Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind
[Part 1 of 3] Constructing the Community, sedentism and engagement with the material world with tools, weights, property, cognition and intentionality..
In his book Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind, published in 2007 …
Colin Renfrew wrote:
Chapter Seven
Constructing the Community
Sedentism and the Domestication of Humankind
It is a central idea of the present work that the most decisive turn in prehistory … came with the order-of-magnitude increase in the varieties of engagement between humans and the material world, mediated by the use of symbols, that began with the development of sedentism — of living the year round in a permanent dwelling within a well-established residential community. Quite rapidly material things then achieved new importance. This seems to be true for the human experience in different parts of the world, along different and quite independent trajectories of development. With sedentism, new kinds of material engagement became possible. In most cases such year-round sedentism could be sustained only with the support of farming, implying new relationships with a number of ‘domesticated’ plants and animals, the end product of generations of interaction – engagement between humans and the relevant species. Yet … this process of engagement should not be seen in purely materialist terms simply as the contact between humans, as living beings, and the material environment that surrounds them. That would suggest a rather basic environmental or ecological approach, where human behaviour is little different from that of other species. As we have seen, the process of engagement is mediated through concepts, through ‘institutional facts’, which is why the cognitive dimension cannot be overlooked.
… [While] social relationships are crucial in any society, so too are the relations between humans and the material world as mediated by human cognition. We have seen how there can be no measure of weight without a concept of weight, which in turn is based upon the human experience of and recognition of mass. And we shall discuss … how there can be no concept of wealth without the human notion that some particular material (such as gold, or jade) is valuable. Again the direct contact with, and cognition of, the material world has primacy. But it is a contact in which the human animal has now become primed, socialised and contextualised. For we have no indications that gold, for instance, was prized much earlier, during palaeolithic times, as a material of value, whilst it did become highly valued subsequently. The interesting question is why the human encounter with this material evoked so little resonance of this kind for 55,000 years, and yet so much in the last 5,000.
In what follows it will be argued that how humans – in different ways – view, understand, and conceive of the world often plays a very significant role in the structuration of long-term change. It cannot be omitted from explanations of change, where it sometimes has to play a primary role. The development of new symbols, new concepts and new beliefs in relation to the human engagement with the world can have a significant influence upon the precise nature of that engagement and its outcomes. For instance, the notion of property and the ways in which the precise form of ownership is exercised can have a profound influence. To give one example, the whole practice of land tenure and inheritance are predicated upon it, and in turn determine entire systems of government; the feudal system of land tenure that shaped the Middle Ages of Europe provides clear evidence of that.
Before turning to the origins and effects of sedentism, however, it is wise to recognise that this process of engagement certainly did not begin with the ‘neolithic revolution’ and its antecedents. On the contrary, it is possible to review the developments occurring during the palaeolithic in these terms. We can recognise also the significant extent to which institutional facts have played a role in much more recent mobile hunter-gatherer societies.
Engagement Processes in the Palaeolithic
The deliberate and systematic production of tools is the most evident example of the engagement process between humans (or hominids) and the material world over the entire course of the human story. To use an object taken from the material world, and shape it for use in order to act upon the material world, is a fundamental step. Indeed, it underlies most of the early definitions of humankind: ‘man the toolmaker’, ‘Homo faber’, and so forth. But those definitions have fallen from favour a little since it has been observed that other apes may take twigs, and even trim them, for example to retrieve termite ants from their holes, or use and even modify a stick to get bananas that are out of reach.
But if the production of the pebble tools of simple form, made using the basic percussive technology seen at Olduvai Gorge (often designated Mode 1 in the sequence of lithic technologies), might be compared with the shaping of twigs by a chimpanzee, something very different is happening with the hand-axes carefully trimmed by Homo erectus from a flint core (using the technology termed Mode 2). As we have seen earlier, it is difficult to see how that technology could have been followed and developed over thousands of years without some mental template in the minds of successive makers. But we should recognise that this need not entail verbal communication; … the process of mimesis (i.e. imitation) can be very effective in allowing one generation of toolmakers to learn the necessary skills from their predecessors.
Indeed, the effectiveness of mimesis is emphasised when we realise how widespread it is among other species. It has been well documented, for instance, that the skill developed by blue tits of pecking their way through the foil tops of milk bottles left on the doorsteps of homes in England began locally in a limited area and gradually spread much more widely. This is of interest not only as an example of mimesis and the transmission of learned behaviour in much lower order species. It reminds us also that other species can demonstrate what we would regard as ‘cultural’ behaviour that is passed on through the generations, thus creating what are in effect trajectories of learned behaviour. A comparable case is that of the Japanese macaque monkey that used water to get the sand off her potatoes, a process which through imitation was widely adopted by others and so became an established tradition.
In many species, of course, there are complex behaviours that are apparently ‘programmed in’ genetically, such as the nest-building activities of bower birds or, indeed, of wasps. In the case of bower birds the inherited genetic component may be supplemented by the imitation of neighbours of the same species, so that local traditions or trajectories of behaviour could develop. But the human species is obviously unique in showing such a vast range of different behaviours across the globe, with only a few of them actually programmed in genetically (and thus seen universally) through the sort of mechanism that determines the nests of bower birds and the seasonal movements of migratory fish.
As noted earlier, another crucial engagement with the natural world was the use of fire. The utility (as well as the dangers) would soon have been evident: the creation of warmth and of light by night, the defence against predators, the potential for drying clothing and the possibilities for cooking. The first skill must have been the translocation and maintenance of fire found occurring naturally (through lightning-induced forest fires). The second skill was the creation of fire through rubbing or percussion. Whether these skills could have been transmitted from generation to generation and to neighbouring groups simply through mimesis and without the use of language is a matter for speculation. But in any case there was a complex sequence of events, and a skill in maintaining various factors under control, that had to be understood by several people, which implies cognition and intentionality. These people knew what they were doing: fire had become an intentional product as well as a hard fact, a fact of nature. That this first step in the development of pyrotechnology was of momentous significance is now evident. Cooking may have been the first deliberate modification of material through exposure to fire, and it is likely that fire-hardening of wood and heat preparation in stone tool production soon followed, as well as the deliberate boiling of water.
The significance and conceptual complexity of boat building should also be discussed. There is presumptive evidence that boats were being built by Homo erectus some 500,000 years ago. Finds of Middle Palaeolithic stone tools on the island of Flores in Indonesia, which even with the low sea levels of a very cold climatic phase would have remained an island, suggest that their makers must have travelled by sea. This must have involved a number of people in a cooperative activity that was directed at other activities that were to follow at some point in the future (i.e. setting out to sea). The proposed voyages would evidently have had a purpose – whether the provision of food from the sea, or travel to obtain raw materials or meet other humans. This was again one of those decisive engagements with the world that vastly enlarged the scope and potential of subsequent human action.
Engagement Processes among Recent Hunter-Gatherers
Ethnographic studies of recent hunter-gatherer groups have documented the vast repertoire of sophisticated procedures that each has for engaging with the world. Many such groups in recent times have lived in what most of us would regard as very marginal conditions ecologically – on the fringe of deserts or in arctic cold. They deploy a range of knowledge-based technologies that allow them to live in conditions that those without their learning and skill would find altogether unviable. Many hunter-gatherer communities show great classificatory precision for key features in their environment: for instance, the variety of terms for different categories of snow among the Inuit. And the coherence of the classificatory systems observed, including so-called totemic classification, has been documented by generations of anthropologists, and refreshingly discussed, for example in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (1966).
For most of these processes we have no way of knowing the extent to which such systems had developed during the palaeolithic period. Certainly Franco-Cantabrian cave art and the Gravettian figurines hint at a comparable richness. But their makers, like more recent hunter-gatherers, can, as we have seen, be situated in the tectonic phase of cultural development. If we ask the question as to which modes of behaviour and which cognitive constructs not prevalent during the palaeolithic have since emerged, in subsequent hunter-gatherer communities, there may be a few archaeological indicators. Twenty-five years ago Grahame Clark considered the production and exchange of stone axes among the Australian Aborigines, basing his study on the fieldwork of the Australian archaeologist Isabel McBryde. Polished stone axes, produced from very localised quarry sources, are exchanged over considerable distances. Their distribution was compared by him to that of polished stone axes in Britain and Europe during neolithic times. He used the ethnographic evidence available in Australia, which documents the social context of the exchange relationships underlying and enabling this axe trade, to give insights into the possible social context of the axe trade in neolithic Europe.
The Australian data, including the knowledge of the vast networks of interpersonal relationships with their accompanying ritual and cognitive dimensions, the so-called ‘songlines’, provided a rich analogy for the European case. In this context, however, it is pertinent to note that there is no evidence in the European palaeolithic period for a trade in polished stone axes; that came as a feature of the European neolithic. And while procurement at a distance is one of the most interesting features of the European Upper Palaeolithic, it did not in general involve the more sophisticated finished objects nor the great distances seen in Australia. The first lesson from this observation is the rather obvious one that it is unreliable to generalise from the ethnographic present to the palaeolithic past without explicit supporting evidence. That is a point that is, of course, well understood by those ethnoarchaeologists, like Lewis Binford or Richard Lee, who have used their experience among living hunter-gatherers to illuminate their understanding of aspects of hunter-gatherer life.
But the second moral is the converse one that we should not in any way assume that aspects of the life of hunter-gatherers that might be inferred for palaeolithic times would necessarily apply to hunter-gatherer communities of today. As noted earlier, modern hunter-gatherers have had as long as any other contemporary communities to develop from our common palaeolithic predecessors, and their culture is as distant in time from the life and times of the palaeolithic as is ours. The richness of the belief systems of contemporary hunter-gatherer communities is well documented: many commentators from Henri Frankfort to Claude Lévi-Strauss have emphasised the ‘mythic’ nature of their thought in contrast to what … has [been] termed the ‘theoretic’ thinking of more recent literate societies. …
The Source:
Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2007
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.