Adam and Eve’s Fall:
The Palaeolithic/Neolithic Divide and its implications
The Palaeolithic/Neolithic Divide and its implications
The concept of Neolithic is just a result of our way of dividing into periods the course of history, a sort of narrative sectioned into chapters. That convention comforts us, in the sense that it gives post hoc meaning to the course of events as we envisage them back from the “origins” until the present.
Ultimately, archaeology of the Paleolithic/Neolithic divide is obviously the modern retaking of the book of Genesis, showing how men, that lived in the wild, needed to start producing and accumulating – the loss of innocence, and the start of “domestication” of the world. Domestication, a word that derives from the Latin “domus” and all the ontology that it carries, is an idea that makes no sense when applied to other times/spaces beyond our own.
Therefore, a critical look at the so called Paleolithic – Neolithic transition is important to try to overcome the nature-culture divide, a dichotomy that is substantially tied to our modern, Western way of looking at the world.
Which alternatives do we all – archeologists of the world - have to that narrative? We know that in many areas outside Europe this divide is presented not as Paleolithic/Neolithic divide, but as the forager/farmer one, i.e., a different version of the same ideology.
That is the challenge implicit in approaching this theme. A topic that will be sooner or later very important to develop...
Ultimately, archaeology of the Paleolithic/Neolithic divide is obviously the modern retaking of the book of Genesis, showing how men, that lived in the wild, needed to start producing and accumulating – the loss of innocence, and the start of “domestication” of the world. Domestication, a word that derives from the Latin “domus” and all the ontology that it carries, is an idea that makes no sense when applied to other times/spaces beyond our own.
Therefore, a critical look at the so called Paleolithic – Neolithic transition is important to try to overcome the nature-culture divide, a dichotomy that is substantially tied to our modern, Western way of looking at the world.
Which alternatives do we all – archeologists of the world - have to that narrative? We know that in many areas outside Europe this divide is presented not as Paleolithic/Neolithic divide, but as the forager/farmer one, i.e., a different version of the same ideology.
That is the challenge implicit in approaching this theme. A topic that will be sooner or later very important to develop...
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