OPENING THE DOOR, POINTING THE WAY

T. WATKINS

Abstract: Naissance des divinits, Naissance de lagriculture (1994) represented his mature and original thinking on the essential nature of neolithisation. While the book continues to inuence the thought and work of many, its impact is diminished because Jacques Cauvin left two major questions unanswered. My own research has been directed to investigating those questions: Cauvin described his rvolution des symboles as psycho-cultural, but he said little about its cognitive and cultural nature; and he repeated the question with which R. Braidwood had challenged us to explain why (in Braidwoods case) hunter-gatherers had turned to farming at that particular time, and why not earlier. My work has been directed at developing an understanding of the cognitive and cultural implications of the use of systems of symbolic representation in material form; and at setting the emergence of those cognitive skills in the context of theories of the evolution of human cultural communication. However, we have made little progress along the way that Cauvin pointed us. Despite rapid and exciting strides in theories about the human mind and the cognitive evolution of human social and communication skills, inter-disciplinary collaboration with archaeologists has placed the climax of the story in the Upper Palaeolithic; the Neolithic has been either ignored or seen as no more than a consequence of a human revolution that was achieved more than 30,000 years ago. In order to progress, we need to form new inter-disciplinary collaborations that will investigate the cognitive and symbolic cultural aspects of the Neolithic. Rsum : Naissance des divinits, Naissance de lagriculture (1994) a ret la pense orignale et aboutie de Jacques Cauvin sur la nature premire de la nolithisation. Cet ouvrage inuence toujours la pense et les travaux dun grand nombre, mais son impact a t limit parce quil a laiss deux questions majeures en suspens. Mes propres recherches se sont fondes sur deux questions : Cauvin a dcrit sa rvolution des symboles comme tant psycho-culturelle mais il sest peu exprim sur sa nature cognitive et culturelle et il a rpt la question que R. Braidwood avait pose en d , comprendre pourquoi les chasseurs-cueilleurs se sont tourns vers lagriculture ce moment prcis et pas plus tt. Je me suis appliqu dans ma recherche contribuer la comprhension des implications cognitives et culturelles de lemploi de systmes de reprsentation symbolique sous une forme matrielle ; et intgrer lmergence de savoirs cognitifs dans le contexte de la thorie de lvolution de la communication culturelle. Toutefois, nous avons peu progress sur le chemin que Cauvin a trac. Malgr des avances rapides et passionnantes dans les thories relatives lesprit humain et lvolution cognitive des savoirs sociaux et de la communication, la collaboration pluri-disciplinaire avec les archologues a replac le centre de la question au Palolithique suprieur. Le Nolithique a t ignor ou considr seulement comme la consquence de la rvolution humaine qui se serait accomplie il y a plus de 30 000 ans. An de progresser, il nous faut mettre en place de nouvelles collaborations multi-disciplinaires, tournes vers les aspects culturels cognitifs et symboliques du Nolithique. Keywords: Neolithic; Epipalaeolithic; Jacques Cauvin; Cognitive psychology; Evolutionary psychology; Symbolic culture. Mots-cls : Nolithique ; pipalolithique ; Jacques Cauvin ; Psychologie cognitive ; Psychologie volutionniste ; Culture des symboles.

I can only give my personal perspective on how we have been inuenced by Jacques Cauvin, and continued to develop our understanding of the processes of neolithisation in southwest Asia. I draw from Cauvins last, great book, Naissance des divinits, Naissance de lagriculture,1 two points that
1. CAUVIN, 1994.

have been fundamentally important in guiding the direction of my own work: Cauvin described his revolution as psychocultural, and he also drew attention to the fact that none of the accounts proposed for the neolithisation process could answer Robert Braidwoods old question of why things happened as they did at that particular time, around the beginning of the Holocene period, and why not earlier. My conclusion is that

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we have not progressed very well along the way that Cauvin pointed us. And in the nal part of this contribution, I seek to understand why progress has been so poor, and to suggest how we can improve matters. I was privileged to work closely with Cauvin through the translation of his book for the English language edition.2 It is dreadfully sad that he died at exactly the time that new and exciting developments in other disciplines and prehistoric archaeology were beginning to converge. Fundamental to Cauvins thesis was the idea that around the end of the Epipalaeolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic in southwest Asia people experienced a psycho-cultural revolution that expanded the way in which they were able to conceive of themselves and their world by means of symbolic thought and symbolic representation. We shall never know how Cauvin would have responded to the new theories on the evolution of human cognition, and how he would have been able to develop his thesis through new collaborations with specialists in cognition, psychology and evolutionary disciplines. Looking back, I can see that my own thinking was completely re-directed by a three-way coincidence. My experience with the very early Neolithic site of Qermez Dere in north Iraq3 had begun to sensitize me to the idea of new kinds of symbolic representation.4 While Cauvin was particularly concerned with small, three-dimensional representations of humans, especially females, and animals, especially the bull, that were modelled in clay or carved in stone, I was more impressed by architecture, and the rituals and symbolism associated with buildings and settlements. Then, while I was reading Naissance des divinits5 and grappling with its exciting ideas, I happened to attend an invited lecture by R. Dunbar in the University of Edinburgh, in which he spoke of ideas that later appeared in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Origins of Language.6 That coincidence proved to be catalytic. I went on to translate the 1997 edition of Cauvins book, which required me to walk slowly in Cauvins company, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. And nally there was a week in Cauvins constant company at Jals, checking, correcting and improving the English version, discussing meaning, and adding the postscript that appears in the English edition. The coincidence of reading Naissance des divinits and encountering the ideas of Dunbars Grooming, Gossip and the Origins of Language was formative. At the foundation
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. CAUVIN, 2000. WATKINS, 1992b; WATKINS et al., 1991 and 1995. WATKINS, 1990, 1992a and 1996. CAUVIN, 1994. DUNBAR, 1997.

of Cauvins thesis is the idea of a psychological and cultural revolution that for the rst time enabled people to formulate and communicate ideas about supernatural beings and the relationship between themselves and the supernatural world. Fundamental to Dunbars work has been the evolutionary relationship between humans and our nearest living relatives among the primates. Linking Cauvin to Dunbar is the idea that our human cultural facility for systems of symbolic representation, whether in the form of language or in the form of our capacity to imagine and formulate concrete notions of divinities, is an evolved capacity. Cauvins idea of a psycho-cultural phenomenon showed me a doorway. And, through that doorway, I glimpsed the ideas of a psychologist who was working on the evolution of the hominid mind and cultural communication. At rst glance, there is an anomaly that deserves some examination. Naissance des divinits has been a successful publication, whether in terms of the number of copies sold, or the frequency with which it has been cited in the archaeological literature: but the way that archaeologists frame their discourse on the neolithisation of southwest Asia has scarcely been affected. The book, sixteen years on, remains in print with CNRS ditions. The publisher informs the world that it has become a classic (although, in the process, it seems to have lost its original and important subtitle, La Rvolution des symboles au Nolithique). Like the popular books of G. Childe,7 this book has reached out far beyond the specialist in prehistoric archaeology, and beyond an academic or a student readership. Clearly, the ideas have had a great appeal for an intelligent lay public. The English edition, published by Cambridge University Press, has likewise remained in print, achieving a remarkable longevity in these times when many academic books are remaindered by their publishers after two or three years. In the eld of Neolithic research in southwest Asia, it has indeed become a classic. Cauvins account of a change in human psycho-cultural facility with symbolic culture, leading to a transformation of society and of subsistence strategies, has been widely read, but he would have been disappointed that among prehistoric archaeologists it has not displaced the environmentally deterministic narrative, simplistically derived from Childes socioeconomic Neolithic revolution, that has become the standard view. Most archaeologists writing on the Neolithic period in southwest Asia still refer, implicitly or explicitly, to the primacy of the adoption of farming practices, and most subscribe to the idea that the adoption of farming was a response demanded by
7. CHILDE, 1936 and 1942.

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the constraints imposed by the Younger Dryas phase on the availability of wild food resources. How is it that the book, so widely read, has not established a new narrative for the neolithisation process? It seems to me that Cauvins thesis has suffered from three related disadvantages, the greatest of which is his untimely death. The second and third disadvantages relate to the timing and the nature of his magnum opus: its subject is a psycho-cultural revolution, but it was written before the explosion of new thinking on the evolution of human cognition, gene-culture co-evolution, and theories such as the extended mind, embodied cognition, and situated psychology; and, of its nature as a relatively compact book, it lacked the space for a detailed analysis and discussion of either his own theories or the orthodox accounts of neolithisation that he wished to displace. Although Cauvin died in 2001, the thesis that he presented was probably formulated ten years earlier. Comparing the second edition8 with the rst,9 it is clear that he made only minor editorial changes and additions where excavations at key sites had produced some more relevant information. The English edition10 was a straightforward translation of the French second edition, with the addition of a postscript that added some more up-to-date excavation information. The thesis of the book was essentially formed some twenty years ago, and was neither modied nor developed. Since Cauvin was writing about a revolutionary new symbolising ability, it is a tragedy that he missed the decade of the mind, as the 1990s were named. Having completed the book, part way through that decade, he was very busy with other things. In the decade since his death, the pace of research on the human brain, mind and their evolution has increased, and the involvement of archaeologists in cognitive archaeology has expanded greatly. Childe proposed his Neolithic revolution theory in a vacuum, before any eld research had been directed at sites of the period in southwest Asia; in a sense, Childe dened the solution, before anyone had discovered the problems and established the tools for tackling them. While archaeologists have encouraged each other to abandon Childe on the grounds that his culture-historical approach is subjective, unscientic and outdated, the Childe-like culture-historical framework that was established for the Levant has lived on. Archaeologists have railed at Childes ideas on revolutions that resemble but antedate the industrial revolution, and yet the notion that the arrival of the Neolithic represents a transfor8. CAUVIN, 1997. 9. CAUVIN, 1994. 10. CAUVIN, 2000.

mation in human affairs remains. Cauvins thesis of a different kind of revolution, however, has had to compete with the standard account of the period, in which generations of specialists have invested academic lifetimes of research. Childe set a paradigm: Cauvin sought to shift that deeply entrenched paradigm. Although we are closer to that paradigm shift in terms of a scientic revolution as discussed by the physicist and philosopher of science T. Kuhn,11 we have still to pass the critical tipping point at which the new perspective begins to seem completely obvious and the old orthodoxy seems incredible. Naissance des divinits is actually a relatively small book, especially when one remembers that it attempts to encompass a general review of the prehistory of southwest Asia between the late Epipalaeolithic (from 12,000 BC) and the end of the Aceramic Neolithic (about 7500 BC). The amount of space given (a) to criticizing the standard environmentally driven account, and (b) to elaborating and sustaining in its place Cauvins original thesis of a psycho-cultural revolution is only a half of an economical book. Within that quite concise treatment, there was not space to deconstruct systematically what Cauvin saw as the environmentally deterministic standard view; rather, he dismissed it. Similarly, he did not allow himself much space for making the case for his thesis of the Naissance des divinits, the product of a rvolution des symboles au Nolithique. Indeed, I nd it very difcult to imagine (with the benet of hindsight) how a case could be made for such a psycho-cultural transformation in the absence of any theory of the evolution of human cognition and culture. Those theories were beginning to appear in specialist journals, but also in popular book form, from the late 1980s, but more so during the 1990s. So far as I am aware, the major players were either native Anglophone, or were based in institutes and universities in the English-speaking world, or wrote in English in international journals. Up to the time when he completed the postscript of the English edition, I am not aware that he had read any of the books on cognitive and cultural evolution, or gene-culture co-evolution, or the evolutionary emergence of language that were appearing.12 The rst archaeologists to see the relevance of cognitive evolutionary theory to archaeology, and of archaeology to cognitive evolutionary theory had also produced important texts in that decade, notably S. Mithen and C. Renfrew.13 Cauvin read English with
11. KUHN, 1962. 12. E.g., BARKOW et al., 1992; BOYD and R ICHERSON, 1985; DEACON, 1997; DONALD, 1991; DUNBAR, 1997; DURHAM, 1991; P LOTKIN, 1997. 13. MITHEN, 1996; R ENFREW and SCARRE, 1998; R ENFREW and ZUBROW, 1994.

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facility, but it was my general impression that the archaeological theorists of the Anglophone world, with the exception of some of I. Hodders work, did not impress him. For many Anglophone readers, I suspect that what Cauvin had to say was unexpected, interesting, but difcult. His style was allusive and in some measure rhetorical; he might well have responded that he thought the style of many Anglophone archaeologists pseudo-scientic. If he mentioned the name of E. Cassirer, he expected the reader to be aware that Cassirer was the author of an important series of volumes on the philosophy of symbolic forms, and, in his short book on human nature and the critical importance of symbolism for human culture, the author of the label Homo symbolicus.14 If my own case is typical, few non-French-speaking archaeologists are conversant with several other important scholars to whom Cauvin refers for the important ideas that he incorporated into his own thinking. The original ideas of archaeologist-anthropologist A. Leroi-Gourhan concerning human culture, cultural communication and prehistoric religion,15 of Annaliste medieval historians such as G. Duby16 and J. Le Goff,17 and of the anthropologist-prehistorian of religion G. Dumzil,18 were important inuences on Cauvins thinking. In Naissance des divinits, however, there was no space either for a full account of his debts to these scholars, or for a reasoned summary of his own ideas. And for Cauvin there was no time to write more books that would have taught us much. Most signicant of all, Cauvin did not present a fully worked out narrative of neolithisation. He said that he did not have the answers to what was surely a very complex process. Rather, on the one hand he pointed out what he considered to be the errors of assuming that the adoption of farming was the critical change, and that it was an adaptation forced on humans by adverse environmental conditions; and on the other hand he sought to turn our attention into new directions for further research.19 In these regards, Cauvins situation was quite different from that of Childe. He was inveighing against a deeply entrenched orthodoxy of long standing, but in its place he was proposing an alternative hypothesis that needed extensive further work. He believed that he could demonstrate a sequence that showed that the adoption of farming was not the primary stage: but he clearly advised that knowing that a precedes b

does not tell us if or how a led to b. In a simple explanation of his hypothesis he wrote:
The observed sequence of events in itself explains nothing. Is there a causal link between symbolism and economy and, if so, what is it? There is no obvious a priori explanation.20

Indeed, the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter reasoning (that b follows a in time, and b is therefore the consequence of a) was his main criticism of the (lack of) logic underlying the orthodox, environmentalist model. Since Cauvin wrote his Naissance des divinits, our information base relating to neolithisation in southwest Asia has continued to expand, and particularly in ways that would have interested him. Some of the sites about which he could write only briey (for example, Jerf el Ahmar, Djade, Tell Aswad and Gbekli Tepe), have produced more dramatic architecture and sculptured representations. The rst sites in Cyprus to date from the late 9th millennium BC were known to Cauvin, but now we know of more sites of that date all across the island, as well as the rst intimations of even earlier sites, narrowing the chronological gap between the aceramic Neolithic settlements and the isolated nal Epipalaeolithic site of AkrotiriAetokremnos.21 Nothing has been discovered or learned that would refute Cauvins thesis (except that he would now nd it harder to sustain his view that his symbolic revolution preceded the beginnings of cultivation and manipulation of animal populations). And the information that has emerged from the earlier Epipalaeolithic emphasises that the early chapters of the story of neolithisation should take note of the 10,000 years before the Levantine Natuan, with which most accounts begin. The settlement and subsistence strategies of the transitional Upper Palaeolithic-Epipalaeolithic site of Ohalo III in the north of Israel,22 and the evidence of extensive settlements with intra-mural burials in the middle Epipalaeolithic23 require us to extend our eld of view. If we should expand our eld of view, we should also recognize that, as Cauvin warned, the process in southwest Asia that we label neolithisation was not simple, mono-causal, or linear. He was vigorous in his rejection of the kind of model that made some external factor, whether climatic and environmental, or demographic, responsible for driving adaptations in subsistence strategy. It seems almost equally inappropriate to think of neolithisation as being a process driven by some
20. Ibid. 21. A MMERMAN et al., 2008; McCARTNEY et al., 2006, 2007 and 2008. 22. NADEL and H ERSHKOVITZ , 1991; NADEL and WERKER , 1999; P IPERNO et al., 2004; WEISS et al., 2004. 23. E.g., MAHER, 2010; MAHER et al., 2011.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

CASSIRER, 1944 and 1975. LEROI-GOURHAN 1943, 1964a and b and 1965. DUBY 1978 and 1980. LE GOFF 1985, 1988a and b, and 1992. DUMZIL, 1958. CAUVIN, 2001: 107.

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internal factor. Rather, we are concerned with a complex process in which there are interacting components, and we cannot assume that we have identied all the components of the system, or how one interacts with or upon another. The processualist solutions have been constructed as systems with a complex interplay between various sub-systems, but the human component has often been reduced to a tool-using population uniquely capable of rapid adaptation through technical innovation. Cauvin believed that the omission of the human cultural component rendered such models, however sophisticated, inadequate and misleading; and the archaeology that has emerged over more than half a century (from the strange tower at Jericho, excavated by K. Kenyon in the 1950s, to the towering monoliths at Gbekli Tepe that are emerging in K. Schmidts ongoing excavations) illustrate vividly the central importance of cultural symbolism to communities of the earliest Neolithic. The impact of Cauvins arguments on behalf of syntheses that allowed for complexity, for processes that were not mono-causal, and for accounts that were not simply linear may be seen, for example, in essays such as those by M. Verhoeven24 and M. Zeder,25 both of which clearly reference their debt to Cauvins publications. Cauvins psycho-cultural transformation implies some signicant change in the cognitive psychology of the human agents on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a new cultural faculty that facilitated the creation of rich, symbolic worlds. With regard to such ideas, we face a difculty in that there is no generally accepted denition of culture that is shared among archaeologists,26 no standard model for change in cultural systems, and little idea how the minds of individual human agents within a cultural community relate to the culture that they share. If we are to understand what a psychocultural transformation means, we need to know something about how the cognitive faculties of the individual relate to the phenomenon that we call culture. This is not a problem that affects archaeologists alone: much of the research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology, for example, regards humans as typical individuals or as a species, taking little account of the role of culture. In the second place, Cauvin drew attention to a question that was posed by Braidwood fty years ago; Braidwood left the question unanswered, and it remained forgotten. He had set about testing Childes hypothesis of climate change and

environmental pressure as the driver that brought about the adoption of agriculture. He and his team were unable to nd evidence for any signicant climatic change at the relevant time; in any case, supposing that there were environmental changes at the relevant time, Braidwood asked why should people have turned to farming in response to that particular occurrence of the change. Why then? Why not earlier? He concluded that, somehow, culture was the critical factor; he answered his own question by saying that, in some un-dened way, culture was not ready.27 Cauvins own theory was that a psychological and cultural change at the beginning of the Neolithic brought about a revolution in symbolic culture that allowed people for the rst time to set about making profound changes to the way that they lived in new social formations supported on new, productive subsistence strategies. I found the arguments with which Cauvin adduced these conclusions very difcult to follow; but I was easily convinced that he was correct in pointing to a step-change in cultural facility that allowed communities to imagine and formulate ideas about the nature of the world and their place within it. I have sought ways to set the archaeological information that we have from the Epipalaeolithic and Aceramic Neolithic periods in the context of theories of human cognition, the human mind, cultural faculties and practice, and their evolution. And it has seemed to me that a key ingredient that we need to add to Cauvins psycho-cultural revolution is the emergence of a new mode of social life in the form of large, permanently co-resident communities locked in wide-area networks, and dependent on new cultural modes of symbolic representation.28 This is a rather different formulation of a theme that has been discussed in terms of sedentism versus mobility among hunter-gatherers for many years. Two factors have been less appreciated. First, not only did communities become sedentary, they also grew larger, massively larger;29 and at the same time became more deeply concerned with creating buildings and settlements that were full of symbolic elements, and that were the arenas for ritual acts. Second, as communities became more and more concerned with symbolism and ritual within the household or the community, they also devoted resources to symbolic exchanges with each other, and the sharing of symbolic practices and representations. Several archaeologists have studied and written about the role of rituals and symbolic practices within Neolithic

24. VERHOEVEN, 2004. 25. ZEDER, 2009. 26. See, for example, KUPER, 1999 for the variety of denitions of culture among anthropologists.

27. BRAIDWOOD and WILLEY, 1962: 332. 28. E.g., WATKINS, 2002, 2004a and b, 2006, 2008a and 2010b. 29. KUIJT, 2000b: 79-87.

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communities.30 But these and other studies have not faced up to Braidwoods question: why then? why not earlier? As a way of situating these dramatic and striking phenomena in a context that may explain why they occurred around the beginning of the Holocene, it is necessary to relate them to theories of the evolution of human cognition, cultural communication and systems of symbolic representation. This involves taking a much longer-term perspective, that of the whole of hominin evolution. And it requires a great deal of reading in several new and exciting, but very unfamiliar, areas, in which progress is very rapid. Often, the themes of workshops and conferences have provided the stimulus and opportunity to explore particular aspects, such as the role of shared systems of religious belief and practice,31 the way that architecture and monumentality provided structures for peoples ideas about their world,32 the completely new social frameworks of the Neolithic,33 and the role of the new, culturally framed environment.34 But all of this is based on a mass of inexpert reading in new disciplinary areas. There will be no real progress with these important issues unless we build new inter-disciplinary partnerships. Archaeologists have done it before, led for example by Braidwood, who formed multi-disciplinary research teams for his eldwork projects of the 1950s and 1960s. By the end of the 1960s conventional archaeologists were beginning to recognize that new inter-disciplinary sub-disciplines, archaeobotany and archaeo-zoology, were emerging.35 We now need to go through the same process once more, with new interdisciplinary collaborations that may lead to the establishment of new inter-disciplinary sub-disciplines. There have been several multi-disciplinary conferences36 and at least one major multi-disciplinary research programme: Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain has been a seven-year programme, funded by the British Academy, and led by R. Dunbar, C. Gamble and J. Gowlett. It has so far generated around 200 scientic publications by collaborators in the project, and one major multi-authored publication.37
30. Notably H ELMER et al., 2003; KUIJT, 1996, 2000a, 2001, 2008 and 2009; STORDEUR, 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2010; STORDEUR et al., 2000; STORDEUR and K HAWAM, 2007 and 2008; VERHOEVEN 2002a, b and c, and 2007. 31. WATKINS, 2002. 32. WATKINS, 2004a and b, and 2006. 33. WATKINS, 2008a. 34. WATKINS, 1997, 2005, 2008b and c, 2010a and b. 35. UCKO and DIMBLEBY, 1969. 36. E.g., A IELLO, 2010; DEMARRAIS et al., 2004; MALAFOURIS and R ENFREW, 2010; R ENFREW and MORLEY, 2009. 37. DUNBAR et al., 2010. Also simultaneously published in the Proceedings of the British Academy 158.

We could think that progress is already under way; from among the young researchers and doctoral students involved in the Lucy to Language project there may emerge a number of inter-disciplinary pioneers, akin to the rst archaeo-botanists and archaeo-zoologists. But there is a serious risk that these practitioners of new inter-disciplinary specializations will pass over the prehistory of southwest Asia. The interdisciplinary workshops, symposia and research programmes are beginning to bring some prehistoric archaeologists into fruitful collaboration with cognitive and evolutionary psychologists, cognitive anthropologists, neuro-scientists, linguists, sociologists and philosophers. Those interested in hominin evolution take the long view, but the archaeologists involved have been primarily Palaeolithic specialists. And the hook that drew them all together was the idea of a Human Revolution, the technical, economic, social and artistic creative explosion of the (western European) Upper Palaeolithic.38 Thus, the long-term evolutionary perspective has tended to take as its conclusion the worldwide diaspora of Homo sapiens and the achievement of modernity as exemplied in Upper Palaeolithic art. For most of the archaeologists involved, the rest of human prehistory and history was a simple narrative, because the evolution of the human mind was complete by about 40,000 years ago, and no further cognitive or cultural evolution had occurred between then and now. That kind of perspective on hominid evolution and the emergence of the modern mind can be seen in Mithens ground-breaking book, The Prehistory of the Mind.39 Over eight chapters the story of the evolution of the human mind builds to an Upper Palaeolithic climax in the nal three chapters. The book then closes with a brief Epilogue, sub-titled the origins of agriculture, which explains the adoption of farming as a direct consequence of the type of thinking that had emerged in the Upper Palaeolithic.40 This focus on the signicance of the Upper Palaeolithic revolution has been criticised from both chronological directions. Recent discoveries in southern Africa demonstrate that some of the traits that appear so dramatically in the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe have a long prehistory among archaic Homo sapiens.41 And Renfrew has challenged the Palaeolithic specialists, arguing that Upper Palaeolithic people seem to have lacked some of the essential characteristics that enable truly modern people to create and use symbolic culture.42 For Renfrew, as for me, the creative explosion that we can see in
38. 39. 40. 41. 42. MELLARS et al., 1996 and 2007; MELLARS and STRINGER, 1989. MITHEN, 1996. Ibid.: 217. MCBREARTY and BROOKS, 2000. R ENFREW, 1996.

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the late Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic of southwest Asia documents communities that lived by symbolic cultures that we can recognize as like our own. At the beginning, I said that Cauvins Naissance des divinits opened a door to a new way of approaching the question of neolithisation. Since his passing, some Palaeolithic specialists, working with cognitive psychologists and evolutionary scientists, have begun to transform our understanding of human evolution, the emergence of human cognitive and cultural faculties, and the development of the human mind. For my own part, I have sought to develop a scenario for the process that we label neolithisation that places the formation of large, permanently co-resident communities during the Epipalaeolithic and particular in the early Aceramic Neolithic as the primary factor; the ability to sustain such large, permanent communities, I have argued, depends on the realization of the cognitive and cultural potential to manage systems of external symbolic storage. Like Cauvin, I do not claim that a form of psychocultural revolution in symbolic representation replaces other accounts in what must be a complex web that takes account

of environmental, economic and social factors. If we can step down the way that Cauvin pointed, and if we, the community of investigators concerned with what we believe is a period of crucial importance in human history, can add the new interdisciplinary collaborations that are needed, in a few years we shall look back at the last decade and wonder why it took so long to achieve momentum in this new area of research. Of course, there must also be advances in many other elds, too. And, of course, the difculty of understanding processes that are complex and inter-twined will only increase the difculty of working out a satisfactory synthesis. But we have the opportunity to ensure that the quite remarkable achievements of the Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic communities of southwest Asia take their proper place in the annals of human history. Trevor WATKINS
School of History, Classics and Archaeology University of Edinburgh William Robertson Wing, Teviot Place Edinburgh EH8 9AG UNITED K INGDOM T.Watkins@ed.ac.uk

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A IELLO L.C. 2010 Working Memory and the Evolution of Modern Thinking: Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 1. Current Anthropology 51,1: 3-4. A MMERMAN A.J., F LOURENTZOS P., GABRIELLE R., MCCARTNEY C., NOLLER J.S., P ELOSO D. and SORABJI D. 2008 More on the New Early Sites on Cyprus. Report of the Department of Antiquities Cyprus : 1-23. BARKOW J.H., COSMIDES L. and TOOBY J. 1992 The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. BOYD R. and R ICHERSON P.J. 1985 Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. BRAIDWOOD R.J. and WILLEY G.R. Conclusions and Afterthoughts. In : WILLEY G.R. and BRAIDWOOD R.J. (eds.), Courses Towards Urban Life: Archaeological Considerations of some Cultural Alternatives: 330-359. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. CASSIRER E. 1944 An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1975 Essai sur lhomme. Paris : ditions de Minuit (Le sens commun) [traduit par MASSA N.]. CAUVIN J. 1994 2000 2001

Naissance des divinits, Naissance de lagriculture. La rvolution des symboles au Nolithique. Paris : ditions du CNRS. The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [translated by WATKINS T.]. Ideology before economy. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 11,1: 106-107.

CHILDE V.G. 1936 Man makes himself. London: Watts. 1942 What happened in history. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. DEACON T.W. 1997 The Symbolic Species: the co-evolution of language and the human brain. London: The Penguin Press. DEMARRAIS E., GOSDEN C. and R ENFREW C. 2004 Rethinking materiality: the engagement of mind with the material world. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Monographs. DONALD M. 1991 Origins of the Modern Mind. Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press. DUBY G. 1978 Les trois ordres ou limaginaire du fodalisme. Paris : Gallimard.

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