This project began when the chairman of my department, Jack Prost, encouraged me in the strongest possible terms to apply for a fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute for the Humanities to write a book on this subject. I was granted the fellowship and enjoyed a year free of teaching and departmental duties in the company of a superb group of scholars: Bruce Calder, Jody Enders, Peter Hale, Mae Henderson, and Jim Schultz from UIC’s departments of history, French, art history, English/African-American studies, and German, respectively. They helped me enlarge my view of my subject, suggested changes in my presentation of material, and raised issues I had not considered. Their good-humored tolerance in debate, devotion to scholarship, and mutual encouragement refuted all of the popular hand-wringing about the state of the humanities in our nation’s universities. I also owe much to the director of the Institute, Gene Ruoff, a distinguished scholar of English Romanticism, for extraordinary encouragement, assistance (yes, even financial!), and astute advice. I am most grateful—both to him for sustaining the Institute administratively and to him and his executive board for accepting a “naive realist” natural scientist into their midst. I hope that this book somehow repays the trouble taken on my behalf by everyone concerned with the UIC’s Institute for the Humanities.
No one is his or her own best critic. Some friends and colleagues have read partial drafts of this book, offering advice and criticism: Jack Prost, Gene Ruoff, Jim Phillips, Bob Hall, Quentin Calkins, Brian Hayden, and my wife, Lesley. A number of colleagues have also provided information, references, and reprints used in this book: April Sievert, Anne Cahen-Delhaye, Paul-Louis Van Berg, Marcel Otte, Larry Kuznar, David Frayer, Waud Kracke, Nancy Fagin, Ron Weber, Brian Hayden, Polly Wiesner, Doug Bamforth, Bob Jurmain, John Beaton, Tom Hester, Ellen Steinberg, Pat Lyons, Jonathan Haas, Bob Hall, and Jim Phillips. None of these helpful people is responsible for any errors of commission or omission perpetrated by me in this work.
I would also like to acknowledge the inspiration of several eminent anthropologists, whom I know only from their work but upon whose data and ideas I have especially relied: Andrew Vayda, Robert Carneiro, Mervyn Meggitt, Paula Brown, William Divale, Thomas Gregor, and Robert Edgerton. Their unblinking realism, comparative approaches, and unapologetic rationality are balm indeed in this era of vacuous “notions” and completely subjective “deep readings.” Any future dissertations on this subject must be founded, as was mine, on the work of these extraordinary anthropologists.
I am most grateful to my editor, David Roll, for finding merit in this work and assisting in its completion. I also appreciate the efforts of Gioia Stevens in seeing it into print.
The research that provided the germ of this book was conducted in conjunction with my friend and colleague, Daniel Cahen. We are grateful to various ministries of the Belgian government and to the National Science Foundation of the United States for funding our research on the Early Neolithic. Many after-dinner discussions with Daniel and with Anne Cahen-Delhaye helped me define the problem addressed here and understand how pervasive it was. I would treasure our long friendship and their unstinting hospitality even if these had not been so academically productive.
Last but not least, I thank my wife, Lesley, for her unfailing support of my efforts by reading, exhorting, comforting, and permitting me to neglect my responsibilities as a homeowner, father, and husband. Even more humbling was the the generous and proud response of my son, Pete, who told his friends that the reason I was “always busy” was that I was writing a “big book.” While I was immersed in the most depressing aspects of human behavior, my family served as a constant reminder that the more hopeful and cheerful facets of human existence far outnumber its darker ones.