|
Today, many scholars show more interest
in unscientific attempts to empathize with ancient peoples
than in obtaining valid knowledge about the past. Archaeologists
have become failed ethnographers, forever regretting the
demise of the people they would like to talk to. Genes,
Memes and Human History offers an ambitious blueprint
for a new approach to archaeology, based on the application
of the latest neo-Darwinian evolutionary ideas.
What is the history of human populations?
How are cultural traditions maintained and changed over
time? Why did people destroy their environments in the past
and were they ever conservationists? What led to the emergence
of marked social inequalities? These are some of the important
questions that evolutionary archaeology can answer.
Stephen Shennan opens with the study of
animal behavior, as acted upon by natural selection, and
goes on to demonstrate that the same ideas can be applied
to human societies, not just through the genes but through
what Richard Dawkins has called "memes," units
of cultural information that are passed on in our second
inheritance system, culture. Shennan then looks in detail
at cultural traditions, population history, methods of subsistence,
male-female relations, social evolution, and competition
and warfare. Fascinating insights emerge. For example, the
unique time-depth of archaeology can be used to show that
human populations have expanded and then crashed far more
frequently in the past than has hitherto been realized.
Similarly, during the Bronze Age increasing control of women
by men as indicated by chained leg rings and other evidence
runs parallel with growing hierarchical and social divisions
in society.
Ranging from life history theory to game
theory, and from the origins of farming to the collapse
of societies, Genes, Memes and Human History takes
us on a thrilling intellectual journey.
Stephen Shennan is Professor of Theoretical
Archaeology and Director of the AHRB Centre for the Evolutionary
Analysis of Cultural Behaviour at the Institute of Archaeology,
University College London. He is the author of several books,
in particular Quantifying Archaeology, and has edited
a number of volumes, including Archaeological Approaches
to Cultural Identity and The Archaeology of Human
Ancestry (with James Steele).
|
