This is a succinct and original way of introducing students to world history–everything, that is, till quite recent times–as understood from archaeology with a moderate dose of social science theory. Of the five chapters, four deal with the last ten thousand years, from agricultural origins in different continents down to the emergence of chiefship, states, literacy, and civilizations (each carefully defined). The first chapter, contrastingly, covers six million years–Ristvet's ‘beginning’ being the divergence of the African ape and hominid lines–condensing somehow not only physical evolution, as known from the accumulating fossil evidence, but also origins of intelligence alongside social, economic, and cultural development through the whole span of the Stone Age. Although the book makes no pretence to being a comprehensive reference work, it is written with didactic purpose to inculcate a balanced appreciation of human achievement over time and around the globe, and at the same time a grasp of essential concepts, from humanity to social complexity. In effect it is offered as an antidote to the persisting dominance, in popular perception as well as North American undergraduate syllabuses, of ‘western civilization’, with all its cultural, political, ethnic, and gender biases. Moreover, the subtitle (with the publisher's series title, Explorations in World History) serves as a belated recognition that archaeological research, in whatever part of the world, produces history, regardless of the period or the culture revealed. This highlights a problem for the American academic tradition, in which archaeology–unless specifically labelled ‘classical’, ‘historical’ (whatever that may mean), or ‘colonial’–is deemed a branch of anthropology. That is more than administrative convenience in universities; it reflects a way of seeing the world at large, the present as much as the past.

Reading this book, with its explanatory treatment of themes and arguments, all neatly arranged under suitably headed subsections, one can imagine Lauren Ristvet as a committed and effective teacher. While she has a message to convey, and essential ideas to instil, she knows how much an average first-year student can absorb at a session. Therefore, instead of attempting to summarize the whole history of human development by era, region, and topic, she deftly selects examples, often unexpected ones, from different parts of the world to illustrate the issues–stone age economics, agricultural origins, invention of writing, or the first ‘states’–and to stimulate comparative thinking. She uses the findings of archaeology throughout, but seldom dwells on the bewildering details of skeletons, ruins, and pots. Rather, she appeals to imagination by throwing in little surprises and analogies drawn from the modern USA or other countries, such as Iraq, figuring in the recent news. (A favourite phrase begins ‘Just like in ...’.) Such devices may keep a lecture class alert and focused; however, in a text they can look forced, especially when scouting outside the author's main expertise. Capable students graduating from her classes will need to answer to more varied intellects and be directed to more demanding literature. Essential too, for appreciating the evidence and deductions from it, must be practical exposure to archaeology and its methods.

Interesting though this is as one lecturer's earnest response to a daunting challenge, as a printed book In the beginning is less convincing. For discerning readers, in search of substance binding the themes, it flits too quickly from this continent to that, while its classroom manner may not endear, its enviable clarity notwithstanding. Students who find expressions such as ‘Archaeologists believe ...’, ‘Historians refer to ...’ satisfyingly authoritative will need to be goaded into looking for the reasons and assessing the evidence. Ristvet has obviously been impressed herself by recent seminal contributions (for example, Andrew Sherratt's ‘secondary products revolution’ among agricultural societies) or persuasive expositions of world history, such as Jared Diamond's. However, regurgitating the latter on the expansion of Bantu-speaking farmers across equatorial and sub-equatorial Africa, on which Diamond for all his perception and lucidity is not a primary authority, may be acceptable in a student's essay but barely satisfies the canons of critical scholarship, which the teacher should be imparting. All the same, presenting the Bantu problem alongside the Indo-European is a good ploy, provided that students’ sense of geography and chronology can keep pace. Those who diligently read on may be more bemused than impressed by the almost melodramatic finale–‘The catastrophe’, attributed to the ‘shadowy’ sea peoples in the twelfth century BCE–which hardly makes for a satisfactory conclusion, seeing that this collapse of Bronze Age civilization is a phenomenon of just one part of the world, namely the Near East and Mediterranean. As an attempt to illustrate a broader theme in antiquity, it is strained and undermines the balanced universal message maintained until this point. For it then transpires that elsewhere, in both Old World and New, the story has already fizzled out or been cut off at different dates, whether BCE or CE. And the comparative ‘timelines’ at the end of each chapter–presumably inserted as ‘help sheets’ for those lost in time and space–are, as produced, starkly unattractive.

If world history (or the history of humanity) is coming increasingly into vogue for undergraduate foundation purposes, those teaching it need to consider how to direct their students. Should they be content with one or two course books tailor-made for this market, whether brief introductions to the issues as currently perceived (such as this one) or encyclopaedic compendia (such as The Human Past, edited by Chris Scarre, and reviewed in this Journal–2, 1, 2007, pp. 113–18)? Or should students be urged to shun this sort of literature with its ‘head on’ approach, and to immerse themselves instead in varied regional and thematic studies from which, with suitable supervision, they can develop their own understanding of human history worldwide? With this in mind, I would recommend Ristvet's effort not so much to students but as a quick read for teachers wishing to see how one of their number tackles so broad and fraught a subject. They will doubtless recognize the strengths of her comparative approach, which presses appreciation of cultural and economic connections between regions and peoples at different periods, as well as contrasting independent developments. She is conscious, moreover, of modern sensitivities and the revolt against former assumptions of the superiority of ‘western civ’ and the related obsession with ‘inventions’ (agriculture, literacy, or the wheel). One method of confronting this is to be ready with negative questions, asking, for example, for an explanation of why some of the world's populations did not become farmers. Nowadays it would not do to disparage these as picturesque groups that lacked the intelligence to ‘invent’ cultivation or to learn from others, and thus found themselves eventually confined to marginal corners of the earth; rather, so one is left to infer, they were just too intelligent to risk upsetting their happy existence and environmental equilibrium. Alternatively, one can adopt a moralizing, if not patronizing, stance in identifying ‘unfair’ or ‘unfavourable’ local factors or climatic trends that prevented initiatives in what, with modern hindsight, should have been the ideal direction for progress. (The adverb ‘unfortunately’, raised to conjunction status, does heavy duty in Ristvet's text.) Useful perhaps for provoking students’ thinking, this ‘Why not?’ reflex can become tiresome, if not an invitation to sentimentality. Appreciation of world history cannot advance in fixed defensive mode.