TALE OF THE AXE

Deep Time, the 2.8 million years in which our earliest ancestors began to be toolmakers, is a period shrouded in mystery. It is still uncertain at what point hominins came on the scene, given that chimpanzees have also been shown to be capable to making tools. Controlled fire for cooking is a pointer, but how does an archaeologist distinguish between controlled and uncontrolled fires? Until the era of Darwin, it was believed that the world was created in 4004 BC, but late Victorian archaeologists started to push back the dates of the Neolithic by several millennia before settling down together, investing in agricultural plots, and collectively erecting massive ceremonial monuments to cement new communal identities. The author's personal experience of digging at early African sites illuminates a fascinating journey of understanding in which he takes the axe-head as the focus. His starting point is a green neolithic axe brought to him by a construction worker at the Devil's Quoits henge at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire. 5000 years old, the stone originated in the Lake District and was thus testimony to the movement of people and implements. He discusses the evidence for migration at several significant archaeological sites such as Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire, a complex of caves with close similarities to the cave systems in the Dordogne. In the 1930s Gordon Childe theorised that the Neolithic was a period in which humans changed from hunters to farmers, and this was supported by the work of Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho in the 1950s, who proposed that hunter-gatherers had settled by a spring in Jericho around 10,000 BC, creating a "man-made tell (settlement mound)" including a sanctuary in a significant transitional stage towards domestication. The author's section on Stonehenge is particularly fascinating, covering several theories about how the blue stones got to Stonehenge from the Preseli mountains. Shipment from Milford Haven is now considered unlikely, and various overland routes are discussed including fording the Severn north of Gloucester. A thread throughout the book is the author's discussion of war and peace, whether aggression was innate in early societies and how this impacts on the future of our world. 2.9 x 19.8cm, 432pp, maps, diagrams, colour photos.