Aspects of Prehistory

Aspects of Prehistory

Grahame Clark

ASPECTS OF

PREHISTORY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1970, by

The Regents of the University of California

Second Printing, 1974

First Paperback Edition, 1974

ISBN: 0-520-01584-3 (cloth-bound)

0-520-02630-6 (paper-bound)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-94989

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

1. The Relevance of World Prehistory

2.Material Progress

3.The Dawn of Self-Awareness

Index

Illustrations

PLATES (opposite p. 122)

I. Doodling in clay and paint by early man and chimpanzee: (a) on the cave wall at Altamira, North Spain; (b) on board by chimpanzee Betsy

II. Ivory carving from Brassempouy, France

III. Stone carvings of the female form, ancient and modern: (a) from the Paleolithic site of Kostien- ki, South Russia; (b) by the modern French sculptor Dodeigne

IV. The female form, ancient and modern: (a) front and back of a 5-cm. carving in haematite from

vii

Aspects of Prehistory Ostrava-Petrkovice, Czechoslovakia; (b) bronze relief The Back II by Henri Matisse

FIGURES

1. Representation of Stonehenge in Wiliam Camden’s Britannia

2. G. de Mortillet’s chronological system (1881)

3. Radiocarbon dating of early human settlement in the New World

4. Old World civilizations in the mid-second millennium B.c. and the second and third centuries A.D.

5. The growth of the brain in the course of primate evolution

6. Wooden spears of Middle Pleistocene age: (upper) pointed tip from Clacton, England; (lower) more or less complete spear from Lehringen, Saxony, Germany

7. Map showing approximate extents of modes 1 and 2 in lithic technology

8. Map showing approximate extents of modes 3 and 4 of Old World lithic technology

9. Traffic in obsidian from certain sources in central and eastern Anatolia to the Zagros and the Levant

10. Weapon heads (spears, harpoons, and arrows) from mode 4 assemblages in Europe

11. Plan of refuse from a mode-3 horizon at Molodova I in the valley of the Dnestr, South Russia

12. The evolution of maize in the Valley of Mexico

13. Bone reaping-knife with flint insets from the Levant (Natufian)

14. Symbols for ox, earth, and heaven in the picto- graphic and historic scripts of Assyria and China

15. Mousterian (mode 3) burial at Teshik-Tash

16. Decorated bracelets: (upper) bronze bracelet decorated in La Tène I style, France; (lower) bracelet of mammoth ivory from the late Pleistocene of Mezine, South Russia

17. The graphic capabilities of chimpanzee and human infant: (a, b) early drawings by young chimpanzee Joni (a) and a small boy Roody (b); (c) later drawing by Joni with greater control but no imagemaking; (d) later drawing by Roody with distinct image

18. Outline of bison’s head scored in clay at Altamira, North Spain

19. Astronomical planning of Maya structures at Uax- actun, Guatemala

20. Plan of Stonehenge I

21. Diagram showing principal alignments at Stonehenge I, each directed to some significant position of the sun or the moon

22. Egyptian pyramids of the Old Kingdom: (upper) stepped pyramid at Sakkara and (lower) great pyramid at Gizeh

23. The White Temple at Uruk, Mesopotamia, fourth millennium B.C.

Preface

The worldwide application of prehistoric research has

made it possible for the first time to visualize the ante-

cedents and emergence both of preliterate societies and

of all the various civilizations of men. No one can survey

so vast a panorama without meditating both on its mean-

ing for ourselves and on the processes by which prehis-

tory has unfolded. One effect of the new picture of the

past that has recently come into view has been to narrow

down and even in some respects eliminate the gap be-

tween the universal concepts of science and technology

and the parochial limitations of histories based on the

xi written records of particular civilizations. In world prehistory all men whatever their recent cultural status— and large parts of the world remained prehistoric down to the nineteenth century—share a common past documented by millions of tangible fossils. But prehistory does more than provide a common area of historical awareness among men; it also removes the barrier once thought to separate men from other animals—or at least it helps us to understand more fully in what respects we are animals of a unique kind. Man himself, his material apparatus of technology, and his self-awareness manifest in such fields as art, ethics, religion, and philosophy can be viewed as outcomes of the same evolutionary process by which we have long learned to account for other forms of life and indeed for the universe as a whole. There is no longer any valid ground for conflict between the notion that man is at one and the same time an animal and yet potentially divine. Indeed, the record of prehistory shows that societies of human character have been selected for survival precisely through the development of the attributes that stem from increasing self-awareness, attributes shared by no other animal and which men have everywhere recognised as of god-like character.

The present book, which treats only a few of the central themes opened up by this new field of knowledge, is the outcome of reflection following on the writing of World Prehistory: An Outline, originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1961 and recently revised and largely rewritten as World Prehistory: A New Outline, published by the same press in 1969. Although some of the ideas incorporated in it were adumbrated in lec- xii tures delivered as William Evans Visiting Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 1964, and as Lewis Fry Memorial Lecturer at the University of Bristol in 1967, the stimulus to develop them further came from the invitation to serve as Visiting Professor on the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Foundation on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1969. The three chapters of this book represent the substance of the three lectures delivered at Berkeley. In preparing these for publication, I have endeavoured to take advantage of the greater scope and precision of the printed page without departing in any radical way from what I sought to convey to my audience. The problem of reconciling the requirements of the reader with the recollections of anyone who heard the lectures is not an easy one. I have been able to enlarge on certain topics, but I have sought to keep my chapters down to a length not too much in excess of what can be conveyed in lectures. I have been greatly helped in this by being able to provide numerous references to the literature in the form of footnotes. .

I would like, in conclusion, to thank Vice-Chancellor Bouwsma for the graceful manner in which he introduced my opening lecture and to express my pleasure at being able to renew contacts with many colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley, as well as at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, from whom I have imbibed not merely facts but insights.

GRAHAME CLARK

Cambridge, England September, 1969

1. The

Relevance of

World Prehistory

It is the past that explains everything, I say to myself. It is in our sense of the past that we find our humani- ty. … The past tells us whence we came and what we are.

GEORGE MOORE

Man has no nature; what he has is history.

ORTEGA Y GASSET

COL. BORMAN’S REPLY from Apollo 8, there’s a beautiful earth out there,1 conveys in a very direct and simple manner what many of us feel about our situation. We are conscious as our fathers could hardly have been that we live in one world; this world seems very small. It is not merely that in relation to outer space it is the merest speck; still more to the point is it that we can traverse continents and oceans that a few generations ago would have taken many weeks and can communicate by word and picture from one part of the globe to another in hardly any time at all. And our world and indeed the proximate regions of outer space are still shrinking. Yet the mentality even of those who in effect rule the world, not to mention the ideas and passions of mankind in general, still reflect the limitations of a previous age when nations and even civilizations were still to a large degree self-sufficient.

It is in this context of broad concern that we may now consider the relevance of world prehistory. The study of world prehistory is capable of opening up historical perspectives of which we stand in dire need if we are to come to terms with the world in which ineluctably we have to live and in which we may still hope to perpetuate our species. In making this suggestion I am by no means urging that the study of prehistory stands in any need of extraneous justification, but merely that it has something to contribute to our awareness of the basic problems of our time. Some measure of freedom from the constrictions of present time and place is inherent in and peculiar to the human condition. William R. Dennes expressed this very clearly in a paper read before the Philosophical Union at Berkeley in 1941 when he maintained that human beings emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the present and the local, share the experience of other ages and of other nations, preserve and interpret their own observations, consider possibilities unbounded in range, predict the future and guide themselves in shaping it.²

One of the prime ways they have achieved this emancipation has been by exploring their own origins and establishing their own identity, first through the written word and latterly through archaeology and cognate disciplines by means of which it has been possible to extend the range of historical awareness far back into prehistoric times. The study of prehistory stands in no more need of justification than exploration of the physical nature and mathematical properties of the universe, the investigation of all the multifarious forms of life, or for that matter the practice of the arts or the cultivation of speculative philosophy. Each in its own way enlarges the range of human experience and enriches the quality of human life. We have it on the authority of the English 3 historian George Macaulay Trevelyan that Man’s evolution is far more extraordinary than the first chapter of Genesis used to lead people to suppose. Man’s history, pre-historic, ancient, medieval and modern, is by far the most wonderful thing in the Universe of which any news has come through to us.⁴

Before coming to grips with our topic it is worth emphasising that the possibility of considering the history of man in the perspective of world prehistory is a very recent one: the very notion of prehistory as we understand it is only four or five generations old,⁵ and it has only been possible to think in precise terms of world prehistory during the few years since the technique of radiocarbon dating (see p. 38) has been applied to the dating of deposits in widely separated parts of the earth.⁶ Archaeology, the most important of the several disciplines used to extend historical knowledge beyond the confines of written documents, was first developed, if only to a limited degree, among the Chinese under the powerful impulse of historical scholarship rooted ultimately in respect for ancestors.⁷ In the West archaeology developed initially as part of the process of rediscovering Classical antiquity, but its main impulse has undoubtedly come from the upsurge of national feeling that has everywhere ushered in the modern age.⁸ Even so, in the context of European civilization, antiquarian and archaeological studies were long subservient to literary scholarship. In the context of his day William Camden (1551-1623) was fully justified in distinguishing three eras of past time, nicely graded in accordance with the reliability of surviving written sources:⁹

1. A period of History, properly so-called because the transactions of that space are related by good Historians, a period going back as far as the First Olympiad.

2. A Fabulous period, extending from the First Olympiad back to the Deluge, so termed because most of those Histories are fabulous, even of the Greek and Roman Authors, the learned part of the world.

3. A period of Obscurity from the