opening the door, pointing the way. trevor watkins (special issue on jacques cauvin), paleorient...

Paléorient, vol. 37.1, p. 29-38 © CNRS ÉDITIONS 2011 Manuscrit reçu le 7 février 2011, accepté le 10 mai 2011

OPENING THE DOOR, POINTING THE WAY

T. WATKINS

Abstract: Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture (1994) represented his mature and original thinking on the essential nature of neolithisation. While the book continues to infl uence the thought and work of many, its impact is diminished because Jacques Cauvin left two major questions unanswered. My own research has been directed to investigating those questions: Cauvin described his “révolution des symboles” as “psycho-cultural”, but he said little about its cognitive and cultural nature; and he repeated the question with which R. Braidwood had challenged us – to explain why (in Braidwood’s case) hunter-gatherers had turned to farming at that particular time, and why not earlier. My work has been directed at developing an understanding of the cognitive and cultural implications of the use of systems of symbolic representation in material form; and at setting the emergence of those cognitive skills in the context of theories of the evolution of human cultural communication. However, we have made little progress along the way that Cauvin pointed us. Despite rapid and exciting strides in theories about the human mind and the cognitive evolution of human social and communication skills, inter-disciplinary collaboration with archaeologists has placed the climax of the story in the Upper Palaeolithic; the Neolithic has been either ignored or seen as no more than a consequence of a “human revolution” that was achieved more than 30,000 years ago. In order to progress, we need to form new inter-disciplinary collaborations that will investigate the cognitive and symbolic cultural aspects of the Neolithic.

Résumé : Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture (1994) a refl été la pensée orignale et aboutie de Jacques Cauvin sur la nature première de la néolithisation. Cet ouvrage infl uence toujours la pensée et les travaux d’un grand nombre, mais son impact a été limité parce qu’il a laissé deux questions majeures en suspens. Mes propres recherches se sont fondées sur deux questions : Cauvin a décrit sa « révolution des symboles » comme étant « psycho-culturelle » mais il s’est peu exprimé sur sa nature cognitive et culturelle et il a répété la question que R. Braidwood avait posée en défi , comprendre pourquoi les chasseurs-cueilleurs se sont tournés vers l’agriculture à ce moment précis et pas plus tôt. Je me suis appliqué dans ma recherche à contribuer à la compréhension des implications cognitives et culturelles de l’emploi de systèmes de représentation symbolique sous une forme matérielle ; et à intégrer l’émergence de savoirs cognitifs dans le contexte de la théorie de l’évolution de la communication culturelle. Toutefois, nous avons peu progressé sur le chemin que Cauvin a tracé. Malgré des avancées rapides et passionnantes dans les théories relatives à l’esprit humain et à l’évolution cognitive des savoirs sociaux et de la communication, la collaboration pluri-disciplinaire avec les archéologues a replacé le centre de la question au Paléolithique supérieur. Le Néolithique a été ignoré ou considéré seulement comme la conséquence de la « révolution humaine » qui se serait accomplie il y a plus de 30 000 ans. Afi n de progresser, il nous faut mettre en place de nouvelles collaborations multi-disciplinaires, tournées vers les aspects culturels cognitifs et symboliques du Néolithique.

Keywords: Neolithic; Epipalaeolithic; Jacques Cauvin; Cognitive psychology; Evolutionary psychology; Symbolic culture.Mots-clés : Néolithique ; Épipaléolithique ; Jacques Cauvin ; Psychologie cognitive ; Psychologie évolutionniste ; Culture des symboles.

I can only give my personal perspective on how we have been infl uenced by Jacques Cauvin, and continued to develop our understanding of the processes of neolithisation in south-west Asia. I draw from Cauvin’s last, great book, Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture,1 two points that

1. CAUVIN, 1994.

have been fundamentally important in guiding the direction of my own work: Cauvin described his revolution as ‘psycho-cultural’, and he also drew attention to the fact that none of the accounts proposed for the neolithisation process could answer Robert Braidwood’s old question of why things happened as they did at that particular time, around the beginning of the Holocene period, and why not earlier. My conclusion is that

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30 T. WATKINS

Paléorient, vol. 37.1, p. 29-38 © CNRS ÉDITIONS 2011

we have not progressed very well along the way that Cauvin pointed us. And in the fi nal part of this contribution, I seek to understand why progress has been so poor, and to suggest how we can improve matters.

I was privileged to work closely with Cauvin through the translation of his book for the English language edition.2 It is dreadfully sad that he died at exactly the time that new and exciting developments in other disciplines and prehistoric archaeology were beginning to converge. Fundamental to Cauvin’s thesis was the idea that around the end of the Epi-palaeolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic in southwest Asia people experienced a ‘psycho-cultural’ revolution that expanded the way in which they were able to conceive of them-selves and their world by means of symbolic thought and sym-bolic representation. We shall never know how Cauvin would have responded to the new theories on the evolution of human cognition, and how he would have been able to develop his thesis through new collaborations with specialists in cognition, psychology and evolutionary disciplines.

Looking back, I can see that my own thinking was com-pletely re-directed by a three-way coincidence. My experience with the very early Neolithic site of Qermez Dere in north Iraq3 had begun to sensitize me to the idea of new kinds of symbolic representation.4 While Cauvin was particularly concerned with small, three-dimensional representations of humans, especially females, and animals, especially the bull, that were modelled in clay or carved in stone, I was more impressed by architec-ture, and the rituals and symbolism associated with buildings and settlements. Then, while I was reading Naissance des divinités5 and grappling with its exciting ideas, I happened to attend an invited lecture by R. Dunbar in the University of Edinburgh, in which he spoke of ideas that later appeared in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Origins of Language.6 That coincidence proved to be catalytic. I went on to translate the 1997 edition of Cauvin’s book, which required me to walk slowly in Cauvin’s company, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. And fi nally there was a week in Cauvin’s con-stant company at Jalès, checking, correcting and improving the English version, discussing meaning, and adding the postscript that appears in the English edition.

The coincidence of reading Naissance des divinités and encountering the ideas of Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip and the Origins of Language was formative. At the foundation

2. CAUVIN, 2000.3. WATKINS, 1992b; WATKINS et al., 1991 and 1995. 4. WATKINS, 1990, 1992a and 1996.5. CAUVIN, 1994.6. DUNBAR, 1997.

of Cauvin’s thesis is the idea of a psychological and cultural revolution that for the fi rst time enabled people to formulate and communicate ideas about supernatural beings and the relationship between themselves and the supernatural world. Fundamental to Dunbar’s work has been the evolutionary relationship between humans and our nearest living relatives among the primates. Linking Cauvin to Dunbar is the idea that our human cultural facility for systems of symbolic represen-tation, whether in the form of language or in the form of our capacity to imagine and formulate concrete notions of divini-ties, is an evolved capacity. Cauvin’s idea of a psycho-cultural phenomenon showed me a doorway. And, through that door-way, I glimpsed the ideas of a psychologist who was working on the evolution of the hominid mind and cultural communica-tion.

At fi rst glance, there is an anomaly that deserves some examination. Naissance des divinités has been a successful publication, whether in terms of the number of copies sold, or the frequency with which it has been cited in the archaeo-logical literature: but the way that archaeologists frame their discourse on the neolithisation of southwest Asia has scarcely been affected. The book, sixteen years on, remains in print with CNRS Éditions. The publisher informs the world that it has “become a classic” (although, in the process, it seems to have lost its original and important subtitle, La Révolu-tion des symboles au Néolithique). Like the popular books of G. Childe,7 this book has reached out far beyond the special-ist in prehistoric archaeology, and beyond an academic or a student readership. Clearly, the ideas have had a great appeal for an intelligent lay public. The English edition, published by Cambridge University Press, has likewise remained in print, achieving a remarkable longevity in these times when many academic books are remaindered by their publishers after two or three years. In the fi eld of Neolithic research in southwest Asia, it has indeed become a classic.

Cauvin’s account of a change in human “psycho-cultural” facility with symbolic culture, leading to a transformation of society and of subsistence strategies, has been widely read, but he would have been disappointed that among prehistoric archaeologists it has not displaced the environmentally deter-ministic narrative, simplistically derived from Childe’s socio-economic “Neolithic revolution”, that has become the standard view. Most archaeologists writing on the Neolithic period in southwest Asia still refer, implicitly or explicitly, to the primacy of the adoption of farming practices, and most subscribe to the idea that the adoption of farming was a response demanded by

7. CHILDE, 1936 and 1942.


Opening the door, pointing the way 31


the constraints imposed by the Younger Dryas phase on the availability of wild food resources.

How is it that the book, so widely read, has not established a new narrative for the neolithisation process? It seems to me that Cauvin’s thesis has suffered from three related disadvan-tages, the greatest of which is his untimely death. The second and third disadvantages relate to the timing and the nature of his magnum opus: its subject is a ‘psycho-cultural’ revolution, but it was written before the explosion of new thinking on the evolution of human cognition, gene-culture co-evolution, and theories such as “the extended mind”, embodied cognition, and situated psychology; and, of its nature as a relatively compact book, it lacked the space for a detailed analysis and discussion of either his own theories or the orthodox accounts of neo-lithisation that he wished to displace.

Although Cauvin died in 2001, the thesis that he presented was probably formulated ten years earlier. Comparing the sec-ond edition8 with the fi rst,9 it is clear that he made only minor editorial changes and additions where excavations at key sites had produced some more relevant information. The English edition10 was a straightforward translation of the French sec-ond edition, with the addition of a postscript that added some more up-to-date excavation information. The thesis of the book was essentially formed some twenty years ago, and was neither modifi ed nor developed.

Since Cauvin was writing about a revolutionary new sym-bolising ability, it is a tragedy that he missed the “decade of the mind”, as the 1990s were named. Having completed the book, part way through that decade, he was very busy with other things. In the decade since his death, the pace of research on the human brain, mind and their evolution has increased, and the involvement of archaeologists in “cognitive archaeology” has expanded greatly. Childe proposed his “Neolithic revolu-tion” theory in a vacuum, before any fi eld research had been directed at sites of the period in southwest Asia; in a sense, Childe defi ned the solution, before anyone had discovered the problems and established the tools for tackling them. While archaeologists have encouraged each other to abandon Childe on the grounds that his ‘culture-historical’ approach is subjec-tive, unscientifi c and outdated, the Childe-like culture-histor-ical framework that was established for the Levant has lived on. Archaeologists have railed at Childe’s ideas on revolutions that resemble but antedate the industrial revolution, and yet the notion that the arrival of the Neolithic represents a transfor-

8. CAUVIN, 1997. 9. CAUVIN, 1994.10. CAUVIN, 2000.

mation in human affairs remains. Cauvin’s thesis of a differ-ent kind of revolution, however, has had to compete with the standard account of the period, in which generations of spe-cialists have invested academic lifetimes of research. Childe set a paradigm: Cauvin sought to shift that deeply entrenched paradigm. Although we are closer to that “paradigm shift” in terms of a scientifi c revolution as discussed by the physicist and philosopher of science T. Kuhn,11 we have still to pass the critical tipping point at which the new perspective begins to seem completely obvious and the old orthodoxy seems incred-ible.

Naissance des divinités is actually a relatively small book, especially when one remembers that it attempts to encompass a general review of the prehistory of southwest Asia between the late Epipalaeolithic (from 12,000 BC) and the end of the Ace-ramic Neolithic (about 7500 BC). The amount of space given (a) to criticizing the standard environmentally driven account, and (b) to elaborating and sustaining in its place Cauvin’s orig-inal thesis of a “psycho-cultural” revolution is only a half of an economical book. Within that quite concise treatment, there was not space to deconstruct systematically what Cauvin saw as the environmentally deterministic standard view; rather, he dismissed it.

Similarly, he did not allow himself much space for making the case for his thesis of the Naissance des divinités, the prod-uct of a révolution des symboles au Néolithique. Indeed, I fi nd it very diffi cult to imagine (with the benefi t of hindsight) how a case could be made for such a ‘psycho-cultural’ transformation in the absence of any theory of the evolution of human cogni-tion and culture. Those theories were beginning to appear in specialist journals, but also in popular book form, from the late 1980s, but more so during the 1990s. So far as I am aware, the major players were either native Anglophone, or were based in institutes and universities in the English-speaking world, or wrote in English in international journals. Up to the time when he completed the postscript of the English edition, I am not aware that he had read any of the books on cognitive and cultural evolution, or gene-culture co-evolution, or the evolu-tionary emergence of language that were appearing.12 The fi rst archaeologists to see the relevance of cognitive evolutionary theory to archaeology, and of archaeology to cognitive evolu-tionary theory had also produced important texts in that decade, notably S. Mithen and C. Renfrew.13 Cauvin read English with

11. KUHN, 1962.12. E.g., BARKOW et al., 1992; BOYD and RICHERSON, 1985; DEACON, 1997;

DONALD, 1991; DUNBAR, 1997; DURHAM, 1991; PLOTKIN, 1997.13. MITHEN, 1996; RENFREW and SCARRE, 1998; RENFREW and ZUBROW,

1994.


32 T. WATKINS


facility, but it was my general impression that the archaeologi-cal theorists of the Anglophone world, with the exception of some of I. Hodder’s work, did not impress him.

For many Anglophone readers, I suspect that what Cauvin had to say was unexpected, interesting, but diffi cult. His style was allusive and in some measure rhetorical; he might well have responded that he thought the style of many Anglophone archaeologists pseudo-scientifi c. If he mentioned the name of E. Cassirer, he expected the reader to be aware that Cassirer was the author of an important series of volumes on the phi-losophy of symbolic forms, and, in his short book on human nature and the critical importance of symbolism for human culture, the author of the label Homo symbolicus.14 If my own case is typical, few non-French-speaking archaeologists are conversant with several other important scholars to whom Cauvin refers for the important ideas that he incorporated into his own thinking. The original ideas of archaeologist-anthro-pologist A. Leroi-Gourhan concerning human culture, cul-tural communication and prehistoric religion,15 of Annaliste medieval historians such as G. Duby16 and J. Le Goff,17 and of the anthropologist-prehistorian of religion G. Dumézil,18 were important infl uences on Cauvin’s thinking. In Naissance des divinités, however, there was no space either for a full account of his debts to these scholars, or for a reasoned summary of his own ideas. And for Cauvin there was no time to write more books that would have taught us much.

Most signifi cant of all, Cauvin did not present a fully worked out narrative of neolithisation. He said that he did not have the answers to what was surely a very complex process. Rather, on the one hand he pointed out what he considered to be the errors of assuming that the adoption of farming was the critical change, and that it was an adaptation forced on humans by adverse environmental conditions; and on the other hand he sought to turn our attention into new directions for further research.19 In these regards, Cauvin’s situation was quite dif-ferent from that of Childe. He was inveighing against a deeply entrenched orthodoxy of long standing, but in its place he was proposing an alternative hypothesis that needed extensive fur-ther work. He believed that he could demonstrate a sequence that showed that the adoption of farming was not the primary stage: but he clearly advised that knowing that a precedes b

14. CASSIRER, 1944 and 1975.15. LEROI-GOURHAN 1943, 1964a and b and 1965.16. DUBY 1978 and 1980.17. LE GOFF 1985, 1988a and b, and 1992.18. DUMÉ ZIL, 1958.19. CAUVIN, 2001: 107.

does not tell us if or how a led to b. In a simple explanation of his hypothesis he wrote:

“The observed sequence of events in itself explains nothing. Is there a causal link between symbolism and economy and, if so, what is it? There is no obvious a priori explanation.”20

Indeed, the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter reasoning (that b follows a in time, and b is therefore the consequence of a) was his main criticism of the (lack of) logic underlying the orthodox, environmentalist model.

Since Cauvin wrote his Naissance des divinités, our infor-mation base relating to neolithisation in southwest Asia has continued to expand, and particularly in ways that would have interested him. Some of the sites about which he could write only briefl y (for example, Jerf el Ahmar, Dja’de, Tell Aswad and Göbekli Tepe), have produced more dramatic architecture and sculptured representations. The fi rst sites in Cyprus to date from the late 9th millennium BC were known to Cauvin, but now we know of more sites of that date all across the island, as well as the fi rst intimations of even earlier sites, narrowing the chronological gap between the aceramic Neolithic settle-ments and the isolated fi nal Epipalaeolithic site of Akrotiri-Aetokremnos.21 Nothing has been discovered or learned that would refute Cauvin’s thesis (except that he would now fi nd it harder to sustain his view that his “symbolic revolution” pre-ceded the beginnings of cultivation and manipulation of ani-mal populations). And the information that has emerged from the earlier Epipalaeolithic emphasises that the early chapters of the story of neolithisation should take note of the 10,000 years before the Levantine Natufi an, with which most accounts begin. The settlement and subsistence strategies of the transi-tional Upper Palaeolithic-Epipalaeolithic site of Ohalo III in the north of Israel,22 and the evidence of extensive settlements with intra-mural burials in the middle Epipalaeolithic23 require us to extend our fi eld of view.

If we should expand our fi eld of view, we should also recog-nize that, as Cauvin warned, the process in southwest Asia that we label ‘neolithisation’ was not simple, mono-causal, or lin-ear. He was vigorous in his rejection of the kind of model that made some “external” factor, whether climatic and environ-mental, or demographic, responsible for driving “adaptations” in subsistence strategy. It seems almost equally inappropriate to think of neolithisation as being a process driven by some

20. Ibid.21. AMMERMAN et al., 2008; McCARTNEY et al., 2006, 2007 and 2008.22. NADEL and HERSHKOVITZ, 1991; NADEL and WERKER, 1999;

PIPERNO et al., 2004; WEISS et al., 2004.23. E.g., MAHER, 2010; MAHER et al., 2011.




“internal” factor. Rather, we are concerned with a complex process in which there are interacting components, and we cannot assume that we have identifi ed all the components of the system, or how one interacts with or upon another. The processualist solutions have been constructed as systems with a complex interplay between various sub-systems, but the human component has often been reduced to a tool-using pop-ulation uniquely capable of rapid adaptation through technical innovation. Cauvin believed that the omission of the human cultural component rendered such models, however sophisti-cated, inadequate and misleading; and the archaeology that has emerged over more than half a century (from the strange tower at Jericho, excavated by K. Kenyon in the 1950s, to the towering monoliths at Göbekli Tepe that are emerging in K. Schmidt’s ongoing excavations) illustrate vividly the central importance of cultural symbolism to communities of the earli-est Neolithic. The impact of Cauvin’s arguments on behalf of syntheses that allowed for complexity, for processes that were not mono-causal, and for accounts that were not simply linear may be seen, for example, in essays such as those by M. Verhoeven24 and M. Zeder,25 both of which clearly refer-ence their debt to Cauvin’s publications.

Cauvin’s ‘psycho-cultural’ transformation implies some signifi cant change in the cognitive psychology of the human agents on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a new cultural faculty that facilitated the creation of rich, symbolic worlds. With regard to such ideas, we face a diffi culty in that there is no generally accepted defi nition of culture that is shared among archaeologists,26 no standard model for change in cultural systems, and little idea how the minds of individual human agents within a cultural community relate to the cul-ture that they share. If we are to understand what a ‘psycho-cultural’ transformation means, we need to know something about how the cognitive faculties of the individual relate to the phenomenon that we call ‘culture’. This is not a problem that affects archaeologists alone: much of the research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology, for example, regards humans as typical individuals or as a species, taking little account of the role of culture.

In the second place, Cauvin drew attention to a question that was posed by Braidwood fi fty years ago; Braidwood left the question unanswered, and it remained forgotten. He had set about testing Childe’s hypothesis of climate change and

24. VERHOEVEN, 2004.25. ZEDER, 2009.26. See, for example, KUPER, 1999 for the variety of defi nitions of culture

among anthropologists.

environmental pressure as the driver that brought about the adoption of agriculture. He and his team were unable to fi nd evidence for any signifi cant climatic change at the relevant time; in any case, supposing that there were environmental changes at the relevant time, Braidwood asked why should people have turned to farming in response to that particular occurrence of the change. “Why then? Why not earlier?” He concluded that, somehow, culture was the critical factor; he answered his own question by saying that, in some un-defi ned way, “culture was not ready”.27 Cauvin’s own theory was that a psychological and cultural change at the beginning of the Neolithic brought about a revolution in symbolic culture that allowed people for the fi rst time to set about making profound changes to the way that they lived in new social formations supported on new, productive subsistence strategies. I found the arguments with which Cauvin adduced these conclusions very diffi cult to follow; but I was easily convinced that he was correct in pointing to a step-change in cultural facility that allowed communities to imagine and formulate ideas about the nature of the world and their place within it.

I have sought ways to set the archaeological information that we have from the Epipalaeolithic and Aceramic Neo-lithic periods in the context of theories of human cognition, the human mind, cultural faculties and practice, and their evolution. And it has seemed to me that a key ingredient that we need to add to Cauvin’s ‘psycho-cultural’ revolution is the emergence of a new mode of social life in the form of large, permanently co-resident communities locked in wide-area networks, and dependent on new cultural modes of symbolic representation.28 This is a rather different formulation of a theme that has been discussed in terms of sedentism versus mobility among hunter-gatherers for many years. Two factors have been less appreciated. First, not only did communities become sedentary, they also grew larger, massively larger;29 and at the same time became more deeply concerned with creating buildings and settlements that were full of symbolic elements, and that were the arenas for ritual acts. Second, as communities became more and more concerned with sym-bolism and ritual within the household or the community, they also devoted resources to symbolic exchanges with each other, and the sharing of symbolic practices and representa-tions. Several archaeologists have studied and written about the role of rituals and symbolic practices within Neolithic

27. BRAIDWOOD and WILLEY, 1962: 332.28. E.g., WATKINS, 2002, 2004a and b, 2006, 2008a and 2010b.29. KUIJT, 2000b: 79-87.


34 T. WATKINS


communities.30 But these and other studies have not faced up to Braidwood’s question: why then? why not earlier?

As a way of situating these dramatic and striking phenom-ena in a context that may explain why they occurred around the beginning of the Holocene, it is necessary to relate them to theories of the evolution of human cognition, cultural commu-nication and systems of symbolic representation. This involves taking a much longer-term perspective, that of the whole of hominin evolution. And it requires a great deal of reading in several new and exciting, but very unfamiliar, areas, in which progress is very rapid. Often, the themes of workshops and conferences have provided the stimulus and opportunity to explore particular aspects, such as the role of shared systems of religious belief and practice,31 the way that architecture and monumentality provided structures for people’s ideas about their world,32 the completely new social frameworks of the Neolithic,33 and the role of the new, culturally framed envi-ronment.34

But all of this is based on a mass of inexpert reading in new disciplinary areas. There will be no real progress with these important issues unless we build new inter-disciplinary part-nerships. Archaeologists have done it before, led for example by Braidwood, who formed multi-disciplinary research teams for his fi eldwork projects of the 1950s and 1960s. By the end of the 1960s conventional archaeologists were beginning to recognize that new inter-disciplinary sub-disciplines, archaeo-botany and archaeo-zoology, were emerging.35 We now need to go through the same process once more, with new inter-disciplinary collaborations that may lead to the establishment of new inter-disciplinary sub-disciplines. There have been several multi-disciplinary conferences36 and at least one major multi-disciplinary research programme: “Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain” has been a seven-year programme, funded by the British Academy, and led by R. Dunbar, C. Gamble and J. Gowlett. It has so far generated around 200 scientifi c publications by collaborators in the proj-ect, and one major multi-authored publication.37

30. Notably HELMER et al., 2003; KUIJT, 1996, 2000a, 2001, 2008 and 2009; STORDEUR, 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2010; STORDEUR et al., 2000; STORDEUR and KHAWAM, 2007 and 2008; VERHOEVEN 2002a, b and c, and 2007.

31. WATKINS, 2002.32. WATKINS, 2004a and b, and 2006.33. WATKINS, 2008a.34. WATKINS, 1997, 2005, 2008b and c, 2010a and b.35. UCKO and DIMBLEBY, 1969.36. E.g., AIELLO, 2010; DEMARRAIS et al., 2004; MALAFOURIS and REN-

FREW, 2010; RENFREW and MORLEY, 2009.37. DUNBAR et al., 2010. Also simultaneously published in the Proceedings

of the British Academy 158.

We could think that progress is already under way; from among the young researchers and doctoral students involved in the Lucy to Language project there may emerge a number of inter-disciplinary pioneers, akin to the fi rst archaeo-botanists and archaeo-zoologists. But there is a serious risk that these practitioners of new inter-disciplinary specializations will pass over the prehistory of southwest Asia. The interdisciplinary workshops, symposia and research programmes are beginning to bring some prehistoric archaeologists into fruitful collabo-ration with cognitive and evolutionary psychologists, cognitive anthropologists, neuro-scientists, linguists, sociologists and philosophers. Those interested in hominin evolution take the long view, but the archaeologists involved have been primar-ily Palaeolithic specialists. And the hook that drew them all together was the idea of a “Human Revolution”, the technical, economic, social and artistic “creative explosion” of the (west-ern European) Upper Palaeolithic.38

Thus, the long-term evolutionary perspective has tended to take as its conclusion the worldwide diaspora of Homo sapiens and the achievement of ‘modernity’ as exemplifi ed in Upper Palaeolithic ‘art’. For most of the archaeologists involved, the rest of human prehistory and history was a simple narrative, because the evolution of the human mind was complete by about 40,000 years ago, and no further cognitive or cultural evolution had occurred between then and now. That kind of perspective on hominid evolution and the emergence of “the modern mind” can be seen in Mithen’s ground-breaking book, The Prehistory of the Mind.39 Over eight chapters the story of the evolution of the human mind builds to an Upper Palaeolithic climax in the fi nal three chapters. The book then closes with a brief Epilogue, sub-titled “the origins of agriculture”, which explains the adop-tion of farming as a direct consequence of the type of thinking that had emerged in the Upper Palaeolithic.40

This focus on the signifi cance of the Upper Palaeolithic revolution has been criticised from both chronological direc-tions. Recent discoveries in southern Africa demonstrate that some of the traits that appear so dramatically in the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe have a long prehistory among archaic Homo sapiens.41 And Renfrew has challenged the Palaeolithic specialists, arguing that Upper Palaeolithic people seem to have lacked some of the essential characteristics that enable truly ‘modern’ people to create and use symbolic culture.42 For Renfrew, as for me, the “creative explosion” that we can see in

38. MELLARS et al., 1996 and 2007; MELLARS and STRINGER, 1989.39. MITHEN, 1996.40. Ibid.: 217.41. MCBREARTY and BROOKS, 2000.42. RENFREW, 1996.




the late Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic of southwest Asia documents communities that lived by symbolic cultures that we can recognize as like our own.

At the beginning, I said that Cauvin’s Naissance des divi-nités opened a door to a new way of approaching the question of neolithisation. Since his passing, some Palaeolithic special-ists, working with cognitive psychologists and evolutionary sci-entists, have begun to transform our understanding of human evolution, the emergence of human cognitive and cultural fac-ulties, and the development of the human mind. For my own part, I have sought to develop a scenario for the process that we label ‘neolithisation’ that places the formation of large, per-manently co-resident communities during the Epipalaeolithic and particular in the early Aceramic Neolithic as the primary factor; the ability to sustain such large, permanent communi-ties, I have argued, depends on the realization of the cognitive and cultural potential to manage systems of external symbolic storage. Like Cauvin, I do not claim that a form of ‘psycho-cultural’ revolution in symbolic representation replaces other accounts in what must be a complex web that takes account

of environmental, economic and social factors. If we can step down the way that Cauvin pointed, and if we, the community of investigators concerned with what we believe is a period of crucial importance in human history, can add the new inter-disciplinary collaborations that are needed, in a few years we shall look back at the last decade and wonder why it took so long to achieve momentum in this new area of research. Of course, there must also be advances in many other fi elds, too. And, of course, the diffi culty of understanding processes that are complex and inter-twined will only increase the diffi culty of working out a satisfactory synthesis. But we have the oppor-tunity to ensure that the quite remarkable achievements of the Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic communities of southwest Asia take their proper place in the annals of human history.

Trevor WATKINSSchool of History, Classics and Archaeology

University of Edinburgh William Robertson Wing, Teviot Place

Edinburgh EH8 9AG – UNITED KINGDOM [email protected]

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