Stuart Piggott (1910–1996)

Prehistoric Societies takes us from the earliest evidence of human culture – the rock art and flint tools of the stone age hunter-gatherers, right through to the development of pottery, towns, and the bronze and iron ages and development of agriculture, cities, and complex civilisation that come to resemble more closesly our own.
This is very much a book written from an archaeological perspective, as archaological evidence is almost the only thing that can tell us anything about how prehistoric people lived, how their economies changed through the ages, what their beliefs might have been, what sort of buildings they probably lived in, and what they wore and ate.
This is quite a detailed book stretching to around 330 pages and plenty of illustrations. This length is appropriate given the vastness of the time periods it covers – hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago when the first stone tools were being made by non-human hominids, right up to the compartively recent pre-historic past of a few thousand BC.
This is a relatively readable book, and a fairly good introduction to Prehistory, though it doesn't as carefully avoid using non-specialist terms, or at least go to the same lengths to explain them, as many popular accounts do. Also, having been written over 50 years ago, it is somewhat out of date in that a lot of new discoveries have been made since then. For example, the oldest known cultures have been discovered further into the past now, and more evidence has been gathered using new techniques such as genetics, which have provided us with a much improved understanding of the past and how and where it was populated with different varieties of extinct anthropoids. This being said, the vast majority of Prehistory, as this book says, is lost forever to human knowledge, as only certain types of material traces are left to survive the huge timescales involved. For this reason, the job of the archaeologist, and the glimpses we see of these long distant cultures are made even more intriguing.… (meer)

This is a short introduction to Archaeology, at 150 pages. It sets out the general aims and methods of archaeology as a discipline, including its overlap and utilisation of neighbouring disciplines including geology, botany, and zoology. It emphasizes the differences in archeology when it is concerned with pre-historic vs historic civilisations, as well as the challenges involved in establishing chronologies and time lines.
While this is a good and readable introduction to archaeology, which covers many important aspects of the subject, I found it slightly less enjoyable than Leonard Wooley's introduction "Digging up the Past" due to his better communication of the excitement and intellectual rewards of archeology. There is some overlap between these volumes in content, however this book is slightly more recent and does cover some additional areas such as dating using pollen.… (meer)

Professor Piggott views archeology as the record of technology expressed in material objects. [15] The 14 contributors are specialists in their respective areas.

Riparian Issue - Humans are a long associated with rivers and shorelines. We know that ice sheets once covered more land mass, and that the shoreline is now raised. For example, in Europe, the ice covered France, and the Mediterranean was much lower. Thus, most human habitats in that region are most certainly submerged today. Chart [20].

Creatures used to be bigger and taller. The Olduvai Gorge has given up wart-hog skeletons as big as rhinoceri, with giant varieties of giraffe, horse, pig, sheep, and baboon. The Dire Wolf was as big as a horse.

The first tool-making man appears 400,000 years ago at Chou K'ou tien near Peking. [21] He extracted marrow from the bones of both men and animals (crushing the bone with stone), and opened the skull for brain extraction. Extent apes were all vegetarian. [21]

Pithecanthropus hunted with stones and wooden spears -- the point hardened in fire. Query, cordage? His brain was nearly twice the size of the apes.

The first "art" appears about 25,000 BC. Small figurines of women have been found over a wide area from the Caucuses to Spain. [24] The arms are abridged, the legs small and tapered, and the face is usually blank. However, the primary and secondary sexual characteristics are prominent. This suggests a concern with reproduction. Often with "string skirts" (!). A few objects are phallic, consisting of only a penis, without any other personal attributes.

Cave Art. At Les Freres -- the bearded dancing deer-figure with horse and fox tail. [28] The author speculates that "Magic ritual" seems inescapable. I disagree: It is clearly sexual, with a protuberant posterior (not steatopygous) and an inviting expression turned toward...us!

At Altamira, bison are drawn on the natural bosses of the roof, with wounds depicted at natural drip marks. [29] Many of the Hand Prints are of small hands. The artists were women.

At the entrance to Lascaux, a bison flees, its back pierced with white lines. No human figures, no kings, no priests.

The ice retreated by 8000 BC. [31] Temperate fertile areas opened up, but the Baltic lake became sea, and large dry land became the North Sea. One of the earliest human figures is a carved man on a mattock head made of mammoth tusk 18,000 years ago. [31]

Thirty-three human skulls of this time were found in depressions in a cave at Ofnet, in Bavaria. Covered with red ochre and faced West. 4 men, 9 women, and 20 children, all of whom suffered a violent death. [34]
...… (meer)