Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (Modern Library Chronicles)

Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (Modern Library Chronicles)

Colin Renfrew

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 0679640975

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In Prehistory, the award-winning archaeologist and renowned scholar Colin Renfrew covers human existence before the advent of written records–which is to say, the overwhelming majority of our time here on earth. But Renfrew also opens up to discussion, and even debate, the term “prehistory” itself, giving an incisive, concise, and lively survey of the past, and how scholars and scientists labor to bring it to light.

Renfrew begins by looking at prehistory as a discipline, particularly how developments of the past century and a half–advances in archaeology and geology; Darwin’s ideas of evolution; discoveries of artifacts and fossil evidence of our human ancestors; and even more enlightened museum and collection curatorship–have fueled continuous growth in our knowledge of prehistory. He details how breakthroughs such as radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis have helped us to define humankind’s past–how things have changed–much more clearly than was possible just a half century ago. Answers for why things have changed, however, continue to elude us, so Renfrew discusses some of the issues and challenges past and present that confront the study of prehistory and its investigators.

In the book’s second part, Renfrew shifts the narrative focus, offering a summary of human prehistory from early hominids to the rise of literate civilization that is refreshingly free from conventional wisdom and grand “unified” theories. The author’s own case studies encompass a vast geographical and chronological range–the Orkney Islands, the Balkans, the Indus Valley, Peru, Ireland, and China–and help to explain the formation and development of agriculture and centralized societies. He concludes with a fascinating chapter on early writing systems, “From Prehistory to History.”

In this invaluable, brief account of human development prior to the last four millennia, Colin Renfrew delivers a meticulously researched and passionately argued chronicle about our life on earth, and our ongoing quest to understand it.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods

Lippincott's Illustrated Q&A Review of Rubin's Pathology (2nd Edition)

Une histoire de tout, ou presque...

Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

Terms of Enlistment (Frontlines, Book 1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

possible to speak of the long sleep of archaeological theory, with little radical discussion of the nature of prehistory. The use of new scientific techniques continued, and the procedures of stratigraphic excavation improved. As we have seen, in the Soviet Union there was a systematic attempt to apply the principles outlined by Karl Marx to the development of human cultures. But the dogmatic approach of the Stalinist era stifled free discussion there, and the Soviet version of Marxist

for age determination in archaeology, geology, geophysics, and other branches of science.” It was an advance that brought about profound changes in archaeology. It may now be seen as the most significant advance in the study of prehistory since the establishment of the antiquity of man nearly a century earlier. The distinguished British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler later related how enthused he felt when first told about it. He was in the company of O.G.S. Crawford, the founder and first

to contemplate that diversity, and perhaps to learn something from it. It is in that sense that the study of prehistory can tell us something of who, or rather what, we are. And despite the successes of a century and a half of archaeological excavation and research, I am not persuaded that the answer is yet a very clear one. In what follows, Part I sets out to review the development of the idea of prehistory and the growth of a scientific discipline centered upon the prehistoric past up to the

behavior, including ritual practice. Half a century ago the very notion of a cognitive archaeology, as applied to prehistoric times, was seen in some quarters as a dubious one. If there were no written records to give a clue as to thought processes, the argument ran, how could one make any valid inferences about them? The subsequent development of various fields of prehistoric archaeology, which can be subsumed under the rubric “cognitive,” now shows this view to have been too cautious. For

complexity for everything else that was done in China. All of this shows that it would be a mistake to privilege the alphabet unduly in assessing the contribution made by different writing systems. And of course, as mentioned earlier, the Japanese script, comparable to the Chinese and ultimately derived from it, has certainly sustained important contributions to theoretic thought, as exemplified by the “six schools” of Buddhist philosophy that flourished in Japan during the Nara period in

Download sample

Download

About admin