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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The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World Review

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The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World ReviewThis is the best book on the skullduggery and infighting behind the scenes in the Pre-Clovis debate since Elaine Dewar's "Bones". The fact that the author has been a credentialed, practicing archaeologist for over thirty years adds additional weight to his commentary on a subject usually addressed by nonprofessional outsiders.
The primary source documents for this book were graciously made available to me about a year ago by Virginia Steen-McIntyre, a tephronologist member of the original Valsequillo excavations. In a weekly newspaper column I write, I did my best to synopsize the technical material in those documents for the lay reader but Chris Hardaker's distillation surpasses my own by an order of magnitude. In addition, Chris has ferreted out related but exceedingly obscure material that I have never seen in print before and likely never would have. This would include his account of recent discoveries of advanced tool making in the African Middle Paleolithic, Lorenzo's raid on the Smithsonian for the Armenta's inscribed bone artifact, and his personal account of suppression of student investigation of Carter's Texas Street Site by his California archaeology professor.
Accusations of archaeological coverups abound in the "fringe" literature and in my experience, the majority of them lack foundation. By the same token, over the years I have found a small core of these accusations have a very real basis in fact. Chris Hardaker covers these as well in "The First American" and goes into the mentality and politics that give rise to such baffling suppression. Still, in the end, Chris is left as puzzled as I am, as to why mainstream science would turn its back on its core principles. To even raise the question of conspiracy to suppress knowledge is to invite an avalanche of ridicule and I must commend Chris Hardaker's courage to stand up publicly and face it. Virginia Steen-McIntyre has endured such ridicule for four decades in an effort to keep the profound discoveries in the Valsequillo Valley from vanishing into the black hole of public consciousness and in 2004 finally saw this site reopened by Texas A&M and INAH. We are still waiting for official publication of their findings promised three years ago. In the meantime, we have Chris' account of what he observed at Hueyatlaco along with surviving members of the original excavations. Though there will be howls of protests that this book is doing an end run around the peer review process, Chris has done a yeoman job of making this fascinating story accessible to highly interested laymen such as myself and he has done so in an extremely lively and entertaining style. For those with a taste for dissident but real archaeology, I give "The First American" my highest recommendation.The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World OverviewForty years ago, an amateur prehistorian discovered an engraved mastodon bone near Mexico City, showing a virtual bestiary from the Ice Age. Harvard University took notice and excavated nearby sites around the Valsequillo Reservoir. They found perfectly buried kill sites with the oldest spearheads in the world. Some archaeologists postulated their age at 40,000 years, three times older than the official 12,000-year-old date for the first Americans. Then the shocker--United States Geology Survey (USGS) geologists came up with the date of 250,000 years old!Even though these dates were published in peer-reviewed geological journals, archaeologists wrote off the geologists, saying they were mistaken and that their dates were too ridiculously old. Archaeologists never returned to the site and curiosity died out. Soon after, this once world-class archaeology region became off-limits for official research, a "professional forbidden zone."The Valsequillo discoveries were legendary, but regarded as "fringe" by professional archaeologists. Why this radical turn-about? What was found that was so unspeakable, so impossible? What happened to these artifacts--America's earliest art and spearheads, and why don't archaeologists seem to care? In the new book, The First American, archaeologist Christopher Hardaker tries to unearth the mystery.The book details the events of the discovery and its subsequent dismissal, as well as the attempt in 2001 by a wealthy outsider to find the truth about the Valsequillo discoveries. Included in The First American are photos of the original artifacts, and excerpts from reports, letters, and memos from the site participants themselves.Archaeologists will once again be forced to ask the same question their mentors asked: Are we too in love with our own theories to ignore the evidence of science yet again? And readers will hear the real story of the great Valsequillo discoveries, the greatest story of early American man never told.

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