Clive Gamble

It took a while to write this review, because I struggled with the rating I would give this book. This work bothered me for a number of reasons: although it is aimed at a general audience, both the language and the theoretical level are very academic. Gamble does not introduce any new material in this work, but he groups the already known data about human history into an idiosyncratic synthesis. He is especially obsessed by presenting his own conceptual frameworks (his 6 consecutive Terrae, for example, the geographical zones in which (pre) human species developed). He combines this with other theoretical elements from the social sciences, especially evolutionary psychology and social anthropology, to explain certain evolutions.
Needless to say, he thus goes far beyond the possibilities of interpretation of classical archaeology. At times you can even call this work downright speculative, and that disturbed me. And he also makes the classic mistake of first proposing a theory as an interesting explanatory hypothesis, and then turning that these into a fact. To me that’s a basic flaw.
But at the same time, after reading this book, a sense of fascination remained: it is to Gamble's credit that he at least makes an attempt to look at the industrious archaeological work from a different angle, in an effort to find better explanations. Those who hold too much to science as exclusively empirically supported knowledge will not get very far, certainly not in this domain. Theory building, and thus to some extent the use of ‘considered imagination’, is certainly necessary, provided caution is exercised. In that sense, I find Gamble's work absolutely challenging and intriguing, although I do think he has ventured a little too far. More on that in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3426973426.… (mais)

In the preface of this book, the author states that the question he will investigate is: why were people everywhere? In other words, why and how did homo sapiens and her cousin species populate almost the entire planet in prehistoric times? This is a fascinatingly broad question and the author certainly has the expertise to seek answers in the global archeological and paleontological evidence, which he reviews at a suitable level for a non-specialist audience.

However, I didn't quite find his presentation and his answers intellectually satisfying. It is to some extent understandable that no very definite answers can be given. The prehistoric evidence would probably be overinterpreted if one was to give only one reason for all prehistoric migrations. But in the concluding chapter, titled "why people were everywhere", the author resorts to the rather placid explanation that "humans went everywhere because humans have purpose". I found this puzzling since "purpose" had not been discussed at all in the earlier chapters, and simply concluding that migration and settlement were deliberate hardly explains why it was successful.

Intriguingly, on several occasions in the book the author actually points toward a more informative answer: increased social interaction. He mentions in passing that the extension of range was the product of more complicated social organization, that social relationships are a form of storage, and that similarities in archeological items indicate increasing scale in social systems as prehistoric colonization proceeded. This seems to make intuitive sense. Wider, peaceful social networks and trade would have multiplied the knowledge and resources available to prehistoric humans, which presumably would have aided migration and settlement.

Unfortunately it is hard to say to what extent these claims of expanding social networks are just unwarranted speculation on the part of the author, or actually supported by evidence. The author does not pursue questions of social scale consistently. Perhaps such questions cannot be reliably investigated by paleontological means, but then he could have written so explicitly.

In summary, the present conclusion, which bears little resemblance to the preceding presentation, would probably have been better left unstated. Since the author set out to answer a general question, he could have re-examined his entire argument more critically to find the archeological and paleontological tracks which could lead to general conclusions with real interest.… (mais)

Professor Gamble interrogates the archeological evidencefrom stone tools, hunting and campsites for information on the scale of social interaction, and the forms of social life. (..) He reconstructs ancient human societies. (back flap). It replaces his earlier book the pal.settlement (1986). Ca. 120 figures and ca. 130 tables. When one scans the figures, and -impossible to ignore- the tables, one gets a clear view of the content. "we are back to the problem that there appear to be no obvious barriers to settlement from the east and yet, if we accept a short chronology, we must ask hominids to kick their heels for either a half or one million years before colonizing Europe" (p.123)… (mais)