. BOOKS OF THE WEEK
A Humanist on Prehistory
THE virtue of Mr. Coates is that, while having the whole range of the archaeological date of prehistory at his fingers' ends, he is not a professional prehistorian. He embarked, as he himself tells us, upon his wide and highly complex survey, not in order to write a text-book nor wide, a thesis nor tabulate the latest research nor teach the uninstructed, but simply in his words "for the author's own satisfaction." The consequences of this bold adventure are by no means amateurish ; they combine a happy independence and breadth of mind with latitude of enquiry into issues that may roughly be called philosophical and a precise examination of all the relevant facts. The only reader who can possibly suffer from this freedom from grooviness is the reviewer, who is confronted not merely with archaeological evidence covering nearly a million years but with evolutionary biology and palaeontology flanking it on one side and ' ethnology, anthropology and psychology on the other. His task of adequate presentation, analysis and criticism has to be abandoned for more selective treatment. Fortunately, Mr. Coates both thinks and writes so lucidly that, though he freely uses scientific nomen- clature, no reader will be burdened with the indigestibility of the average professional treatise.
The book opens with an introductory essay repudiating the modern tendency to depersonalise history and prehistory alike by substituting for the human element the abstractions of social changes, technical advances and in its extreme form economic determinism. The "ultimate reference" is to "persons," and "our relation to the whole human past is essentially the same as to our own parents." History, and prehistory with it, differ from the sciences in being concerned with subjects rather than objects, and human beings are not passive instruments of external circumstance, "flies to the wanton gods." People themselves are the motive forces of change, whether for good or evil, and the individual is the key to prehistory as to history.
Mr. Coates then proceeds on more orthodox lines to describe the world-wide distribution of earliest man, his likeness and unlikeness to the apes (articulate speech is the " absolute" barrier between them, whatever the anatomical kinship), the parallelisms in evolution between different groups, the development of their artefacts, and allied topics. The most absorbing part of this long exposition is his detailed account of the palaeolithic cultures of Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian man during the Ice Age, with particular attention to the unique art of this ancestral stock of Homo sapiens, or, as the author would prefer him to be called, Homo Fin gens, Man the Fashioner. There was a very definite gap in Understanding here to be filled, for the man of science is not in the least qualified to interpret ?Lich an unprecedented phenomenon as a community which, living in semi-arctic conditions sometimes (as in the Wiirm glaciation) of extreme severity, yet maintained an art in sculpture, engraving and painting of the highest possible quality, by any standards, throughout a period (if Breuil's calculations be accepted) of 13,000 years and in "studios" whose perpetual darkness was only lighted by the feeble glimmer of burning animal fat. Not only must or should science pause on the threshold of these most wonderful galleries, but it is very doubtful whether our whole age, with its manifold disintegrations, is capable of comprehending an art based primarily on religious emotion and significance and secondarily on the food- supply of the community. It needs an individual mind like Mr. Coates's to explore this great age of the primitive, the artist, the hunter, the ritualist and " unaccommodated man" battling with his inhospitable environment, all in one. The latter part of the book is devoted to a fruitful discussion of primitive mind and society. The author's claim upon the_given evidence that the family group is pre-human in origin and that religion and morality go to the very roots of human life runs, of course, directly counter on the one hand to the Freudian view of primaeval man as the tyrant ruling his " horde " by brute force and subjecting the women to his will, and on the other to the evolutionary view of prehistory as a nightmare period of ignorance, misery and violence from which man extricated himself, according to Professor Childe, by a series of "industrial revolutions" and by increase of population. Since over-population and over-industrialism now
threaten the survival of civilisation, the nightmare has shifted to the other end, and it is Mr. Coates's plea that primitive society was considerably more moral than our own.
It is a pity, therefore, that he does not discuss more painstakingly the Elliott Smith-Perry theory as to the essential peaceableness of primitive as opposed to savage and civilised communities. Perhaps the more weight attaches to the argument of the book from the very fact that it is based on lean and logical thinking to the exclusion of imaginative feeling. But the absence from the book of the latter is very perceptible to the reader. It is introduced by a foreword from Dr. Glyn E. Daniel, a pleasant gesture of welcome from the professional to the free-lance.
Aspects of Archaeology is a series of specialist essays dedicated to 0. G. S. Crawford, the most interesting of which are perhaps Sir Cyril Fox's survey of the round-chimneyed farmhouses of North Pembrokeshire and their parallels, and Professor Stuart _Piggott's Stonehenge Reviewed. In respect of the former, it is odd that no mention is made of the round-chimneyed farmhouses of the
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