Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T16:27:39.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Identity of Europe in Prehistoric Archaeology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Colin Renfrew
Colin Renfrew*
Affiliation:
McDonald Institute, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3ER, Great Britain
Get access

Extract

In rewriting … The Dawn of European Civilisation in 1956, I began to realise how right Hawkes had been in 1940 when in his The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe he had insisted that by the Bronze Age Europe had achieved a kind of culture distinctively its own. I saw not only that this was so but also why.

— V. Gordon Childe, Retrospect (1958b:74)

Gordon Childe is a suitable name to invoke in responding to the considerable honour of delivering the Inaugural Address at the first meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. For this is a historic occasion, and in founding such an association we are participating in the heritage left by the fathers of our discipline: such great names as C. J. Thomsen, J. J. A. Worsaae, Heinrich Schliemann, Oscar Montelius, Arthur Evans, the Abbé Breuil, and in our own day perhaps I might add the names of two such very different scholars as Sir Grahame Clark and the late Marija Gimbutas, whose absence we regret today. As Napoleon is reported to have said to his troops before the pyramids at Giza: ‘Soldats, songez que, du haut de ces pyramides, quarante siècles vous contemplent.’ Well, many more centuries of history and of prehistory look down upon us, as well as a century and a half of European archaeological scholarship. This is a notable heritage in two senses: the heritage of our European past, and the heritage of scholarship in the field of archaeology which has revealed and is revealing that past to us. But let us not forget that it is a heritage also in a more troublesome sense. For it is we as archaeologists who reconstruct (or some would say construct) that past. In this we cannot avoid doing so from the standpoint of the present, and we have the responsibility of interpreting that past for our contemporaries in the present.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of European Archaeology , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1994 , pp. 153 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © European Association of Archaeologists 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beck, Curt and Stephen, Shennan, 1991. Amber in Prehistoric Britain. Oxford: Oxbow (Oxbow Monographs 8).Google Scholar
Bogucki, Peter, 1988. Forest Farmers and Stockherders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bowen, H. Collin and Fowler, Peter J. (eds), 1978. Early Land Allotment in the British Isles. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports (Brit. Ser. 48).Google Scholar
Bradley, Richard and Chapman, Robert, 1986. The nature and development of long-distance relations in Late Neolithic Great Britain and Ireland. In Renfrew, Colin and Cherry, John F. (eds), Peer Poliry Interaction and Socio-Political Change: 127–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chapman, John C., 1982. ‘The secondary products revolution’ and the limitations of the Neolithic. Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology (London) 19: 107–122.Google Scholar
Childe, V. Gordon, 1929. The Danube in Prehistory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Childe, V. Gordon, 1950. The urban revolution. Town Planning Review 21: 3–17.Google Scholar
Childe, V. Gordon, 1958a. The Prehistory of European Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Childe, V. Gordon, 1958b. Retrospect Antiquity 32: 69–74.Google Scholar
Dragadze, Tamara, 1980. The place of ‘ethnos’ theory in Soviet anthropology. In Gellner, Ernest (ed.), Soviet and Western Anthropology: 161–170. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Fleming, Andrew, 1983. The prehistoric landscape of Dartmoor part 2: north and east Dartmoor. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 37: 115–131.Google Scholar
Gilman, Antonio and Thornes, John B., 1985. Land Use and Prehistory in South-East Spain. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Gimbutas, Marija, 1980. The Kurgan migration (c. 3400-3200 BC) into Europe and the following transformation of culture. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 5:227–228.Google Scholar
Gimbutas, Marija, 1991. The Civilisation of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe. San Francisco: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Hawkes, Christopher F.C., 1940. The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Higham, Charles, 1989. The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kristiansen, Kristian, 1987. Center and periphery in Bronze Age Scandinavia. In Rowlands, Michael, Larsen, Mogens T., and Kristiansen, K. (eds), Centre and Periphery in Ancient World Systems: 74–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kristiansen, Kristian, in press. Europe before History: the European Worlds in the First and Second Millennia BC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Manning, Sturt W., 1994. The emergence of divergence: development and decline on Bronze Age Crete and the Cyclades. In Mathers, Clay and Stoddart, Simon (eds), Development and Decline in the Mediterranean Bronze Age: 221–270. Sheffield: Collis.Google Scholar
Renfrew, Colin, 1973. Before Civilisation, the Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe. London: Cape.Google Scholar
Renfrew, Colin, 1974. Beyond a subsistence conomy: the evolution of social organisation in prehistoric Europe. In Moore, C. B. (ed.), Reconstructing Complex Societies: 69–96. (Supplement to the Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research 20).Google Scholar
Renfrew, Colin, 1986. Varna and the emergence of wealth in prehistoric Europe. In Appadurai, Arjun (ed.), The Social Life of Things: 141–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Renfrew, Colin, 1987. Archaeology and Language, the Puzzle of Indo European Origins. London: Cape.Google Scholar
Renfrew, Colin, 1993. The Roots of Ethnicity. Archaeology, Genetics and the Origins of Europe. Rome: Unione Internazionale degli Istuti di Archeologia Storia e Storia dell'Arte in Roma.Google Scholar
Robb, John, 1994. Gender contradictions, moral coalitions, and inequality in prehistoric Italy. Journal of European Archaeology 2.1:20–49.Google Scholar
Sherratt, Andrew, 1981. Plough and pastoralism: aspects of the secondary product revolution. In Hodder, Ian, Isaac, Glynn, and Hammond, Norman (eds), Pattern of the Past Studies in Honour of David Clarke: 261–305. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sherratt, Andrew, 1993. ‘Who are you calling peripheral?’ Dependence and independence in European prehistory. In Scarre, Christopher and Healy, Frances (eds), Trade and Exchange in Prehistoric Europe: 245–255. Oxford: Oxbow (Oxbow Monographs 33).Google Scholar
Sherratt, Andrew, 1994. Core, periphery and margin: perspectives on the Bronze Age. In Mathers, Clay and Stoddart, Simon (eds), Development and Decline in the Mediterranean Bronze Age: 335–346. Sheffield: Collis.Google Scholar