Neolithic Explanations

Abstract

A prehistorian, like any other historian, should aim not only to describe, but also to explain. . .' Thus Childe's valediction (1958, 6). But we frustrate ourselves unless fiercely selective in explaining traces of small farming (or hunting) communities near subsistence level, with the critical apparatus of contemporary or 19th-century industrial societies; conceptions wholly arising from such societies are likely to be appropriate only to them." Yet we cannot easily avoid these errors, for we are alienated from our material-and not only by time. Schools of archaeology are necessarily urban, draw deeply on traditions of longestablished urban institutions. The conditions of that pre-industrial life which was almost the whole of reality to our ancestors may seem inconceivably remote-and disappointing, distasteful even.