Robert J. Braidwood

“ The cave art of the Franco-Cantabrian style is one of the great artistic achievements of all time. The subjects drawn are almost always the larger animals of the time: the bison, wild cattle and horses, the wooly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the wild boar, and the bear. In some of the best examples, the beasts are drawn in full color and the paintings are remarkably alive and charged with energy. They come from the hands of men who knew the great animals well—knew the feel of their fur, the tremendous drive of their muscles, and the danger one faced when he hunted them. ”

“ By the time the written records of Mesopotamia and Egypt begin to turn up in number, the climaxes there are well under way. To understand the beginnings of the climaxes, and the real beginnings of the second act itself, we are thrown back on prehistoric archeology. And this is as true for China, India, Middle America, and the Andes, as it is for the Near East.
There are lessons to be learned from all of man’s past, not simply lessons of how to fight battles or win peace conferences, but of how human society evolves from one stage to another. ”

“ An assemblage is made up of a number of “industries” (that is, all the tools in chipped stone, all the tools in bone, all the tools in wood, the traces of houses, etc.) and everything else that manages to survive, such as the art, the burials, the bones of the animals used as food, and the traces of plant foods; in fact, everything that has been left to us and can be used to help reconstruct the lives of the people to whom it once belonged. ”

“ Red is the color of blood, which means life, and of fire, which means heat. Professor Childe wonders if the red ochre was a pathetic attempt at magic—to give back to the body the heat that had gone from it. But pathetic or not, it is sure proof that these people were already moved by death as men still are moved by it.
Their art is another example of the direction the human mind was taking. And when I say human, I mean it in the fullest sense, for this is the time in which fully modern man has appeared. ”

“ It is still too soon to know whether certain combinations of tools within industries were made only by certain physical types of men. But since tools of both the core-biface and the flake traditions, and their blends, turn up from South Africa to England to India, it is most unlikely that only one type of man used only one particular habit in the preparation of tools. What seems perfectly clear is that men in Africa and men in India were making just as good tools as the men who lived in western Europe. ”

“ LIFE IN EARLIEST TIMES
What do we actually know of life in these earliest times? In the glacial gravels, or in the terrace gravels of rivers once swollen by floods of melt water or heavy rains, or on the windswept deserts, we find stone tools. The earliest and coarsest of these are the pebble tools. We do not yet know what the men who made them looked like, although the Sterkfontein australopithecines probably give us a good hint. Then begin the more formal tool preparation traditions of the west—the core-bifaces and the flake tools—and the chopper-chopping tool series of the farther east. ”

“ Except for the stone tools, what do we know of the way men lived in the time range after 100,000 to perhaps 40,000 years ago or even later? We know that in the area from Europe to Palestine, at least some of the people (some of the time) lived in the fronts of caves and warmed themselves over fires. In Europe, in the cave layers of these times, we find the bones of different animals; the bones in the lowest layers belong to animals that lived in a warm climate; above them are the bones of those who could stand the cold, like the reindeer and mammoth. ”

“ The anthropologists use the word too, and argue heatedly over its finer meanings; but they all agree that every human being is part of or has some kind of culture. Each particular human group has a particular culture; that is one of the ways in which we can tell one group of men from another. In this sense, a CULTURE means the way the members of a group of people think and believe and live, the tools they make, and the way they do things. Professor Robert Redfield says a culture is an organized or formalized body of conventional understandings. ”

“ Remember that Britain is simply a single example we select; the same thing could be done for all the other countries of Europe, and will be possible also, some day, for further Asia and Africa. Remember, too, that prehistory in most of Europe runs on for three thousand or more years after conventional ancient history begins in the Near East. Britain is a good example to use in showing how prehistory ended in Europe. ”

“ Men cannot domesticate plants and animals that do not exist in the environment where the men live. Also, there are certainly some animals and probably some plants that resist domestication, although they might be useful.
This brings me back again to the point that both the level of culture and the natural condition of the environment—with the proper plants and animals in it—must have been ready before domestication could have happened. But this is precondition, not cause. Why did effective food-production happen first in the Near East? ”

“ More important than anything else—as our structure grows more complicated and our materials increase—is the fact that “a sort of history of human activity” does begin to appear. The habits or traditions that men formed in the making of their tools and in the ways they did things, begin to stand out for us. How characteristic were these habits and traditions? What areas did they spread over? How long did they last? ”

“ The traces suggest the Brittany coast of France as a source, and the people seem at first to have been a small but “heroic” group of aristocrats. Their “heroes” are buried with wealth and ceremony, surrounded by their axes and daggers of bronze, their gold ornaments, and amber and jet beads. These rich finds show that the trade-linkage these warriors patronized spread from the Baltic sources of amber to Mycenean Greece or even Egypt, as evidenced by glazed blue beads.
The great visual trace of Wessex achievement is the final form of the spectacular sanctuary at Stonehenge. ”

“ Why did these two civilizations spring up in these two river lands which apparently were not even part of the area where the village-farming community began? Why didn’t we have the first civilizations in Palestine, Syria, north Iraq, or Iran, where we’re sure food-production had had a long time to develop? I think the probable answer gives a clue to the ways in which civilization began in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The land in the hilly flanks is of a sort which people can farm without too much trouble. There is a fairly fertile coastal strip in Palestine and Syria. ”

“ You can see that the more we dig and find, the more clearly the main facts begin to stand out. We begin to be more sure of which people lived at the same time, which earlier and which later. We begin to know who traded with whom, and which peoples seemed to live off by themselves. We begin to find enough skeletons in burials so that the physical anthropologists can tell us what the people looked like. We get animal bones, and a paleontologist may tell us they are all bones of wild animals ”

“ Some of the people live in the country; some live in very large towns or cities. Classes of society have begun. There are officials and government people; there are priests or religious officials; there are merchants and traders; there are craftsmen, metal-workers, potters, builders, and so on; there are also farmers, and these are the people who produce the food for the whole population. It must be obvious that civilization cannot exist without food-production and that food-production must also be at a pretty efficient level of village-farming before civilization can even begin. ”

“ People who looked pretty much as we do, and who used different tools to do different things, are men to me. We’ll probably never know whether the earliest ones talked or not. They probably had vocal cords, so they could make sounds, but did they know how to make sounds work as symbols to carry meanings? But if the fossil bones look like our skeletons, and if we find tools which we’ll agree couldn’t have been made by nature or by animals, then I’d say we had traces of men.
The australopithecine finds of the Transvaal and Bechuanaland, in south Africa, are bound to come into the discussion here. ”

“ The food-producing revolution ushers in the food-producing stage. This stage began to be replaced by the industrial stage only about two hundred years ago. Now notice that my stage divisions are in terms of technology and economics. We must think sharply to be sure that the subdivisions of the stages, the eras, are in the same terms. This does not mean that I think technology and economics are the only important realms of culture. It is rather that for most of prehistoric time the materials left to the archeologists tend to limit our deductions to technology and economics. ”

“ In many cases, the terminal era of food-collecting was ended by the incoming of the food-producing peoples themselves. For example, the practices of food-production were carried into Europe by the actual movement of some numbers of peoples (we don’t know how many) who had reached at least the level of the primary village-farming community. The “Forest folk” learned food-production from them. There was never an era of incipient cultivation and domestication proper in Europe, if my hunch is right. ”

“ I suspect that the difficulty of making a good book that covers all of its later prehistory is another aspect of what makes Europe so very complicated a continent today. The prehistoric foundations for Europe’s very complicated set of civilizations, cultures, and sub-cultures—which begin to appear as history proceeds—were in themselves very complicated. ”

“ Geologists call the last great geological period the Pleistocene. It began somewhere between a half million and a million years ago, and was a time of great changes. Sometimes we call it the Ice Age, for in the Pleistocene there were at least three or four times when large areas of earth were covered with glaciers. The reason for my uncertainty is that while there seem to have been four major mountain or alpine phases of glaciation, there may only have been three general continental phases in the Old World.2 ”

“ The physical anthropologists are even working on a method—chemical tests of the bones—that will enable them to discover what the blood-type may have been. One thing is sure. We have never found a group of skeletons so absolutely similar among themselves—so cast from a single mould, so to speak—that we could claim to have a “pure” race. I am sure we never shall.
We become particularly interested in any signs of change—when new materials and tool types and ways of doing things replace old ones. We watch for signs of social change and progress in one way or another. ”

“ We can tell what tools go together in an “industrial” sense only if we have archeological context.
59 Up to now, the only things we could have called “industries” were the worked stone industry and perhaps the worked (?) bone industry of the Peking cave. We could add some of the very clear cases of open air sites, like Olorgesailie. We couldn’t use the term for the stone tools from the glacial gravels, because we do not know which tools belonged together. But when the cave materials begin to appear in Europe, we can begin to speak of industries. ”

“ SKETCH OF SELECTED ITEMS OF UBAIDIAN ASSEMBLAGE
There is a large Ubaid cemetery at Eridu, much of it still awaiting excavation. The few skeletons so far tentatively studied reveal a completely modern type of “Mediterraneanoid”; the individuals whom the skeletons represent would undoubtedly blend perfectly into the modern population of southern Iraq. What the Ubaidian assemblage says to us is that these people had already adapted themselves and their culture to the peculiar riverine environment of classic southern Mesopotamia. ”

“ It means that, at one moment in time, within each different area, men tended to look somewhat alike. From area to area, men tended to look somewhat different, just as they do today. This is all quite natural. People tended to mate near home; in the anthropological jargon, they made up geographically localized breeding populations. The simple continental division of “stocks”—black = Africa, yellow = Asia, white = Europe—is too simple a picture to fit the facts. People became accustomed to life in some particular area within a continent (we might call it a “natural area”) . ”