Modern Mind

First, it revised the timing of the way the earth was populated. For example, from about 1960 on it was known that Australia had been occupied by man as early as 4000 BC , and maybe even as early as 17000 BC . Maize, it was established, was gathered systematically in Mexico by 5000 BC , and well before 3000 BC it was showing signs of domestication. The real significance of these dates was not just that they were earlier than anyone had thought hitherto, but that they killed off the vague theories then current that Meso-America had only developed civilisation after it had been imported, in some indefinable way, from Europe. The Americas had been cut off from the rest of the world since 12000–13000 BC , in effect the last ice age, and had developed all the hallmarks of civilisation – farming, building, metallurgy, religion – entirely separately. 46
    This revision of chronology, and what it meant, was the second element in Renfrew’s book, and here he concentrated on the area he knew best, Europe and the classical world of the Middle East. In the traditional view, the civilisations of the Middle East – Sumer and Egypt, for example – were the mother civilisations, the first great collective achievements of mankind, giving rise to the Minoans on Crete, and the classical world of the Aegean: Athens, Mycenae, Troy. From there, civilisation had spread farther north, to the Balkans and thenGermany and Britain, and west to Italy and then France, and the Iberian peninsula. But after the C 14 revolution, there was suddenly a serious problem with this model. 47 On the new dating, the huge megalithic sites of the Atlantic seaboard, in Spain and Portugal, in Brittany and Britain, and in Denmark, were either contemporaneous with the civilisations of the Aegean or actually preceded them. This wasn’t just a question of an isolated date here and there but of many hundreds of revised datings, consistent with each other, and which in some cases put the Atlantic megaliths up to a thousand years earlier than Aegean cultures. The traditional model, for Egypt, the Middle East, and the Aegean, still held. But there was, as Renfrew put it, a sort of archaeological ‘fault line’ around the Aegean. Beyond that, a new model was needed.
    The model he came up with started from a rejection of the old idea of ‘diffusion’ – that there had been an area of mother civilisations in the Middle East from which ideas of farming, metallurgy, and, say, the domestication of plants and animals had started, and then spread to all other areas as people migrated. It seemed clear to Renfrew that up and down the Atlantic coasts of Europe, there had developed a series of chiefdoms, a level of social organisation midway between hunter-gatherers and full-blown civilisation as represented in Egypt, Sumer, or Crete, which had kings, elaborate palaces, a highly stratified society. The sovereign areas of the chiefdoms were smaller (six on the Isle of Arran in Scotland, for example), and they were centred around large tombs and occasionally religious/astronomical sites, such as Stonehenge. 48 Associated with these chiefdoms were a rudimentary social stratification and early trade. Sufficient numbers were needed to build the impressive stone works, funerary religious monuments around which the clans cohered. The megaliths were always found associated with arable land, suggesting that chiefdoms were a natural stage in the evolution of society: when man settled with the first domesticated crops, chiefdoms and megaliths soon followed. 49
    Renfrew’s analysis, now generally accepted, concentrated on sites in Britain, Spain, and the Balkans, which illustrated his argument. But it was his general thrust that counted: although early man had no doubt spread out to populate the globe from an initial point (maybe East Africa), civilisation, culture – call it what you will – had not developed in one place and then spread in the same way; civilisations had grown up in different times at different places of their own accord. 50 This had two important long-term intellectual consequences, quite apart from killing off any idea (which still lingered then) that American civilisations had been seeded by European ones (such as the ‘lost tribe’ of Israel). First, it demolished the idea that, culturally speaking, the history of man is one story; all cultures across the world were
sui generis
and did not owe their being to a mother culture, the ancestor of all.