Colin Renfrew (1937–2024)

I purchased this book when it first came out (fifteen years ago) and have only now found that I was misled - and in a way that does Thames & Hudson no credit. What I had thought I was buying was a serious insight into the use of virtual reality in elucidating archaeological discoveries.

After all, this is what it said on the front cover in no uncertain times and this is what Colin (now The Lord) Renfrew seemed to be saying in an extensive quotation on the back. It suggested a treasure trove show more of excitements that never happened.

In fact this is merely the translation of a general review of archaeological discoveries across the world, with a strong Italian orientation, in which there are some important references to the use of new technology and virtual techniques but, bluntly, not a great deal.

To be fair, in 1997, computer-aided research techniques were still quite expensive and in their relative infancy (or at least adolescence) so perhaps not too much should have been expected.

Today, one would expect links to the internet to see the reconstructions - here we get stills that still depend on the text for explanation.

Nevertheless, the marketing department of T&H of the time needs a strong slap across the wrist for degrading their brand's considerable reputation with excessive puff.

While the translation seems adequate, the essays are of varying quality, bitty and cannot decide whether they are to be tales of technical explanation or narratives of ancient cultures while the maps and charts are often poorly signposted with a lack of clarity over internal numbering.

In short, it looks like a poorly edited rush job to exploit a given text, with Lord Renfrew's brief essay (with his now standard crack at private collectors) and presence tacked on to get prime position on museum bookshop shelves.

So why give it such a high rating? Despite the misleading publicity (which is a matter of judgment), the weak editing and the sometimes parochial Italian content, the book provides, nevertheless, a valuable summary of research that is often not covered in an equally parochial UK.

It also has to be said that those sections that make use of virtual reconstruction do offer excellent accounts of the 'actuality' of sites such as, say, the Acropolis or the great Egyptian sites. There are very clear accounts of, above all, pre-Columban archaeology.

In many ways, the 'substance' is very good and worthwhile but let down by the 'form' - the lack of attention to detail, the lack of tough editorial direction in the original work and the over-selling in the UK. Looking at the back, I note the quite high price at the time at £29.95 (1997).

An extremely uneven work that deserved better and is now considerably out of date. It stays in my library but shows how much bad feeling can be caused when publishers undertake rush jobs to exploit a market. It could have been so much more interesting ... show less

This book represents an archaeologist's attempt to take a fresh look at the archaeology and linguistics of the language we tend to call "proto-Indo-European," and try on that basis to relocate the origin of the language. Author Colin Renfrew cautiously attempts to relocate the origin, and also to date it much earlier than most recent studies.

I incline to think that his attempt at relocation has held up better than his attempt to re-date. This book is almost forty years old now, and neither show more archaeology nor linguistics have stood still. I don't think anyone today would accept Renfrew's date of 8000+ years ago for the origin of PIE, although the location is still a matter of some debate.

There are a lot of criticisms which can be leveled at the work, most of which are better left to experts than to someone like me, but there is one important note that is a real drawback to Renfrew's logic, and it needs to be drawn out. Renfrew criticizes the whole notion of a "family tree" of Indo-European, and therefore restricts its use. His argument is, basically, that no family tree has been constructed that can explain all the linguistic phenomena we observe. That is, if you take all the differences we observe in Indo-European languages, and treat them as "splits" in the history, there is no tree of languages which makes every split correspond to a proper split in the genealogy.

This is true, but it's also not relevant. A genealogy of languages is not a genealogy of people (although, even in people, cousins can marry, causing traits that originated in one part of a genealogy to show up in people in another part). A genealogy of languages is, so to speak, an averaging-out of all the genealogies of individual language features.

I'll give an analogy from the human genome. All humans are, of course, more related to each other than they are to any chimpanzee. That's their overall relatedness. But take blood types. Type A and type B blood are caused by different genes -- and both chimpanzees and humans have the same blood types: The split into types A/B/O blood precedes the split between humans and chimps (indeed, it appears to precede the split from gorillas). So a person with type A blood, as far as blood goes, is more closely related to a type-A-blood chimpanzee than to a type-B-blood human. Other than that, and a few other traits, the human is more related to the human. But individual features do not follow the same genealogy as a whole creature, whether in genealogy, DNA, or linguistics. Failing to appreciate that puts a big part of Renfrew's argument on very shaky ground.

To top it all off, the whole book rests on a whole lot of very detailed argument based on things few people will understand very well. And the writing is not good enough to explain it all, or make it pleasant to learn.

I bought this book because I want to know more about PIE, and frankly it was cheap. Sadly, I don't think it justified the effort. If you're a true expert in the field, it's probably still worth reading, just to see what arguments Renfrew used. But if you just want to learn about PIE, there are much better (if more expensive) books. show less

The ideal reader for this book would have been an undergraduate about to embark on graduate study in archaeology 45 years ago. But the reader today will still find a fascinating record of a moment when the study of prehistoric Europe moved away from a model that had dominated the field in the first half of the twentieth century. Renfrew repeatedly cites V. Gordon Childe’s Dawn of European Civilization as the classic statement of the moderate diffusionist model. That model held that all show more technological innovation originated in Egypt and the Middle East and spread from there, either through migration or at the very least by diffusion.
This model began to wobble with the advent of radiocarbon dating. When radiocarbon dates were supplemented by dendrochronology (analysis of tree-rings), dates of artifacts and monuments throughout Europe turned out to be much older than previously assumed. Renfrew’s book appeared at a time when this revolution in dating had come about, but when the question of which new model might take the place of the diffusion model was still open.
That’s why a student in the 1970s would have found this book a useful leg-up, not only in exam preparation but, more importantly, in being exposed to possible topics for his or her own graduate research. Any new model would continue to start with the remains in the field — and here, Renfrew certifies Childe’s continued value as a paragon of comprehensive knowledge of the sites and a careful documenter of their strata. Researchers coming along could aspire to emulate such careful excavation — in fact, through the use of improved methods, do an even better job. One danger Renfrew hopes they will avoid, however, is to simply collect and sort artifacts as if more data will somehow yield a coherent picture.
Instead, Renfrew sees the future of the study of prehistory drawing on studies of population density and growth, of pre-market exchange of goods, and of social organization. Theorizing about these matters can make cautious use of ethnographic parallels (pre-industrial cultures of the more recent past). The spread of ideas from neighboring or even distant cultures (diffusion) is not ruled out, but can no longer be invoked as a convenient explanation for every advance, especially in the absence of any material evidence. And even when diffusion might have occurred, one is still left with the question of why an innovation was adopted (neolithic cultures are conservative). Nor is a change in the mix of artifacts in a stratum automatically taken as evidence of migration.
Anyone looking to quickly get up to speed on the current state of research into prehistoric Europe can bypass this book. Someone like me, who enjoys watching changes in scientific thought take place, might, however, find it worthwhile reading. Keeping in mind that the ideal reader was a student of the field, that is, neither an expert nor a layperson, I found the writing clear and the presentation of ideas easy to follow. show less

Yes, cognitive archaeology exists - and it's a fascinating field. Homo sapiens is a couple hundred thousand years old, but for much of that time there was little change. Then, about 12 thousand years ago, things began changing more rapidly, and often in ways we take completely for granted. When is the last time you thought about the origin of the notion of weighing things? Or the conceptual basis for coinage? Or the incredibly varied trajectories different human cultures have taken? This show more book discusses all these and made me think about our development in ways I never had before. show less