocks. In his neighborhood enough food could be grown
|
||
and enough animals bred so that many people were kept busy. They all
|
||
lived close to their flocks and fields, in a village. The village was
|
||
already of a fair size, and it was growing, too. Everybody had more to
|
||
eat; they were presumably all stronger, and there were more children.
|
||
Children and old men could shepherd the animals by day or help with
|
||
the lighter work in the fields. After the crops had been harvested the
|
||
younger men might go hunting and some of them would fish, but the food
|
||
they brought in was only an addition to the food in the village; the
|
||
villagers wouldn<64>t starve, even if the hunters and fishermen came home
|
||
empty-handed.
|
||
|
||
There was more time to do different things, too. They began to modify
|
||
nature. They made pottery out of raw clay, and textiles out of hair
|
||
or fiber. People who became good at pottery-making traded their pots
|
||
for food and spent all of their time on pottery alone. Other people
|
||
were learning to weave cloth or to make new tools. There were already
|
||
people in the village who were becoming full-time craftsmen.
|
||
|
||
Other things were changing, too. The villagers must have had
|
||
to agree on new rules for living together. The head man of the
|
||
village had problems different from those of the chief of the small
|
||
food-collectors<72> band. If somebody<64>s flock of sheep spoiled a wheat
|
||
field, the owner wanted payment for the grain he lost. The chief of
|
||
the hunters was never bothered with such questions. Even the gods
|
||
had changed. The spirits and the magic that had been used by hunters
|
||
weren<EFBFBD>t of any use to the villagers. They needed gods who would watch
|
||
over the fields and the flocks, and they eventually began to erect
|
||
buildings where their gods might dwell, and where the men who knew most
|
||
about the gods might live.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WAS FOOD-PRODUCTION A <20>REVOLUTION<4F>?
|
||
|
||
If you can see the difference between these two pictures--between
|
||
life in the food-collecting stage and life after food-production
|
||
had begun--you<6F>ll see why Professor Childe speaks of a revolution.
|
||
By revolution, he doesn<73>t mean that it happened over night or that
|
||
it happened only once. We don<6F>t know exactly how long it took. Some
|
||
people think that all these changes may have occurred in less than
|
||
500 years, but I doubt that. The incipient era was probably an affair
|
||
of some duration. Once the level of the village-farming community had
|
||
been established, however, things did begin to move very fast. By
|
||
six thousand years ago, the descendants of the first villagers had
|
||
developed irrigation and plow agriculture in the relatively rainless
|
||
Mesopotamian alluvium and were living in towns with temples. Relative
|
||
to the half million years of food-gathering which lay behind, this had
|
||
been achieved with truly revolutionary suddenness.
|
||
|
||
|
||
GAPS IN OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE NEAR EAST
|
||
|
||
If you<6F>ll look again at the chart (p. 111) you<6F>ll see that I have
|
||
very few sites and assemblages to name in the incipient era of
|
||
cultivation and domestication, and not many in the earlier part of
|
||
the primary village-farming level either. Thanks in no small part
|
||
to the intelligent co-operation given foreign excavators by the
|
||
Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities, our understanding of the
|
||
sequence in Iraq is growing more complete. I shall use Iraq as my main
|
||
yard-stick here. But I am far from being able to show you a series of
|
||
Sears Roebuck catalogues, even century by century, for any part of
|
||
the nuclear area. There is still a great deal of earth to move, and a
|
||
great mass of material to recover and interpret before we even begin to
|
||
understand <20>how<6F> and <20>why.<2E>
|
||
|
||
Perhaps here, because this kind of archeology is really my specialty,
|
||
you<EFBFBD>ll excuse it if I become personal for a moment. I very much look
|
||
forward to having further part in closing some of the gaps in knowledge
|
||
of the Near East. This is not, as I<>ve told you, the spectacular
|
||
range of Near Eastern archeology. There are no royal tombs, no gold,
|
||
no great buildings or sculpture, no writing, in fact nothing to
|
||
excite the normal museum at all. Nevertheless it is a range which,
|
||
idea-wise, gives the archeologist tremendous satisfaction. The country
|
||
of the hilly flanks is an exciting combination of green grasslands
|
||
and mountainous ridges. The Kurds, who inhabit the part of the area
|
||
in which I<>ve worked most recently, are an extremely interesting and
|
||
hospitable people. Archeologists don<6F>t become rich, but I<>ll forego
|
||
the Cadillac for any bright spring morning in the Kurdish hills, on a
|
||
good site with a happy crew of workmen and an interested and efficient
|
||
staff. It is probably impossible to convey the full feeling which life
|
||
on such a dig holds--halcyon days for the body and acute pleasurable
|
||
stimulation for the mind. Old things coming newly out of the good dirt,
|
||
and the pieces of the human puzzle fitting into place! I think I am
|
||
an honest man; I cannot tell you that I am sorry the job is not yet
|
||
finished and that there are still gaps in this part of the Near Eastern
|
||
archeological sequence.
|
||
|
||
|
||
EARLIEST SITES OF THE VILLAGE FARMERS
|
||
|
||
So far, the Karim Shahir type of assemblage, which we looked at in the
|
||
last chapter, is the earliest material available in what I take to
|
||
be the nuclear area. We do not believe that Karim Shahir was a village
|
||
site proper: it looks more like the traces of a temporary encampment.
|
||
Two caves, called Belt and Hotu, which are outside the nuclear area
|
||
and down on the foreshore of the Caspian Sea, have been excavated
|
||
by Professor Coon. These probably belong in the later extension of
|
||
the terminal era of food-gathering; in their upper layers are traits
|
||
like the use of pottery borrowed from the more developed era of the
|
||
same time in the nuclear area. The same general explanation doubtless
|
||
holds true for certain materials in Egypt, along the upper Nile and in
|
||
the Kharga oasis: these materials, called Sebilian III, the Khartoum
|
||
<EFBFBD>neolithic,<2C> and the Khargan microlithic, are from surface sites,
|
||
not from caves. The chart (p. 111) shows where I would place these
|
||
materials in era and time.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: THE HILLY FLANKS OF THE CRESCENT AND EARLY SITES OF THE
|
||
NEAR EAST]
|
||
|
||
Both M<>lefaat and Dr. Solecki<6B>s Zawi Chemi Shanidar site appear to have
|
||
been slightly more <20>settled in<69> than was Karim Shahir itself. But I do
|
||
not think they belong to the era of farming-villages proper. The first
|
||
site of this era, in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan, is Jarmo, on which
|
||
we have spent three seasons of work. Following Jarmo comes a variety of
|
||
sites and assemblages which lie along the hilly flanks of the crescent
|
||
and just below it. I am going to describe and illustrate some of these
|
||
for you.
|
||
|
||
Since not very much archeological excavation has yet been done on sites
|
||
of this range of time, I shall have to mention the names of certain
|
||
single sites which now alone stand for an assemblage. This does not
|
||
mean that I think the individual sites I mention were unique. In the
|
||
times when their various cultures flourished, there must have been
|
||
many little villages which shared the same general assemblage. We are
|
||
only now beginning to locate them again. Thus, if I speak of Jarmo,
|
||
or Jericho, or Sialk as single examples of their particular kinds of
|
||
assemblages, I don<6F>t mean that they were unique at all. I think I could
|
||
take you to the sites of at least three more Jarmos, within twenty
|
||
miles of the original one. They are there, but they simply haven<65>t yet
|
||
been excavated. In 1956, a Danish expedition discovered material of
|
||
Jarmo type at Shimshara, only two dozen miles northeast of Jarmo, and
|
||
below an assemblage of Hassunan type (which I shall describe presently).
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE GAP BETWEEN KARIM SHAHIR AND JARMO
|
||
|
||
As we see the matter now, there is probably still a gap in the
|
||
available archeological record between the Karim Shahir-M<>lefaat-Zawi
|
||
Chemi group (of the incipient era) and that of Jarmo (of the
|
||
village-farming era). Although some items of the Jarmo type materials
|
||
do reflect the beginnings of traditions set in the Karim Shahir group
|
||
(see p. 120), there is not a clear continuity. Moreover--to the
|
||
degree that we may trust a few radiocarbon dates--there would appear
|
||
to be around two thousand years of difference in time. The single
|
||
available Zawi Chemi <20>date<74> is 8900 <20> 300 B.C.; the most reasonable
|
||
group of <20>dates<65> from Jarmo average to about 6750 <20> 200 B.C. I am
|
||
uncertain about this two thousand years--I do not think it can have
|
||
been so long.
|
||
|
||
This suggests that we still have much work to do in Iraq. You can
|
||
imagine how earnestly we await the return of political stability in the
|
||
Republic of Iraq.
|
||
|
||
|
||
JARMO, IN THE KURDISH HILLS, IRAQ
|
||
|
||
The site of Jarmo has a depth of deposit of about twenty-seven feet,
|
||
and approximately a dozen layers of architectural renovation and
|
||
change. Nevertheless it is a <20>one period<6F> site: its assemblage remains
|
||
essentially the same throughout, although one or two new items are
|
||
added in later levels. It covers about four acres of the top of a
|
||
bluff, below which runs a small stream. Jarmo lies in the hill country
|
||
east of the modern oil town of Kirkuk. The Iraq Directorate General of
|
||
Antiquities suggested that we look at it in 1948, and we have had three
|
||
seasons of digging on it since.
|
||
|
||
The people of Jarmo grew the barley plant and two different kinds of
|
||
wheat. They made flint sickles with which to reap their grain, mortars
|
||
or querns on which to crack it, ovens in which it might be parched, and
|
||
stone bowls out of which they might eat their porridge. We are sure
|
||
that they had the domesticated goat, but Professor Reed (the staff
|
||
zoologist) is not convinced that the bones of the other potentially
|
||
domesticable animals of Jarmo--sheep, cattle, pig, horse, dog--show
|
||
sure signs of domestication. We had first thought that all of these
|
||
animals were domesticated ones, but Reed feels he must find out much
|
||
more before he can be sure. As well as their grain and the meat from
|
||
their animals, the people of Jarmo consumed great quantities of land
|
||
snails. Botanically, the Jarmo wheat stands about half way between
|
||
fully bred wheat and the wild forms.
|
||
|
||
|
||
ARCHITECTURE: HALL-MARK OF THE VILLAGE
|
||
|
||
The sure sign of the village proper is in its traces of architectural
|
||
permanence. The houses of Jarmo were only the size of a small cottage
|
||
by our standards, but each was provided with several rectangular rooms.
|
||
The walls of the houses were made of puddled mud, often set on crude
|
||
foundations of stone. (The puddled mud wall, which the Arabs call
|
||
_touf_, is built by laying a three to six inch course of soft mud,
|
||
letting this sun-dry for a day or two, then adding the next course,
|
||
etc.) The village probably looked much like the simple Kurdish farming
|
||
village of today, with its mud-walled houses and low mud-on-brush
|
||
roofs. I doubt that the Jarmo village had more than twenty houses at
|
||
any one moment of its existence. Today, an average of about seven
|
||
people live in a comparable Kurdish house; probably the population of
|
||
Jarmo was about 150 people.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SKETCH OF JARMO ASSEMBLAGE
|
||
|
||
CHIPPED STONE
|
||
UNBAKED CLAY
|
||
GROUND STONE
|
||
POTTERY _UPPER THIRD OF SITE ONLY._
|
||
REED MATTING
|
||
BONE
|
||
ARCHITECTURE]
|
||
|
||
It is interesting that portable pottery does not appear until the
|
||
last third of the life of the Jarmo village. Throughout the duration
|
||
of the village, however, its people had experimented with the plastic
|
||
qualities of clay. They modeled little figurines of animals and of
|
||
human beings in clay; one type of human figurine they favored was that
|
||
of a markedly pregnant woman, probably the expression of some sort of
|
||
fertility spirit. They provided their house floors with baked-in-place
|
||
depressions, either as basins or hearths, and later with domed ovens of
|
||
clay. As we<77>ve noted, the houses themselves were of clay or mud; one
|
||
could almost say they were built up like a house-sized pot. Then,
|
||
finally, the idea of making portable pottery itself appeared, although
|
||
I very much doubt that the people of the Jarmo village discovered the
|
||
art.
|
||
|
||
On the other hand, the old tradition of making flint blades and
|
||
microlithic tools was still very strong at Jarmo. The sickle-blade was
|
||
made in quantities, but so also were many of the much older tool types.
|
||
Strangely enough, it is within this age-old category of chipped stone
|
||
tools that we see one of the clearest pointers to a newer age. Many of
|
||
the Jarmo chipped stone tools--microliths--were made of obsidian, a
|
||
black volcanic natural glass. The obsidian beds nearest to Jarmo are
|
||
over three hundred miles to the north. Already a bulk carrying trade
|
||
had been established--the forerunner of commerce--and the routes were
|
||
set by which, in later times, the metal trade was to move.
|
||
|
||
There are now twelve radioactive carbon <20>dates<65> from Jarmo. The most
|
||
reasonable cluster of determinations averages to about 6750 <20> 200
|
||
B.C., although there is a completely unreasonable range of <20>dates<65>
|
||
running from 3250 to 9250 B.C.! _If_ I am right in what I take to be
|
||
<EFBFBD>reasonable,<2C> the first flush of the food-producing revolution had been
|
||
achieved almost nine thousand years ago.
|
||
|
||
|
||
HASSUNA, IN UPPER MESOPOTAMIAN IRAQ
|
||
|
||
We are not sure just how soon after Jarmo the next assemblage of Iraqi
|
||
material is to be placed. I do not think the time was long, and there
|
||
are a few hints that detailed habits in the making of pottery and
|
||
ground stone tools were actually continued from Jarmo times into the
|
||
time of the next full assemblage. This is called after a site named
|
||
Hassuna, a few miles to the south and west of modern Mosul. We also
|
||
have Hassunan type materials from several other sites in the same
|
||
general region. It is probably too soon to make generalizations about
|
||
it, but the Hassunan sites seem to cluster at slightly lower elevations
|
||
than those we have been talking about so far.
|
||
|
||
The catalogue of the Hassuna assemblage is of course more full and
|
||
elaborate than that of Jarmo. The Iraqi government<6E>s archeologists
|
||
who dug Hassuna itself, exposed evidence of increasing architectural
|
||
know-how. The walls of houses were still formed of puddled mud;
|
||
sun-dried bricks appear only in later periods. There were now several
|
||
different ways of making and decorating pottery vessels. One style of
|
||
pottery painting, called the Samarran style, is an extremely handsome
|
||
one and must have required a great deal of concentration and excellence
|
||
of draftsmanship. On the other hand, the old habits for the preparation
|
||
of good chipped stone tools--still apparent at Jarmo--seem to have
|
||
largely disappeared by Hassunan times. The flint work of the Hassunan
|
||
catalogue is, by and large, a wretched affair. We might guess that the
|
||
kinaesthetic concentration of the Hassuna craftsmen now went into other
|
||
categories; that is, they suddenly discovered they might have more fun
|
||
working with the newer materials. It<49>s a shame, for example, that none
|
||
of their weaving is preserved for us.
|
||
|
||
The two available radiocarbon determinations from Hassunan contexts
|
||
stand at about 5100 and 5600 B.C. <20> 250 years.
|
||
|
||
|
||
OTHER EARLY VILLAGE SITES IN THE NUCLEAR AREA
|
||
|
||
I<EFBFBD>ll now name and very briefly describe a few of the other early
|
||
village assemblages either in or adjacent to the hilly flanks of the
|
||
crescent. Unfortunately, we do not have radioactive carbon dates for
|
||
many of these materials. We may guess that some particular assemblage,
|
||
roughly comparable to that of Hassuna, for example, must reflect a
|
||
culture which lived at just about the same time as that of Hassuna. We
|
||
do this guessing on the basis of the general similarity and degree of
|
||
complexity of the Sears Roebuck catalogues of the particular assemblage
|
||
and that of Hassuna. We suppose that for sites near at hand and of a
|
||
comparable cultural level, as indicated by their generally similar
|
||
assemblages, the dating must be about the same. We may also know that
|
||
in a general stratigraphic sense, the sites in question may both appear
|
||
at the bottom of the ascending village sequence in their respective
|
||
areas. Without a number of consistent radioactive carbon dates, we
|
||
cannot be precise about priorities.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SKETCH OF HASSUNA ASSEMBLAGE
|
||
|
||
POTTERY
|
||
POTTERY OBJECTS
|
||
CHIPPED STONE
|
||
BONE
|
||
GROUND STONE
|
||
ARCHITECTURE
|
||
REED MATTING
|
||
BURIAL]
|
||
|
||
The ancient mound at Jericho, in the Dead Sea valley in Palestine,
|
||
yields some very interesting material. Its catalogue somewhat resembles
|
||
that of Jarmo, especially in the sense that there is a fair depth
|
||
of deposit without portable pottery vessels. On the other hand, the
|
||
architecture of Jericho is surprisingly complex, with traces of massive
|
||
stone fortification walls and the general use of formed sun-dried
|
||
mud brick. Jericho lies in a somewhat strange and tropically lush
|
||
ecological niche, some seven hundred feet below sea level; it is
|
||
geographically within the hilly-flanks zone but environmentally not
|
||
part of it.
|
||
|
||
Several radiocarbon <20>dates<65> for Jericho fall within the range of those
|
||
I find reasonable for Jarmo, and their internal statistical consistency
|
||
is far better than that for the Jarmo determinations. It is not yet
|
||
clear exactly what this means.
|
||
|
||
The mound at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) contains a remarkably
|
||
fine sequence, which perhaps does not have the gap we noted in
|
||
Iraqi-Kurdistan between the Karim Shahir group and Jarmo. While I am
|
||
not sure that the Jericho sequence will prove valid for those parts
|
||
of Palestine outside the special Dead Sea environmental niche, the
|
||
sequence does appear to proceed from the local variety of Natufian into
|
||
that of a very well settled community. So far, we have little direct
|
||
evidence for the food-production basis upon which the Jericho people
|
||
subsisted.
|
||
|
||
There is an early village assemblage with strong characteristics of its
|
||
own in the land bordering the northeast corner of the Mediterranean
|
||
Sea, where Syria and the Cilician province of Turkey join. This early
|
||
Syro-Cilician assemblage must represent a general cultural pattern
|
||
which was at least in part contemporary with that of the Hassuna
|
||
assemblage. These materials from the bases of the mounds at Mersin, and
|
||
from Judaidah in the Amouq plain, as well as from a few other sites,
|
||
represent the remains of true villages. The walls of their houses were
|
||
built of puddled mud, but some of the house foundations were of stone.
|
||
Several different kinds of pottery were made by the people of these
|
||
villages. None of it resembles the pottery from Hassuna or from the
|
||
upper levels of Jarmo or Jericho. The Syro-Cilician people had not
|
||
lost their touch at working flint. An important southern variation of
|
||
the Syro-Cilician assemblage has been cleared recently at Byblos, a
|
||
port town famous in later Phoenician times. There are three radiocarbon
|
||
determinations which suggest that the time range for these developments
|
||
was in the sixth or early fifth millennium B.C.
|
||
|
||
It would be fascinating to search for traces of even earlier
|
||
village-farming communities and for the remains of the incipient
|
||
cultivation era, in the Syro-Cilician region.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE IRANIAN PLATEAU AND THE NILE VALLEY
|
||
|
||
The map on page 125 shows some sites which lie either outside or in
|
||
an extension of the hilly-flanks zone proper. From the base of the
|
||
great mound at Sialk on the Iranian plateau came an assemblage of
|
||
early village material, generally similar, in the kinds of things it
|
||
contained, to the catalogues of Hassuna and Judaidah. The details of
|
||
how things were made are different; the Sialk assemblage represents
|
||
still another cultural pattern. I suspect it appeared a bit later
|
||
in time than did that of Hassuna. There is an important new item in
|
||
the Sialk catalogue. The Sialk people made small drills or pins of
|
||
hammered copper. Thus the metallurgist<73>s specialized craft had made its
|
||
appearance.
|
||
|
||
There is at least one very early Iranian site on the inward slopes
|
||
of the hilly-flanks zone. It is the earlier of two mounds at a place
|
||
called Bakun, in southwestern Iran; the results of the excavations
|
||
there are not yet published and we only know of its coarse and
|
||
primitive pottery. I only mention Bakun because it helps us to plot the
|
||
extent of the hilly-flanks zone villages on the map.
|
||
|
||
The Nile Valley lies beyond the peculiar environmental zone of the
|
||
hilly flanks of the crescent, and it is probable that the earliest
|
||
village-farming communities in Egypt were established by a few people
|
||
who wandered into the Nile delta area from the nuclear area. The
|
||
assemblage which is most closely comparable to the catalogue of Hassuna
|
||
or Judaidah, for example, is that from little settlements along the
|
||
shore of the Fayum lake. The Fayum materials come mainly from grain
|
||
bins or silos. Another site, Merimde, in the western part of the Nile
|
||
delta, shows the remains of a true village, but it may be slightly
|
||
later than the settlement of the Fayum. There are radioactive carbon
|
||
<EFBFBD>dates<EFBFBD> for the Fayum materials at about 4275 B.C. <20> 320 years, which
|
||
is almost fifteen hundred years later than the determinations suggested
|
||
for the Hassunan or Syro-Cilician assemblages. I suspect that this
|
||
is a somewhat over-extended indication of the time it took for the
|
||
generalized cultural pattern of village-farming community life to
|
||
spread from the nuclear area down into Egypt, but as yet we have no way
|
||
of testing these matters.
|
||
|
||
In this same vein, we have two radioactive carbon dates for an
|
||
assemblage from sites near Khartoum in the Sudan, best represented by
|
||
the mound called Shaheinab. The Shaheinab catalogue roughly corresponds
|
||
to that of the Fayum; the distance between the two places, as the Nile
|
||
flows, is roughly 1,500 miles. Thus it took almost a thousand years for
|
||
the new way of life to be carried as far south into Africa as Khartoum;
|
||
the two Shaheinab <20>dates<65> average about 3300 B.C. <20> 400 years.
|
||
|
||
If the movement was up the Nile (southward), as these dates suggest,
|
||
then I suspect that the earliest available village material of middle
|
||
Egypt, the so-called Tasian, is also later than that of the Fayum. The
|
||
Tasian materials come from a few graves near a village called Deir
|
||
Tasa, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that the Tasian <20>assemblage<67>
|
||
may be mainly an artificial selection of poor examples of objects which
|
||
belong in the following range of time.
|
||
|
||
|
||
SPREAD IN TIME AND SPACE
|
||
|
||
There are now two things we can do; in fact, we have already begun to
|
||
do them. We can watch the spread of the new way of life upward through
|
||
time in the nuclear area. We can also see how the new way of life
|
||
spread outward in space from the nuclear area, as time went on. There
|
||
is good archeological evidence that both these processes took place.
|
||
For the hill country of northeastern Iraq, in the nuclear area, we
|
||
have already noticed how the succession (still with gaps) from Karim
|
||
Shahir, through M<>lefaat and Jarmo, to Hassuna can be charted (see
|
||
chart, p. 111). In the next chapter, we shall continue this charting
|
||
and description of what happened in Iraq upward through time. We also
|
||
watched traces of the new way of life move through space up the Nile
|
||
into Africa, to reach Khartoum in the Sudan some thirty-five hundred
|
||
years later than we had seen it at Jarmo or Jericho. We caught glimpses
|
||
of it in the Fayum and perhaps at Tasa along the way.
|
||
|
||
For the remainder of this chapter, I shall try to suggest briefly for
|
||
you the directions taken by the spread of the new way of life from the
|
||
nuclear area in the Near East. First, let me make clear again that
|
||
I _do not_ believe that the village-farming community way of life
|
||
was invented only once and in the Near East. It seems to me that the
|
||
evidence is very clear that a separate experiment arose in the New
|
||
World. For China, the question of independence or borrowing--in the
|
||
appearance of the village-farming community there--is still an open
|
||
one. In the last chapter, we noted the probability of an independent
|
||
nuclear area in southeastern Asia. Professor Carl Sauer strongly
|
||
champions the great importance of this area as _the_ original center
|
||
of agricultural pursuits, as a kind of <20>cradle<6C> of all incipient eras
|
||
of the Old World at least. While there is certainly not the slightest
|
||
archeological evidence to allow us to go that far, we may easily expect
|
||
that an early southeast Asian development would have been felt in
|
||
China. However, the appearance of the village-farming community in the
|
||
northwest of India, at least, seems to have depended on the earlier
|
||
development in the Near East. It is also probable that ideas of the new
|
||
way of life moved well beyond Khartoum in Africa.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE SPREAD OF THE VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE INTO EUROPE
|
||
|
||
How about Europe? I won<6F>t give you many details. You can easily imagine
|
||
that the late prehistoric prelude to European history is a complicated
|
||
affair. We all know very well how complicated an area Europe is now,
|
||
with its welter of different languages and cultures. Remember, however,
|
||
that a great deal of archeology has been done on the late prehistory of
|
||
Europe, and very little on that of further Asia and Africa. If we knew
|
||
as much about these areas as we do of Europe, I expect we<77>d find them
|
||
just as complicated.
|
||
|
||
This much is clear for Europe, as far as the spread of the
|
||
village-community way of life is concerned. The general idea and much
|
||
of the know-how and the basic tools of food-production moved from the
|
||
Near East to Europe. So did the plants and animals which had been
|
||
domesticated; they were not naturally at home in Europe, as they were
|
||
in western Asia. I do not, of course, mean that there were traveling
|
||
salesmen who carried these ideas and things to Europe with a commercial
|
||
gleam in their eyes. The process took time, and the ideas and things
|
||
must have been passed on from one group of people to the next. There
|
||
was also some actual movement of peoples, but we don<6F>t know the size of
|
||
the groups that moved.
|
||
|
||
The story of the <20>colonization<6F> of Europe by the first farmers is
|
||
thus one of (1) the movement from the eastern Mediterranean lands
|
||
of some people who were farmers; (2) the spread of ideas and things
|
||
beyond the Near East itself and beyond the paths along which the
|
||
<EFBFBD>colonists<EFBFBD> moved; and (3) the adaptations of the ideas and things
|
||
by the indigenous <20>Forest folk<6C>, about whose <20>receptiveness<73> Professor
|
||
Mathiassen speaks (p. 97). It is important to note that the resulting
|
||
cultures in the new European environment were European, not Near
|
||
Eastern. The late Professor Childe remarked that <20>the peoples of the
|
||
West were not slavish imitators; they adapted the gifts from the East
|
||
... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own
|
||
original lines.<2E>
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE WAYS TO EUROPE
|
||
|
||
Suppose we want to follow the traces of those earliest village-farmers
|
||
who did travel from western Asia into Europe. Let us start from
|
||
Syro-Cilicia, that part of the hilly-flanks zone proper which lies in
|
||
the very northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. Three ways would be
|
||
open to us (of course we could not be worried about permission from the
|
||
Soviet authorities!). We would go north, or north and slightly east,
|
||
across Anatolian Turkey, and skirt along either shore of the Black Sea
|
||
or even to the east of the Caucasus Mountains along the Caspian Sea,
|
||
to reach the plains of Ukrainian Russia. From here, we could march
|
||
across eastern Europe to the Baltic and Scandinavia, or even hook back
|
||
southwestward to Atlantic Europe.
|
||
|
||
Our second way from Syro-Cilicia would also lie over Anatolia, to the
|
||
northwest, where we would have to swim or raft ourselves over the
|
||
Dardanelles or the Bosphorus to the European shore. Then we would bear
|
||
left toward Greece, but some of us might turn right again in Macedonia,
|
||
going up the valley of the Vardar River to its divide and on down
|
||
the valley of the Morava beyond, to reach the Danube near Belgrade
|
||
in Jugoslavia. Here we would turn left, following the great river
|
||
valley of the Danube up into central Europe. We would have a number of
|
||
tributary valleys to explore, or we could cross the divide and go down
|
||
the valley of the Rhine to the North Sea.
|
||
|
||
Our third way from Syro-Cilicia would be by sea. We would coast along
|
||
southern Anatolia and visit Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean islands on
|
||
our way to Greece, where, in the north, we might meet some of those who
|
||
had taken the second route. From Greece, we would sail on to Italy and
|
||
the western isles, to reach southern France and the coasts of Spain.
|
||
Eventually a few of us would sail up the Atlantic coast of Europe, to
|
||
reach western Britain and even Ireland.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: PROBABLE ROUTES AND TIMING IN THE SPREAD OF THE
|
||
VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE FROM THE NEAR EAST TO EUROPE]
|
||
|
||
Of course none of us could ever take these journeys as the first
|
||
farmers took them, since the whole course of each journey must have
|
||
lasted many lifetimes. The date given to the assemblage called Windmill
|
||
Hill, the earliest known trace of village-farming communities in
|
||
England, is about 2500 B.C. I would expect about 5500 B.C. to be a
|
||
safe date to give for the well-developed early village communities of
|
||
Syro-Cilicia. We suspect that the spread throughout Europe did not
|
||
proceed at an even rate. Professor Piggott writes that <20>at a date
|
||
probably about 2600 B.C., simple agricultural communities were being
|
||
established in Spain and southern France, and from the latter region a
|
||
spread northwards can be traced ... from points on the French seaboard
|
||
of the [English] Channel ... there were emigrations of a certain number
|
||
of these tribes by boat, across to the chalk lands of Wessex and Sussex
|
||
[in England], probably not more than three or four generations later
|
||
than the formation of the south French colonies.<2E>
|
||
|
||
New radiocarbon determinations are becoming available all the
|
||
time--already several suggest that the food-producing way of life
|
||
had reached the lower Rhine and Holland by 4000 B.C. But not all
|
||
prehistorians accept these <20>dates,<2C> so I do not show them on my map
|
||
(p. 139).
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE EARLIEST FARMERS OF ENGLAND
|
||
|
||
To describe the later prehistory of all Europe for you would take
|
||
another book and a much larger one than this is. Therefore, I have
|
||
decided to give you only a few impressions of the later prehistory of
|
||
Britain. Of course the British Isles lie at the other end of Europe
|
||
from our base-line in western Asia. Also, they received influences
|
||
along at least two of the three ways in which the new way of life
|
||
moved into Europe. We will look at more of their late prehistory in a
|
||
following chapter: here, I shall speak only of the first farmers.
|
||
|
||
The assemblage called Windmill Hill, which appears in the south of
|
||
England, exhibits three different kinds of structures, evidence of
|
||
grain-growing and of stock-breeding, and some distinctive types of
|
||
pottery and stone implements. The most remarkable type of structure
|
||
is the earthwork enclosures which seem to have served as seasonal
|
||
cattle corrals. These enclosures were roughly circular, reached over
|
||
a thousand feet in diameter, and sometimes included two or three
|
||
concentric sets of banks and ditches. Traces of oblong timber houses
|
||
have been found, but not within the enclosures. The second type of
|
||
structure is mine-shafts, dug down into the chalk beds where good
|
||
flint for the making of axes or hoes could be found. The third type
|
||
of structure is long simple mounds or <20>unchambered barrows,<2C> in one
|
||
end of which burials were made. It has been commonly believed that the
|
||
Windmill Hill assemblage belonged entirely to the cultural tradition
|
||
which moved up through France to the Channel. Professor Piggott is now
|
||
convinced, however, that important elements of Windmill Hill stem from
|
||
northern Germany and Denmark--products of the first way into Europe
|
||
from the east.
|
||
|
||
The archeological traces of a second early culture are to be found
|
||
in the west of England, western and northern Scotland, and most of
|
||
Ireland. The bearers of this culture had come up the Atlantic coast
|
||
by sea from southern France and Spain. The evidence they have left us
|
||
consists mainly of tombs and the contents of tombs, with only very
|
||
rare settlement sites. The tombs were of some size and received the
|
||
bodies of many people. The tombs themselves were built of stone, heaped
|
||
over with earth; the stones enclosed a passage to a central chamber
|
||
(<28>passage graves<65>), or to a simple long gallery, along the sides of
|
||
which the bodies were laid (<28>gallery graves<65>). The general type of
|
||
construction is called <20>megalithic<69> (= great stone), and the whole
|
||
earth-mounded structure is often called a _barrow_. Since many have
|
||
proper chambers, in one sense or another, we used the term <20>unchambered
|
||
barrow<EFBFBD> above to distinguish those of the Windmill Hill type from these
|
||
megalithic structures. There is some evidence for sacrifice, libations,
|
||
and ceremonial fires, and it is clear that some form of community
|
||
ritual was focused on the megalithic tombs.
|
||
|
||
The cultures of the people who produced the Windmill Hill assemblage
|
||
and of those who made the megalithic tombs flourished, at least in
|
||
part, at the same time. Although the distributions of the two different
|
||
types of archeological traces are in quite different parts of the
|
||
country, there is Windmill Hill pottery in some of the megalithic
|
||
tombs. But the tombs also contain pottery which seems to have arrived
|
||
with the tomb builders themselves.
|
||
|
||
The third early British group of antiquities of this general time
|
||
(following 2500 B.C.) comes from sites in southern and eastern England.
|
||
It is not so certain that the people who made this assemblage, called
|
||
Peterborough, were actually farmers. While they may on occasion have
|
||
practiced a simple agriculture, many items of their assemblage link
|
||
them closely with that of the <20>Forest folk<6C> of earlier times in
|
||
England and in the Baltic countries. Their pottery is decorated with
|
||
impressions of cords and is quite different from that of Windmill Hill
|
||
and the megalithic builders. In addition, the distribution of their
|
||
finds extends into eastern Britain, where the other cultures have left
|
||
no trace. The Peterborough people had villages with semi-subterranean
|
||
huts, and the bones of oxen, pigs, and sheep have been found in a few
|
||
of these. On the whole, however, hunting and fishing seem to have been
|
||
their vital occupations. They also established trade routes especially
|
||
to acquire the raw material for stone axes.
|
||
|
||
A probably slightly later culture, whose traces are best known from
|
||
Skara Brae on Orkney, also had its roots in those cultures of the
|
||
Baltic area which fused out of the meeting of the <20>Forest folk<6C> and
|
||
the peoples who took the eastern way into Europe. Skara Brae is very
|
||
well preserved, having been built of thin stone slabs about which
|
||
dune-sand drifted after the village died. The individual houses, the
|
||
bedsteads, the shelves, the chests for clothes and oddments--all built
|
||
of thin stone-slabs--may still be seen in place. But the Skara Brae
|
||
people lived entirely by sheep- and cattle-breeding, and by catching
|
||
shellfish. Neither grain nor the instruments of agriculture appeared at
|
||
Skara Brae.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE EUROPEAN ACHIEVEMENT
|
||
|
||
The above is only a very brief description of what went on in Britain
|
||
with the arrival of the first farmers. There are many interesting
|
||
details which I have omitted in order to shorten the story.
|
||
|
||
I believe some of the difficulty we have in understanding the
|
||
establishment of the first farming communities in Europe is with
|
||
the word <20>colonization.<2E> We have a natural tendency to think of
|
||
<EFBFBD>colonization<EFBFBD> as it has happened within the last few centuries. In the
|
||
case of the colonization of the Americas, for example, the colonists
|
||
came relatively quickly, and in increasingly vast numbers. They had
|
||
vastly superior technical, political, and war-making skills, compared
|
||
with those of the Indians. There was not much mixing with the Indians.
|
||
The case in Europe five or six thousand years ago must have been very
|
||
different. I wonder if it is even proper to call people <20>colonists<74>
|
||
who move some miles to a new region, settle down and farm it for some
|
||
years, then move on again, generation after generation? The ideas and
|
||
the things which these new people carried were only _potentially_
|
||
superior. The ideas and things and the people had to prove themselves
|
||
in their adaptation to each new environment. Once this was done another
|
||
link to the chain would be added, and then the forest-dwellers and
|
||
other indigenous folk of Europe along the way might accept the new
|
||
ideas and things. It is quite reasonable to expect that there must have
|
||
been much mixture of the migrants and the indigenes along the way; the
|
||
Peterborough and Skara Brae assemblages we mentioned above would seem
|
||
to be clear traces of such fused cultures. Sometimes, especially if the
|
||
migrants were moving by boat, long distances may have been covered in
|
||
a short time. Remember, however, we seem to have about three thousand
|
||
years between the early Syro-Cilician villages and Windmill Hill.
|
||
|
||
Let me repeat Professor Childe again. <20>The peoples of the West were
|
||
not slavish imitators: they adapted the gifts from the East ... into
|
||
a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original
|
||
lines.<2E> Childe is of course completely conscious of the fact that his
|
||
<EFBFBD>peoples of the West<73> were in part the descendants of migrants who came
|
||
originally from the <20>East,<2C> bringing their <20>gifts<74> with them. This
|
||
was the late prehistoric achievement of Europe--to take new ideas and
|
||
things and some migrant peoples and, by mixing them with the old in its
|
||
own environments, to forge a new and unique series of cultures.
|
||
|
||
What we know of the ways of men suggests to us that when the details
|
||
of the later prehistory of further Asia and Africa are learned, their
|
||
stories will be just as exciting.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE Conquest of Civilization
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
Now we must return to the Near East again. We are coming to the point
|
||
where history is about to begin. I am going to stick pretty close
|
||
to Iraq and Egypt in this chapter. These countries will perhaps be
|
||
the most interesting to most of us, for the foundations of western
|
||
civilization were laid in the river lands of the Tigris and Euphrates
|
||
and of the Nile. I shall probably stick closest of all to Iraq, because
|
||
things first happened there and also because I know it best.
|
||
|
||
There is another interesting thing, too. We have seen that the first
|
||
experiment in village-farming took place in the Near East. So did
|
||
the first experiment in civilization. Both experiments <20>took.<2E> The
|
||
traditions we live by today are based, ultimately, on those ancient
|
||
beginnings in food-production and civilization in the Near East.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHAT <20>CIVILIZATION<4F> MEANS
|
||
|
||
I shall not try to define <20>civilization<6F> for you; rather, I shall
|
||
tell you what the word brings to my mind. To me civilization means
|
||
urbanization: the fact that there are cities. It means a formal
|
||
political set-up--that there are kings or governing bodies that the
|
||
people have set up. It means formal laws--rules of conduct--which the
|
||
government (if not the people) believes are necessary. It probably
|
||
means that there are formalized projects--roads, harbors, irrigation
|
||
canals, and the like--and also some sort of army or police force
|
||
to protect them. It means quite new and different art forms. It
|
||
also usually means there is writing. (The people of the Andes--the
|
||
Incas--had everything which goes to make up a civilization but formal
|
||
writing. I can see no reason to say they were not civilized.) Finally,
|
||
as the late Professor Redfield reminded us, civilization seems to bring
|
||
with it the dawn of a new kind of moral order.
|
||
|
||
In different civilizations, there may be important differences in the
|
||
way such things as the above are managed. In early civilizations, it is
|
||
usual to find religion very closely tied in with government, law, and
|
||
so forth. The king may also be a high priest, or he may even be thought
|
||
of as a god. The laws are usually thought to have been given to the
|
||
people by the gods. The temples are protected just as carefully as the
|
||
other projects.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CIVILIZATION IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT FOOD-PRODUCTION
|
||
|
||
Civilizations have to be made up of many people. Some of the people
|
||
live in the country; some live in very large towns or cities. Classes
|
||
of society have begun. There are officials and government people; there
|
||
are priests or religious officials; there are merchants and traders;
|
||
there are craftsmen, metal-workers, potters, builders, and so on; there
|
||
are also farmers, and these are the people who produce the food for the
|
||
whole population. It must be obvious that civilization cannot exist
|
||
without food-production and that food-production must also be at a
|
||
pretty efficient level of village-farming before civilization can even
|
||
begin.
|
||
|
||
But people can be food-producing without being civilized. In many
|
||
parts of the world this is still the case. When the white men first
|
||
came to America, the Indians in most parts of this hemisphere were
|
||
food-producers. They grew corn, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and many
|
||
other things the white men had never eaten before. But only the Aztecs
|
||
of Mexico, the Mayas of Yucatan and Guatemala, and the Incas of the
|
||
Andes were civilized.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHY DIDN<44>T CIVILIZATION COME TO ALL FOOD-PRODUCERS?
|
||
|
||
Once you have food-production, even at the well-advanced level of
|
||
the village-farming community, what else has to happen before you
|
||
get civilization? Many men have asked this question and have failed
|
||
to give a full and satisfactory answer. There is probably no _one_
|
||
answer. I shall give you my own idea about how civilization _may_ have
|
||
come about in the Near East alone. Remember, it is only a guess--a
|
||
putting together of hunches from incomplete evidence. It is _not_ meant
|
||
to explain how civilization began in any of the other areas--China,
|
||
southeast Asia, the Americas--where other early experiments in
|
||
civilization went on. The details in those areas are quite different.
|
||
Whether certain general principles hold, for the appearance of any
|
||
early civilization, is still an open and very interesting question.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHERE CIVILIZATION FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEAR EAST
|
||
|
||
You remember that our earliest village-farming communities lay along
|
||
the hilly flanks of a great <20>crescent.<2E> (See map on p. 125.)
|
||
Professor Breasted<65>s <20>fertile crescent<6E> emphasized the rich river
|
||
valleys of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers. Our hilly-flanks
|
||
area of the crescent zone arches up from Egypt through Palestine and
|
||
Syria, along southern Turkey into northern Iraq, and down along the
|
||
southwestern fringe of Iran. The earliest food-producing villages we
|
||
know already existed in this area by about 6750 B.C. (<28> 200 years).
|
||
|
||
Now notice that this hilly-flanks zone does not include southern
|
||
Mesopotamia, the alluvial land of the lower Tigris and Euphrates in
|
||
Iraq, or the Nile Valley proper. The earliest known villages of classic
|
||
Mesopotamia and Egypt seem to appear fifteen hundred or more years
|
||
after those of the hilly-flanks zone. For example, the early Fayum
|
||
village which lies near a lake west of the Nile Valley proper (see p.
|
||
135) has a radiocarbon date of 4275 B.C. <20> 320 years. It was in the
|
||
river lands, however, that the immediate beginnings of civilization
|
||
were made.
|
||
|
||
We know that by about 3200 B.C. the Early Dynastic period had begun
|
||
in southern Mesopotamia. The beginnings of writing go back several
|
||
hundred years earlier, but we can safely say that civilization had
|
||
begun in Mesopotamia by 3200 B.C. In Egypt, the beginning of the First
|
||
Dynasty is slightly later, at about 3100 B.C., and writing probably
|
||
did not appear much earlier. There is no question but that history and
|
||
civilization were well under way in both Mesopotamia and Egypt by 3000
|
||
B.C.--about five thousand years ago.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE HILLY-FLANKS ZONE VERSUS THE RIVER LANDS
|
||
|
||
Why did these two civilizations spring up in these two river
|
||
lands which apparently were not even part of the area where the
|
||
village-farming community began? Why didn<64>t we have the first
|
||
civilizations in Palestine, Syria, north Iraq, or Iran, where we<77>re
|
||
sure food-production had had a long time to develop? I think the
|
||
probable answer gives a clue to the ways in which civilization began in
|
||
Egypt and Mesopotamia.
|
||
|
||
The land in the hilly flanks is of a sort which people can farm without
|
||
too much trouble. There is a fairly fertile coastal strip in Palestine
|
||
and Syria. There are pleasant mountain slopes, streams running out to
|
||
the sea, and rain, at least in the winter months. The rain belt and the
|
||
foothills of the Turkish mountains also extend to northern Iraq and on
|
||
to the Iranian plateau. The Iranian plateau has its mountain valleys,
|
||
streams, and some rain. These hilly flanks of the <20>crescent,<2C> through
|
||
most of its arc, are almost made-to-order for beginning farmers. The
|
||
grassy slopes of the higher hills would be pasture for their herds
|
||
and flocks. As soon as the earliest experiments with agriculture and
|
||
domestic animals had been successful, a pleasant living could be
|
||
made--and without too much trouble.
|
||
|
||
I should add here again, that our evidence points increasingly to a
|
||
climate for those times which is very little different from that for
|
||
the area today. Now look at Egypt and southern Mesopotamia. Both are
|
||
lands without rain, for all intents and purposes. Both are lands with
|
||
rivers that have laid down very fertile soil--soil perhaps superior to
|
||
that in the hilly flanks. But in both lands, the rivers are of no great
|
||
aid without some control.
|
||
|
||
The Nile floods its banks once a year, in late September or early
|
||
October. It not only soaks the narrow fertile strip of land on either
|
||
side; it lays down a fresh layer of new soil each year. Beyond the
|
||
fertile strip on either side rise great cliffs, and behind them is the
|
||
desert. In its natural, uncontrolled state, the yearly flood of the
|
||
Nile must have caused short-lived swamps that were full of crocodiles.
|
||
After a short time, the flood level would have dropped, the water and
|
||
the crocodiles would have run back into the river, and the swamp plants
|
||
would have become parched and dry.
|
||
|
||
The Tigris and the Euphrates of Mesopotamia are less likely to flood
|
||
regularly than the Nile. The Tigris has a shorter and straighter course
|
||
than the Euphrates; it is also the more violent river. Its banks are
|
||
high, and when the snows melt and flow into all of its tributary rivers
|
||
it is swift and dangerous. The Euphrates has a much longer and more
|
||
curving course and few important tributaries. Its banks are lower and
|
||
it is less likely to flood dangerously. The land on either side and
|
||
between the two rivers is very fertile, south of the modern city of
|
||
Baghdad. Unlike the Nile Valley, neither the Tigris nor the Euphrates
|
||
is flanked by cliffs. The land on either side of the rivers stretches
|
||
out for miles and is not much rougher than a poor tennis court.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE RIVERS MUST BE CONTROLLED
|
||
|
||
The real trick in both Egypt and Mesopotamia is to make the rivers work
|
||
for you. In Egypt, this is a matter of building dikes and reservoirs
|
||
that will catch and hold the Nile flood. In this way, the water is held
|
||
and allowed to run off over the fields as it is needed. In Mesopotamia,
|
||
it is a matter of taking advantage of natural river channels and branch
|
||
channels, and of leading ditches from these onto the fields.
|
||
|
||
Obviously, we can no longer find the first dikes or reservoirs of
|
||
the Nile Valley, or the first canals or ditches of Mesopotamia. The
|
||
same land has been lived on far too long for any traces of the first
|
||
attempts to be left; or, especially in Egypt, it has been covered by
|
||
the yearly deposits of silt, dropped by the river floods. But we<77>re
|
||
pretty sure the first food-producers of Egypt and southern Mesopotamia
|
||
must have made such dikes, canals, and ditches. In the first place,
|
||
there can<61>t have been enough rain for them to grow things otherwise.
|
||
In the second place, the patterns for such projects seem to have been
|
||
pretty well set by historic times.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CONTROL OF THE RIVERS THE BUSINESS OF EVERYONE
|
||
|
||
Here, then, is a _part_ of the reason why civilization grew in Egypt
|
||
and Mesopotamia first--not in Palestine, Syria, or Iran. In the latter
|
||
areas, people could manage to produce their food as individuals. It
|
||
wasn<EFBFBD>t too hard; there were rain and some streams, and good pasturage
|
||
for the animals even if a crop or two went wrong. In Egypt and
|
||
Mesopotamia, people had to put in a much greater amount of work, and
|
||
this work couldn<64>t be individual work. Whole villages or groups of
|
||
people had to turn out to fix dikes or dig ditches. The dikes had to be
|
||
repaired and the ditches carefully cleared of silt each year, or they
|
||
would become useless.
|
||
|
||
There also had to be hard and fast rules. The person who lived nearest
|
||
the ditch or the reservoir must not be allowed to take all the water
|
||
and leave none for his neighbors. It was not only a business of
|
||
learning to control the rivers and of making their waters do the
|
||
farmer<EFBFBD>s work. It also meant controlling men. But once these men had
|
||
managed both kinds of controls, what a wonderful yield they had! The
|
||
soil was already fertile, and the silt which came in the floods and
|
||
ditches kept adding fertile soil.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE GERM OF CIVILIZATION IN EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA
|
||
|
||
This learning to work together for the common good was the real germ of
|
||
the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations. The bare elements of
|
||
civilization were already there: the need for a governing hand and for
|
||
laws to see that the communities<65> work was done and that the water was
|
||
justly shared. You may object that there is a sort of chicken and egg
|
||
paradox in this idea. How could the people set up the rules until they
|
||
had managed to get a way to live, and how could they manage to get a
|
||
way to live until they had set up the rules? I think that small groups
|
||
must have moved down along the mud-flats of the river banks quite
|
||
early, making use of naturally favorable spots, and that the rules grew
|
||
out of such cases. It would have been like the hand-in-hand growth of
|
||
automobiles and paved highways in the United States.
|
||
|
||
Once the rules and the know-how did get going, there must have been a
|
||
constant interplay of the two. Thus, the more the crops yielded, the
|
||
richer and better-fed the people would have been, and the more the
|
||
population would have grown. As the population grew, more land would
|
||
have needed to be flooded or irrigated, and more complex systems of
|
||
dikes, reservoirs, canals, and ditches would have been built. The more
|
||
complex the system, the more necessity for work on new projects and for
|
||
the control of their use.... And so on....
|
||
|
||
What I have just put down for you is a guess at the manner of growth of
|
||
some of the formalized systems that go to make up a civilized society.
|
||
My explanation has been pointed particularly at Egypt and Mesopotamia.
|
||
I have already told you that the irrigation and water-control part of
|
||
it does not apply to the development of the Aztecs or the Mayas, or
|
||
perhaps anybody else. But I think that a fair part of the story of
|
||
Egypt and Mesopotamia must be as I<>ve just told you.
|
||
|
||
I am particularly anxious that you do _not_ understand me to mean that
|
||
irrigation _caused_ civilization. I am sure it was not that simple at
|
||
all. For, in fact, a complex and highly engineered irrigation system
|
||
proper did not come until later times. Let<65>s say rather that the simple
|
||
beginnings of irrigation allowed and in fact encouraged a great number
|
||
of things in the technological, political, social, and moral realms of
|
||
culture. We do not yet understand what all these things were or how
|
||
they worked. But without these other aspects of culture, I do not
|
||
think that urbanization and civilization itself could have come into
|
||
being.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE ARCHEOLOGICAL SEQUENCE TO CIVILIZATION IN IRAQ
|
||
|
||
We last spoke of the archeological materials of Iraq on page 130,
|
||
where I described the village-farming community of Hassunan type. The
|
||
Hassunan type villages appear in the hilly-flanks zone and in the
|
||
rolling land adjacent to the Tigris in northern Iraq. It is probable
|
||
that even before the Hassuna pattern of culture lived its course, a
|
||
new assemblage had been established in northern Iraq and Syria. This
|
||
assemblage is called Halaf, after a site high on a tributary of the
|
||
Euphrates, on the Syro-Turkish border.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SKETCH OF SELECTED ITEMS OF HALAFIAN ASSEMBLAGE
|
||
|
||
BEADS AND PENDANTS
|
||
POTTERY MOTIFS
|
||
POTTERY]
|
||
|
||
The Halafian assemblage is incompletely known. The culture it
|
||
represents included a remarkably handsome painted pottery.
|
||
Archeologists have tended to be so fascinated with this pottery that
|
||
they have bothered little with the rest of the Halafian assemblage. We
|
||
do know that strange stone-founded houses, with plans like those of the
|
||
popular notion of an Eskimo igloo, were built. Like the pottery of the
|
||
Samarran style, which appears as part of the Hassunan assemblage (see
|
||
p. 131), the Halafian painted pottery implies great concentration and
|
||
excellence of draftsmanship on the part of the people who painted it.
|
||
|
||
We must mention two very interesting sites adjacent to the mud-flats of
|
||
the rivers, half way down from northern Iraq to the classic alluvial
|
||
Mesopotamian area. One is Baghouz on the Euphrates; the other is
|
||
Samarra on the Tigris (see map, p. 125). Both these sites yield the
|
||
handsome painted pottery of the style called Samarran: in fact it
|
||
is Samarra which gives its name to the pottery. Neither Baghouz nor
|
||
Samarra have completely Hassunan types of assemblages, and at Samarra
|
||
there are a few pots of proper Halafian style. I suppose that Samarra
|
||
and Baghouz give us glimpses of those early farmers who had begun to
|
||
finger their way down the mud-flats of the river banks toward the
|
||
fertile but yet untilled southland.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CLASSIC SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA FIRST OCCUPIED
|
||
|
||
Our next step is into the southland proper. Here, deep in the core of
|
||
the mound which later became the holy Sumerian city of Eridu, Iraqi
|
||
archeologists uncovered a handsome painted pottery. Pottery of the same
|
||
type had been noticed earlier by German archeologists on the surface
|
||
of a small mound, awash in the spring floods, near the remains of the
|
||
Biblical city of Erich (Sumerian = Uruk; Arabic = Warka). This <20>Eridu<64>
|
||
pottery, which is about all we have of the assemblage of the people who
|
||
once produced it, may be seen as a blend of the Samarran and Halafian
|
||
painted pottery styles. This may over-simplify the case, but as yet we
|
||
do not have much evidence to go on. The idea does at least fit with my
|
||
interpretation of the meaning of Baghouz and Samarra as way-points on
|
||
the mud-flats of the rivers half way down from the north.
|
||
|
||
My colleague, Robert Adams, believes that there were certainly
|
||
riverine-adapted food-collectors living in lower Mesopotamia. The
|
||
presence of such would explain why the Eridu assemblage is not simply
|
||
the sum of the Halafian and Samarran assemblages. But the domesticated
|
||
plants and animals and the basic ways of food-production must have
|
||
come from the hilly-flanks country in the north.
|
||
|
||
Above the basal Eridu levels, and at a number of other sites in the
|
||
south, comes a full-fledged assemblage called Ubaid. Incidentally,
|
||
there is an aspect of the Ubaidian assemblage in the north as well. It
|
||
seems to move into place before the Halaf manifestation is finished,
|
||
and to blend with it. The Ubaidian assemblage in the south is by far
|
||
the more spectacular. The development of the temple has been traced
|
||
at Eridu from a simple little structure to a monumental building some
|
||
62 feet long, with a pilaster-decorated fa<66>ade and an altar in its
|
||
central chamber. There is painted Ubaidian pottery, but the style is
|
||
hurried and somewhat careless and gives the _impression_ of having been
|
||
a cheap mass-production means of decoration when compared with the
|
||
carefully drafted styles of Samarra and Halaf. The Ubaidian people made
|
||
other items of baked clay: sickles and axes of very hard-baked clay
|
||
are found. The northern Ubaidian sites have yielded tools of copper,
|
||
but metal tools of unquestionable Ubaidian find-spots are not yet
|
||
available from the south. Clay figurines of human beings with monstrous
|
||
turtle-like faces are another item in the southern Ubaidian assemblage.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SKETCH OF SELECTED ITEMS OF UBAIDIAN ASSEMBLAGE]
|
||
|
||
There is a large Ubaid cemetery at Eridu, much of it still awaiting
|
||
excavation. The few skeletons so far tentatively studied reveal a
|
||
completely modern type of <20>Mediterraneanoid<69>; the individuals whom the
|
||
skeletons represent would undoubtedly blend perfectly into the modern
|
||
population of southern Iraq. What the Ubaidian assemblage says to us is
|
||
that these people had already adapted themselves and their culture to
|
||
the peculiar riverine environment of classic southern Mesopotamia. For
|
||
example, hard-baked clay axes will chop bundles of reeds very well, or
|
||
help a mason dress his unbaked mud bricks, and there were only a few
|
||
soft and pithy species of trees available. The Ubaidian levels of Eridu
|
||
yield quantities of date pits; that excellent and characteristically
|
||
Iraqi fruit was already in use. The excavators also found the clay
|
||
model of a ship, with the stepping-point for a mast, so that Sinbad the
|
||
Sailor must have had his antecedents as early as the time of Ubaid.
|
||
The bones of fish, which must have flourished in the larger canals as
|
||
well as in the rivers, are common in the Ubaidian levels and thereafter.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE UBAIDIAN ACHIEVEMENT
|
||
|
||
On present evidence, my tendency is to see the Ubaidian assemblage
|
||
in southern Iraq as the trace of a new era. I wish there were more
|
||
evidence, but what we have suggests this to me. The culture of southern
|
||
Ubaid soon became a culture of towns--of centrally located towns with
|
||
some rural villages about them. The town had a temple and there must
|
||
have been priests. These priests probably had political and economic
|
||
functions as well as religious ones, if the somewhat later history of
|
||
Mesopotamia may suggest a pattern for us. Presently the temple and its
|
||
priesthood were possibly the focus of the market; the temple received
|
||
its due, and may already have had its own lands and herds and flocks.
|
||
The people of the town, undoubtedly at least in consultation with the
|
||
temple administration, planned and maintained the simple irrigation
|
||
ditches. As the system flourished, the community of rural farmers would
|
||
have produced more than sufficient food. The tendency for specialized
|
||
crafts to develop--tentative at best at the cultural level of the
|
||
earlier village-farming community era--would now have been achieved,
|
||
and probably many other specialists in temple administration, water
|
||
control, architecture, and trade would also have appeared, as the
|
||
surplus food-supply was assured.
|
||
|
||
Southern Mesopotamia is not a land rich in natural resources other
|
||
than its fertile soil. Stone, good wood for construction, metal, and
|
||
innumerable other things would have had to be imported. Grain and
|
||
dates--although both are bulky and difficult to transport--and wool and
|
||
woven stuffs must have been the mediums of exchange. Over what area did
|
||
the trading net-work of Ubaid extend? We start with the idea that the
|
||
Ubaidian assemblage is most richly developed in the south. We assume, I
|
||
think, correctly, that it represents a cultural flowering of the south.
|
||
On the basis of the pottery of the still elusive <20>Eridu<64> immigrants
|
||
who had first followed the rivers into alluvial Mesopotamia, we get
|
||
the notion that the characteristic painted pottery style of Ubaid
|
||
was developed in the southland. If this reconstruction is correct
|
||
then we may watch with interest where the Ubaid pottery-painting
|
||
tradition spread. We have already mentioned that there is a substantial
|
||
assemblage of (and from the southern point of view, _fairly_ pure)
|
||
Ubaidian material in northern Iraq. The pottery appears all along the
|
||
Iranian flanks, even well east of the head of the Persian Gulf, and
|
||
ends in a later and spectacular flourish in an extremely handsome
|
||
painted style called the <20>Susa<73> style. Ubaidian pottery has been noted
|
||
up the valleys of both of the great rivers, well north of the Iraqi
|
||
and Syrian borders on the southern flanks of the Anatolian plateau.
|
||
It reaches the Mediterranean Sea and the valley of the Orontes in
|
||
Syria, and it may be faintly reflected in the painted style of a
|
||
site called Ghassul, on the east bank of the Jordan in the Dead Sea
|
||
Valley. Over this vast area--certainly in all of the great basin of
|
||
the Tigris-Euphrates drainage system and its natural extensions--I
|
||
believe we may lay our fingers on the traces of a peculiar way of
|
||
decorating pottery, which we call Ubaidian. This cursive and even
|
||
slap-dash decoration, it appears to me, was part of a new cultural
|
||
tradition which arose from the adjustments which immigrant northern
|
||
farmers first made to the new and challenging environment of southern
|
||
Mesopotamia. But exciting as the idea of the spread of influences of
|
||
the Ubaid tradition in space may be, I believe you will agree that the
|
||
consequences of the growth of that tradition in southern Mesopotamia
|
||
itself, as time passed, are even more important.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE WARKA PHASE IN THE SOUTH
|
||
|
||
So far, there are only two radiocarbon determinations for the Ubaidian
|
||
assemblage, one from Tepe Gawra in the north and one from Warka in the
|
||
south. My hunch would be to use the dates 4500 to 3750 B.C., with a
|
||
plus or more probably a minus factor of about two hundred years for
|
||
each, as the time duration of the Ubaidian assemblage in southern
|
||
Mesopotamia.
|
||
|
||
Next, much to our annoyance, we have what is almost a temporary
|
||
black-out. According to the system of terminology I favor, our next
|
||
<EFBFBD>assemblage<EFBFBD> after that of Ubaid is called the _Warka_ phase, from
|
||
the Arabic name for the site of Uruk or Erich. We know it only from
|
||
six or seven levels in a narrow test-pit at Warka, and from an even
|
||
smaller hole at another site. This <20>assemblage,<2C> so far, is known only
|
||
by its pottery, some of which still bears Ubaidian style painting. The
|
||
characteristic Warkan pottery is unpainted, with smoothed red or gray
|
||
surfaces and peculiar shapes. Unquestionably, there must be a great
|
||
deal more to say about the Warkan assemblage, but someone will first
|
||
have to excavate it!
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION
|
||
|
||
After our exasperation with the almost unknown Warka interlude,
|
||
following the brilliant <20>false dawn<77> of Ubaid, we move next to an
|
||
assemblage which yields traces of a preponderance of those elements
|
||
which we noted (p. 144) as meaning civilization. This assemblage
|
||
is that called _Proto-Literate_; it already contains writing. On
|
||
the somewhat shaky principle that writing, however early, means
|
||
history--and no longer prehistory--the assemblage is named for the
|
||
historical implications of its content, and no longer after the name of
|
||
the site where it was first found. Since some of the older books used
|
||
site-names for this assemblage, I will tell you that the Proto-Literate
|
||
includes the latter half of what used to be called the <20>Uruk period<6F>
|
||
_plus_ all of what used to be called the <20>Jemdet Nasr period.<2E> It shows
|
||
a consistent development from beginning to end.
|
||
|
||
I shall, in fact, leave much of the description and the historic
|
||
implications of the Proto-Literate assemblage to the conventional
|
||
historians. Professor T. J. Jacobsen, reaching backward from the
|
||
legends he finds in the cuneiform writings of slightly later times, can
|
||
in fact tell you a more complete story of Proto-Literate culture than
|
||
I can. It should be enough here if I sum up briefly what the excavated
|
||
archeological evidence shows.
|
||
|
||
We have yet to dig a Proto-Literate site in its entirety, but the
|
||
indications are that the sites cover areas the size of small cities.
|
||
In architecture, we know of large and monumental temple structures,
|
||
which were built on elaborate high terraces. The plans and decoration
|
||
of these temples follow the pattern set in the Ubaid phase: the chief
|
||
difference is one of size. The German excavators at the site of Warka
|
||
reckoned that the construction of only one of the Proto-Literate temple
|
||
complexes there must have taken 1,500 men, each working a ten-hour day,
|
||
five years to build.
|
||
|
||
|
||
ART AND WRITING
|
||
|
||
If the architecture, even in its monumental forms, can be seen to
|
||
stem from Ubaidian developments, this is not so with our other
|
||
evidence of Proto-Literate artistic expression. In relief and applied
|
||
sculpture, in sculpture in the round, and on the engraved cylinder
|
||
seals--all of which now make their appearance--several completely
|
||
new artistic principles are apparent. These include the composition
|
||
of subject-matter in groups, commemorative scenes, and especially
|
||
the ability and apparent desire to render the human form and face.
|
||
Excellent as the animals of the Franco-Cantabrian art may have been
|
||
(see p. 85), and however handsome were the carefully drafted
|
||
geometric designs and conventionalized figures on the pottery of the
|
||
early farmers, there seems to have been, up to this time, a mental
|
||
block about the drawing of the human figure and especially the human
|
||
face. We do not yet know what caused this self-consciousness about
|
||
picturing themselves which seems characteristic of men before the
|
||
appearance of civilization. We do know that with civilization, the
|
||
mental block seems to have been removed.
|
||
|
||
Clay tablets bearing pictographic signs are the Proto-Literate
|
||
forerunners of cuneiform writing. The earliest examples are not well
|
||
understood but they seem to be <20>devices for making accounts and
|
||
for remembering accounts.<2E> Different from the later case in Egypt,
|
||
where writing appears fully formed in the earliest examples, the
|
||
development from simple pictographic signs to proper cuneiform writing
|
||
may be traced, step by step, in Mesopotamia. It is most probable
|
||
that the development of writing was connected with the temple and
|
||
the need for keeping account of the temple<6C>s possessions. Professor
|
||
Jacobsen sees writing as a means for overcoming space, time, and the
|
||
increasing complications of human affairs: <20>Literacy, which began
|
||
with ... civilization, enhanced mightily those very tendencies in its
|
||
development which characterize it as a civilization and mark it off as
|
||
such from other types of culture.<2E>
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: RELIEF ON A PROTO-LITERATE STONE VASE, WARKA
|
||
|
||
Unrolled drawing, with restoration suggested by figures from
|
||
contemporary cylinder seals]
|
||
|
||
While the new principles in art and the idea of writing are not
|
||
foreshadowed in the Ubaid phase, or in what little we know of the
|
||
Warkan, I do not think we need to look outside southern Mesopotamia
|
||
for their beginnings. We do know something of the adjacent areas,
|
||
too, and these beginnings are not there. I think we must accept them
|
||
as completely new discoveries, made by the people who were developing
|
||
the whole new culture pattern of classic southern Mesopotamia. Full
|
||
description of the art, architecture, and writing of the Proto-Literate
|
||
phase would call for many details. Men like Professor Jacobsen and Dr.
|
||
Adams can give you these details much better than I can. Nor shall I do
|
||
more than tell you that the common pottery of the Proto-Literate phase
|
||
was so well standardized that it looks factory made. There was also
|
||
some handsome painted pottery, and there were stone bowls with inlaid
|
||
decoration. Well-made tools in metal had by now become fairly common,
|
||
and the metallurgist was experimenting with the casting process. Signs
|
||
for plows have been identified in the early pictographs, and a wheeled
|
||
chariot is shown on a cylinder seal engraving. But if I were forced to
|
||
a guess in the matter, I would say that the development of plows and
|
||
draft-animals probably began in the Ubaid period and was another of the
|
||
great innovations of that time.
|
||
|
||
The Proto-Literate assemblage clearly suggests a highly developed and
|
||
sophisticated culture. While perhaps not yet fully urban, it is on
|
||
the threshold of urbanization. There seems to have been a very dense
|
||
settlement of Proto-Literate sites in classic southern Mesopotamia,
|
||
many of them newly founded on virgin soil where no earlier settlements
|
||
had been. When we think for a moment of what all this implies, of the
|
||
growth of an irrigation system which must have existed to allow the
|
||
flourish of this culture, and of the social and political organization
|
||
necessary to maintain the irrigation system, I think we will agree that
|
||
at last we are dealing with civilization proper.
|
||
|
||
|
||
FROM PREHISTORY TO HISTORY
|
||
|
||
Now it is time for the conventional ancient historians to take over
|
||
the story from me. Remember this when you read what they write. Their
|
||
real base-line is with cultures ruled over by later kings and emperors,
|
||
whose writings describe military campaigns and the administration of
|
||
laws and fully organized trading ventures. To these historians, the
|
||
Proto-Literate phase is still a simple beginning for what is to follow.
|
||
If they mention the Ubaid assemblage at all--the one I was so lyrical
|
||
about--it will be as some dim and fumbling step on the path to the
|
||
civilized way of life.
|
||
|
||
I suppose you could say that the difference in the approach is that as
|
||
a prehistorian I have been looking forward or upward in time, while the
|
||
historians look backward to glimpse what I<>ve been describing here. My
|
||
base-line was half a million years ago with a being who had little more
|
||
than the capacity to make tools and fire to distinguish him from the
|
||
animals about him. Thus my point of view and that of the conventional
|
||
historian are bound to be different. You will need both if you want to
|
||
understand all of the story of men, as they lived through time to the
|
||
present.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
End of PREHISTORY
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
You<EFBFBD>ll doubtless easily recall your general course in ancient history:
|
||
how the Sumerian dynasties of Mesopotamia were supplanted by those of
|
||
Babylonia, how the Hittite kingdom appeared in Anatolian Turkey, and
|
||
about the three great phases of Egyptian history. The literate kingdom
|
||
of Crete arose, and by 1500 B.C. there were splendid fortified Mycenean
|
||
towns on the mainland of Greece. This was the time--about the whole
|
||
eastern end of the Mediterranean--of what Professor Breasted called the
|
||
<EFBFBD>first great internationalism,<2C> with flourishing trade, international
|
||
treaties, and royal marriages between Egyptians, Babylonians, and
|
||
Hittites. By 1200 B.C., the whole thing had fragmented: <20>the peoples of
|
||
the sea were restless in their isles,<2C> and the great ancient centers in
|
||
Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia were eclipsed. Numerous smaller states
|
||
arose--Assyria, Phoenicia, Israel--and the Trojan war was fought.
|
||
Finally Assyria became the paramount power of all the Near East,
|
||
presently to be replaced by Persia.
|
||
|
||
A new culture, partaking of older west Asiatic and Egyptian elements,
|
||
but casting them with its own tradition into a new mould, arose in
|
||
mainland Greece.
|
||
|
||
I once shocked my Classical colleagues to the core by referring to
|
||
Greece as <20>a second degree derived civilization,<2C> but there is much
|
||
truth in this. The principles of bronze- and then of iron-working, of
|
||
the alphabet, and of many other elements in Greek culture were borrowed
|
||
from western Asia. Our debt to the Greeks is too well known for me even
|
||
to mention it, beyond recalling to you that it is to Greece we owe the
|
||
beginnings of rational or empirical science and thought in general. But
|
||
Greece fell in its turn to Rome, and in 55 B.C. Caesar invaded Britain.
|
||
|
||
I last spoke of Britain on page 142; I had chosen it as my single
|
||
example for telling you something of how the earliest farming
|
||
communities were established in Europe. Now I will continue with
|
||
Britain<EFBFBD>s later prehistory, so you may sense something of the end of
|
||
prehistory itself. Remember that Britain is simply a single example
|
||
we select; the same thing could be done for all the other countries
|
||
of Europe, and will be possible also, some day, for further Asia and
|
||
Africa. Remember, too, that prehistory in most of Europe runs on for
|
||
three thousand or more years _after_ conventional ancient history
|
||
begins in the Near East. Britain is a good example to use in showing
|
||
how prehistory ended in Europe. As we said earlier, it lies at the
|
||
opposite end of Europe from the area of highest cultural achievement in
|
||
those times, and should you care to read more of the story in detail,
|
||
you may do so in the English language.
|
||
|
||
|
||
METAL USERS REACH ENGLAND
|
||
|
||
We left the story of Britain with the peoples who made three different
|
||
assemblages--the Windmill Hill, the megalith-builders, and the
|
||
Peterborough--making adjustments to their environments, to the original
|
||
inhabitants of the island, and to each other. They had first arrived
|
||
about 2500 B.C., and were simple pastoralists and hoe cultivators who
|
||
lived in little village communities. Some of them planted little if any
|
||
grain. By 2000 B.C., they were well settled in. Then, somewhere in the
|
||
range from about 1900 to 1800 B.C., the traces of the invasion of a new
|
||
series of peoples began to appear.
|
||
|
||
The first newcomers are called the Beaker folk, after the name of a
|
||
peculiar form of pottery they made. The beaker type of pottery seems
|
||
oldest in Spain, where it occurs with great collective tombs of
|
||
megalithic construction and with copper tools. But the Beaker folk who
|
||
reached England seem already to have moved first from Spain(?) to the
|
||
Rhineland and Holland. While in the Rhineland, and before leaving for
|
||
England, the Beaker folk seem to have mixed with the local population
|
||
and also with incomers from northeastern Europe whose culture included
|
||
elements brought originally from the Near East by the eastern way
|
||
through the steppes. This last group has also been named for a peculiar
|
||
article in its assemblage; the group is called the Battle-axe folk. A
|
||
few Battle-axe folk elements, including, in fact, stone battle-axes,
|
||
reached England with the earliest Beaker folk,[6] coming from the
|
||
Rhineland.
|
||
|
||
[6] The British authors use the term <20>Beaker folk<6C> to mean both
|
||
archeological assemblage and human physical type. They speak
|
||
of a <20>... tall, heavy-boned, rugged, and round-headed<65> strain
|
||
which they take to have developed, apparently in the Rhineland,
|
||
by a mixture of the original (Spanish?) beaker-makers and
|
||
the northeast European battle-axe makers. However, since the
|
||
science of physical anthropology is very much in flux at the
|
||
moment, and since I am not able to assess the evidence for these
|
||
physical types, I _do not_ use the term <20>folk<6C> in this book with
|
||
its usual meaning of standardized physical type. When I use
|
||
<20>folk<6C> here, I mean simply _the makers of a given archeological
|
||
assemblage_. The difficulty only comes when assemblages are
|
||
named for some item in them; it is too clumsy to make an
|
||
adjective of the item and refer to a <20>beakerian<61> assemblage.
|
||
|
||
The Beaker folk settled earliest in the agriculturally fertile south
|
||
and east. There seem to have been several phases of Beaker folk
|
||
invasions, and it is not clear whether these all came strictly from the
|
||
Rhineland or Holland. We do know that their copper daggers and awls
|
||
and armlets are more of Irish or Atlantic European than of Rhineland
|
||
origin. A few simple habitation sites and many burials of the Beaker
|
||
folk are known. They buried their dead singly, sometimes in conspicuous
|
||
individual barrows with the dead warrior in his full trappings. The
|
||
spectacular element in the assemblage of the Beaker folk is a group
|
||
of large circular monuments with ditches and with uprights of wood or
|
||
stone. These <20>henges<65> became truly monumental several hundred years
|
||
later; while they were occasionally dedicated with a burial, they were
|
||
not primarily tombs. The effect of the invasion of the Beaker folk
|
||
seems to cut across the whole fabric of life in Britain.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: BEAKER]
|
||
|
||
There was, however, a second major element in British life at this
|
||
time. It shows itself in the less well understood traces of a group
|
||
again called after one of the items in their catalogue, the Food-vessel
|
||
folk. There are many burials in these <20>food-vessel<65> pots in northern
|
||
England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the pottery itself seems to
|
||
link back to that of the Peterborough assemblage. Like the earlier
|
||
Peterborough people in the highland zone before them, the makers of
|
||
the food-vessels seem to have been heavily involved in trade. It is
|
||
quite proper to wonder whether the food-vessel pottery itself was made
|
||
by local women who were married to traders who were middlemen in the
|
||
transmission of Irish metal objects to north Germany and Scandinavia.
|
||
The belt of high, relatively woodless country, from southwest to
|
||
northeast, was already established as a natural route for inland trade.
|
||
|
||
|
||
MORE INVASIONS
|
||
|
||
About 1500 B.C., the situation became further complicated by the
|
||
arrival of new people in the region of southern England anciently
|
||
called Wessex. The traces suggest the Brittany coast of France as a
|
||
source, and the people seem at first to have been a small but <20>heroic<69>
|
||
group of aristocrats. Their <20>heroes<65> are buried with wealth and
|
||
ceremony, surrounded by their axes and daggers of bronze, their gold
|
||
ornaments, and amber and jet beads. These rich finds show that the
|
||
trade-linkage these warriors patronized spread from the Baltic sources
|
||
of amber to Mycenean Greece or even Egypt, as evidenced by glazed blue
|
||
beads.
|
||
|
||
The great visual trace of Wessex achievement is the final form of
|
||
the spectacular sanctuary at Stonehenge. A wooden henge or circular
|
||
monument was first made several hundred years earlier, but the site
|
||
now received its great circles of stone uprights and lintels. The
|
||
diameter of the surrounding ditch at Stonehenge is about 350 feet, the
|
||
diameter of the inner circle of large stones is about 100 feet, and
|
||
the tallest stone of the innermost horseshoe-shaped enclosure is 29
|
||
feet 8 inches high. One circle is made of blue stones which must have
|
||
been transported from Pembrokeshire, 145 miles away as the crow flies.
|
||
Recently, many carvings representing the profile of a standard type of
|
||
bronze axe of the time, and several profiles of bronze daggers--one of
|
||
which has been called Mycenean in type--have been found carved in the
|
||
stones. We cannot, of course, describe the details of the religious
|
||
ceremonies which must have been staged in Stonehenge, but we can
|
||
certainly imagine the well-integrated and smoothly working culture
|
||
which must have been necessary before such a great monument could have
|
||
been built.
|
||
|
||
|
||
<EFBFBD>THIS ENGLAND<4E>
|
||
|
||
The range from 1900 to about 1400 B.C. includes the time of development
|
||
of the archeological features usually called the <20>Early Bronze Age<67>
|
||
in Britain. In fact, traces of the Wessex warriors persisted down to
|
||
about 1200 B.C. The main regions of the island were populated, and the
|
||
adjustments to the highland and lowland zones were distinct and well
|
||
marked. The different aspects of the assemblages of the Beaker folk and
|
||
the clearly expressed activities of the Food-vessel folk and the Wessex
|
||
warriors show that Britain was already taking on her characteristic
|
||
trading role, separated from the European continent but conveniently
|
||
adjacent to it. The tin of Cornwall--so important in the production
|
||
of good bronze--as well as the copper of the west and of Ireland,
|
||
taken with the gold of Ireland and the general excellence of Irish
|
||
metal work, assured Britain a trader<65>s place in the then known world.
|
||
Contacts with the eastern Mediterranean may have been by sea, with
|
||
Cornish tin as the attraction, or may have been made by the Food-vessel
|
||
middlemen on their trips to the Baltic coast. There they would have
|
||
encountered traders who traveled the great north-south European road,
|
||
by which Baltic amber moved southward to Greece and the Levant, and
|
||
ideas and things moved northward again.
|
||
|
||
There was, however, the Channel between England and Europe, and this
|
||
relative isolation gave some peace and also gave time for a leveling
|
||
and further fusion of culture. The separate cultural traditions began
|
||
to have more in common. The growing of barley, the herding of sheep and
|
||
cattle, and the production of woolen garments were already features
|
||
common to all Britain<69>s inhabitants save a few in the remote highlands,
|
||
the far north, and the distant islands not yet fully touched by
|
||
food-production. The <20>personality of Britain<69> was being formed.
|
||
|
||
|
||
CREMATION BURIALS BEGIN
|
||
|
||
Along with people of certain religious faiths, archeologists are
|
||
against cremation (for other people!). Individuals to be cremated seem
|
||
in past times to have been dressed in their trappings and put upon a
|
||
large pyre: it takes a lot of wood and a very hot fire for a thorough
|
||
cremation. When the burning had been completed, the few fragile scraps
|
||
of bone and such odd beads of stone or other rare items as had resisted
|
||
the great heat seem to have been whisked into a pot and the pot buried.
|
||
The archeologist is left with the pot and the unsatisfactory scraps in
|
||
it.
|
||
|
||
Tentatively, after about 1400 B.C. and almost completely over the whole
|
||
island by 1200 B.C., Britain became the scene of cremation burials
|
||
in urns. We know very little of the people themselves. None of their
|
||
settlements have been identified, although there is evidence that they
|
||
grew barley and made enclosures for cattle. The urns used for the
|
||
burials seem to have antecedents in the pottery of the Food-vessel
|
||
folk, and there are some other links with earlier British traditions.
|
||
In Lancashire, a wooden circle seems to have been built about a grave
|
||
with cremated burials in urns. Even occasional instances of cremation
|
||
may be noticed earlier in Britain, and it is not clear what, if any,
|
||
connection the British cremation burials in urns have with the classic
|
||
_Urnfields_ which were now beginning in the east Mediterranean and
|
||
which we shall mention below.
|
||
|
||
The British cremation-burial-in-urns folk survived a long time in the
|
||
highland zone. In the general British scheme, they make up what is
|
||
called the <20>Middle Bronze Age,<2C> but in the highland zone they last
|
||
until after 900 B.C. and are considered to be a specialized highland
|
||
<EFBFBD>Late Bronze Age.<2E> In the highland zone, these later cremation-burial
|
||
folk seem to have continued the older Food-vessel tradition of being
|
||
middlemen in the metal market.
|
||
|
||
Granting that our knowledge of this phase of British prehistory is
|
||
very restricted because the cremations have left so little for the
|
||
archeologist, it does not appear that the cremation-burial-urn folk can
|
||
be sharply set off from their immediate predecessors. But change on a
|
||
grander scale was on the way.
|
||
|
||
|
||
REVERBERATIONS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE
|
||
|
||
In the centuries immediately following 1000 B.C., we see with fair
|
||
clarity two phases of a cultural process which must have been going
|
||
on for some time. Certainly several of the invasions we have already
|
||
described in this chapter were due to earlier phases of the same
|
||
cultural process, but we could not see the details.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: SLASHING SWORD]
|
||
|
||
Around 1200 B.C. central Europe was upset by the spread of the
|
||
so-called Urnfield folk, who practiced cremation burial in urns and
|
||
whom we also know to have been possessors of long, slashing swords and
|
||
the horse. I told you above that we have no idea that the Urnfield
|
||
folk proper were in any way connected with the people who made
|
||
cremation-burial-urn cemeteries a century or so earlier in Britain. It
|
||
has been supposed that the Urnfield folk themselves may have shared
|
||
ideas with the people who sacked Troy. We know that the Urnfield
|
||
pressure from central Europe displaced other people in northern France,
|
||
and perhaps in northwestern Germany, and that this reverberated into
|
||
Britain about 1000 B.C.
|
||
|
||
Soon after 750 B.C., the same thing happened again. This time, the
|
||
pressure from central Europe came from the Hallstatt folk who were iron
|
||
tool makers: the reverberation brought people from the western Alpine
|
||
region across the Channel into Britain.
|
||
|
||
At first it is possible to see the separate results of these folk
|
||
movements, but the developing cultures soon fused with each other and
|
||
with earlier British elements. Presently there were also strains of
|
||
other northern and western European pottery and traces of Urnfield
|
||
practices themselves which appeared in the finished British product. I
|
||
hope you will sense that I am vastly over-simplifying the details.
|
||
|
||
The result seems to have been--among other things--a new kind of
|
||
agricultural system. The land was marked off by ditched divisions.
|
||
Rectangular fields imply the plow rather than hoe cultivation. We seem
|
||
to get a picture of estate or tribal boundaries which included village
|
||
communities; we find a variety of tools in bronze, and even whetstones
|
||
which show that iron has been honed on them (although the scarce iron
|
||
has not been found). Let me give you the picture in Professor S.
|
||
Piggott<EFBFBD>s words: <20>The ... Late Bronze Age of southern England was but
|
||
the forerunner of the earliest Iron Age in the same region, not only in
|
||
the techniques of agriculture, but almost certainly in terms of ethnic
|
||
kinship ... we can with some assurance talk of the Celts ... the great
|
||
early Celtic expansion of the Continent is recognized to be that of the
|
||
Urnfield people.<2E>
|
||
|
||
Thus, certainly by 500 B.C., there were people in Britain, some of
|
||
whose descendants we may recognize today in name or language in remote
|
||
parts of Wales, Scotland, and the Hebrides.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE COMING OF IRON
|
||
|
||
Iron--once the know-how of reducing it from its ore in a very hot,
|
||
closed fire has been achieved--produces a far cheaper and much more
|
||
efficient set of tools than does bronze. Iron tools seem first to
|
||
have been made in quantity in Hittite Anatolia about 1500 B.C. In
|
||
continental Europe, the earliest, so-called Hallstatt, iron-using
|
||
cultures appeared in Germany soon after 750 B.C. Somewhat later,
|
||
Greek and especially Etruscan exports of _objets d<>art_--which moved
|
||
with a flourishing trans-Alpine wine trade--influenced the Hallstatt
|
||
iron-working tradition. Still later new classical motifs, together with
|
||
older Hallstatt, oriental, and northern nomad motifs, gave rise to a
|
||
new style in metal decoration which characterizes the so-called La T<>ne
|
||
phase.
|
||
|
||
A few iron users reached Britain a little before 400 B.C. Not long
|
||
after that, a number of allied groups appeared in southern and
|
||
southeastern England. They came over the Channel from France and must
|
||
have been Celts with dialects related to those already in England. A
|
||
second wave of Celts arrived from the Marne district in France about
|
||
250 B.C. Finally, in the second quarter of the first century B.C.,
|
||
there were several groups of newcomers, some of whom were Belgae of
|
||
a mixed Teutonic-Celtic confederacy of tribes in northern France and
|
||
Belgium. The Belgae preceded the Romans by only a few years.
|
||
|
||
|
||
HILL-FORTS AND FARMS
|
||
|
||
The earliest iron-users seem to have entrenched themselves temporarily
|
||
within hill-top forts, mainly in the south. Gradually, they moved
|
||
inland, establishing _individual_ farm sites with extensive systems
|
||
of rectangular fields. We recognize these fields by the <20>lynchets<74> or
|
||
lines of soil-creep which plowing left on the slopes of hills. New
|
||
crops appeared; there were now bread wheat, oats, and rye, as well as
|
||
barley.
|
||
|
||
At Little Woodbury, near the town of Salisbury, a farmstead has been
|
||
rather completely excavated. The rustic buildings were within a
|
||
palisade, the round house itself was built of wood, and there were
|
||
various outbuildings and pits for the storage of grain. Weaving was
|
||
done on the farm, but not blacksmithing, which must have been a
|
||
specialized trade. Save for the lack of firearms, the place might
|
||
almost be taken for a farmstead on the American frontier in the early
|
||
1800<EFBFBD>s.
|
||
|
||
Toward 250 B.C. there seems to have been a hasty attempt to repair the
|
||
hill-forts and to build new ones, evidently in response to signs of
|
||
restlessness being shown by remote relatives in France.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE SECOND PHASE
|
||
|
||
Perhaps the hill-forts were not entirely effective or perhaps a
|
||
compromise was reached. In any case, the newcomers from the Marne
|
||
district did establish themselves, first in the southeast and then to
|
||
the north and west. They brought iron with decoration of the La T<>ne
|
||
type and also the two-wheeled chariot. Like the Wessex warriors of
|
||
over a thousand years earlier, they made <20>heroes<65><73> graves, with their
|
||
warriors buried in the war-chariots and dressed in full trappings.
|
||
|
||
[Illustration: CELTIC BUCKLE]
|
||
|
||
The metal work of these Marnian newcomers is excellent. The peculiar
|
||
Celtic art style, based originally on the classic tendril motif,
|
||
is colorful and virile, and fits with Greek and Roman descriptions
|
||
of Celtic love of color in dress. There is a strong trace of these
|
||
newcomers northward in Yorkshire, linked by Ptolemy<6D>s description to
|
||
the Parisii, doubtless part of the Celtic tribe which originally gave
|
||
its name to Paris on the Seine. Near Glastonbury, in Somerset, two
|
||
villages in swamps have been excavated. They seem to date toward the
|
||
middle of the first century B.C., which was a troubled time in Britain.
|
||
The circular houses were built on timber platforms surrounded with
|
||
palisades. The preservation of antiquities by the water-logged peat of
|
||
the swamp has yielded us a long catalogue of the materials of these
|
||
villagers.
|
||
|
||
In Scotland, which yields its first iron tools at a date of about 100
|
||
B.C., and in northern Ireland even slightly earlier, the effects of the
|
||
two phases of newcomers tend especially to blend. Hill-forts, <20>brochs<68>
|
||
(stone-built round towers) and a variety of other strange structures
|
||
seem to appear as the new ideas develop in the comparative isolation of
|
||
northern Britain.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE THIRD PHASE
|
||
|
||
For the time of about the middle of the first century B.C., we again
|
||
see traces of frantic hill-fort construction. This simple military
|
||
architecture now took some new forms. Its multiple ramparts must
|
||
reflect the use of slings as missiles, rather than spears. We probably
|
||
know the reason. In 56 B.C., Julius Caesar chastised the Veneti of
|
||
Brittany for outraging the dignity of Roman ambassadors. The Veneti
|
||
were famous slingers, and doubtless the reverberations of escaping
|
||
Veneti were felt across the Channel. The military architecture suggests
|
||
that some Veneti did escape to Britain.
|
||
|
||
Also, through Caesar, we learn the names of newcomers who arrived in
|
||
two waves, about 75 B.C. and about 50 B.C. These were the Belgae. Now,
|
||
at last, we can even begin to speak of dynasties and individuals.
|
||
Some time before 55 B.C., the Catuvellauni, originally from the Marne
|
||
district in France, had possessed themselves of a large part of
|
||
southeastern England. They evidently sailed up the Thames and built a
|
||
town of over a hundred acres in area. Here ruled Cassivellaunus, <20>the
|
||
first man in England whose name we know,<2C> and whose town Caesar sacked.
|
||
The town sprang up elsewhere again, however.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE END OF PREHISTORY
|
||
|
||
Prehistory, strictly speaking, is now over in southern Britain.
|
||
Claudius<EFBFBD> effective invasion took place in 43 A.D.; by 83 A.D., a raid
|
||
had been made as far north as Aberdeen in Scotland. But by 127 A.D.,
|
||
Hadrian had completed his wall from the Solway to the Tyne, and the
|
||
Romans settled behind it. In Scotland, Romanization can have affected
|
||
the countryside very little. Professor Piggott adds that <20>... it is
|
||
when the pressure of Romanization is relaxed by the break-up of the
|
||
Dark Ages that we see again the Celtic metal-smiths handling their
|
||
material with the same consummate skill as they had before the Roman
|
||
Conquest, and with traditional styles that had not even then forgotten
|
||
their Marnian and Belgic heritage.<2E>
|
||
|
||
In fact, many centuries go by, in Britain as well as in the rest of
|
||
Europe, before the archeologist<73>s task is complete and the historian on
|
||
his own is able to describe the ways of men in the past.
|
||
|
||
|
||
BRITAIN AS A SAMPLE OF THE GENERAL COURSE OF PREHISTORY IN EUROPE
|
||
|
||
In giving this very brief outline of the later prehistory of Britain,
|
||
you will have noticed how often I had to refer to the European
|
||
continent itself. Britain, beyond the English Channel for all of her
|
||
later prehistory, had a much simpler course of events than did most of
|
||
the rest of Europe in later prehistoric times. This holds, in spite
|
||
of all the <20>invasions<6E> and <20>reverberations<6E> from the continent. Most
|
||
of Europe was the scene of an even more complicated ebb and flow of
|
||
cultural change, save in some of its more remote mountain valleys and
|
||
peninsulas.
|
||
|
||
The whole course of later prehistory in Europe is, in fact, so very
|
||
complicated that there is no single good book to cover it all;
|
||
certainly there is none in English. There are some good regional
|
||
accounts and some good general accounts of part of the range from about
|
||
3000 B.C. to A.D. 1. I suspect that the difficulty of making a good
|
||
book that covers all of its later prehistory is another aspect of what
|
||
makes Europe so very complicated a continent today. The prehistoric
|
||
foundations for Europe<70>s very complicated set of civilizations,
|
||
cultures, and sub-cultures--which begin to appear as history
|
||
proceeds--were in themselves very complicated.
|
||
|
||
Hence, I selected the case of Britain as a single example of how
|
||
prehistory ends in Europe. It could have been more complicated than we
|
||
found it to be. Even in the subject matter on Britain in the chapter
|
||
before the last, we did not see direct traces of the effect on Britain
|
||
of the very important developments which took place in the Danubian
|
||
way from the Near East. Apparently Britain was not affected. Britain
|
||
received the impulses which brought copper, bronze, and iron tools from
|
||
an original east Mediterranean homeland into Europe, almost at the ends
|
||
of their journeys. But by the same token, they had had time en route to
|
||
take on their characteristic European aspects.
|
||
|
||
Some time ago, Sir Cyril Fox wrote a famous book called _The
|
||
Personality of Britain_, sub-titled <20>Its Influence on Inhabitant and
|
||
Invader in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times.<2E> We have not gone
|
||
into the post-Roman early historic period here; there are still the
|
||
Anglo-Saxons and Normans to account for as well as the effects of
|
||
the Romans. But what I have tried to do was to begin the story of
|
||
how the personality of Britain was formed. The principles that Fox
|
||
used, in trying to balance cultural and environmental factors and
|
||
interrelationships would not be greatly different for other lands.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Summary
|
||
|
||
[Illustration]
|
||
|
||
|
||
In the pages you have read so far, you have been brought through the
|
||
earliest 99 per cent of the story of man<61>s life on this planet. I have
|
||
left only 1 per cent of the story for the historians to tell.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE DRAMA OF THE PAST
|
||
|
||
Men first became men when evolution had carried them to a certain
|
||
point. This was the point where the eye-hand-brain co-ordination was
|
||
good enough so that tools could be made. When tools began to be made
|
||
according to sets of lasting habits, we know that men had appeared.
|
||
This happened over a half million years ago. The stage for the play
|
||
may have been as broad as all of Europe, Africa, and Asia. At least,
|
||
it seems unlikely that it was only one little region that saw the
|
||
beginning of the drama.
|
||
|
||
Glaciers and different climates came and went, to change the settings.
|
||
But the play went on in the same first act for a very long time. The
|
||
men who were the players had simple roles. They had to feed themselves
|
||
and protect themselves as best they could. They did this by hunting,
|
||
catching, and finding food wherever they could, and by taking such
|
||
protection as caves, fire, and their simple tools would give them.
|
||
Before the first act was over, the last of the glaciers was melting
|
||
away, and the players had added the New World to their stage. If
|
||
we want a special name for the first act, we could call it _The
|
||
Food-Gatherers_.
|
||
|
||
There were not many climaxes in the first act, so far as we can see.
|
||
But I think there may have been a few. Certainly the pace of the
|
||
first act accelerated with the swing from simple gathering to more
|
||
intensified collecting. The great cave art of France and Spain was
|
||
probably an expression of a climax. Even the ideas of burying the dead
|
||
and of the <20>Venus<75> figurines must also point to levels of human thought
|
||
and activity that were over and above pure food-getting.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE SECOND ACT
|
||
|
||
The second act began only about ten thousand years ago. A few of the
|
||
players started it by themselves near the center of the Old World part
|
||
of the stage, in the Near East. It began as a plant and animal act, but
|
||
it soon became much more complicated.
|
||
|
||
But the players in this one part of the stage--in the Near East--were
|
||
not the only ones to start off on the second act by themselves. Other
|
||
players, possibly in several places in the Far East, and certainly in
|
||
the New World, also started second acts that began as plant and animal
|
||
acts, and then became complicated. We can call the whole second act
|
||
_The Food-Producers_.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE FIRST GREAT CLIMAX OF THE SECOND ACT
|
||
|
||
In the Near East, the first marked climax of the second act happened
|
||
in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The play and the players reached that great
|
||
climax that we call civilization. This seems to have come less than
|
||
five thousand years after the second act began. But it could never have
|
||
happened in the first act at all.
|
||
|
||
There is another curious thing about the first act. Many of the players
|
||
didn<EFBFBD>t know it was over and they kept on with their roles long after
|
||
the second act had begun. On the edges of the stage there are today
|
||
some players who are still going on with the first act. The Eskimos,
|
||
and the native Australians, and certain tribes in the Amazon jungle are
|
||
some of these players. They seem perfectly happy to keep on with the
|
||
first act.
|
||
|
||
The second act moved from climax to climax. The civilizations of
|
||
Mesopotamia and Egypt were only the earliest of these climaxes. The
|
||
players to the west caught the spirit of the thing, and climaxes
|
||
followed there. So also did climaxes come in the Far Eastern and New
|
||
World portions of the stage.
|
||
|
||
The greater part of the second act should really be described to you
|
||
by a historian. Although it was a very short act when compared to the
|
||
first one, the climaxes complicate it a great deal. I, a prehistorian,
|
||
have told you about only the first act, and the very beginning of the
|
||
second.
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE THIRD ACT
|
||
|
||
Also, as a prehistorian I probably should not even mention the third
|
||
act--it began so recently. The third act is _The Industrialization_.
|
||
It is the one in which we ourselves are players. If the pace of the
|
||
second act was so much faster than that of the first, the pace of the
|
||
third act is terrific. The danger is that it may wear down the players
|
||
completely.
|
||
|
||
What sort of climaxes will the third act have, and are we already in
|
||
one? You have seen by now that the acts of my play are given in terms
|
||
of modes or basic patterns of human economy--ways in which people
|
||
get food and protection and safety. The climaxes involve more than
|
||
human economy. Economics and technological factors may be part of the
|
||
climaxes, but they are not all. The climaxes may be revolutions in
|
||
their own way, intellectual and social revolutions if you like.
|
||
|
||
If the third act follows the pattern of the second act, a climax should
|
||
come soon after the act begins. We may be due for one soon if we are
|
||
not already in it. Remember the terrific pace of this third act.
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHY BOTHER WITH PREHISTORY?
|
||
|
||
Why do we bother about prehistory? The main reason is that we think it
|
||
may point to useful ideas for the present. We are in the troublesome
|
||
beginnings of the third act of the play. The beginnings of the second
|
||
act may have lessons for us and give depth to our thinking. I know
|
||
there are at least _some_ lessons, even in the present incomplete
|
||
state of our knowledge. The players who began the second act--that of
|
||
food-production--separately, in different parts of the world, were not
|
||
all of one <20>pure race<63> nor did they have <20>pure<72> cultural traditions.
|
||
Some apparently quite mixed Mediterraneans got off to the first start
|
||
on the second act and brought it to its first two climaxes as well.
|
||
Peoples of quite different physical type achieved the first climaxes in
|
||
China and in the New World.
|
||
|
||
In our British example of how the late prehistory of Europe worked, we
|
||
listed a continuous series of <20>invasions<6E> and <20>reverberations.<2E> After
|
||
each of these came fusion. Even though the Channel protected Britain
|
||
from some of the extreme complications of the mixture and fusion of
|
||
continental Europe, you can see how silly it would be to refer to a
|
||
<EFBFBD>pure<EFBFBD> British race or a <20>pure<72> British culture. We speak of the United
|
||
States as a <20>melting pot.<2E> But this is nothing new. Actually, Britain
|
||
and all the rest of the world have been <20>melting pots<74> at one time or
|
||
another.
|
||
|
||
By the time the written records of Mesopotamia and Egypt begin to turn
|
||
up in number, the climaxes there are well under way. To understand the
|
||
beginnings of the climaxes, and the real beginnings of the second act
|
||
itself, we are thrown back on prehistoric archeology. And this is as
|
||
true for China, India, Middle America, and the Andes, as it is for the
|
||
Near East.
|
||
|
||
There are lessons to be learned from all of man<61>s past, not simply
|
||
lessons of how to fight battles or win peace conferences, but of how
|
||
human society evolves from one stage to another. Many of these lessons
|
||
can only be looked for in the prehistoric past. So far, we have only
|
||
made a beginning. There is much still to do, and many gaps in the story
|
||
are yet to be filled. The prehistorian<61>s job is to find the evidence,
|
||
to fill the gaps, and to discover the lessons men have learned in the
|
||
past. As I see it, this is not only an exciting but a very practical
|
||
goal for which to strive.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
List of Books
|
||
|
||
|
||
BOOKS OF GENERAL INTEREST
|
||
|
||
(Chosen from a variety of the increasingly useful list of cheap
|
||
paperbound books.)
|
||
|
||
Childe, V. Gordon
|
||
_What Happened in History._ 1954. Penguin.
|
||
_Man Makes Himself._ 1955. Mentor.
|
||
_The Prehistory of European Society._ 1958. Penguin.
|
||
|
||
Dunn, L. C., and Dobzhansky, Th.
|
||
_Heredity, Race, and Society._ 1952. Mentor.
|
||
|
||
Frankfort, Henri, Frankfort, H. A., Jacobsen, Thorkild, and Wilson,
|
||
John A.
|
||
_Before Philosophy._ 1954. Penguin.
|
||
|
||
Simpson, George G.
|
||
_The Meaning of Evolution._ 1955. Mentor.
|
||
|
||
Wheeler, Sir Mortimer
|
||
_Archaeology from the Earth._ 1956. Penguin.
|
||
|
||
|
||
GEOCHRONOLOGY AND THE ICE AGE
|
||
|
||
(Two general books. Some Pleistocene geologists disagree with Zeuner<65>s
|
||
interpretation of the dating evidence, but their points of view appear
|
||
in professional journals, in articles too cumbersome to list here.)
|
||
|
||
Flint, R. F.
|
||
_Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch._ 1947. John Wiley
|
||
and Sons.
|
||
|
||
Zeuner, F. E.
|
||
_Dating the Past._ 1952 (3rd ed.). Methuen and Co.
|
||
|
||
|
||
FOSSIL MEN AND RACE
|
||
|
||
(The points of view of physical anthropologists and human
|
||
paleontologists are changing very quickly. Two of the different points
|
||
of view are listed here.)
|
||
|
||
Clark, W. E. Le Gros
|
||
_History of the Primates._ 1956 (5th ed.). British Museum
|
||
(Natural History). (Also in Phoenix edition, 1957.)
|
||
|
||
Howells, W. W.
|
||
_Mankind So Far._ 1944. Doubleday, Doran.
|
||
|
||
|
||
GENERAL ANTHROPOLOGY
|
||
|
||
(These are standard texts not absolutely up to date in every detail, or
|
||
interpretative essays concerned with cultural change through time as
|
||
well as in space.)
|
||
|
||
Kroeber, A. L.
|
||
_Anthropology._ 1948. Harcourt, Brace.
|
||
|
||
Linton, Ralph
|
||
_The Tree of Culture._ 1955. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
|
||
|
||
Redfield, Robert
|
||
_The Primitive World and Its Transformations._ 1953. Cornell
|
||
University Press.
|
||
|
||
Steward, Julian H.
|
||
_Theory of Culture Change._ 1955. University of Illinois Press.
|
||
|
||
White, Leslie
|
||
_The Science of Culture._ 1949. Farrar, Strauss.
|
||
|
||
|
||
GENERAL PREHISTORY
|
||
|
||
(A sampling of the more useful and current standard works in English.)
|
||
|
||
Childe, V. Gordon
|
||
_The Dawn of European Civilization._ 1957. Kegan Paul, Trench,
|
||
Trubner.
|
||
_Prehistoric Migrations in Europe._ 1950. Instituttet for
|
||
Sammenlignende Kulturforskning.
|
||
|
||
Clark, Grahame
|
||
_Archaeology and Society._ 1957. Harvard University Press.
|
||
|
||
Clark, J. G. D.
|
||
_Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis._ 1952. Methuen and Co.
|
||
|
||
Garrod, D. A. E.
|
||
_Environment, Tools, and Man._ 1946. Cambridge University
|
||
Press.
|
||
|
||
Movius, Hallam L., Jr.
|
||
<20>Old World Prehistory: Paleolithic<69> in _Anthropology Today_.
|
||
Kroeber, A. L., ed. 1953. University of Chicago Press.
|
||
|
||
Oakley, Kenneth P.
|
||
_Man the Tool-Maker._ 1956. British Museum (Natural History).
|
||
(Also in Phoenix edition, 1957.)
|
||
|
||
Piggott, Stuart
|
||
_British Prehistory._ 1949. Oxford University Press.
|
||
|
||
Pittioni, Richard
|
||
_Die Urgeschichtlichen Grundlagen der Europ<6F>ischen Kultur._
|
||
1949. Deuticke. (A single book which does attempt to cover the
|
||
whole range of European prehistory to ca. 1 A.D.)
|
||
|
||
|
||
THE NEAR EAST
|
||
|
||
Adams, Robert M.
|
||
<20>Developmental Stages in Ancient Mesopotamia,<2C> _in_ Steward,
|
||
Julian, _et al_, _Irrigation Civilizations: A Comparative
|
||
Study_. 1955. Pan American Union.
|
||
|
||
Braidwood, Robert J.
|
||
_The Near East and the Foundations for Civilization._ 1952.
|
||
University of Oregon.
|
||
|
||
Childe, V. Gordon
|
||
_New Light on the Most Ancient East._ 1952. Oriental Dept.,
|
||
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
|
||
|
||
Frankfort, Henri
|
||
_The Birth of Civilization in the Near East._ 1951. University
|
||
of Indiana Press. (Also in Anchor edition, 1956.)
|
||
|
||
Pallis, Svend A.
|
||
_The Antiquity of Iraq._ 1956. Munksgaard.
|
||
|
||
Wilson, John A.
|
||
_The Burden of Egypt._ 1951. University of Chicago Press. (Also
|
||
in Phoenix edition, called _The Culture of Ancient Egypt_,
|
||
1956.)
|
||
|
||
|
||
HOW DIGGING IS DONE
|
||
|
||
Braidwood, Linda
|
||
_Digging beyond the Tigris._ 1953. Schuman, New York.
|
||
|
||
Wheeler, Sir Mortimer
|
||
_Archaeology from the Earth._ 1954. Oxford, London.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Index
|
||
|
||
|
||
Abbevillian, 48;
|
||
core-biface tool, 44, 48
|
||
|
||
Acheulean, 48, 60
|
||
|
||
Acheuleo-Levalloisian, 63
|
||
|
||
Acheuleo-Mousterian, 63
|
||
|
||
Adams, R. M., 106
|
||
|
||
Adzes, 45
|
||
|
||
Africa, east, 67, 89;
|
||
north, 70, 89;
|
||
south, 22, 25, 34, 40, 67
|
||
|
||
Agriculture, incipient, in England, 140;
|
||
in Near East, 123
|
||
|
||
Ain Hanech, 48
|
||
|
||
Amber, taken from Baltic to Greece, 167
|
||
|
||
American Indians, 90, 142
|
||
|
||
Anatolia, used as route to Europe, 138
|
||
|
||
Animals, in caves, 54, 64;
|
||
in cave art, 85
|
||
|
||
Antevs, Ernst, 19
|
||
|
||
Anyathian, 47
|
||
|
||
Archeological interpretation, 8
|
||
|
||
Archeology, defined, 8
|
||
|
||
Architecture, at Jarmo, 128;
|
||
at Jericho, 133
|
||
|
||
Arrow, points, 94;
|
||
shaft straightener, 83
|
||
|
||
Art, in caves, 84;
|
||
East Spanish, 85;
|
||
figurines, 84;
|
||
Franco-Cantabrian, 84, 85;
|
||
movable (engravings, modeling, scratchings), 83;
|
||
painting, 83;
|
||
sculpture, 83
|
||
|
||
Asia, western, 67
|
||
|
||
Assemblage, defined, 13, 14;
|
||
European, 94;
|
||
Jarmo, 129;
|
||
Maglemosian, 94;
|
||
Natufian, 113
|
||
|
||
Aterian, industry, 67;
|
||
point, 89
|
||
|
||
Australopithecinae, 24
|
||
|
||
Australopithecine, 25, 26
|
||
|
||
Awls, 77
|
||
|
||
Axes, 62, 94
|
||
|
||
Ax-heads, 15
|
||
|
||
Azilian, 97
|
||
|
||
Aztecs, 145
|
||
|
||
|
||
Baghouz, 152
|
||
|
||
Bakun, 134
|
||
|
||
Baltic sea, 93
|
||
|
||
Banana, 107
|
||
|
||
Barley, wild, 108
|
||
|
||
Barrow, 141
|
||
|
||
Battle-axe folk, 164;
|
||
assemblage, 164
|
||
|
||
Beads, 80;
|
||
bone, 114
|
||
|
||
Beaker folk, 164;
|
||
assemblage, 164-165
|
||
|
||
Bear, in cave art, 85;
|
||
cult, 68
|
||
|
||
Belgium, 94
|
||
|
||
Belt cave, 126
|
||
|
||
Bering Strait, used as route to New World, 98
|
||
|
||
Bison, in cave art, 85
|
||
|
||
Blade, awl, 77;
|
||
backed, 75;
|
||
blade-core, 71;
|
||
end-scraper, 77;
|
||
stone, defined, 71;
|
||
strangulated (notched), 76;
|
||
tanged point, 76;
|
||
tools, 71, 75-80, 90;
|
||
tool tradition, 70
|
||
|
||
Boar, wild, in cave art, 85
|
||
|
||
Bogs, source of archeological materials, 94
|
||
|
||
Bolas, 54
|
||
|
||
Bordes, Fran<61>ois, 62
|
||
|
||
Borer, 77
|
||
|
||
Boskop skull, 34
|
||
|
||
Boyd, William C., 35
|
||
|
||
Bracelets, 118
|
||
|
||
Brain, development of, 24
|
||
|
||
Breadfruit, 107
|
||
|
||
Breasted, James H., 107
|
||
|
||
Brick, at Jericho, 133
|
||
|
||
Britain, 94;
|
||
late prehistory, 163-175;
|
||
invaders, 173
|
||
|
||
Broch, 172
|
||
|
||
Buffalo, in China, 54;
|
||
killed by stampede, 86
|
||
|
||
Burials, 66, 86;
|
||
in <20>henges,<2C> 164;
|
||
in urns, 168
|
||
|
||
Burins, 75
|
||
|
||
Burma, 90
|
||
|
||
Byblos, 134
|
||
|
||
|
||
Camel, 54
|
||
|
||
Cannibalism, 55
|
||
|
||
Cattle, wild, 85, 112;
|
||
in cave art, 85;
|
||
domesticated, 15;
|
||
at Skara Brae, 142
|
||
|
||
Caucasoids, 34
|
||
|
||
Cave men, 29
|
||
|
||
Caves, 62;
|
||
art in, 84
|
||
|
||
Celts, 170
|
||
|
||
Chariot, 160
|
||
|
||
Chicken, domestication of, 107
|
||
|
||
Chiefs, in food-gathering groups, 68
|
||
|
||
Childe, V. Gordon, 8
|
||
|
||
China, 136
|
||
|
||
Choukoutien, 28, 35
|
||
|
||
Choukoutienian, 47
|
||
|
||
Civilization, beginnings, 144, 149, 157;
|
||
meaning of, 144
|
||
|
||
Clactonian, 45, 47
|
||
|
||
Clay, used in modeling, 128;
|
||
baked, used for tools, 153
|
||
|
||
Club-heads, 82, 94
|
||
|
||
Colonization, in America, 142;
|
||
in Europe, 142
|
||
|
||
Combe Capelle, 30
|
||
|
||
Combe Capelle-Br<42>nn group, 34
|
||
|
||
Commont, Victor, 51
|
||
|
||
Coon, Carlton S., 73
|
||
|
||
Copper, 134
|
||
|
||
Corn, in America, 145
|
||
|
||
Corrals for cattle, 140
|
||
|
||
<20>Cradle of mankind,<2C> 136
|
||
|
||
Cremation, 167
|
||
|
||
Crete, 162
|
||
|
||
Cro-Magnon, 30, 34
|
||
|
||
Cultivation, incipient, 105, 109, 111
|
||
|
||
Culture, change, 99;
|
||
characteristics, defined, 38, 49;
|
||
prehistoric, 39
|
||
|
||
|
||
Danube Valley, used as route from Asia, 138
|
||
|
||
Dates, 153
|
||
|
||
Deer, 54, 96
|
||
|
||
Dog, domesticated, 96
|
||
|
||
Domestication, of animals, 100, 105, 107;
|
||
of plants, 100
|
||
|
||
<20>Dragon teeth<74> fossils in China, 28
|
||
|
||
Drill, 77
|
||
|
||
Dubois, Eugene, 26
|
||
|
||
|
||
Early Dynastic Period, Mesopotamia, 147
|
||
|
||
East Spanish art, 72, 85
|
||
|
||
Egypt, 70, 126
|
||
|
||
Ehringsdorf, 31
|
||
|
||
Elephant, 54
|
||
|
||
Emiliani, Cesare, 18
|
||
|
||
Emiran flake point, 73
|
||
|
||
England, 163-168;
|
||
prehistoric, 19, 40;
|
||
farmers in, 140
|
||
|
||
Eoanthropus dawsoni, 29
|
||
|
||
Eoliths, 41
|
||
|
||
Erich, 152
|
||
|
||
Eridu, 152
|
||
|
||
Euphrates River, floods in, 148
|
||
|
||
Europe, cave dwellings, 58;
|
||
at end of Ice Age, 93;
|
||
early farmers, 140;
|
||
glaciers in, 40;
|
||
huts in, 86;
|
||
routes into, 137-140;
|
||
spread of food-production to, 136
|
||
|
||
|
||
Far East, 69, 90
|
||
|
||
Farmers, 103
|
||
|
||
Fauresmith industry, 67
|
||
|
||
Fayum, 135;
|
||
radiocarbon date, 146
|
||
|
||
<20>Fertile Crescent,<2C> 107, 146
|
||
|
||
Figurines, <20>Venus,<2C> 84;
|
||
at Jarmo, 128;
|
||
at Ubaid, 153
|
||
|
||
Fire, used by Peking man, 54
|
||
|
||
First Dynasty, Egypt, 147
|
||
|
||
Fish-hooks, 80, 94
|
||
|
||
Fishing, 80;
|
||
by food-producers, 122
|
||
|
||
Fish-lines, 80
|
||
|
||
Fish spears, 94
|
||
|
||
Flint industry, 127
|
||
|
||
Font<6E>chevade, 32, 56, 58
|
||
|
||
Food-collecting, 104, 121;
|
||
end of, 104
|
||
|
||
Food-gatherers, 53, 176
|
||
|
||
Food-gathering, 99, 104;
|
||
in Old World, 104;
|
||
stages of, 104
|
||
|
||
Food-producers, 176
|
||
|
||
Food-producing economy, 122;
|
||
in America, 145;
|
||
in Asia, 105
|
||
|
||
Food-producing revolution, 99, 105;
|
||
causes of, 101;
|
||
preconditions for, 100
|
||
|
||
Food-production, beginnings of, 99;
|
||
carried to Europe, 110
|
||
|
||
Food-vessel folk, 164
|
||
|
||
<20>Forest folk,<2C> 97, 98, 104, 110
|
||
|
||
Fox, Sir Cyril, 174
|
||
|
||
France, caves in, 56
|
||
|
||
|
||
Galley Hill (fossil type), 29
|
||
|
||
Garrod, D. A., 73
|
||
|
||
Gazelle, 114
|
||
|
||
Germany, 94
|
||
|
||
Ghassul, 156
|
||
|
||
Glaciers, 18, 30;
|
||
destruction by, 40
|
||
|
||
Goat, wild, 108;
|
||
domesticated, 128
|
||
|
||
Grain, first planted, 20
|
||
|
||
Graves, passage, 141;
|
||
gallery, 141
|
||
|
||
Greece, civilization in, 163;
|
||
as route to western Europe, 138;
|
||
towns in, 162
|
||
|
||
Grimaldi skeletons, 34
|
||
|
||
|
||
Hackberry seeds used as food, 55
|
||
|
||
Halaf, 151;
|
||
assemblage, 151
|
||
|
||
Hallstatt, tradition, 169
|
||
|
||
Hand, development of, 24, 25
|
||
|
||
Hand adzes, 46
|
||
|
||
Hand axes, 44
|
||
|
||
Harpoons, antler, 83, 94;
|
||
bone, 82, 94
|
||
|
||
Hassuna, 131;
|
||
assemblage, 131, 132
|
||
|
||
Heidelberg, fossil type, 28
|
||
|
||
Hill-forts, in England, 171;
|
||
in Scotland, 172
|
||
|
||
Hilly flanks of Near East, 107, 108, 125, 131, 146, 147
|
||
|
||
History, beginning of, 7, 17
|
||
|
||
Hoes, 112
|
||
|
||
Holland, 164
|
||
|
||
Homo sapiens, 32
|
||
|
||
Hooton, E. A., 34
|
||
|
||
Horse, 112;
|
||
wild, in cave art, 85;
|
||
in China, 54
|
||
|
||
Hotu cave, 126
|
||
|
||
Houses, 122;
|
||
at Jarmo, 128;
|
||
at Halaf, 151
|
||
|
||
Howe, Bruce, 116
|
||
|
||
Howell, F. Clark, 30
|
||
|
||
Hunting, 93
|
||
|
||
|
||
Ice Age, in Asia, 99;
|
||
beginning of, 18;
|
||
glaciers in, 41;
|
||
last glaciation, 93
|
||
|
||
Incas, 145
|
||
|
||
India, 90, 136
|
||
|
||
Industrialization, 178
|
||
|
||
Industry, blade-tool, 88;
|
||
defined, 58;
|
||
ground stone, 94
|
||
|
||
Internationalism, 162
|
||
|
||
Iran, 107, 147
|
||
|
||
Iraq, 107, 124, 127, 136, 147
|
||
|
||
Iron, introduction of, 170
|
||
|
||
Irrigation, 123, 149, 155
|
||
|
||
Italy, 138
|
||
|
||
|
||
Jacobsen, T. J., 157
|
||
|
||
Jarmo, 109, 126, 128, 130;
|
||
assemblage, 129
|
||
|
||
Java, 23, 29
|
||
|
||
Java man, 26, 27, 29
|
||
|
||
Jefferson, Thomas, 11
|
||
|
||
Jericho, 119, 133
|
||
|
||
Judaidah, 134
|
||
|
||
|
||
Kafuan, 48
|
||
|
||
Kanam, 23, 36
|
||
|
||
Karim Shahir, 116-119, 124;
|
||
assemblage, 116, 117
|
||
|
||
Keith, Sir Arthur, 33
|
||
|
||
Kelley, Harper, 51
|
||
|
||
Kharga, 126
|
||
|
||
Khartoum, 136
|
||
|
||
Knives, 80
|
||
|
||
Krogman, W. M., 3, 25
|
||
|
||
|
||
Lamps, 85
|
||
|
||
Land bridges in Mediterranean, 19
|
||
|
||
La T<>ne phase, 170
|
||
|
||
Laurel leaf point, 78, 89
|
||
|
||
Leakey, L. S. B., 40
|
||
|
||
Le Moustier, 57
|
||
|
||
Levalloisian, 47, 61, 62
|
||
|
||
Levalloiso-Mousterian, 47, 63
|
||
|
||
Little Woodbury, 170
|
||
|
||
|
||
Magic, used by hunters, 123
|
||
|
||
Maglemosian, assemblage, 94, 95;
|
||
folk, 98
|
||
|
||
Makapan, 40
|
||
|
||
Mammoth, 93;
|
||
in cave art, 85
|
||
|
||
<20>Man-apes,<2C> 26
|
||
|
||
Mango, 107
|
||
|
||
Mankind, age, 17
|
||
|
||
Maringer, J., 45
|
||
|
||
Markets, 155
|
||
|
||
Marston, A. T., 11
|
||
|
||
Mathiassen, T., 97
|
||
|
||
McCown, T. D., 33
|
||
|
||
Meganthropus, 26, 27, 36
|
||
|
||
Men, defined, 25;
|
||
modern, 32
|
||
|
||
Merimde, 135
|
||
|
||
Mersin, 133
|
||
|
||
Metal-workers, 160, 163, 167, 172
|
||
|
||
Micoquian, 48, 60
|
||
|
||
Microliths, 87;
|
||
at Jarmo, 130;
|
||
<20>lunates,<2C> 87;
|
||
trapezoids, 87;
|
||
triangles, 87
|
||
|
||
Minerals used as coloring matter, 66
|
||
|
||
Mine-shafts, 140
|
||
|
||
M<>lefaat, 126, 127
|
||
|
||
Mongoloids, 29, 90
|
||
|
||
Mortars, 114, 118, 127
|
||
|
||
Mounds, how formed, 12
|
||
|
||
Mount Carmel, 11, 33, 52, 59, 64, 69, 113, 114
|
||
|
||
<20>Mousterian man,<2C> 64
|
||
|
||
<20>Mousterian<61> tools, 61, 62;
|
||
of Acheulean tradition, 62
|
||
|
||
Movius, H. L., 47
|
||
|
||
|
||
Natufian, animals in, 114;
|
||
assemblage, 113, 114, 115;
|
||
burials, 114;
|
||
date of, 113
|
||
|
||
Neanderthal man, 29, 30, 31, 56
|
||
|
||
Near East, beginnings of civilization in, 20, 144;
|
||
cave sites, 58;
|
||
climate in Ice Age, 99;
|
||
<20>Fertile Crescent,<2C> 107, 146;
|
||
food-production in, 99;
|
||
Natufian assemblage in, 113-115;
|
||
stone tools, 114
|
||
|
||
Needles, 80
|
||
|
||
Negroid, 34
|
||
|
||
New World, 90
|
||
|
||
Nile River valley, 102, 134;
|
||
floods in, 148
|
||
|
||
Nuclear area, 106, 110;
|
||
in Near East, 107
|
||
|
||
|
||
Obsidian, used for blade tools, 71;
|
||
at Jarmo, 130
|
||
|
||
Ochre, red, with burials, 86
|
||
|
||
Oldowan, 48
|
||
|
||
Old World, 67, 70, 90;
|
||
continental phases in, 18
|
||
|
||
Olorgesailie, 40, 51
|
||
|
||
Ostrich, in China, 54
|
||
|
||
Ovens, 128
|
||
|
||
Oxygen isotopes, 18
|
||
|
||
|
||
Paintings in caves, 83
|
||
|
||
Paleoanthropic man, 50
|
||
|
||
Palestine, burials, 56;
|
||
cave sites, 52;
|
||
types of man, 69
|
||
|
||
Parpallo, 89
|
||
|
||
Patjitanian, 45, 47
|
||
|
||
Pebble tools, 42
|
||
|
||
Peking cave, 54;
|
||
animals in, 54
|
||
|
||
Peking man, 27, 28, 29, 54, 58
|
||
|
||
Pendants, 80;
|
||
bone, 114
|
||
|
||
Pestle, 114
|
||
|
||
Peterborough, 141;
|
||
assemblage, 141
|
||
|
||
Pictographic signs, 158
|
||
|
||
Pig, wild, 108
|
||
|
||
<20>Piltdown man,<2C> 29
|
||
|
||
Pins, 80
|
||
|
||
Pithecanthropus, 26, 27, 30, 36
|
||
|
||
Pleistocene, 18, 25
|
||
|
||
Plows developed, 123
|
||
|
||
Points, arrow, 76;
|
||
laurel leaf, 78;
|
||
shouldered, 78, 79;
|
||
split-based bone, 80, 82;
|
||
tanged, 76;
|
||
willow leaf, 78
|
||
|
||
Potatoes, in America, 145
|
||
|
||
Pottery, 122, 130, 156;
|
||
decorated, 142;
|
||
painted, 131, 151, 152;
|
||
Susa style, 156;
|
||
in tombs, 141
|
||
|
||
Prehistory, defined, 7;
|
||
range of, 18
|
||
|
||
Pre-neanderthaloids, 30, 31, 37
|
||
|
||
Pre-Solutrean point, 89
|
||
|
||
Pre-Stellenbosch, 48
|
||
|
||
Proto-Literate assemblage, 157-160
|
||
|
||
|
||
Race, 35;
|
||
biological, 36;
|
||
<20>pure,<2C> 16
|
||
|
||
Radioactivity, 9, 10
|
||
|
||
Radioactive carbon dates, 18, 92, 120, 130, 135, 156
|
||
|
||
Redfield, Robert, 38, 49
|
||
|
||
Reed, C. A., 128
|
||
|
||
Reindeer, 94
|
||
|
||
Rhinoceros, 93;
|
||
in cave art, 85
|
||
|
||
Rhodesian man, 32
|
||
|
||
Riss glaciation, 58
|
||
|
||
Rock-shelters, 58;
|
||
art in, 85
|
||
|
||
|
||
Saccopastore, 31
|
||
|
||
Sahara Desert, 34, 102
|
||
|
||
Samarra, 152;
|
||
pottery, 131, 152
|
||
|
||
Sangoan industry, 67
|
||
|
||
Sauer, Carl, 136
|
||
|
||
Sbaikian point, 89
|
||
|
||
Schliemann, H., 11, 12
|
||
|
||
Scotland, 171
|
||
|
||
Scraper, flake, 79;
|
||
end-scraper on blade, 77, 78;
|
||
keel-shaped, 79, 80, 81
|
||
|
||
Sculpture in caves, 83
|
||
|
||
Sebilian III, 126
|
||
|
||
Shaheinab, 135
|
||
|
||
Sheep, wild, 108;
|
||
at Skara Brae, 142;
|
||
in China, 54
|
||
|
||
Shellfish, 142
|
||
|
||
Ship, Ubaidian, 153
|
||
|
||
Sialk, 126, 134;
|
||
assemblage, 134
|
||
|
||
Siberia, 88;
|
||
pathway to New World, 98
|
||
|
||
Sickle, 112, 153;
|
||
blade, 113, 130
|
||
|
||
Silo, 122
|
||
|
||
Sinanthropus, 27, 30, 35
|
||
|
||
Skara Brae, 142
|
||
|
||
Snails used as food, 128
|
||
|
||
Soan, 47
|
||
|
||
Solecki, R., 116
|
||
|
||
Solo (fossil type), 29, 32
|
||
|
||
Solutrean industry, 77
|
||
|
||
Spear, shaft, 78;
|
||
thrower, 82, 83
|
||
|
||
Speech, development of organs of, 25
|
||
|
||
Squash, in America, 145
|
||
|
||
Steinheim fossil skull, 28
|
||
|
||
Stillbay industry, 67
|
||
|
||
Stonehenge, 166
|
||
|
||
Stratification, in caves, 12, 57;
|
||
in sites, 12
|
||
|
||
Swanscombe (fossil type), 11, 28
|
||
|
||
Syria, 107
|
||
|
||
|
||
Tabun, 60, 71
|
||
|
||
Tardenoisian, 97
|
||
|
||
Taro, 107
|
||
|
||
Tasa, 135
|
||
|
||
Tayacian, 47, 59
|
||
|
||
Teeth, pierced, in beads and pendants, 114
|
||
|
||
Temples, 123, 155
|
||
|
||
Tepe Gawra, 156
|
||
|
||
Ternafine, 29
|
||
|
||
Teshik Tash, 69
|
||
|
||
Textiles, 122
|
||
|
||
Thong-stropper, 80
|
||
|
||
Tigris River, floods in, 148
|
||
|
||
Toggle, 80
|
||
|
||
Tomatoes, in America, 145
|
||
|
||
Tombs, megalithic, 141
|
||
|
||
Tool-making, 42, 49
|
||
|
||
Tool-preparation traditions, 65
|
||
|
||
Tools, 62;
|
||
antler, 80;
|
||
blade, 70, 71, 75;
|
||
bone, 66;
|
||
chopper, 47;
|
||
core-biface, 43, 48, 60, 61;
|
||
flake, 44, 47, 51, 60, 64;
|
||
flint, 80, 127;
|
||
ground stone, 68, 127;
|
||
handles, 94;
|
||
pebble, 42, 43, 48, 53;
|
||
use of, 24
|
||
|
||
Touf (mud wall), 128
|
||
|
||
Toynbee, A. J., 101
|
||
|
||
Trade, 130, 155, 162
|
||
|
||
Traders, 167
|
||
|
||
Traditions, 15;
|
||
blade tool, 70;
|
||
definition of, 51;
|
||
interpretation of, 49;
|
||
tool-making, 42, 48;
|
||
chopper-tool, 47;
|
||
chopper-chopping tool, 45;
|
||
core-biface, 43, 48;
|
||
flake, 44, 47;
|
||
pebble tool, 42, 48
|
||
|
||
Tool-making, prehistory of, 42
|
||
|
||
Turkey, 107, 108
|
||
|
||
|
||
Ubaid, 153;
|
||
assemblage, 153-155
|
||
|
||
Urnfields, 168, 169
|
||
|
||
|
||
Village-farming community era, 105, 119
|
||
|
||
|
||
Wad B, 72
|
||
|
||
Wadjak, 34
|
||
|
||
Warka phase, 156;
|
||
assemblage, 156
|
||
|
||
Washburn, Sherwood L., 36
|
||
|
||
Water buffalo, domestication of, 107
|
||
|
||
Weidenreich, F., 29, 34
|
||
|
||
Wessex, 166, 167
|
||
|
||
Wheat, wild, 108;
|
||
partially domesticated, 127
|
||
|
||
Willow leaf point, 78
|
||
|
||
Windmill Hill, 138;
|
||
assemblage, 138, 140
|
||
|
||
Witch doctors, 68
|
||
|
||
Wool, 112;
|
||
in garments, 167
|
||
|
||
Writing, 158;
|
||
cuneiform, 158
|
||
|
||
W<>rm I glaciation, 58
|
||
|
||
|
||
Zebu cattle, domestication of, 107
|
||
|
||
Zeuner, F. E., 73
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
* * * * * *
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Transcriber<EFBFBD>s note:
|
||
|
||
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
|
||
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
|
||
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|
||
|
||
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|
||
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|
||
|
||
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
|
||
|
||
Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.
|
||
|
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|
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|
||
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|
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