Mesolithic Prelude

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Grahame Clark
mesolithic prelude
The Palaeolithic-Neolithic Transition
in Old World Prehistory
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^ Grahame Clark's main theme is to show that the century-old division of the Stone Age in Europe and south-west Asia into Palaeo- and Neolithic masks a false dichotomy and one that impedes real understanding. He argues that Childe's 'Neolithic Revolution' was in reality a slow transition, that in the Old as in the New World the transformation of hunter-forager into farming economies was of its nature gradual, resting as it did on changes in relationships and the intensification of pre-existing systems of food procurement. Professor Clark lays special emphasis on the continuity of settlement in early postglacial Europe, and argues that it was the activities of its Mesolithic inhabitants that... Tovább

Fülszöveg

• i

Grahame Clark
mesolithic prelude
The Palaeolithic-Neolithic Transition
in Old World Prehistory
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1' , i : I ^
I ¦ ' I ,.„ i
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. ! ' 'II
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, I'll
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" I ,!¦ , IU>
' ¦ I ; ¦ ¦ I
I: ,1, , r i \
I I i
ill, 1. ' : ll
^ Grahame Clark's main theme is to show that the century-old division of the Stone Age in Europe and south-west Asia into Palaeo- and Neolithic masks a false dichotomy and one that impedes real understanding. He argues that Childe's 'Neolithic Revolution' was in reality a slow transition, that in the Old as in the New World the transformation of hunter-forager into farming economies was of its nature gradual, resting as it did on changes in relationships and the intensification of pre-existing systems of food procurement. Professor Clark lays special emphasis on the continuity of settlement in early postglacial Europe, and argues that it was the activities of its Mesolithic inhabitants that help explain the diversity and independence of the succeeding Neolithic cultures. Finally, he thinks that overemphasis on economic changes at the start of the Neolithic has obscured the importance for prehistory of the emergence, well forward in the Upper Pleistocene, of modern man. Whether they hunted or farmed or combined both, members of the species homo sapiens shared the same potential. ^The author is Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
edinburgh university press 22 George Square, Edinburgh isbn 0 85224 365 0 Vissza