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New Approaches in Archaelogy
Turning to the second preliminary question: why are political scientists, especially those familiar with the modern political science established by Voegelin, concerned with what is conventionally referred to as prehistoric humanity? The adjective “prehistoric” is not the best. To begin with, it is a nineteenth-century French barbarism, like sociology.
Even so, and ignoring its status as a linguistic mongrel, the term “prehistory” does seem to be a necessary starting point. Prehistory is distinguished from history by the existence or nonexistence of documentation and literacy. Given that literacy has been absent from some societies until quite recently, we have an obvious problem that prehistory ends at different times in different places. 3 We will simplify matters by ignoring the problem.
Political scientists usually deal with texts. The absence of texts from the Paleolithic means we must rely on the evidence unearthed (sometimes literally) by archeologists. But what is it that archeologists do that might be relevant to political science?
According to one contemporary school called “postprocessural” (discussed below in section three) the goal of archeology “is to resuscitate deceased culture” by interpreting their material remains and artifacts.4 At the very least this approach seems promising because it allows contemporary human beings to say something meaningful about the extensive phenomena connected to preliterate human existence.
Of course, matters are never so simple: Historians of archeology usually distinguish between classical archeologists concerned with the material remains of Greece and Rome and archeologists interested in prehistory –in German Archäologie refers to the former only; the subject-matter of prehistoric archeology is usually referred to as Urgeschichte or Frühgeschichte .
Prehistorical archeology developed from early modern antiquarianism and was initially mixed up with speculation on such matters as dating the Great Flood and the origins of specific national and ethnic groups. Thus the subject-matter relevant to political science will have to be distinguished from what is of concern to archeologists, the several “schools” of which have different approaches and priorities anyway.
Chronology and Radio Carbon Dating
One of the inevitable consequences of the Enlightenment was to separate questions of religious doctrine from those of what, to use a later term, came to be known as natural history. In France and the English-speaking world, Paleolithic archeology grew out of geology, not nationalist or ethnic antiquarianism. The speculations of Lyell and Darwin are a well known part of this story.
Less well known, but equally important, is the development, particularly in Scandinavia, of principles of chronology. Specifically, Danish and Swedish nationalist antiquarians developed a “three-age theory” that postulated the succession: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.5
More finely calibrated chronologies soon enough were developed: the Old Stone Age was distinguished form the New; within the Paleolithic, the Lower, Middle, and Upper were distinguished from one another as well as from the Neolithic.6 Here we would note only that these eras were distinguished chiefly in terms of the predominant tool-making technologies, since stone tools are mostly what is left from these early times for archeologists to study easily.
It might also be worth noting that chronology and dating still pose significant problems, despite enormous improvements in calibration. 7
Leaving aside another complex question regarding the emergence or differentiation of Homo sapiens and stability of the species, it is probably fair to say that most of the nineteenth-century accounts of the origins of stone-age humans relied either on a Darwinian model based on Malthusian liberalism or on the approach of Marx and Engels, neatly fitting new archeological evidence into the argument developed in Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).
During the 1920s Gordon Childe advanced a kind of modified Marxist approach based on “diffusionism,” a view that Renfrew later mocked as “the diffusion of European barbarism with Oriental civilization.” 8 Renfrew could do so because of the invention of radiocarbon dating in 1947, a technique that made possible the relatively accurate dating of ancient civilizations and societies independent of any postulated Darwinian, Marxist, or diffusionist “theory.”
Whatever their shortcomings, the great advantage of such theories was to provide an intelligible and relatively simple story that was, in principle, a single story of human development.
