Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory Review

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Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory ReviewI got much more than I expected. Gamble works in archaeology but takes some of the latest ideas to bring the subject to today's cutting edge. He attempts three basic efforts roughly paralleling the three sections of the book. He first demolishes the easy storylines of what has passed as prehistoric "revolutions" such as the Neolithic as being pretty much along the lines of magic bullet theories where first we had X (fill in the blank: big brains, language, agriculture, etc.) and then we had significant jumps to people who looked surprisingly close to ... us. The historical connections within European archaeology to various ideologies and cultural preconceptions don't get neglected in his critique.
Then he turns in the second section to his serious rebuilding of archaeology by emphasizing the need to bring the people back into the artefacts. And for this he turns very productively to material culture studies and many of the thinkers who are testing the waters of material agency. Sometimes his language can seem a little convoluted, but the ideas are rich, well illustrated, given many examples from many excavations throughout prehistory, and convincing. Just listing his ideas for how people used objects and tools gives a feel for the way he brings artefacts into people-using forms: sets and nets, enchainment and accumulation, containers and instruments, consuming and fragmenting, additive and reductive technologies, planning depth and tactical depth and curation (maintaining technology over time), and childscape within habitscape. His use of the studies of others who have recreated individual archaeological sites for the manufacture of blades and flakes in the use of flint to apply these concepts brings life to the imagined activities uncovered in these studies. The ample examples, photos, and drawings greatly reduce the tedium of the sometimes heavy theory.
In the last section he then takes his new concepts and applies them to give a different sense of the gradual movement of prehistory. Here, the richness of the extant archaeological studies tumbles out as he brings his new concepts into simpler view. This part was the easiest and most rewarding to read. He is probing how to rebuild the contours of prehistory without the facile origins and revolutions that have defined it sometimes in the past.
What is best about the book for those of us who are not archaeologists is the exploration of material agency and the social-action dimensions of objects. What was oddly missing from the book were connections to biology and evolution, especially cultural evolution. Presumably, he left this out to keep the focus from becoming too wide, but the issues he raises beg to be integrated with cultural evolutionary theory and other fields such as cognitive science. What he does give us, thankfully, is a deep overview of the field of prehistoric studies and a promising set of tools to explore material agency, which is tenaciously taking hold within material culture studies and which is philosophically radical.Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory OverviewIn this innovative 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 new 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.

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