Unit 3 - Prehistory Begins – Stone Age Stories

Now that we’ve covered archaeological method and theory, we’re going to start our grand story of human accomplishments by looking at the three most important changes in human prehistory. These are often referred to as “revolutions”, for the immensity of change they brought about. In this unit we’ll consider the “Creative Revolution” – the origins of human behavior and mind as we know them – and the “Neolithic Revolution” – or the origins of a farming way of life. In the next chapter we’ll turn to complex societies and city life with the Urban Revolution. These are important topics, and they all stand behind the six great civilizations we’ll consider in the middle part of this course. However, there are other, older, great revolutions that we won’t consider in this course, mainly for lack of time. Among those that we will have to skip past are:

- the evolution of humans in Africa many millions of years ago from earlier Australopithecines

- the origins of culture and the development of the first stone tools over two million years ago

- the first evidence for the controlled use of fire

- the first evidence for cooperative hunting and sharing, or for the development of a gendered division of labor, or of left and right handedness, and so forth.

World archaeologists have spent much time researching all of these events and processes, and I hope that you will someday take an anthropology course covering those topics (such as ANT 105 at SCC). Instead, in this class, we’re going to fast forward to a time period called the Upper Paleolithic , roughly 35 to 12 thousand years ago, when our ancestors began to act in ways that seem more familiar to us today. We won’t slow down much in the “Stone Age,” as this lecture will also include topics from the Mesolithic and Neolithic after we briefly discuss the Upper Paleolithic.

The Paleolithic is divided into three broad periods of unequal lengths of time. The largest by far is the Lower Paleolithic (from Paleo = old, Lithic = stone), the time period of our earliest human ancestors, and then the Middle Paleolithic, which includes our relatives such as the Neanderthals. The Upper Paleolithic is the most recent of the three and the shortest. Their names reflect what one finds when digging into the earth, the most recent is usually near the surface ( ie “Upper”), while the oldest material is at the bottom ( ie “Lower”). The Upper Paleolithic contains the “Creative Revolution,” and is the time period of the famous cave paintings of France and Spain, but also world wide there seems to be a change in the way our ancestors thought and saw the world. What had been purely functional spear points no longer seem to be merely tools, some appear made for ceremonial rather than functional purposes and demonstrate a craftsmanship and expertise not known from earlier times. Even more so, material culture begins to show real stylistic differences for the first time. Different groups made things in different ways, perhaps simply to assert that they themselves were different from each other (e.g. “I belong here, you don’t”). Of course this seems natural and “human” to us today, precisely because we live in a world of style, but it was a revolution. During the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, certain tool shapes were essentially the same over the entire inhabited world, and extremely conservative over very long periods of time. Archaeologists can still create typologies to help them sort out these earlier periods, but the amount of stylistic diversity is nothing compared to what begins in the Upper Paleolithic.

The Creative Revolution seems to have entailed a significant change in the way people looked at the world, and beyond. There were changes in the way bodies were treated after death by the survivors, in terms of burials, grave goods, and even body decorations. The people of the Upper Paleolithic were able to move into harsh landscapes such as the far north that they had not been able to survive in previously. Just what caused these changes at this time is unclear; the physical bodies of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH, another name for Homo sapiens sapiens ) hadn’t changed in tens of thousands of years. Instead it seems to have been an evolution of the mind rather than of the body that led to these changes, and hence the phrase “Creative Revolution.” Abstract thinking and invention are obviously adaptive, they help us survive in any environment, and maybe that realm of life we now call “art” was simply a by-product of those other cognitive changes. The two specific topics we’ll consider in this unit for the Upper Paleolithic are “art” and the ability to colonize new parts of the world. At the end of the day, I think they both stem from the same cognitive changes, perhaps related to the development of fully-fledged language for the first time, even though it’s difficult for archaeology to approach such topics as language development through material remains.

I used quote marks with art above because the word can be devilishly tricky to define, especially when we are looking at ancient prehistoric peoples. Modern artists and art historians have put a lot of thought into “what is art,” but in its general uses we tend to treat it (whether as objects or events) as somehow separate from the mundane parts of life. Treating it as a separate realm leads to an easy commodification , but at heart it is just a stylized way of doing something. The origins of art in the Upper Paleolithic are found in small portable objects, such as the finely made spear points mentioned above. People (in Europe, these people are called Cro-Magnons) began to take more care with the objects they made, demonstrating their abilities through careful work, a level of craftsmanship beyond what was simply needed for the functioning of the tool. This seems common to us today, a pride in one’s abilities, competence, mastery; but earlier humans lacked good evidence of such behavior. This behavioral change occurs throughout the Old World (Europe, Asia, and Africa), even though we’ll mainly be discussing European examples in this unit, reflecting in part the quantity of research undertaken in Europe. Besides their tools, Cro-Magnon’s increasingly abstract thought is also displayed on a series of carved bones, which seem to be tally sticks (or counting sticks). The tally sticks are simply bone plaques with a series of hash marks engraved on them. What precisely they were counting we don’t know, but some of the bones also have engraved depictions of plants and animals. These more complex objects often have opposing seasons depicted on the two sides – realistic images of plants and animals in the springtime on one side, and scenes from the fall on the back. This concern with and attempt to document or depict the changing of the seasons is also found on a few bones that have been argued to be the world’s first calendars, such as the bone plaque from Abri Blanchard (see photo below).

bone calendar

(bone plaque from Abri Blanchard)

Alexander Marshack was a researcher writing a book for NASA on the history of science and technology. He wanted to start at the very beginning, and began to investigate these early carved bones from the Upper Paleolithic. He became fascinated with the possibility that these tally sticks were the first calendars, and his “history of science” never made it out of the Stone Age. Most famously, Marshack looked at a piece of carved bone from a French cave, Abri Blanchard, under high powered microscopes. Just as individual typewriters leave tell-tale signs on paper, individual tools can leave specific signature marks on the material they engrave. Marshack argued that the marks on the Abri Blanchard bone were made with multiple tools, and hence represent an object made over an extended period of time ( ie . Why would someone at a single setting use so many tools, making one mark and then picking up a different stone tool to make the next pit?) Marshack argued that multiple tools imply the marks were applied one at a time, over a few months, using whatever stone tool was handy that day. He further argued that the marks themselves represented the phases of the moon as it waxed and waned (as the pits in the bone change shape from whole circles to partial circles). Having a calendar like this is obviously beneficial. By simply watching the moon for a few nights in a row, you can tell precisely where you are in the seasonal round, how many weeks until Spring , or until you’re meant to rendezvous with the rest of your group, etc. And since it seems so obvious to us today, the millions of years of human existence before the Upper Paleolithic (when people seem to have not done such things as this), implies that they were probably very different from ourselves. Thirty five thousand years ago things changed, and human behavior began to look much more familiar.

Willendorf

(The famous Venus of Willendorf, photographed on an SCC study tour to Vienna, Austria)

If art begins with small portable objects that have some identifiable function, it very quickly spread to other portable objects that are tougher for us to interpret, including the so-called “Venus figurines.” The most famous of these is the Venus of Willendorf , excavated along the Danube River in Austria (see photo above). The name comes from the early assumption that these were religious idols, used to represent gods and goddesses. Upper Paleolithic figurines as a whole demonstrate a wide range of variation, and not all are heavy-set female figures like Willendorf . Male statues have been found, and even some hermaphrodite ones (having both breasts and male genitalia). They come in all shapes and sizes, some fat, some thin, some which almost look like “breasts on a stick” (see photo below). The oldest human images are carved onto the back of the tally sticks discussed above: rows of hash marks on one side with the relief of a human figure on the other. What this means we don’t really know. These early human figurines might have represented gods and goddesses, but there are other possibilities as well. Archaeologists rarely consider children in prehistory, but dolls are universal in children’s play among the cultures of today, so why not look for them in prehistory as well? And the objects themselves might give some clues. Both the Venuses of Willendorf and Dolni Vestonice have large breasts and waists but short stubby legs, and lack facial details. It has been pointed out that this is how women see their own bodies (especially when pregnant) when looking downward at themselves . Living in a world without mirrors means you perceive your body differently from others, and the visual perspective would include short, stubby legs. Maybe these figurines were made by expectant mothers, and were therefore involved somehow in the miracles of birth and reproduction. Others have suggested that the hair style on the Venus of Willendorf is a model for basketry production. Archaeologists would argue that artifacts make the most sense when considered as part of a class of objects. It is the context that can help us understand meaning and function.

Dolni V

(artifacts from the site of Dolni Vestonice, now at the Natural History Museum in Prague, Czech Republic)

In trying to understand why people made these figurines, it's important to point out that the human figurines from the Upper Paleolithic are vastly outnumbered by the animal figurines. Why were these people making such objects? At the Czech site of Dolni Vestonice , in addition to the Venus figurine discussed above, literally thousands of clay animal figurines were discovered. It appears that once created, the figurines were thrown into the fire, where they’d break and explode from the moisture left in the clay. Perhaps there were Paleolithic pyromaniacs, think of today’s teenagers who like to throw things into the camp fire and watch them pop. Or, perhaps the animal figurines were part of a serious religious system, perhaps related to hunting magic. This is usually called sympathetic magic, where capturing the likeness of an animal will help lead to its capture in real life. Many cultures of the world have had the belief that photographs are dangerous because they can capture one’s soul - a sympathetic magic of sorts. To move from the portable art to the more famous cave paintings, sympathetic magic would explain why the majority of the painted images are animals, and why so many of them are drawn with arrow and spear shapes sticking into them, or nearby. In this view, to paint people, to capture a person’s soul, would be black magic, and thus people are extremely rare in the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic. With sympathetic magic, the images are made before the hunt to ensure the success of the hunt, rather than afterwards to record the results, which would be a kind of trophyism . This “after-the-fact” painting does have some evidence as well, as with the shaman hunter in Lascaux.

Lascaux is one of three Paleolithic caves with multiple colors (the others are the nearby Font de Gaumme in the south of France, and Altamira in Spain). For all of the famous, and well-drawn, animals found in Lascaux, there is only a single human image, and it is a poorly drawn stick figure with a bird’s head. The scene appears to be a commemoration of a tragic hunt, as the human figure is falling over backwards in front of a charging bull that seems to have been speared and is losing its intestines (see photo below). Near the human figure is a bird headed staff and 2 pieces of wood which might represent a spear thrower or atlatl (which is why the figure has been called a “shaman hunter”). Unlike the animal images in the cave which seem to fit a sympathetic magic interpretation, this tableaux seems to tell the story of an unsuccessful outing, and it is clear that the artists who had no problem realistically representing bulls and horses were for some reason reluctant to realistically depict a human face (because, I'm arguing, they believed in sympathetic magic).

Lascaux

(the shaman-hunter from Lascaux, photograph of the cave replica)

There have been other interesting interpretations of the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, many of which come from a careful consideration of their spatial distribution. For instance, it’s been noted that most of the painted animals appear in those parts of the caves with the best sound acoustics. This might imply that chanting and singing were somehow connected to the images, giving one the sense of prehistoric cathedrals for religious services. Against this religious metaphor, others have argued the acoustics and paintings imply use of the space as prehistoric schools for learning what’s needed to survive an Ice Age life. Even the distribution of the caves themselves might be meaningful, as the development of “style” in this period might also be connected with the development of ethnicity or tribalism. The painted caves might have helped create social units, serving as territorial markers that bind people together and signal ownership of land. Related to this might be the seasonal round which accompanied European life at the time. Small groups were most likely highly nomadic for most of the year, but the larger clan would congregate just a few times a year at rendezvous spots, perhaps in the regions around the painted caves. Thus the caves themselves could have been important symbols in group formation and identity.

Another approach to this art, both the portable art and the cave paintings, is through human psychology, and specifically entopic phenomenon. Entopic phenomena are essentially the stars that surround a cartoon characters’ heads after they get hit with the frying pan. When our optic nerves get stimulated in certain ways (such as a blow to the head), humans report seeing visual effects such as a grid of spots and other patterns. The same effect can be achieved by certain hallucinogenic drugs, or by going into trance – a self-induced, altered state of consciousness achieved by many shamans (or medicine men) in different cultures. When one closely examines the portable animal figurines, and the painted images found in the caves, many of them are covered by a field of spots and crosses that often extend beyond the painted animal. The interpretation here is that prehistoric shamans painted the cave art to either focus their attention and help them go into trance, or as a record of what they saw on that spot while they were in trance. Twentieth century shamans among the !Kung San (or Bushmen) of southern Africa would etch and paint animal figures onto rocks for precisely these reasons, and saw their art work as portals into the supernatural world that they could step through once they entered a trance. In our theory section I discussed the problems with simply imposing the present onto the past, but in this case, the production of a similar material culture at least gives us a possible parallel for the use of Paleolithic art.

One final explanation I’ll offer takes us back to the “Creative Revolution” itself. Many things indicate a profound change in the human mind about 35 thousand years ago. So, perhaps the simplest answer to the questions of “Why did they make the Upper Paleolithic art?” and “What does it mean?” is merely, “because they were human.” The need to use our brains creatively and the desire to leave our mark on the world around us lead to what we would call “art” in every culture known historically and ethnographically. In the Upper Paleolithic people finally became what we’d call human, and their painting on the walls is thus to be expected, because it comes naturally to us as well.

Colonization:

At the opening of this unit, I argued that the fact that much of the world was colonized by people for the first time during the Upper Paleolithic also indicates a change in abilities (perhaps related to the development of fully-formed language). North East Asia along with the “New World” – North and South America were first settled by people in what we’ve called the Upper Paleolithic, as were Australia and New Guinea by boats or rafts a bit before this time period. The settling of the New World has received the most archaeological attention, and there are some interesting kinks in the story that still need to be worked out. It was long argued that people migrated on foot across what’s now the Bearing Sea between Alaska and Siberia (the phrase “land bridge” seems to imply a narrow walkway, but this was in fact a huge land mass exposed by the lower sea levels, lower because of the water trapped in glaciers around the globe). It was traditionally argued that the first immigrants then followed an ice free corridor to the east of the Rocky Mountains southward to settle the rest of the hemisphere. One big kink in this story is that the oldest dated sites in this ice free corridor are in the southern portion, which seems to imply that people settled it from the south rather than from the north. Likewise, the oldest sites overall are found near the west coast of South America at sites like Monte Verde in Chile, and not in Alaska or Canada. One newer theory to explain these differences is the possibility that the first immigrants were more coastal fishing groups, moving down the west coast in small boats living off land and marine resources, rather than big game hunters following migratory herds of animals down the inland, ice-free corridor. With the rising sea levels after the end of the last Ice Age, these coastal plains have been flooded, and most evidence of the first occupations of the New World is now underwater. Peoples living along the west coasts of both North and South America then began to spread inland to the east, with some eventually moving northward into the ice free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains. The settling of the New World is one of the great topics of prehistoric archaeology, and much new evidence is coming to light. Some evidence, especially from the southeastern United States, might indicate early connections with the Iberian Peninsula of Europe (Spain and Portugal); though more work needs to be done. The Big Eddy site northwest of Springfield (and being dug by a group of archaeologists connected with Missouri State) is one of only three of these early “pre-Clovis” sites being excavated in the United States. As these projects go forward, I expect we’ll know much more about the settling of the New World in a decade or so.

Starting about 12,000 years ago, the first wide-spread culture covering much of North America appeared which has been termed the Clovis culture, after the small town in New Mexico where the characteristic fluted points were first found (“fluted” refers to the channel removed from the center of both sides of the spear point, where it was hafted onto its wooden shaft). Though first discovered in the American southwest, some archaeologists have argued that the heartland of the Clovis peoples seems to have been the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, based on the numbers of fluted points recovered (since more of these points have been recovered from this area than any other). From this origin, it spread to cover much of North America. One archaeologist even devised an interesting study to learn more about Clovis life along these rivers, specifically, did they use boats and canoes to navigate the waters? By comparing the quarry sources of the stone material with the find spots for the spear points themselves, she concluded that they did not use boats, since they would walk much further on their side of the river to get the raw material rather than cross one of the major rivers to reach a geographically closer quarry. The one exception was along the Mississippi River north of Davenport, Iowa, where it was argued that the complete freezing of the river in winter would allow people to walk to the nearest quarry, regardless of which bank it was on. There are other possible explanations (perhaps the major rivers served as ethnic boundaries and so for social reasons one wasn’t able to use the nearest quarry), but I like how this study uses the existing evidence to get at life 10,000 years ago.

We’ve started the grand story for this course with the Creative Revolution because the development of the modern mind stands behind all of the achievements we’ll look at in the rest of this course, including those in the latter parts of the “stone age” to which we turn next.

The end of the Upper Paleolithic time period roughly corresponds to the warming of the earth at the end of the last Ice Age. The short, transitory period which follows has been traditionally called the Mesolithic (or “Middle Stone” Age) in Europe, and represents the change in climate and human adaptations that eventually led to the Neolithic (or “New Stone” Age) with the invention of farming. The phrase “Neolithic Revolution” was coined by the famous twentieth century archaeologist V. Gordon Childe. Childe also came up with the notion of the “Urban Revolution” (for the beginnings of state level societies and life in cities) to which we’ll turn in Unit 4. Childe, in his broad overviews of European prehistory, felt that both changes were the most fundamental to life as we know it.

The Mesolithic

The climate changes accompanying the end of the last Ice Age were monumental and severe. Slight fluctuations in the earth’s orbit have led to periodic cold periods every 40,000 years or so. These “natural” fluctuations differ from the modern process of global warming and climate change; since the problem now is that we’re already warm, in a period between Ice Ages, and human action is making the earth far warmer than ever before. (As the earth warms further, weather events of all sorts are predicted to become more severe and extreme. Modern climate change is an important topic worthy of discussion, but outside the scope of this class … so back to the last Ice Age). As the Earth warmed, water that had been trapped in glaciers around the world melted and flowed into the oceans. World sea levels rose almost 400 feet in a relatively short period of time. Coastlines around the world changed, but most importantly, the continental shelf was flooded. During the Ice Age, the sea floor in many regions dropped away from land quickly, rapidly becoming too deep for sunlight to penetrate and support marine plants growing on the sea floor. But as the broad coastal plains flooded, the shallow waters near shore supported more life, and people were able to live off of marine resources to a greater extent than before. Foods that had not been exploited, such as snails (prehistoric escargot if you will), became the focus of many groups, such as the Caspian culture in the Mediterranean. No longer do we find massive mounds of woolly mammoth bones, but huge shell middens (trash heaps) of left over sea and snail shells. Inland, the end of the Ice Age meant the return of the forests to many temperate regions of the world (as Europe for example changed from open arctic tundra to heavy forest). The herds of big game ( megafauna ) retreated with the vegetation, and people switched from following the herds to hunting smaller more isolated animal species. They also probably had a renewed focus on plant foods, though evidence for this survives less well in the archaeological record. The upshot of these changes is that people began to settle down to a greater degree, able to live off the environment with less movement on their part. As they diversified their diet (eating everything rather than just a few main staples) and intensified (eating certain foods, like snails, that had been overlooked before), people developed new technologies. In relation to these changes, people also seem to have begun to develop social complexity and inequalities to a greater degree than ever before.

Vedbaek

(Photograph of the Mesolithic mother and child burial at the site of Vedbaek, Denmark)

Two good examples of Mesolithic cultures are the site of Vedbaek in Denmark and Jomon culture in Japan. Vedbaek is a coastal site that shows the Mesolithic tendency of people settling down near the new coastlines to live off of marine resources. Because they were less migratory, people began to create cemeteries for their dead. In one of the world’s first cemeteries, 22 individuals have been found buried close together at Vedbaek . In addition to the new concept of a cemetery (showing a more permanent connection to a certain place), individuals at the site were marked according to their gender (females were buried with roe deer teeth, and males were buried with flint tools). One particularly touching burial has a female (whose head once rested on a blanket covered in deer teeth) with a very young child laying next to her on the wing of a swan. The child has the flint blade characteristic of males at this site, but is too young to otherwise know the child's sex based on the sciatic arch of the pelvis. Whatever their names and story, the loving burial of this mother and child can tell us much about their lives and the world they lived in … one of the goals of archaeology.

Jomon culture in Japan is a second Mesolithic culture that gives us insight into life some 10,000 years ago. This early group created what’s thought to be the world’s first pottery, and typify the diversification of diet typical of the Mesolithic. At Jomon sites, the food remains include 30 different species of shellfish and almost 180 species of plants. Eating so many different plant foods seems strange in comparison to later farming cultures that focus on just a few products, but this varied diet is, of course, healthier and evolutionarily adaptive for humans. These Mesolithic trends lead directly to the next great human advance – the Neolithic Revolution.

Jomon pot

(early Jomon pot from Japan)

The Neolithic

As people began to exploit their environments more intensively than ever before, they began in a few places to also control the plants and animals in such a way that, through selective breeding, the chosen plants and animals became dependent on people. This co-dependency is called domestication, which is the basis for the “Neolithic Revolution.” Neolithic means “new stone,” and it refers to a new type of stone tool which began to emerge with the increased emphasis on plant foods in the human diet. These tools were ground stone, rather than flaked. From the grinding stones that made flour ( manos and metates ) to the ground stone axes that cleared the forests, the development of ground stone tools often indicates the development of agriculture. The food from domesticated plants and animals underlies modern life, and a central question for archaeologists is why did the first people adopt farming?

The first answer to this question - that it merely took a prehistoric genius to come up with the brilliant idea (because “farming is inherently better”) - is almost certainly wrong. The first farming villages were more susceptible to diseases (both from the less healthy diet and from the increased numbers of people living in close contact) and more susceptible to famines (think of the Irish potato famine … farmers tend to focus on just a few, very productive crops, which is essentially putting all your eggs in one basket when things go wrong). Farming is also often a harder life in terms of the work required (think of what’s needed to turn a wheat field into loaves of bread). Studies have repeatedly shown that twentieth century hunter-gatherer groups spent less time acquiring food, and therefore have more free time that can add to quality of life than early farming groups. However, once farming was adopted by those very first groups, it was a way of life that quickly spread to cover most of the suitable lands of the world. Why? Because once you’ve gone through all that work to make a loaf of bread, it’s not that much more trouble to make a hundred loaves. Farming allows the production of a surplus, by putting just a bit more labor into the system, much more food can come out on the other end. This food surplus can support greater population densities along with occupational specialization (say professional soldiers, who eat food that was produced by others). So when a group of foragers (hunter-gatherers) who were living in a band of 25 people roaming about a very large area are confronted with a farming village of 250 people, the village wins out, and they settle and farm where they want. The cultural adaptation of farming spread because of the strength in numbers it allowed. This might explain why farming has become so common, but the original question remains: Why did people start farming in the very first place?

Childe’s own answer could be termed the “oasis theory,” in that he believed the drying out of the environment in the Near East at the end of the last Ice Age led to plants and animals and people all retreating to the shrinking pockets of water on the landscape … the oasis. Driven into close contact, people learned more about the plants and animals, and soon began to take care of them. This initial theory falls down on a number of points. First, it seems that agriculture was independently adopted in a number of different places around the world, so any explanation we propose should be general in scope. Second, Childe’s thinking reflected the ethnocentrism of his day: that farming was naturally better and people just needed to learn more before they could adopt it. But think back on the Jomon of Japan. If those hunters and gatherers were successfully utilizing 180 different species of plants, many requiring a specific treatment to make edible, it wasn’t a lack of knowledge about the natural world that inhibited farming. In general, one could argue that foraging groups have greater knowledge of and are more “in-tune” with their environment than any farming group, not less. Nevertheless, Childe’s linking this change to the drying out of the Middle East has remained a part of many more recent theories.

A second theory could be called the “nuclear zone” hypothesis and was made famous by University of Chicago professor Robert Braidwood. Braidwood’s work is a good example of predictive archaeology. He had a theory: that farming would have emerged first in the center of the natural distribution of the wild plants and animals that were domesticated (that being where they were the most plentiful, and thus the most appealing to humans as a food staple). He therefore looked at maps of the Middle East, identified the natural range of various species like sheep, goats, wheat and barley, and then went to actually check the center of those ranges. In the end, he discovered what was then the oldest known farming village – Jarmo , in northern Iraq . Even though his theory did lead Braidwood to discover a very ancient site, more recent archaeologists, like Lewis Binford (discussed in Unit 1) and Kent Flannery of the University of Michigan, have turned his theory on its head creating the “edge zone hypothesis.” Their reasoning is that it wouldn’t be in the plant’s natural range, but rather in the marginal habitat where the plants would first become dependent on human intervention for their reproduction. This theory fits such early sites as Jericho in the West Bank, and Abu Hureyra in Syria, where there were established villages well before the advent of farming. People were able to settle in one spot in substantial housing because the wild wheat and barley was so productive that people were able to harvest enough in just a few weeks to store and eat the rest of the year. However, as the last Ice Age ended and the Middle East became drier (as in Childe’s own theory above), the range of the wild stands of wheat and barley began to shrink. People born and raised in settled village life now had a choice to either pick up and move back to a foraging way of life or to help the plants survive in the changed environment (by watering, weeding, planting, etc). It is an irony of human history that the biggest changes often come from a conservative impulse: people want to preserve a way of life they know and grew up with, but in trying to keep things “as they’ve always been,” they lay the seeds for the most monumental change. In this case, people wanted to maintain their village culture in the face of major climate change, and in so doing, they forever altered human’s relationship to the environment with the beginnings of agriculture.

Personally, I think Binford and Flannery's edge zone hypothesis makes the most sense, but there is one other interesting theory of the origins of farming that I'd like to discuss. Archaeologist Barbara Bender has wondered if our emphasis on the environment as the prime driver isn’t misplaced. For Bender, farming is adopted whenever one has to produce a surplus for some reason, and she sees more social than environmental reasons for having to do this. Though she doesn’t use these words, I’ve always thought of this as the “mafia model.” Think of prehistoric henchmen, extracting resources as protection money (perhaps the world’s first “taxes) from a group of people in a certain region. Suddenly people now have need of a food surplus, to both feed their family and pay off the gang demanding payment, and they begin to farm to produce that surplus. Others have pointed out that maybe we shouldn’t even be focusing so much on food crops. Farming may have started with non-food crops: cotton for string, nets, and textiles, spices to liven up the diet, even hallucinogenic plants for social or religious use. Many of these non-food crops are also among the world's earliest domesticates.

These different theories are all part of the on-going debate in archaeology about the Neolithic Revolution. Whatever the true answer, agriculture was adopted in many parts of the world using different crops. In addition to the wheat, oats, sheep and goats of the Middle East, cows were added to the mix from North Africa; lentils from South Asia; chickens and rice from southeast Asia; millet from Northern China; maize, beans, and squash from MesoAmerica ; and potatoes and manioc from South America. Each of these areas, after developing farming, also developed into the world’s first civilizations, and that transition will be the main topic of unit four.

Stone Age Side Story:

Lascaux is probably the most famous painted cave in the world, and it’s found in the Dordogne region of southern France. Tourism is very important to the economy of this region, which is a favorite of both international tourists and the French themselves. In addition to the other attractions, tourists began to flock to the area to view the cave paintings after Lascaux was discovered by four boys in 1940 following their dog named "Robot". Tourism always has an impact, and Lascaux is no exception. Most of the cave floor was destroyed before it could be excavated (but like the other caves, this one was probably not used as a living space), and the paintings themselves began to suffer. Think of each visitor as a little 100 degree space heater, puffing out heat and moisture with each breath. The presence of so many people altered the previously steady climate inside the cave so that new micro-organisms began to grow, destroying the ancient artwork. Things became so bad that the cave was closed to tourists in 1963, and only a handful of researchers are allowed in each year (and I imagine the waiting list to be quite lengthy). Because of this development, the French built a nearly exact replica of the cave just a few hundred yards away, dubbed “Lascaux 2.” This had always sounded too "Disney" for me, but once I got a chance to visit the south of France recently I learned that Lascaux 2 is a ctually a great experience. One can stand on the actual hillside and look out over the valley and rivers, and then go into the replica cave nearby for a guided tour, without endangering the original. (However, even without the tourists the original Lascaux has recently been endangered by those who were supposed to be protecting it, as we'll read in a Reader article for this Unit). Archaeology can lead to great tourism, and I hope that is one of the take-away messages from this course. If you take no other archaeology course than World Archaeology , you'll probably still hear about archaeology the rest of your life as news outlets report on the important discoveries in coming years. You'll probably also get a chance to travel at some point if you haven't already, even if it's just locally like across the river towards Cahokia Mounds. So one impact of this course is that I hope you’ll keep your eyes open for ancient sites to visit as you travel. It’s worth going a bit out of your way to get to someplace like Lascaux. Tourism benefits archaeology in many ways, and it’s how most of us enjoy the fruits of archaeology and our common heritage. There are ethics to travel and archaeological tourism, but as seen at Lascaux 2, experiences don’t need to threaten our archaeological heritage to be enjoyable.

Unit 3 – Reading Comments and Web Readings

Read: Fagan Ch. 4, and the Section 3 Overview in the Reader

Read Articles

16. Killing Lascaux, Paul Bahn , Archaeology , May/June 2008.

21. New Women of the Ice Age, Heather Pringle, Discover , April 1998.

24. America's First Immigrants, Evan Hadingham , Smithsonian , November 2004.

Fagan’s chapter 4 covers much the same ground as my unit 3 lecture write-up, but of course he includes more dates, details, and names than I do in my write-ups (as always). Among the things I didn’t have time to mention however, are his discussion of Mezhirich and similar sites in the central Asian steppe, and the development of microlith technologies. I also didn't include as many images of Upper Paleolithic art as I would have liked, so pay attention to Fagan's illustrations as well as his text.

I think we have three nice articles to go with this unit, so I hope you enjoy them. Paul Bahn , a well-known British archaeologist and author of the very funny book Bluff your way in Archaeology , gives us an update on the recent mismanagement at the famous cave of Lascaux, while Hadingham reports on the rapidly changing picture of the initial settling of the New World. Heather Pringle’s article primarily considers the work of archaeologist Olga Soffer at the Upper Paleolithic Czech site of Dolni Vestonice (which was discussed in the Unit lecture). This is by far the oldest article I’ve included in our reader, but it’s an important read and I did not want to leave it out.

Web Reading:

The extra credit opportunity for this section will include searching the web for a cartoon (if you choose to do the extra credit), so there's no otherwise assigned web reading for Unit 3.