“Not quite what I expected. This is more of an overview of the study of prehistory than an overview of prehistory itself. And perhaps I'm just not clever enough to follow Renfrew's argument, but I didn't see much of an attempt to explain how or why the human mind developed. Renfrew absolutely noted that changes seemed to occur at particular points in particular societies trajectories, but I did not get any sense of why, for example, Renfrew thinks egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups transitioned into class-conscious groups. Was it simply a matter of critical mass - enough people were gathered in one place for existing behaviors to become important? Or did something really change in the human mind at this time? ”
marykir wrote this review Saturday, November 7 2009.
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