My copy of The Emergence of Civilisation has definitely seen better days: its pages have long since parted company with the cloth binding, most of them are yellowing at the edges, and their margins are full of scrawled annotations and updates. I very much need a replacement, and so the present reprint is welcome for that reason alone. From an inscription on the flyleaf I see that I bought The Emergence in January 1974, the self-same month in which I moved to the University of Southampton to begin my doctoral studies under Colin Renfrew’s supervision. For an impecunious postgraduate student such as myself, this was a significant financial investment. A big heavy book of over 600 pages with many figures and plates, and issued only in hardback, it was certainly expensive: even Professor Sir John Boardman, in The Classical Review (25.1 [1975] 118–20), complained that its price was “intolerable” (£14.75, or in todays terms about £115!). Nevertheless, for the budding Aegean prehistorian, as for many others interested in the development of early complex societies, this was a must-have book.
The disciplinary scene onto which The Emergence exploded in 1972 was, within Aegean prehistory, rather sleepy and self-absorbed. One has only to consult the invaluable monthly bibliographic newsletter Nestor (http://classics.uc.edu/nestor/index.php/nestorbib) to see to what extent the sorts of publications appearing at about the same time as The Emergence were mired in thick descriptive detail, and seemingly oblivious to the seismic changes that had been affecting archaeology elsewhere for a number of years. Truth to tell, even Renfrew’s own first monograph, Excavations at Saliagos near Antiparos (1968)—a report on his important fieldwork, with John D. Evans, at the first Neolithic site to be investigated in the Cyclades—is fairly traditional in its format and general approach. (I recall a memorable dinner in 1973 at the home of the champion of the “New Archaeology”, Lewis Binford, at which Colin’s enthusiastic remarks about processual archaeology prompted Lew to fetch from his study a copy of the Saliagos monograph, only to tease him by reading out loud, in a mocking sing-song voice, the tedious details of an Appendix on fish-bone remains!) But The Emergence, published just four years later, was an altogether different kind of book. For this was a volume that not only deployed concepts and terminology radical in an Aegean setting—systems theory, cybernetics, locational analysis, statistics and quantification, and so on—but one that displayed an unusual and refreshing awareness of the wider world of archaeology, especially in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and Europe, as well as a warm sympathy for at least some of the tenets of the New Archaeology.
Initial reactions to the book on the part of established Aegean prehistorians, perhaps unsurprisingly, were very mixed. I remember chancing upon one of them flipping through the pages of a copy on display in the book exhibit at one of the Aegean Prehistory conferences held regularly at Sheffield University during the 1970s. She remarked, sniffily, that while the up-to-date summaries of data in the Culture Sequence chapters (5–13) looked useful enough, especially for the Cycladic islands, she could see little of interest or value to her in the rest of the book, and certainly did not plan to buy a copy. (In later years, I am pleased to report, she changed her mind.) Most of the early reviews focused myopically on quibbles about matters of factual detail and culture history, largely overlooking, or at least seriously underestimating, the book’s more revolutionary aspects in terms of its emphasis on model-building, explanation, comparison, quantification, and a broadly anthropological approach. As Sinclair Hood remarked in his review (Journal of Hellenic Studies 93 [1973] 251–52), “Much tends to be esoteric by reason of the jargon used. To what extent the introduction of concepts and jargon from other disciplines helps our understanding of Aegean prehistory will be a matter of opinion.” Alleged “lapses into gobbledygook” and the “portentous jargon of anthropological Newspeak” evidently bothered Michael Walker (Technology and Culture 14.1 [1973] 78-81) as well: “there is also an unfortunate tendency at times to call a spade a ferrous implement employed in agricultural manual procedures, as it were.” As we look back almost four decades on, however, knowing the sorts of tangled knots into which archaeological prose would later become tied, especially as the New Archaeology came under critique by postprocessualism from the early 1980s, Renfrew’s writing reveals itself as quite refreshingly straightforward and intelligible, whatever one may now think of its arguments.
John Boardman’s review was one of the few to take the book seriously as a whole, praising it as “a notable work of synthesis and scholarship... [which] deserves a wide circulation,” and he had clearly grasped the overall message. Unfortunately, it was a message he did not wish to receive. He was sceptical of the “precipitate” endorsement of the “apparent” results of radiocarbon dating, as newly revised by dendrochronology (the subject of Renfrew’s next book, Before Civilisation [1973]). And he was wholly unable to accept a largely endogenous account of culture change in the Bronze Age Aegean—that is, an emergence of civilisation dependent on local factors rather than external ones — which (not entirely without a certain logic, it must be said) he saw as the inevitable outcome of the chosen analytical model of sub-systems and feedback effects. His ultimate put-down was to assert that “in many respects Renfrew’s account is simply a different way of saying what others have tried to say already.”
These, of course, were some of the reactions of an older generation of scholars. Colin Renfrew was 35 when The Emergence was published, and his most enthusiastic readers were certainly those of his own age or younger, especially postgraduate students. For them, the book seemed to provide all the wider context they had been seeking for their individual studies; it offered new frameworks, a new rigor, a welcome shift to explanation as distinct from narration. Its impact was thus quite overwhelming, at least for those predisposed to be open to fresh ways of thinking about the past. In my own case—if the reader will indulge a moment of autobiography—it was literally lifechanging.
In autumn 1971, I was an early-stage graduate student in a doctoral program in Classical Archaeology, gaining field experience by excavating in the Gymnasium Area of ancient Corinth. A mis-step as I framed a photograph from the edge of my excavation trench resulted in a 25-foot fall onto a very unforgiving Roman marble pavement—and a shattered right foot, rendering me useless for the remainder of the excavation season in a knee-to-toe plaster cast. As make-work, I was put to the study of some 30,000 very fragmented sherds of Early Helladic II pottery which had been found immediately above bedrock throughout the excavation area. Until then I had imagined myself writing a dissertation (and, I hoped, pursuing a career) in the field of Classical Archaeology; but working on this material gave me a new-found interest in Aegean prehistory, which I had previously encountered only through introductory survey-level courses. Returning to the University of Texas at Austin in 1972 to “write up the material” (as they say) for a Masters thesis, and casting about for publications that might better contextualize my material, I stumbled across The Emergence, fresh off the press. It was a revelation. There I saw the much larger picture within which my own parochial assemblage could be fitted and have wider relevance. Obviously, I had to study with Colin Renfrew. I wrote to him in 1973, and he suggested a meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the time he would be a participant in the School of American Research Advanced Seminar on “Ancient Civilizations and Trade.” This too was a revelation, since there I encountered a number of my academic heroes, besides Renfrew—Bob Adams, George Dalton, Kwang-Chih Chang, Greg Johnson, Bill Rathje, Jerry Sabloff. Renfrew and I agreed to meet a few days later at Lew Binford’s house outside Albuquerque, and I was duly “interviewed” in his back yard for my suitability as a postgraduate student; Colin seemed more concerned with protecting the top of his head from the desert sun than with whether or not I was a worthy potential student! In any event, I was accepted and, somewhat to my own surprise, became an Aegean prehistorian. Dissertation completed, I was hired as Lecturer in Aegean Prehistory in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, taking up my position, as chance would have it, on the very same day that Renfrew himself began his tenure as Disney Professor in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge.
I tell this tale, because it was almost entirely my excitement about The Emergence that led me down this path. Its synthesis of Cycladic and Aegean prehistory, obviously, was on a scale and at a level of detail not previously attempted. But that is not what made it so very different from any previous book in the field. For many of us, both before and after The Emergence, Emily Vermeule’s Greece in the Bronze Age (1964), was the textbook that provided our entrée to Aegean prehistory; it was organized as a story about the prehistoric peoples of the Aegean, framed in terms of lively description of archaological and art-historical material, and a pseudo-historical, narrative structure. The Emergence, on the other hand, placed culture process and the explanation of culture change unabashedly front and center. By proposing causal, systems-based models, it seemed to provide, for the first time, a coherent, over-arching framework for trying to understand and explain how and why palace-based state polities emerged where and when they did in the Aegean Bronze Age. The Emergence placed Aegean prehistory squarely in face-to-face interaction with archaeologies well outside the Classical tradition, to a degree seen earlier perhaps only in the writings of V. Gordon Childe (to whose memory, very appropriately, The Emergence was dedicated). In fact, The Emergence, and the work it subsequently stimulated, could be said to constitute a major crossing of that divide separating anthropological archaeologies from those in the “Great Tradition,” about which Renfrew was to write a few years later in the American Journal of Archaeology (84 [1980] 287–98).
I sometimes wonder whether today’s students of archaeology experience anything akin to the buzz of excitement that permeated the field in the early 1970s. We looked forward with keen anticipation for the next issue of American Antiquity to arrive in our mailboxes, for the next publication by any of the leading luminaries of the New Archaeology, for the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology and (a little later) of the Theoretical Archaeology Group. There was a palpable sense—one could almost hear the creaking sounds—of a discipline changing direction, renewing and transforming itself in very significant and sometimes unexpected ways. The heady debates which swirled around us all are well reflected in the literature of the time, some of which naturally now seems very dated, but much of which has proven to be influential and of lasting value.
It is not simply the rose-tinted spectacles of retrospect that suggest to me that 1972, the year of The Emergence’s publication, was indeed an annus mirabilis for archaeological publication more generally. Aside from The Emergence, that same year saw the publication of Binford’s An Archaeological Perspective; David Clarke’s Models in Archaeology (and his influential ‘loss of innocence’ paper a few months later in 1973); Kent Flannery’s seminal article on ‘the cultural evolution of civilizations’; Michael Schiffer’s first paper on ‘archaeological context and systemic context’; widely influential books such as Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics and the first English translation of Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; some important edited collections of papers and conference proceedings—for example, Eric Higgs’ Papers in Economic Prehistory, Mark Leone’s Contemporary Archaeology, Ed Wilmsen’s Social Exchange and Interaction, and the proceedings of the London meeting organized by Peter Ucko et al. on Man, Settlement and Urbanism (Renfrew’s own similar mega-conference, The Explanation of Culture Change: Models in Prehistory, followed hot on its heels the next year). As I explored in more detail in my contribution to The Emergence of Civilisation Revisited (2004), yet another 1972 publication of special salience for Aegean prehistory was The Minnesota Messenia Expedition: Reconstructing a Bronze Age Regional Environment, edited by William McDonald and George Rapp Jr—the first truly interdisciplinary regional-scale, problem-oriented research project in Greece. We can only speculate about how The Emergence might have been different had the Minnesota survey reached final publication a year or two earlier. In any case, the list of publications from 1972 is long and very impressive.
Notwithstanding The Emergence’s impressive pedigree, it is still a fair question to ask what justifies its reissue, without change, so long after its initial release. Very few books in archaeology, in fact, do enjoy second editions or reprints. Of course, certain textbooks which have hit on a winning formula are reissued (or, as their publishers like to put it, “refreshed”) every 3 or 4 years, with new images and up-to-date case studies to take account of the latest discoveries in the field; Brian Fagan’s In the Beginning is now in its 12th edition, his People of the Earth in its 13th, while Colin Renfrew’s own Archaeology: Theory, Methods and Practice, with Paul Bahn, has reached its fifth edition, along with a shorter epitome, Archaeology Essentials. Other publications of long ago—Heinrich Schliemanns Troia and Mykenai, for example, or Sir Arthur Evans’ The Palace of Minos—have been re-issued as facsimile reprints, on account of their historical significance in the field. But most books in archaeology are lucky to have a first edition, a paperback version, and a revised second edition a few years later. It is in general only books which have manifestly made a difference that enjoy a second life many years after their initial dissemination. Several of the works of V. Gordon Childe spring to mind, or Ian Hodder’s Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, or Lewis Binford’s Debating Archaeology.
In the case of The Emergence, many scholars have piled on to point out how thoroughly out of date it now is, in terms of the data on which it drew. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere (and I know he agrees), Renfrew’s study just missed out on what is perhaps the most important revolution to have an impact on Aegean prehistory over the past several decades—namely, the advent of intensive surface survey and regional settlement pattern studies. In this respect, some sections of the book now read like a relic from an earlier, more innocent, age. The thorough-going new Introduction does an admirable job of bringing the reader up to date, most particularly in respect of research and discovery in the Cyclades during the third millennium BC—which was, after all, the central focus of The Emergence. There exist, furthermore, a number of relatively recent articles and edited volumes which provide useful overviews of the various parts of the Aegean world at different stages of its prehistory.
The Emergence was very much a book of its time, and no amount of updating to take into account subsequent discoveries could now turn it into a satisfactory vademecum for Aegean prehistory in the 21st century. But the reader should not think of this reprint purely as an historical exercise: that would be to treat the book as though it were a fossil fly trapped in amber. For, as Colin Renfrew emphasizes in his Preface that follows, many of the problems of explanation which The Emergence set out to tackle in strikingly original ways still remain important, fascinating, and for the most part not yet fully or satisfactorily resolved. Accordingly, the key question is how far his overall approach and underlying theoretical framework still have some validity, available for rethinking and restructuring as part of the ongoing quest for more adequate understanding of the emergence of civilization in the third and second millennia bc in the Aegean. It is both an honour and a privilege to re-introduce one of the most important books in archaeology from the second half of the 20th century to a new generation of students and scholars, with the hope that they will find it as provocative and stimulating as I did many years ago.
John F. Cherry
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
and the Ancient World
Brown University
July 2009