Beccy Scott has produced a new essential text for Neanderthal studies; a work focused squarely on the Earlier Middle Palaeolithic (EMP). The EMP describes stone-tool technologies based on new techniques of working prepared cores. These technologies emerge in northern Europe after 350,000 years ago and largely disappear as Upper Palaeolithic technology becomes more prevalent across the continent. They are generally associated in Europe with Neanderthal populations.
The EMP is a period that has remained too long the Cinderella of the British stone age. Its archaeology relates to neither the earliest occupation of the region, nor the over-obsessed demise of the Neanderthals. The EMP lacks the captivating and easily understood bifaces of the Acheulean in abundant numbers and gaining any more than a superficial understanding of the period requires getting to grips with Levallois technology, a research area still considered a dark art to many prehistorians, seemingly requiring a heightened sense of spatial awareness and a fluent command of French to comprehend.
Scott has made a bold move towards redressing this imbalance through this neatly presented hardback volume. It provides an account of the EMP that firmly demonstrates why the period warrants detailed study and should demand our fuller attention. The title of the book sets out Scott's stall: the archaeology of the British EMP is not simply a technological phenomenon: it is the tangible record of the evolution of Neanderthal populations on the limits of their geographical range. The exciting advances in our understanding of the British Palaeolithic occupation, developed over the past two decades and consolidated in the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) Project, have given us a robust framework of long-term climate change and colonization history to work with. This perspective is embedded in the volume, in which the chronology of glacial and interglacial cycles covering the period are set out clearly and then provide the framework against which to read the remarkable development of Neanderthal populations. While some of Scott's work has been presented before, summarized in some AHOB publications (eg Ashton, Lewis and Stringer 2011) and the recent Thames through Time volume (Morigi et al Reference Morigi, Schreve, White, Hey, Garwood, Robinson, Barclay and Bradley2011), here we have the first published fully rounded account of the British EMP. It should thus be considered an essential text for students and researchers of early prehistory in northern Europe.
The evolutionary story that Scott presents is one which only archaeology could provide: that of behavioural, as opposed to anatomical or genetic, development. Scott's approach to the record is a dynamic one, firmly bedded in landscape and the concept of chaîne opératoire, taking the static scatters and isolated finds of the period and animating them in time and space through a close reading of the record. The volume is therefore more than a reference book of the period. It constitutes a textbook exemplar in archaeology as discipline. The seamless integration of Scott's understanding as an exceptional fieldworker, technologist and historian of the subject combine in a synthesis which reaches a state of total archaeology. In her hands this long-neglected period is illuminated, distilled and explained through an approach which integrates an understanding of context for each find (historical and geoarchaeological), a forensic reading of the archaeology at an artefact and assemblage scale with a fish-eye evolutionary perspective which never loses sight of the whole picture while explaining the necessary details.
As a textbook, one of the volume's most useful strengths is in providing an account of our understanding of Levallois technology (most of which was developed by French academics from Bordes to Boëda) in a highly accessible and detailed way. For any British or English-speaking student of the European Middle Palaeolithic, Scott has provided here the seminal text for the next generation. With clear illustrations and tabulated summaries of assemblage variability, an entire approach to understanding the technology is laid out as the evidence is discussed. Similarly the British record is not dealt with in isolation but in the context of understanding the Middle Palaeolithic as a wider phenomenon, especially as part of the record of Neanderthals in northern Europe.
For much of the book, the record is discussed on a site-by-site basis, outlining the circumstances of discovery, sedimentary context, assemblage characteristics, environment, dating and overall behavioural interpretations distilled from the above. Scott's accomplished understanding of the research history for each site stems from her meticulous archival research, bringing to life the people responsible for early discoveries (eg Allen-Brown, Burchell, Spurrell) and critically examining both their contributions and their occasional failings as field researchers. Scott's account has a tone of easy familiarity with, and respect for, these personalities and this is an intimate tone that extends to the sites and artefact assemblages too. This intimacy is evidently hard won. It is the product of time spent by the author immersed in the material of the subject: the often bleak excavation locales, the airless archives or the hours of painstaking sorting, analysis and refitting of artefacts. It displays a command of the subject that one might expect from someone at the end, rather than the beginning, of their academic career.
The level of detail might overwhelm a casual reader hoping for a simple and dramatic account of the Neanderthals. This is not a book that delivers the Neanderthal of either popular imagination or pop-science. Nowhere in this book do we find the raw-living, ultimately doomed cousin to humanity. This is also not an account that pits the Neanderthal against modern humans in circular reasoning that renders the eventual domination of the latter inevitable. There is thankfully no revisionist hyperbole attempting to redeem Neanderthal from years of bad press and missing the key distinction of Neanderthal populations in the process. This is a more nuanced and illuminating account that focuses on a necessarily broad time frame, examining the populations on their own terms and allowing the archaeology to speak for itself. The Neanderthal that emerges from Scott's account is a clear participant in evolutionary process, evolving and adapting to environmental challenges, developing new niches and evolving complex and sophisticated behavioural responses to climate change. Scott's Neanderthal is one very much engaged in the wider story of human evolution, a distinctive Eurasian population with a long evolutionary trajectory and highly successful in adapting to significant environmental challenges. The volume ultimately provides an account of a developing and flexible Middle Palaeolithic behavioural package which, due to a well-dated and episodic record, can be brought into far sharper focus in Britain than in other parts of the Neanderthal world.
Becoming Neanderthals therefore represents a significant contribution to the study of these vanished populations. It provides an example of how a fully rounded and detailed total-archaeology approach can access the dynamics of past human life on both intimate and human evolutionary scales. It delivers to Neanderthal populations in northern Europe a deep past and enviable pedigree, and to us it delivers a new perspective through which to view both their adaptive achievements and their eventual disappearance.
