Chapter VI: Part 6

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 “devices for making accounts and for remembering accounts.” 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’s possessions. Professor Jacobsen sees writing as a means for overcoming space, time, and the increasing complications of human affairs: “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.”

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

You’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 “first great internationalism,” with flourishing trade, international treaties, and royal marriages between Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hittites. By 1200 B.C., the whole thing had fragmented: “the peoples of the sea were restless in their isles,” 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 “a second degree derived civilization,” 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’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 “Beaker folk” to mean both
archeological assemblage and human physical type. They speak
of a “... tall, heavy-boned, rugged, and round-headed” 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 “folk” in this book with
its usual meaning of standardized physical type. When I use
“folk” 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 “beakerian” 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 “henges” 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.

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 “food-vessel” 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 “heroic” group of aristocrats. Their “heroes” 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.

“THIS ENGLAND”

The range from 1900 to about 1400 B.C. includes the time of development of the archeological features usually called the “Early Bronze Age” 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’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’s inhabitants save a few in the remote highlands, the far north, and the distant islands not yet fully touched by food-production. The “personality of Britain” 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 “Middle Bronze Age,” but in the highland zone they last until after 900 B.C. and are considered to be a specialized highland “Late Bronze Age.” 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.

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’s words: “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.”

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 Tène 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 “lynchets” 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’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 Tène type and also the two-wheeled chariot. Like the Wessex warriors of over a thousand years earlier, they made “heroes’” graves, with their warriors buried in the war-chariots and dressed in full trappings.

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’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, “brochs” (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, “the first man in England whose name we know,” 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’ 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 “... 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.”

In fact, many centuries go by, in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe, before the archeologist’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 “invasions” and “reverberations” 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’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 “Its Influence on Inhabitant and Invader in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times.” 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

In the pages you have read so far, you have been brought through the earliest 99 per cent of the story of man’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 “Venus” 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’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 “pure race” nor did they have “pure” 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 “invasions” and “reverberations.” 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 “pure” British race or a “pure” British culture. We speak of the United States as a “melting pot.” But this is nothing new. Actually, Britain and all the rest of the world have been “melting pots” 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’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’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’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.
“Old World Prehistory: Paleolithic” 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 Europäischen 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.
“Developmental Stages in Ancient Mesopotamia,” _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, François, 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 “henges,” 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-Brünn group, 34

Commont, Victor, 51

Coon, Carlton S., 73

Copper, 134

Corn, in America, 145

Corrals for cattle, 140

“Cradle of mankind,” 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

“Dragon teeth” 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

“Fertile Crescent,” 107, 146

Figurines, “Venus,” 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

Fontéchevade, 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

“Forest folk,” 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 Tène 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

“Man-apes,” 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;
“lunates,” 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

“Mousterian man,” 64

“Mousterian” 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;
“Fertile Crescent,” 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

“Piltdown man,” 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;
“pure,” 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

Würm I glaciation, 58

Zebu cattle, domestication of, 107

Zeuner, F. E., 73

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

In the original book, chapter headings were accompanied by illustrations, sometimes above, sometimes below, and sometimes adjacent. In this eBook those ilustrations always appear below the headings.