People of the Earth

An Introduction to World Prehistory

Brian M. Fagan, Nadia Durrani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351757645
• Edition: 15
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

People of the Earth is a narrative account of the prehistory of humankind from our origins over 3 million years ago to the first pre-industrial civilizations, beginning about 5, 000 years ago. This is a global prehistory, which covers prehistoric times in every corner of the world, in a jargon-free style for newcomers to archaeology. Many world histories begin with the first civilizations. This book starts at the beginning of human history and summarizes the latest research into such major topics as human origins, the emergence and spread of modern humans, the first farming, and the origins of civilization.

People of the Earth is unique in its even balance of the human past, its readily accessible style, and its flowing narrative that carries the reader through the long sweep of our past. The book is highly illustrated, and features boxes and sidebars describing key dating methods and important archaeological sites.

This classic world prehistory sets the standard for books on the subject and is the most widely used prehistory textbook in the world. It is aimed at introductory students in archaeology and anthropology taking survey courses on the prehistoric past, as well as more advanced readers. It will also appeal to students of human responses to climatic and environmental change.

1	Introducing World Prehistory

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Archaeology and Prehistory

The Beginnings of World Prehistory

Who Needs the Past?

Studying Culture and Culture Change

Primary Cultural Processes

Theoretical Approaches: Culture as Adaptation

Theoretical Approaches: Evolutionary Ecology and Hunter-Gatherers

Theoretical Approaches: People as Agents of Change

The two men paused in front of the doorway that bore the seals of the long-dead pharaoh. They had waited six long years, from 1917 to 1922, for this moment. Silently, Howard Carter pried a hole through the ancient plaster. Hot air rushed out of the small cavity and massaged his face. Carter shone a flashlight through the hole and peered into the tomb. Gold objects swam in front of his eyes, and he was struck dumb with amazement.

Lord Carnarvon moved impatiently behind him as Carter remained silent.

“Can you see anything?” he asked, hoarse with excitement.

“Yes, wonderful things,” whispered Carter as he stepped back from the doorway.

They soon broke down the door. In a daze of wonderment, Carter and Carnarvon wandered through the antechamber of Tutankhamun’s tomb. They fingered golden funerary beds, admired beautifully inlaid chests, and examined the pharaoh’s chariots stacked against the wall. Gold was everywhere—on wooden statues, inlaid on thrones and boxes, in jewelry, even on children’s stools (Reeves, 1990). Soon Tutankhamun was known as the golden pharaoh, and archaeology as the domain of buried treasure and royal sepulchers (Figure 1.1). ■

The White House, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, c. a.d. 1200.

Gold, silver, lost civilizations, unsolved mysteries, grinning skeletons—all are part of the romantic world of archaeology in most people’s minds. Archaeologists seem like adventurers, digging into pyramids and finding long-forgotten inscriptions in remote places. Like Indiana Jones of movie fame, we seem to be students of sunken continents and great migrations, experts on epic journeys and powerful civilizations. A century ago, many archaeologists were indeed adventurers. Even as late as the 1870s, you could go out digging in Southwest Asia and find a long-lost civilization. German businessman turned archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was convinced that Homer’s Troy had existed. Armed with a copy of the Iliad, he went to Turkey and cut great trenches into the ancient mounds at Hissarlik in northwest Turkey. Schliemann found the remains of nine cities stratified one atop the other and announced that the seventh was Homer’s Troy (Traill, 1995). His discoveries caused an international sensation. So did Frenchman Emil de Sarzec when he unearthed Sumer in desolate southern Mesopotamia, a civilization that soon turned out to be one of the earliest in the world and the society where the Flood legend in Genesis probably originated (Fagan and Durrani, 2016) (Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.1 Howard Carter works on the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, 1922. Photography by Egyptian Expedition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Today, however, the excitement of the detective story has replaced the fascination of great adventure. Fictional detectives take a handful of clues and solve apparently insoluble murders. Archaeologists take a multitude of small and apparently trivial archaeological finds and use them to answer basic questions about past human behavior.

FIGURE 1.2 The famous “Flood Tablet” from the Assyrian king Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh. The tablet, found by epigrapher George Smith in 1873, records the story of a flood that bears a remarkable resemblance to the one described in Genesis. This was a copy of a much earlier Sumerian legend which dates from long before the writing down of the Old Testament. Copyright The British Museum.

The twentieth century saw archaeology turn from a casual treasure hunt into a complex and demanding science (Fagan, 1985, 2005b). There have been dramatic discoveries by the dozens: Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922; the royal cemetery at Ur in Iraq in 1928; the spectacular early human fossils discovered by the Leakey family in East Africa during the last quarter of the century; and the magnificent royal burials in China and Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. Although these finds have stirred the popular imagination, archaeologists have been engaged in a less conspicuous but just as fascinating adventure of discovery—through over 3 million years of the human past.

People of the Earth takes you on a journey through these 3 million years, from the origins of the first humans through the evolution of modern humanity—ourselves—to the last 5,000 years, when literate civilizations appeared on earth. This is a book about the prehistory of humankind.

Archaeology and Prehistory

Contrary to popular belief, archaeologists do not study dinosaurs, for ancient fossil animals are the scholarly province of paleontologists. Archaeologists are anthropologists. Anthropology is the biological and cultural study of all humanity, ancient and modern. Cultural (or social) anthropologists are typically concerned with living societies, whereas archaeologists usually study the human cultures and societies of the past. (No attempt is made to describe the basic principles, methods, and theoretical approaches of archaeology in this book. For information, the reader should consult one of the following widely available college texts: Fagan and Durrani, 2018; Renfrew and Bahn, 2016; Sharer and Ashmore, 2013; Thomas and Kelly, 2017.)

A British archaeologist once described archaeology as “the science of rubbish,” a somewhat apt description, for archaeologists do indeed spend much of their time delving into the garbage heaps and middens of long-vanished human societies. Archaeology is the study of past human behavior based on surviving material finds. These material remains come in many forms: as crude or finely made stone artifacts tens of thousands, even millions, of years old; as durable pot fragments from clay vessels used by early farmers; as house foundations; as seeds and broken food bones; in the form of cave paintings; and, when preservation conditions permit, as wooden artifacts, textiles, or human corpses. All these finds constitute the archaeological record, the archives of the past, which can be made up of surviving finds resulting from ancient human behavior. Reconstructing this behavior from such fragmentary records requires great scientific skill, insight, and creativity. Imagine trying to reconstruct twentieth-century life from a handful of artifacts, including two broken plates, a spark plug, a computer keyboard, three cow bones, and an aluminum beer can tab, and you will realize the challenge facing students of the remote past (Figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.3 Excavated prehistoric houses at Skara Brae, Orkney Islands, Scotland, occupied c. 3000 b.c.

We use the word remote deliberately. Though some archaeologists deal with sites from the last (and even this) century, most of the archaeological research described in this book deals with biological and cultural developments thousands of years back in the past, with long-vanished environments and societies that lived on earth when it was very different. Few people realize just how much the world has changed during the past 3 million years, and especially during the past 780,000 years, when the constant climatic fluctuations of the Ice Age have kept global climate in a state of transition from extreme cold to warmer conditions (see Chapters 2 to 4). Only 15,000 years ago, the world was in the grip of a major glacial episode that covered much of northern Europe and North America with vast ice sheets, lowered sea levels everywhere by about 91 m (300 feet), and resulted in open, treeless plains from western France to Siberia. England was part of the European continent; Siberia was joined to Alaska; and Borneo was part of mainland Southeast Asia. The human inhabitants of this late Ice Age world lived on a planet unimaginably different from our own, which makes it doubly hard for us to reconstruct and explain their societies.

For the past 5,000 years, humans have used writing as a means of recording business transactions, making inventories of commodities, and measuring the passage of time (Robinson, 2015). From these simple records developed far more sophisticated writings: primordial epics and poems; king lists; histories and literature itself; written archives preserved on clay tablets and papyrus reed documents or as inscriptions on stone and eventually on parchment and paper. Such archives are the realm of historians, scholars who study the written records of the past.

History is very different from archaeology. Although eclectic in their interests, historians work with documents. These may be chronicles of individual deeds, or of great kings and lords anxious to trumpet their triumphs or justify their doings. They also study more prosaic archives: the records of royal palaces and governments, the day-to-day transactions of officialdom, to gain wider perspectives on every aspect of society from religious beliefs to food supplies, trade, and social interactions.

In contrast, archaeology is, most of the time, entirely anonymous. Its chronologies are not the years, even hours and minutes, found in history books but are much larger chunks of time, rarely shorter than a half century or a generation. The archaeologist’s past is usually without written records to fill in vital gaps. Even when documents are available to amplify historical records on, say, the Egypt of Pharaoh Rameses II or the rituals celebrated by a Maya lord, archaeology brings a unique quality to the past. Only a few people in ancient societies were literate, so the scope of written records is immediately limited. But archaeologists study artifacts and food remains, a dispassionate record of all ancient human behavior, whether that of a monarch or an anonymous sea captain and his crew wrecked on the cliffs of southern Turkey. By excavating the humble dwellings of common folk or the middens of imposing palaces, also studying burials and human remains, among other finds, archaeologists add new dimensions to the study of even societies that are well documented with written records of all kinds (see the Site box—The Amesbury Archer).

Archaeologists make a clear distinction between two major types of archaeology:

• Text-aided archaeology is archaeology practiced with the aid of historical documents. Many of the civilizations described in Parts IV and V of this book involve specialist archaeologists, such as Assyriologists, Egyptologists, or Mayanists, who have at least some expertise in ancient scripts. Text-aided archaeology is confined to societies that have flourished during the past 5,000 years and sometimes provides fascinating insights into the people of the past. At the Roman frontier settlement at Vindolanda by Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, slivers of bark paper dating to a.d. 95 to 105 have preserved intimate details of life on the wall. We learn that only 265 men, including 1 centurion, were at Vindolanda itself and “fit and well.” The rest were serving elsewhere. Store inventories reveal allocations to soldiers and punishments. Occasionally, the correspondence takes a more personal note. “Why have you not written back to me for such a long time about our parents?” laments a soldier named Chrautius to an old messmate in distant London. “I have sent you . . . woolen socks . . . two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants,” writes a friend of a Vindolanda officer, who was thankful for the gift. There are even fragments of school tablets, one a copy of a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, with the notation in another hand: “sloppy work” (Birley, 2009).

• Prehistoric archaeology is the archaeology of ancient societies that were nonliterate. The term période anti-historique was coined by French archaeologist Paul Tournal in 1833 for the period of human history extending back before the time of written documents (Grayson, 1983). In time, this phrase shrank to prehistory, and it now encompasses the enormous span of human cultural evolution that extends back at least 3.3 million years.

People of the Earth is about both prehistoric and text-aided archaeology. We draw on archaeology, geological evidence, linguistic and biological data, oral traditions, historical records, and many other sources of information about 3 million years of the human past, sometimes called world prehistory. Some people, notably Native Americans, object to the word prehistoric. They feel it implies racial inferiority and expresses the belief that people without written documents have no worthwhile history. These objections are part of a wider debate about the ownership of the past and about archaeology’s role in modern society (see the section “Who Needs the Past?” in this chapter).

Prehistory and prehistoric are convenient, and long-established, scientific terms without any pejorative implications. Although it is true that a century ago many scholars classified human societies in racist terms, those days are long gone. Modern archaeologists study both literate and nonliterate societies and how they changed without making any value judgments as to their superiority or inferiority to the archaeologists’ own society. T...