BY ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, OLD WORLD PREHISTORY
PROFESSOR ORIENTAL INSTITUTE AND DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Drawings by SUSAN T. RICHERT
Edited by Lillian A. Ross
Like the writing of most professional archeologists, mine has been confined to so-called learned papers. Good, bad, or indifferent, these papers were in a jargon that only my colleagues and a few advanced students could understand. Hence, when I was asked to do this little book, I soon found it extremely difficult to say what I meant in simple fashion. The style is new to me, but I hope the reader will not find it forced or pedantic; at least I have done my very best to tell the story simply and clearly.
Many friends have aided in the preparation of the book. The whimsical charm of Miss Susan Richert’s illustrations add enormously to the spirit I wanted. She gave freely of her own time on the drawings and in planning the book with me. My colleagues at the University of Chicago, especially Professor Wilton M. Krogman (now of the University of Pennsylvania), and also Mrs. Linda Braidwood, Associate of the Oriental Institute, and Professors Fay-Cooper Cole and Sol Tax, of the Department of Anthropology, gave me counsel in matters bearing on their special fields, and the Department of Anthropology bore some of the expense of the illustrations. From Mrs. Irma Hunter and Mr. Arnold Maremont, who are not archeologists at all and have only an intelligent layman’s notion of archeology, I had sound advice on how best to tell the story. I am deeply indebted to all these friends.
While I was preparing the second edition, I had the great fortune to be able to rework the third chapter with Professor Sherwood L. Washburn, now of the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters with Professor Hallum L. Movius, Jr., of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. The book has gained greatly in accuracy thereby. In matters of dating, Professor Movius and the indications of Professor W. F. Libby’s Carbon 14 chronology project have both encouraged me to choose the lowest dates now current for the events of the Pleistocene Ice Age. There is still no certain way of fixing a direct chronology for most of the Pleistocene, but Professor Libby’s method appears very promising for its end range and for proto-historic dates. In any case, this book names “periods,” and new dates may be written in against mine, if new and better dating systems appear.
I wish to thank Dr. Clifford C. Gregg, Director of Chicago Natural History Museum, for the opportunity to publish this book. My old friend, Dr. Paul S. Martin, Chief Curator in the Department of Anthropology, asked me to undertake the job and inspired me to complete it. I am also indebted to Miss Lillian A. Ross, Associate Editor of Scientific Publications, and to Mr. George I. Quimby, Curator of Exhibits in Anthropology, for all the time they have given me in getting the manuscript into proper shape.
Robert J. Braidwood
June 15, 1950
Preface to the Third Edition
In preparing the enlarged third edition, many of the above mentioned friends have again helped me. I have picked the brains of Professor F. Clark Howell of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago in reworking the earlier chapters, and he was very patient in the matter, which I sincerely appreciate.
All of Mrs. Susan Richert Allen’s original drawings appear, but a few necessary corrections have been made in some of the charts and some new drawings have been added by Mr. John Pfiffner, Staff Artist, Chicago Natural History Museum.
Robert J. Braidwood
March 1, 1959
Prehistory means the time before written history began. Actually, more than 99 per cent of man’s story is prehistory. Man is at least half a million years old, but he did not begin to write history (or to write anything) until about 5,000 years ago.
The men who lived in prehistoric times left us no history books, but they did unintentionally leave a record of their presence and their way of life. This record is studied and interpreted by different kinds of scientists.
The scientists who study the bones and teeth and any other parts they find of the bodies of prehistoric men, are called physical anthropologists. Physical anthropologists are trained, much like doctors, to know all about the human body. They study living people, too; they know more about the biological facts of human “races” than anybody else. If the police find a badly decayed body in a trunk, they ask a physical anthropologist to tell them what the person originally looked like. The physical anthropologists who specialize in prehistoric men work with fossils, so they are sometimes called human paleontologists.
There is a kind of scientist who studies the things that prehistoric men made and did. Such a scientist is called an archeologist. It is the archeologist’s business to look for the stone and metal tools, the pottery, the graves, and the caves or huts of the men who lived before history began.
But there is more to archeology than just looking for things. In Professor V. Gordon Childe’s words, archeology “furnishes a sort of history of human activity, provided always that the actions have produced concrete results and left recognizable material traces.” You will see that there are at least three points in what Childe says:
1. The archeologists have to find the traces of things left behind by ancient man, and
2. Only a few objects may be found, for most of these were probably too soft or too breakable to last through the years. However,
3. The archeologist must use whatever he can find to tell a story—to make a “sort of history”—from the objects and living-places and graves that have escaped destruction.
What I mean is this: Let us say you are walking through a dump yard, and you find a rusty old spark plug. If you want to think about what the spark plug means, you quickly remember that it is a part of an automobile motor. This tells you something about the man who threw the spark plug on the dump. He either had an automobile, or he knew or lived near someone who did. He can’t have lived so very long ago, you’ll remember, because spark plugs and automobiles are only about sixty years old.
When you think about the old spark plug in this way you have just been making the beginnings of what we call an archeological interpretation; you have been making the spark plug tell a story. It is the same way with the man-made things we archeologists find and put in museums. Usually, only a few of these objects are pretty to look at; but each of them has some sort of story to tell. Making the interpretation of his finds is the most important part of the archeologist’s job. It is the way he gets at the “sort of history of human activity” which is expected of archeology.
There are many other scientists who help the archeologist and the physical anthropologist find out about prehistoric men. The geologists help us tell the age of the rocks or caves or gravel beds in which human bones or man-made objects are found. There are other scientists with names which all begin with “paleo” (the Greek word for “old”). The paleontologists study fossil animals. There are also, for example, such scientists as paleobotanists and paleoclimatologists, who study ancient plants and climates. These scientists help us to know the kinds of animals and plants that were living in prehistoric times and so could be used for food by ancient man; what the weather was like; and whether there were glaciers. Also, when I tell you that prehistoric men did not appear until long after the great dinosaurs had disappeared, I go on the say-so of the paleontologists. They know that fossils of men and of dinosaurs are not found in the same geological period. The dinosaur fossils come in early periods, the fossils of men much later.
Since World War II even the atomic scientists have been helping the archeologists. By testing the amount of radioactivity left in charcoal, wood, or other vegetable matter obtained from archeological sites, they have been able to date the sites. Shell has been used also, and even the hair of Egyptian mummies. The dates of geological and climatic events have also been discovered. Some of this work has been done from drillings taken from the bottom of the sea.
This dating by radioactivity has considerably shortened the dates which the archeologists used to give. If you find that some of the dates I give here are more recent than the dates you see in other books on prehistory, it is because I am using one of the new lower dating systems.
RADIOCARBON CHART
The rate of disappearance of radioactivity as time passes.
It is important that the limitations of the radioactive carbon “dating” system be held in mind. As the statistics involved in the system are used, there are two chances in three that the “date” of the sample falls within the range given as plus or minus an added number of years. For example, the “date” for the Jarmo village (see chart), given as 6750 ± 200 B.C., really means that there are only two chances in three that the real date of the charcoal sampled fell between 6950 and 6550 B.C. We have also begun to suspect that there are ways in which the samples themselves may have become “contaminated,” either on the early or on the late side. We now tend to be suspicious of single radioactive carbon determinations, or of determinations from one site alone. But as a fabric of consistent determinations for several or more sites of one archeological period, we gain confidence in the “dates.”
So far, this chapter has been mainly about the people who find out about prehistoric men. We also need a word about how they find out.
All our finds came by accident until about a hundred years ago. Men digging wells, or digging in caves for fertilizer, often turned up ancient swords or pots or stone arrowheads. People also found some odd pieces of stone that didn’t look like natural forms, but they also didn’t look like any known tool. As a result, the people who found them gave them queer names; for example, “thunderbolts.” The people thought the strange stones came to earth as bolts of lightning. We know now that these strange stones were prehistoric stone tools.
Many important finds still come to us by accident. In 1935, a British dentist, A. T. Marston, found the first of two fragments of a very important fossil human skull, in a gravel pit at Swanscombe, on the River Thames, England. He had to wait nine months, until the face of the gravel pit had been dug eight yards farther back, before the second fragment appeared. They fitted! Then, twenty years later, still another piece appeared. In 1928 workmen who were blasting out rock for the breakwater in the port of Haifa began to notice flint tools. Thus the story of cave men on Mount Carmel, in Palestine, began to be known.
Planned archeological digging is only about a century old. Even before this, however, a few men realized the significance of objects they dug from the ground; one of these early archeologists was our own Thomas Jefferson. The first real mound-digger was a German grocer’s clerk, Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann made a fortune as a merchant, first in Europe and then in the California gold-rush of 1849. He became an American citizen. Then he retired and had both money and time to test an old idea of his. He believed that the heroes of ancient Troy and Mycenae were once real Trojans and Greeks. He proved it by going to Turkey and Greece and digging up the remains of both cities.
Schliemann had the great good fortune to find rich and spectacular treasures, and he also had the common sense to keep notes and make descriptions of what he found. He proved beyond doubt that many ancient city mounds can be stratified. This means that there may be the remains of many towns in a mound, one above another, like layers in a cake.
You might like to have an idea of how mounds come to be in layers. The original settlers may have chosen the spot because it had a good spring and there were good fertile lands nearby, or perhaps because it was close to some road or river or harbor. These settlers probably built their town of stone and mud-brick. Finally, something would have happened to the town—a flood, or a burning, or a raid by enemies—and the walls of the houses would have fallen in or would have melted down as mud in the rain. Nothing would have remained but the mud and debris of a low mound of one layer.
The second settlers would have wanted the spot for the same reasons the first settlers did—good water, land, and roads. Also, the second settlers would have found a nice low mound to build their houses on, a protection from floods. But again, something would finally have happened to the second town, and the walls of its houses would have come tumbling down. This makes the second layer. And so on....
In Syria I once had the good fortune to dig on a large mound that had no less than fifteen layers. Also, most of the layers were thick, and there were signs of rebuilding and repairs within each layer. The mound was more than a hundred feet high. In each layer, the building material used had been a soft, unbaked mud-brick, and most of the debris consisted of fallen or rain-melted mud from these mud-bricks.
This idea of stratification, like the cake layers, was already a familiar one to the geologists by Schliemann’s time. They could show that their lowest layer of rock was oldest or earliest, and that the overlying layers became more recent as one moved upward. Schliemann’s digging proved the same thing at Troy. His first (lowest and earliest) city had at least nine layers above it; he thought that the second layer contained the remains of Homer’s Troy. We now know that Homeric Troy was layer VIIa from the bottom; also, we count eleven layers or sub-layers in total.
Schliemann’s work marks the beginnings of modern archeology. Scholars soon set out to dig on ancient sites, from Egypt to Central America.
As time went on, the study of archeological materials—found either by accident or by digging on purpose—began to show certain things. Archeologists began to get ideas as to the kinds of objects that belonged together. If you compared a mail-order catalogue of 1890 with one of today, you would see a lot of differences. If you really studied the two catalogues hard, you would also begin to see that certain objects “go together.” Horseshoes and metal buggy tires and pieces of harness would begin to fit into a picture with certain kinds of coal stoves and furniture and china dishes and kerosene lamps. Our friend the spark plug, and radios and electric refrigerators and light bulbs would fit into a picture with different kinds of furniture and dishes and tools. You won’t be old enough to remember the kind of hats that women wore in 1890, but you’ve probably seen pictures of them, and you know very well they couldn’t be worn with the fashions of today.
This is one of the ways that archeologists study their materials. The various tools and weapons and jewelry, the pottery, the kinds of houses, and even the ways of burying the dead tend to fit into pictures. Some archeologists call all of the things that go together to make such a picture an assemblage. The assemblage of the first layer of Schliemann’s Troy was as different from that of the seventh layer as our 1900 mail-order catalogue is from the one of today.
The archeologists who came after Schliemann began to notice other things and to compare them with occurrences in modern times. The idea that people will buy better mousetraps goes back into very ancient times. Today, if we make good automobiles or radios, we can sell some of them in Turkey or even in Timbuktu. This means that a few present-day types of American automobiles and radios form part of present-day “assemblages” in both Turkey and Timbuktu. The total present-day “assemblage” of Turkey is quite different from that of Timbuktu or that of America, but they have at least some automobiles and some radios in common.
Now these automobiles and radios will eventually wear out. Let us suppose we could go to some remote part of Turkey or to Timbuktu in a dream. We don’t know what the date is, in our dream, but we see all sorts of strange things and ways of living in both places. Nobody tells us what the date is. But suddenly we see a 1936 Ford; so we know that in our dream it has to be at least the year 1936, and only as many years after that as we could reasonably expect a Ford to keep in running order. The Ford would probably break down in twenty years’ time, so the Turkish or Timbuktu “assemblage” we’re seeing in our dream has to date at about A.D. 1936–56.
Archeologists not only “date” their ancient materials in this way; they also see over what distances and between which peoples trading was done. It turns out that there was a good deal of trading in ancient times, probably all on a barter and exchange basis.
Now we need to pull these ideas all together and see the complicated structure the archeologists can build with their materials.
Even the earliest archeologists soon found that there was a very long range of prehistoric time which would yield only very simple things. For this very long early part of prehistory, there was little to be found but the flint tools which wandering, hunting and gathering people made, and the bones of the wild animals they ate. Toward the end of prehistoric time there was a general settling down with the coming of agriculture, and all sorts of new things began to be made. Archeologists soon got a general notion of what ought to appear with what. Thus, it would upset a French prehistorian digging at the bottom of a very early cave if he found a fine bronze sword, just as much as it would upset him if he found a beer bottle. The people of his very early cave layer simply could not have made bronze swords, which came later, just as do beer bottles. Some accidental disturbance of the layers of his cave must have happened.
With any luck, archeologists do their digging in a layered, stratified site. They find the remains of everything that would last through time, in several different layers. They know that the assemblage in the bottom layer was laid down earlier than the assemblage in the next layer above, and so on up to the topmost layer, which is the latest. They look at the results of other “digs” and find that some other archeologist 900 miles away has found ax-heads in his lowest layer, exactly like the ax-heads of their fifth layer. This means that their fifth layer must have been lived in at about the same time as was the first layer in the site 200 miles away. It also may mean that the people who lived in the two layers knew and traded with each other. Or it could mean that they didn’t necessarily know each other, but simply that both traded with a third group at about the same time.
You can see that the more we dig and find, the more clearly the main facts begin to stand out. We begin to be more sure of which people lived at the same time, which earlier and which later. We begin to know who traded with whom, and which peoples seemed to live off by themselves. We begin to find enough skeletons in burials so that the physical anthropologists can tell us what the people looked like. We get animal bones, and a paleontologist may tell us they are all bones of wild animals; or he may tell us that some or most of the bones are those of domesticated animals, for instance, sheep or cattle, and therefore the people must have kept herds.
More important than anything else—as our structure grows more complicated and our materials increase—is the fact that “a sort of history of human activity” does begin to appear. The habits or traditions that men formed in the making of their tools and in the ways they did things, begin to stand out for us. How characteristic were these habits and traditions? What areas did they spread over? How long did they last? We watch the different tools and the traces of the way things were done—how the burials were arranged, what the living-places were like, and so on. We wonder about the people themselves, for the traces of habits and traditions are useful to us only as clues to the men who once had them. So we ask the physical anthropologists about the skeletons that we found in the burials. The physical anthropologists tell us about the anatomy and the similarities and differences which the skeletons show when compared with other skeletons. The physical anthropologists are even working on a method—chemical tests of the bones—that will enable them to discover what the blood-type may have been. One thing is sure. We have never found a group of skeletons so absolutely similar among themselves—so cast from a single mould, so to speak—that we could claim to have a “pure” race. I am sure we never shall.
We become particularly interested in any signs of change—when new materials and tool types and ways of doing things replace old ones. We watch for signs of social change and progress in one way or another.
We must do all this without one word of written history to aid us. Everything we are concerned with goes back to the time before men learned to write. That is the prehistorian’s job—to find out what happened before history began.
Mankind, we’ll say, is at least a half million years old. It is very hard to understand how long a time half a million years really is. If we were to compare this whole length of time to one day, we’d get something like this: The present time is midnight, and Jesus was born just five minutes and thirty-six seconds ago. Earliest history began less than fifteen minutes ago. Everything before 11:45 was in prehistoric time.
Or maybe we can grasp the length of time better in terms of generations. As you know, primitive peoples tend to marry and have children rather early in life. So suppose we say that twenty years will make an average generation. At this rate there would be 25,000 generations in a half-million years. But our United States is much less than ten generations old, twenty-five generations take us back before the time of Columbus, Julius Caesar was alive just 100 generations ago, David was king of Israel less than 150 generations ago, 250 generations take us back to the beginning of written history. And there were 24,750 generations of men before written history began!
I should probably tell you that there is a new method of prehistoric dating which would cut the earliest dates in my reckoning almost in half. Dr. Cesare Emiliani, combining radioactive (C14) and chemical (oxygen isotope) methods in the study of deep-sea borings, has developed a system which would lower the total range of human prehistory to about 300,000 years. The system is still too new to have had general examination and testing. Hence, I have not used it in this book; it would mainly affect the dates earlier than 25,000 years ago.
The earth probably hasn’t changed much in the last 5,000 years (250 generations). Men have built things on its surface and dug into it and drawn boundaries on maps of it, but the places where rivers, lakes, seas, and mountains now stand have changed very little.