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Is there pre-history?
Stella Souvatzi, Adnan Baysal and Emma L. Baysal
History
Human history is much more than just an irreversible sequence of events moving in a direction or towards some goal, a series of causes and effects, a linear narrative of ‘progress’ or the analysis of written records. History is a process through which people construct their relations to each other and their understandings of the world in diverse cultural and social contexts and the multiple scales of space and time at which this happens; an outcome of human agency and “an awareness that social relations are shaped by individual or collective action” (Gosden and Lock 1998: 5); a mode of structuring time; and a meaningful way for people to relate past, present and future and to make sense of this relationship.
History is much deeper in time than the temporally shallow period since the emergence of (systematic) writing in the fourth millennium BCE, traditionally associated with the emergence of states and ‘complex’ societies and commonly considered as the starting point of ordered human progress. The equation of history with written records, or the notion of history as textual representation alone, not only devalues all other types of historical evidence, but it also dismisses the rich complexity and diversity of hundreds of thousands of years of human history, reducing it to the last few millennia. It also disregards the partiality and incompleteness that may be involved in written evidence (cf. Bayliss and Whittle, this volume). Inextricably bound up in people’s actions and interactions, history extends well beyond written records to the very first human societies. It is embedded in human existence and it is closely intertwined with the entire presence of humankind. There is no society without history. As the archaeologist Julia Hendon (2010: 17) succinctly puts it, history is universal but culturally constructed; that is, all societies have a sense of history; it is how they define the concept that differs.
Equally problematic is the notion of history as directional, teleological and goal-directed and as “defined by the laws governing the patterns of progress” (Smail and Shryock 2013: 717), a progress equated, moreover, with social complexity as inequality or hierarchy and with technological advancement. This is a Eurocentric model for thinking about history that involves prejudices stemming from 19th-century metaphors and the Victorian conceptualizations of time as linear progression. Coupled with the emergence in the 20th century of neo-evolutionism, functionalism, positivism and determinism, these views have led, inevitably, to a series of false dichotomies: modern vs. traditional, and dynamic vs. static societies; history vs. myth or memory (e.g. see critiques in Chapman 2014; Gosden and Lock 1998; Hendon 2010: 14–18; Schmidt, this volume); subject vs. object; culture vs. agency and so on. Clearly, there are severe limitations in using such top-down and ahistorical perspectives to develop a comprehensive history of past events. Apart from disregarding historical context, they effectively dismiss non-Western societies as being not just outside history but incapable of progress. Unlike the assumptions of such perspectives, no society just exists outside history, nor is history something that happens somewhere outside societies and to which societies merely respond.
History is a polysemic and encompassing concept, susceptible to multiple understandings, expressed in various ways and taking various forms. As Crossland (2015: 19–20) epitomizes it, by ‘history’ we can mean all kinds of historical sources, including oral histories, remembering over time, national heritage and archaeological finds; the historical narratives or how the past is reconstructed; as well as ‘disappeared’ past events, acts, broader practices, beliefs and processes, mediated through material traces. We also use the term ‘history’ to discuss a plethora of intangible things such as the development of a social phenomenon, ideas or thought (e.g. ‘history of religion’, ‘history of philosophy’) or even to narrate daily events and to commemorate personal lived experiences.
History therefore is a fundamental subject of research across a wide range of disciplines concerned with human action and the human past, notably archaeology, history and anthropology, but also philosophy, sociology, human geography and philology among others. Strangely however, history also is a “fragmented subject” (Shryock and Smail 2011a: 3) when it comes to disciplinary co-operation and the unbounded flow of intellectual knowledge (cf. Gamble 2014: 2; Hann 2012: 27–31; also Corfield, and Watkins, this volume). After the postmodernist critiques in the 1980s, and particularly since the 2000s, a new interest in history has emerged in archaeology and its related disciplines, with renewed coverage and self-reflexive criticisms, stressing the relational character of human history, rejecting dualisms and exploring theoretically diverse interpretative schemes (e.g. Corfield 2007; Evans 1997; Gaddis 2002; Hodder 2012; Robb and Pauketat 2013b; Shryock and Smail 2011b; Smail and Shryock 2013; Taylor 2008). However, this epistemological shift has not brought archaeology, anthropology and history together into an effective dialogue. Instead, the flow between the three disciplines continues to be one way: while archaeology has benefited from ideas of anthropology and history repeatedly over the years, anthropology and history continue to pay limited attention to archaeological scholarship, despite regular efforts to redress the balance (e.g. Corfield, this volume; Garrow and Yarrow 2010; Gosden 1999; Hann 2012; Shankland 2012). This is surprising, given not only archaeology’s long disciplinary experience with deep time, but also the shared themes, concerns, theoretical influences and critiques in the three disciplines. It is even ironic given that in the conventional academia of the Western world and the institutional frameworks within which scholars study the past, archaeology is still commonly found in a single department or faculty with history and/or anthropology.
In archaeology, Knapp (1992a: 3–4) located the roots of the problem hindering interdisciplinary dialogue deep in the rift between the sciences and the humanities, developed in the 19th century (and further reinforced by the positivist, determinist and anti-historical tenets of the ‘New Archaeology’ in the 1960s and 1970s). More recently Gamble (2014: 1–3) has proposed that history, and particularly ‘deep history’, provides an ideal opportunity to move away from fission and towards fusion, inviting participation from archaeological, anthropological and historical research (cf. “Big History project” in Corfield, this volume).
In anthropology, despite the “rediscovery of history” (Robb and Pauketat 2013b: 7) since the 1950s, it is still argued that the continuing anthropological presentism and functionalism flattens the past into the present (e.g. Filippucci 2010: 70, 72). The relationship between the past and the present has always been a point of debate between anthropologists and archaeologists (e.g. Adam and Kemp, this volume; Feuchtwang and Rowlands 2010; Gosden 1999: 167–171; Ingold 1983). Ingold (1983: 5) argued that a major obstacle to an integration of archaeological and anthropological approaches lies in their embodiment of contrary notions of time, i.e. long vs. short term, and linear vs. cyclical time (also Shryock and Smail 2011a: 3–4; but see Lucas 2015; Olivier 2011; and Schmidt, this volume for alternative archaeological approaches to time).
More surprising is that a similar flattening of the past seems to occur within the discipline of history. Smail and Shryock (2013: 709; cf. Corfield, this volume; Guldi and Armitage 2014: 50, 59–60, 87) remark that historical research has narrowed dramatically in scope over the past few decades, concentrating in the recent past and in ‘modern’ times, i.e. in colonial and postcolonial societies, to an extent that modernity seems to have become the “key concept for general history”. Two consequences of this are the present loss of history’s ability to think comparatively (Smail and Shryock 2013: 728) and its reluctance to formulate analytical frames for big history (Shryock and Smail 2011a: 4). As a result, the boundary between historical and archaeological knowledge persists, and was evident in the preparation of this volume, for which it was difficult to find historians as contributors. This preoccupation with the modern and the postmodern may ultimately be another face of the earlier Western models for history and the tendency to fragment the past into an historical and a non-historical age or to make all pre-modern cultures inconsequential. In turn, the idea that only moderns have history implies that contemporary analysts are the only ones capable of recognizing a (temporal) difference between past and present of events, and of preserving the knowledge of historical events (Hendon 2010: 16).
Finally, history, especially as representation and as long-term narratives, is an ideological thing, not an objective and politically neutral one. History studies themselves have not been shaped outside history; they have grown out of earlier perspectives and specific research agendas. A consideration of this kind of history is important for a fuller understanding of the tendency to divide the past into history and ‘pre-history’ and for finally overcoming this divide.
Pre-history
As editors of this volume and authors of this chapter we all three identify as prehistorians and archaeologists. In so doing we acknowledge that we occupy a particular academic space and generally operate within a defined structure of the distant human past. The development of this construction of the past lies with those who came before us; we have walked into a pre-existing framework of thought about time and space. Taken at face value the use of the word ‘prehistory’, according to its dictionary definition, implies strictly the time before writing. To understand the discipline in which we work – indeed to question the very nature of the field – is to think about prehistory as an opposition. Pre-history as the time when history wasn’t, or as Smail and Shryock (2013: 711) describe, “The ‘pre’ is a shadow cast by modern things, a space of simplified contrasts that is noticeable yet encourages inattention”.
The coining of the term prehistory to mean the period before the appearance of a written record by Daniel Wilson in 1851 came with the caution that there was a significant difference between understanding a culture from material culture or approaching it via written records (Trigger 1989: 83). The beginnings of the use of the term prehistory lie in the beginning of our understanding of deep time in the early to mid-19th century (Taylor 2008: 2) that led to “a profound change of consciousness” and “a conceptual innovation that functioned as a protective barrier between remote antiquity and a set of scholarly techniques that was applicable only to a recent sliver of the human past” (Shryock et al. 2011: 21). Timescales caused a tension between the needs of the archaeological and the religious communities in the early days of prehistory’s use. Prehistory has since concertinaed outwards from a short Biblical chronology to the almost unimaginable lengths that we now know. The combination of the Three Age System and the term prehistory serve to equate the passage of time with major technological or social changes (see Hadji and Souvatzi 2014 for discussion of time and change) to support an evolutionary increase in complexity.
Just as prehistoric archaeology saw different processes of conception and development according to geographical region, such as the early advancement of the discipline in Scandinavia, Scotland and Switzerland (Trigger 1989: 84), prehistory is still affected by politics and academic ideology (Taylor 2008: 3). The scope of prehistory in a British or American University environment is not the same as it is, for instance, in a Turkish or German one, where protohistory intervenes at the beginning of the Bronze Age providing a ‘soft’ transition into history. Indeed both Clark (1977) and Scarre (2005; see also Taylor 2008 for discussion) also included early states, perhaps acknowledging the ephemeral nature of early written records. Approach, of course, relates in part to regional differences in the relationship between the defined stages of cultural development and the introduction of the written text – there is no single or consistent formula for this relationship – indeed a small geographical area may be host to both literate and highly historical groups and illiterate ‘others’ who are viewed from afar by those writing texts (see Linke 2017 for a description of how written records from two ‘sides’ tell different stories). Clark considers both the temporal and geographical dimensions, concluding that “almost the whole of human history is prehistoric in the technical sense” and that “vast territories remained ‘prehistoric’ until ‘discovered’ by western man in recent centuries” (Clark 1977: xvii). Nowhere has the differentiation between prehistoric archaeology and historical archaeology been more pronounced than in North America, where until recently the division was based on Native American and colonial European populations (see Lightfoot 1995: 202 for discussion).
Gamble (2014: 152) has recently argued strongly that the term ‘pre-history’ has had its day, citing Smail and Shryock’s (2013: 713) discussion of the nature of the ‘pre’ as something that is an endlessly movable and justifiable binary used according to the interests of the individual scholar and the needs of modernity. Taylor (2008: 1) notes a possible distinction between archaeology and prehistory in which archaeology is the analytical tool and prehistory is the narrative constructed afterwards, making prehistory akin to history in its conception. In this case archaeologists must take more responsibility for their agency in the writing of the narrative and their understanding of scale, and move away from the “sterile distinction that is often drawn between object- and text-centred history” (Gamble 2014: 153).
The identification of prehistory as the time before writing implies that the arrival of writing fundamentally changed several variables in the human condition, primarily allowing people to record their lives, thoughts, victories and enmities. The matter of both which things were written down and which and whether those things have survived until the present – as Taylor (2008: 10) conceives it, whether works such as the Iliad were accepted or rejected and the degree to which Homer and the oral tradition effected the way in which they were written – is an important area of debate. Early written records deal with a very limited range of subject matter, and the origins of writing cause an awkward tension between the treatment of sites or levels with and without tablet archives (as discussed by Taylor 2008: 5). The beginning of history (and the end of prehistory) does not occur at the same time even within a single geographical location if the nature of early writing, levels of literacy and chosen subject matter are considered along with the degree to which our knowledge of the past is informed by those archives in contrast to the accompanying archaeological data (see Kulakoğlu and Kangal 2010 for the situation at Kanesh).
If history is fundamentally tied to written records, what does the history in prehistory mean? This inevitably changes according to the nature of the archaeological discipline. At its inception there was little data and the historical narrative of prehistory was based on a schematic development of human society, through social evolution that led towards civilization, with cities, social hierarchy and institutionalized organization and placing complexity in opposition to simplicity. This was, of necessity, a grand narrative, thought to find parallels in many different regions of the world and without any reference to the histories of individuals or communities but only ‘cultures’ (for discussion see Sherratt 1995 and for examples Johnson and Earle 1987; White 1959; Upham 1990).
Our ability to research and write about the distant past has changed enormously since the writing of the grand historical narratives and this has transformed the way that prehistoric cultures are thought about, studied and narrated. The level of detail that can now be achieved in excavation may not vary between prehistoric and historic assemblages and scientific approaches to the archa...
