Clive Gamble - Böcker

To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestral stages that brought us to this point. The core to that story has been the role of evolving cognition -the social brain - in mediating the changes in behaviour that we see in the archaeological record. This volume brings together two powerful approaches - the social brain hypothesis and the concept of the distributed mind. The volume compares perspectives on these two approaches from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. A particular focus is on the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost three million years of artefact and tool uses provides the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, social networks and the politics of local, everyday interaction in small-world societies. A second focus is on how, during the course of hominin evolution, increasingly large spatially distributed communities created stresses that threatened social cohesion. This volume offers the possibility of new insights into the evolution of human cognition and social lives that will further our understanding of the relationship between mind and world.

One afternoon in late April 1859 two geologically minded businessmen, John Evans and Joseph Prestwich, found and photographed the proof for great human antiquity. Their evidence -- small, hand-held stone tools found in the gravel quarries of the Somme among the bones of ancient animals -- shattered the timescale of Genesis and kicked open the door for a time revolution in human history.In the space of a calendar year, and at a furious pace, the relationship between humans and time was forever changed. This interpretation of deep human history was shaped by the optimistic decade of the 1850s, the Victorian Heyday in the age of equipoise. Proving great human antiquity depended on matching the principles of geology with the personal values of scientific zeal and perseverance; qualities which time-revolutionaries such as Evans and Prestwich had in abundance. Their revolution was driven by a small group of weekend scientists rather than some great purpose, and it proved effective because of its bonds of friendship stiffened by scientific curiosity and business acumen.Clive Gamble explores the personalities of these time revolutionaries and their scientific co-collaborators and adjudicators -- Darwin, Falconer, Lyell, Huxley, and the French antiquary Boucher de Perthes -- as well as their sisters, wives, and nieces Grace McCall, Civil Prestwich, and Fanny Evans. As with all scientific discoveries getting there was often circuitous and messy; the revolutionaries changed their minds and disagreed with those who should have been allies. Gamble's chronological narrative reveals each step from discovery to presentation, reception, consolidation, and widespread acceptance, and considers the impact of their work on the scientific advances of the next 160 years and on our fascination with the shaping power of time.

The concept of the social brain has become a popular topic in the last decade and has generated interest within the research community and contributed to a wide public examination of human culture, nature, mind, and instinct, as well as aspects of social and business organisation. At its core, the hypothesis that our social life drove the dramatic enlargement of our brain, bridges the dimensions of our evolutionary history and our contemporary experience. This has been the focus of a seven-year research project funded by the British Academy, the British Academy Centenary Research Project (otherwise known as the Lucy Project). The main aim of the Lucy Project has been to explore these two axes in an integrated set of studies whose focus was to link archaeology and, in its broadest sense, evolutionary psychology, which offers powerful, new explanatory insights. This approach redresses the past contribution from archaeology towards the study of evolutionary issues and ties evolutionary psychology into the extensive historical data from the past, allowing us to escape the confined timeframe of the comparatively recent human mind. In this volume of published and new papers, the contributors explore the question of just what it is that makes us so different, and why and when these uniquely human capacities evolved.

When was the human threshold crossed? What is the evidence for evolving humans and their emerging humanity? This volume explores in a global overview the archaeology of the Middle Pleistocene, 800,000 to 130,000 years ago when evidence for innovative cultural behaviour appeared. The evidence shows that the threshold was crossed slowly, by a variety of human ancestors, and was not confined to one part of the Old World. Crossing the Human Threshold examines the changing evidence during this period for the use of place, landscape and technology. It focuses on the emergence of persistent places, and associated developments in tool use, hunting strategies and the control of fire, represented across the Old World by deeply stratified cave sites. These include the most important sites for the archaeology of human origins in the Levant, South Africa, Asia and Europe, presented here as evidence for innovation in landscape-thinking during the Middle Pleistocene. The volume also examines persistence at open locales through a cutting-edge review of the archaeology of Northern France and England.Crossing the Human Threshold is for the worldwide community of students and researchers studying early hominins and human evolution. It presents new archaeological data. It frames the evidence within current debates to understand the differences and similarities between ourselves and our ancient ancestors.

This book explores new approaches to the remarkably detailed information that archaeologists now have for the study of our early ancestors. Rather than explaining the archaeology of stones and bones as the product of group decisions, the contributors investigate how individual action created social life. This challenge to the accepted standpoint of the Palaeolithic brings new models and theories into the period; innovations that are matched by the resolution of data preserving individual action among the stones and bones. The volume brings together examples from recent excavations such as Boxgrove, Schöningen and Blombos Cave and the analyses of artefacts from Middle and Early Upper Pleistocene excavations in Europe, Africa and Asia.

This book explores new approaches to the remarkably detailed information that archaeologists now have for the study of our early ancestors. Rather than explaining the archaeology of stones and bones as the product of group decisions, the contributors investigate how individual action created social life. This challenge to the accepted standpoint of the Palaeolithic brings new models and theories into the period; innovations that are matched by the resolution of data preserving individual action among the stones and bones. The volume brings together examples from recent excavations such as Boxgrove, Schöningen and Blombos Cave and the analyses of artefacts from Middle and Early Upper Pleistocene excavations in Europe, Africa and Asia.

When and how did the brains of our hominin ancestors become human minds? When and why did our capacity for language or art, music and dance evolve? It is the contention of this pathbreaking and provocative book that it was the need for early humans to live in ever-larger social groups, and to maintain social relations over ever-greater distances – the ability to ‘think big’ – that drove the enlargement of the human brain and the development of the human mind. This ‘social brain hypothesis’, put forward by evolutionary psychologists such as Robin Dunbar, one of the authors of this book, can be tested against archaeological and fossil evidence, as archaeologists Clive Gamble and John Gowlett show in the second part of Thinking Big. Along the way, the three authors touch on subjects as diverse and diverting as the switch from finger-tip grooming to vocal grooming or the crucial importance of making fire for the lengthening of the social day. As this remarkable book shows, it seems we still inhabit social worlds that originated deep in our evolutionary past – by the fireside, in the hunt and on the grasslands of Africa.

This 1999 book re-examines traditional assumptions about the nature of social relationships in Greek households during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Through detailed exploration of archaeological evidence from individual houses, Lisa Nevett identifies a recognisable concept of the citizen household as a social unit, and suggests that this was present in numerous Greek cities. She argues that in such households relations between men and women, traditionally perceived as dominating the domestic environment, should be placed within the wider context of domestic activity. Although gender was an important cultural factor which helped to shape the organisation of the house, this was balanced against other influences, notably the relationship between household members and outsiders. At the same time the role of the household in relation to the wider social structures of the polis, or city state, changed rapidly through time, with the house itself coming to represent an important symbol of personal prestige.

This book studies the formation of complex societies in prehistoric China during the Neolithic and early state periods, c. 7000-1500 BC. Archaeological materials are interpreted through anthropological perspectives, using systematic analytic methods in settlement and burial patterns. Both agency and process are considered in the development of chiefdoms and in the emergence of early states in the Yellow River region. Interrelationships between factors such as mortuary practice, craft specialization, ritual activities, warfare, exchange of elite goods, climatic fluctuations, and environmental changes are emphasized. This study offers a critical evaluation of current archaeological data from Chinese sources, and argues that, although some general tendencies are noted, social changes were affected by multiple factors in no pre-determined sequence. In this most comprehensive study to date, Li Liu attempts to reconstruct developmental trajectories toward early states in Chinese civilization and discusses theoretical implications of Chinese archaeology for the understanding of social evolution.

Drawing upon his own extensive knowledge of European archaeology, Graeme Barker has impressively integrated the full range of archaeological data to produce in this book a masterly account of prehistoric farming in Europe on a unique scale. He makes use of modern archaeological techniques to reconstruct the lives of prehistoric farmers in remarkable detail. Not only do we now have a vivid picture of the prehistoric farmyard, but we know what animals were kept, how they were fed and why they were bred. Evidence for crops grown and techniques of cultivation and husbandry helps recreate the prehistoric landscape. Even the social organisation that determined the use of resources, and provided the crucial stimulus for agricultural change, can be relived. Graeme Barker develops his argument through analogies with the agricultural history of classical and medieval Europe and concludes that today's industrial farmers can learn much from the successes and failures of early European farming.

Since the 1950s, when the phrase 'industrial archaeology' was coined, there has been an enormous growth of interest in what have come to be seen as the monuments of our more recent past. One result of this is that all kinds of old industrial plant, once valued only for what it could produce or do, have been accorded an intrinsic value often tinged with a somewhat incongruous nostalgia. In this book Kenneth Hudson sets out to restore these monuments to their place at the centre of the wider history they embody, social and economic as well as technical. Less than this, he claims, cannot properly be called industrial archaeology. Taking each major industry in turn Mr Hudson provides fully illustrated examples from many countries. By making this a study of world industrial archaeology, Mr Hudson escapes from the idea that the subject is confined to a period roughly denoted by the Industrial Revolution in England.

This study of the changing relationships between burial rituals and social structure in Early Iron Age Greece will be required reading for all archaeologists working with burial evidence, in whatever period. This book differs from many topical studies of state formation in that unique and particular developments are given as much weight as those factors which are common to all early states. The ancient literary evidence and the relevant historical and anthropological comparisons are extensively drawn on in an attempt to explain the transition to the city-state, a development which was to have decisive effects for the subsequent development of European society.

Analysing the material remains left by Maryland's colonists in the eighteenth century in conjunction with historical records and works of art, archaeologists have reconstructed the daily life of the aristocratic British family of the governor of Maryland. In this large household people from different cultures interacted, and English and West African lifestyles merged. Using this fascinating case-study, Anne Yentsch illustrates the way in which historical archaeology draws on different disciplines to interpret the past.

Following the theoretical perspective of his earlier book, Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process (1985), Dean Arnold's ethnoarchaeological study explores the relationships of ceramic production to society and its environment in the Peruvian Andes. The book traces these contemporary linkages through the production, decoration, and use of pottery and relates them to the analysis and interpretation of ancient ceramic production. Utilizing an ecological approach within a single community, Arnold expands the scope of previous ceramic theory by focusing on the population as the unit of analysis in production and decoration.

In this innovative study, James Whitley examines the relationship between the development of pot style and social changes in the Dark Age of Greece (1100-700 BC). He focuses on Athens where the Protogeometric and Geometric styles first appeared. He considers pot shape and painted decoration primarily in relation to the other relevant features - metal artefacts, grave architecture, funerary rites, and the age and sex of the deceased - and also takes into account different contexts in which these shapes and decorations appear. A computer analysis of grave assemblages supports his view that pot style is an integral part of the collective representations of Early Athenian society. It is a lens through which we can focus on the changing social circumstances of Dark Age Greece. Dr Whitley's approach to the study of style challenges many of the assumptions which have underpinned more traditional studies of Early Greek art.

This innovative analysis of archaeological settlement patterns as a guide to ancient political structure focuses on the Maya of Southeastern Mexico. Working principally with data from the Classic Period in the Rosario Valley, Dr de Montmollin relates problem orientation and theory to themes with wide currency in political anthropolgy. For archaeologists interested in complex societies, the handling of the settlement evidence and the close attention paid to bridging arguments provide valuable guidance on analysing a multiscale settlement record when reconstructing political structure. For Mayanists, the characterization of settlement and political structure is unprecedented in its rigour and scope. The Archaeology of Political Structure thus blends the particular fascination of Maya archaeology with developments of more general interest in anthropological archaeology to make a substantial contribution to the practice and theory of settlement studies within complex societies.

Archaeological research in Sweden and Denmark has uncovered a startling array of evidence over the last 150 years, but until now there has been no comprehensive synthesis and interpretation of the material. An Ethnography of the Neolithic bridges this gap, giving an accessible and up-to-date analysis of a wide range of evidence, from landscapes to monumental tombs to portable artifacts. Christopher Tilley also uses this material as a basis for a provocative and novel reconstruction of late Mesolithic and earlier Neolithic societies in southern Scandinavia, over a period of 3,000 years. His skilful integration of archaeological evidence with new anthropological approaches makes this book an original contribution to an important topic, whose significance stretches outside Scandinavia, and beyond the Neolithic.

Widely known as an innovative figure in contemporary archaeology, Michael Shanks has written a challenging contribution to recent debates on the emergence of the Greek city states in the first millennium BC. He interprets the art and archaeological remains of Korinth to elicit connections between new urban environments, foreign trade, warfare, and the ideology of male sovereignty. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, which draws on an anthropologically informed archaeology, ancient history, art history, material culture studies and structural approaches to the classics, his book raises large questions about the links between design and manufacture, political and social structure, and culture and ideology in the ancient Greek world.

Social archaeology is concerned with how one might use the archaeological record of the present to elucidate how social interactions were ordered in a past society. This requires a meaningful model of society, considerable archaeological data, and a reliable connection between them. A major goal of this book is to improve our understanding of one aspect of social archaeology, the inference of status hierarchy. The first section covers what is involved in social inference, and presents ideas on how it may be done reliably. In the following section, the typological models of Elman Service and Morton Fried are used to clarify certain aspects of ranking. The final section draws together a number of insights concerning the recognition of status inequality. These approaches are given systematic arrangement and evaluated in light of the model of social inference. This arrangement clarifies how they relate to each other, making it easier to see how they may be applied in varied real contexts, and stimulates new ideas for more correlations of ranking.

Jacques Cauvin has spent many years researching the beginnings of the Neolithic in the Near East, excavating key sites and developing new ideas to explain the hugely significant cultural, social and economic changes which transformed mobile hunter-gatherers into the first village societies and farmers in the world. In this book, first published in 2000, the synthesis of his mature understanding of the process beginning around 14,000 years ago challenges ecological and materialist interpretations, arguing for a quite different kind of understanding influenced by ideas of structuralist archaeologists and members of the French Annales school of historians. Defining the Neolithic Revolution as essentially a restructuring of the human mentality, expressed in terms of new religious ideas and symbols, the survey ends around nine thousand years ago, when the developed religious ideology, the social practice of village life and the economy of mixed farming had become established throughout the Near East and east Mediterranean, and spreading powerfully into Europe.

Palaeolithic societies have been a neglected topic in the discussion of human origins. In this book, which succeeds and replaces The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe, published by Cambridge University Press in 1986, Clive Gamble challenges the established view that the social life of Europeans over the 500,000 years of the European Palaeolithic must remain a mystery. In the past forty years archaeologists have recovered a wealth of information from sites throughout the continent. Professor Gamble now introduces a new approach to this material. He examines the archaeological evidence from stone tools, hunting and campsites for information on the scale of social interaction, and the forms of social life. Taking a pan-European view of the archaeological evidence, he reconstructs ancient human societies, and introduces new perspectives on the unique social experience of human beings.

In this study Clive Gamble presents and questions two of the most famous descriptions of change in prehistory. The first is the 'human revolution', when evidence for art, music, religion and language first appears. The second is the economic and social revolution of the Neolithic period. Gamble identifies the historical agendas behind 'origins research' and presents a bold alternative to these established frameworks, relating the study of change to the material basis of human identity. He examines, through artefact proxies, how changing identities can be understood using embodied material metaphors and in two major case-studies charts the prehistory of innovations, asking, did agriculture really change the social world? This is an important and challenging book that will be essential reading for every student and scholar of prehistory.

The societies of the European Bronze Age produced elaborate artifacts and were drawn into a wide trade network extending over the whole of Europe, even though they were economically and politically undiversified. Kristian Kristansen attempts to explain this paradox using a world-systems analysis, and in particular tries to acount for the absence of state formation. He presents his case with a powerful marshalling of the evidence across the whole of Europe and over two millennia. The result is the most coherent overview of this period of European prehistory since the writings of Gordon Childe and Christopher Hawkes. A great strength of this book is the broad European perspective, which allows the author to address some of the larger questions that have been raised in the study of the Bronze Age. It captures the complexity of a prehistorical world at different levels of integration and interaction from local to global.

In this study Clive Gamble presents and questions two of the most famous descriptions of change in prehistory. The first is the 'human revolution', when evidence for art, music, religion and language first appears. The second is the economic and social revolution of the Neolithic period. Gamble identifies the historical agendas behind 'origins research' and presents a bold alternative to these established frameworks, relating the study of change to the material basis of human identity. He examines, through artefact proxies, how changing identities can be understood using embodied material metaphors and in two major case-studies charts the prehistory of innovations, asking, did agriculture really change the social world? This is an important and challenging book that will be essential reading for every student and scholar of prehistory.

Involving contributions from archaeology, geology, ethnography, anthropology and prehistory, The World at 18 000 BP: High Latitudes (first of the two volumes, and originally published in 1990) surveys the world scene 18,000 years ago. Following an introduction (common to the two volumes) on the diversity of human adaptations at the last glacial maximum, Volume 1 covers high latitudes: Europe, Asia and the New World. Volume 2 covers low latitudes: Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and Australasia.The volumes conation contributions from leading specialists on regional records. Each discusses the pertinent environmental settings, archaeological data, and cultural adaptations. This sampler of the way we were 18,000 years ago affords Pleistocene specialists a multidisciplinary conspectus revealing the diversity of past cultural practices as well as the innate universality of human nature. By stressing both the diversity and the similarity in human cultural practices, the authors contribute invaluable data for both theoretical constructs and a sound empirical basis for global culture history. the global nature of the work also reveals the covert biases hitherto present in reconstructions of the past and perceptions of past cultural change.This is a fully international and thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of a key topic for the wide range of disciplines concerned with human prehistory and Quaternary environmental reconstruction.

Involving contributions from archaeology, geology, ethnography, anthropology and prehistory, The World at 18 000 BP: Low Latitudes (second of the two volumes, and originally published in 1990) surveys the world scene 18,000 years ago. Following an introduction (common to the two volumes) on the diversity of human adaptations at the last glacial maximum, Volume 1 covers high latitudes: Europe, Asia and the New World. Volume 2 covers low latitudes: Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and Australasia.The volumes contain contributions from leading specialists on regional records. Each discusses the pertinent environmental settings, archaeological data, and cultural adaptations. This sampler of the way we were 18,000 years ago affords Pleistocene specialists a multidisciplinary conspectus revealing the diversity of past cultural practices as well as the innate universality of human nature. By stressing both the diversity and the similarity in human cultural practices, the authors contribute invaluable data for both theoretical constructs and a sound empirical basis for global culture history. The global nature of the work also reveals the covert biases hitherto present in reconstructions of the past and perceptions of past cultural change.This is a fully international and thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of a key topic for the wide range of disciplines concerned with human prehistory and Quaternary environmental reconstruction.

In this worldwide survey, Clive Gamble explores the evolution of the human imagination, without which we would not have become a global species. He sets out to determine the cognitive and social basis for our imaginative capacity and traces the evidence back into deep human history. He argues that it was the imaginative ability to 'go beyond' and to create societies where people lived apart yet stayed in touch that made us such effective world settlers. To make his case Gamble brings together information from a wide range of disciplines: psychology, cognitive science, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, archaeogenetics, geography, quaternary science and anthropology. He presents a novel deep history that combines the archaeological evidence for fossil hominins with the selective forces of Pleistocene climate change, engages with the archaeogeneticists' models for population dispersal and displacement, and ends with the Europeans' rediscovery of the deep history settlement of the Earth.

In this worldwide survey, Clive Gamble explores the evolution of the human imagination, without which we would not have become a global species. He sets out to determine the cognitive and social basis for our imaginative capacity and traces the evidence back into deep human history. He argues that it was the imaginative ability to 'go beyond' and to create societies where people lived apart yet stayed in touch that made us such effective world settlers. To make his case Gamble brings together information from a wide range of disciplines: psychology, cognitive science, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, archaeogenetics, geography, quaternary science and anthropology. He presents a novel deep history that combines the archaeological evidence for fossil hominins with the selective forces of Pleistocene climate change, engages with the archaeogeneticists' models for population dispersal and displacement, and ends with the Europeans' rediscovery of the deep history settlement of the Earth.