The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age

310 pages. Illustré de nombreuses photos en noir et blanc hors texte et de quelques dessins en noir et blanc dans le texte. Bon état Couv. convenable Intérieur frais In-8 Carré Relié The Stone Age. The Mother Tongue. A New Rosetta Stone. Paleoscience. Stone Age Surgery. Venus Figurines...

Introduction

A near-universal theme in the mythologies of the world is that the present state of the world, and more specifically the social world, is in decline -- a fall from the Garden of Eden or from a Golden Age. Modern civilisation has turned these traditional mythological assumptions on their head and written a new script, one based on the idea of social progress and evolution. In this new mythology the notion of civilisation (as it is generally understood) replaces Eden and this novel paradise exists not at the beginning of time but, if not right now, then just around the corner. Civilisation is, in the plot of this new mythology, envisaged as a great success story -- from prehistoric rags to civilised riches -- and it is presented as the final flowering of human achievement born out of a long and interminable struggle against the powers of darkness and ignorance that are represented by the Stone Age.

The way in which the human story has been written to date is so abridged and poorly edited that it has provided us with an account of ourselves which leaves out most of the contents of the early chapters. Despite the fact that prehistory makes up more than 95 per cent of our time on this planet, history, the remaining 5 per cent, makes up at least 95 per cent of most accounts of the human story. The prehistory of humankind is no mere prelude to history; history is rather a colourful and eventful afterword to the Stone Age. In this book I will show how rich and eventful were the contents of these early chapters of the life of our species; how great is the debt of historical societies to their prehistoric counterparts in all spheres of cultural life; and how civilised in many respects were those human cultures that have been reviled as savage. Before doing so I shall show how savage the so-called civilised peoples can be, and how the barbarism of our own culture is projected outward into the geographically remote (modern tribal cultures) as well as into the temporally remote prehistoric cultures.

One might expect that anthropologists, as the representatives of civilised scientific practices in the investigation of tribal societies, would have had a greater respect for their subjects than other colonial groups who had direct experience of the 'natives'. But here we find a sinister skeleton in the cupboard. In 1863 the Anthropological Society of London was set up and included among its members Sir James Hunt, the famous explorer Richard Burton and Robert Knox the anatomist. Burton described it as 'a refuge for Destitute Truth', a reference to the fact that it was the only outlet for his ethnological writings on sexual matters and related subjects that were strictly taboo among the mainstream Victorian intelligentsia. Hunt used the society as a vehicle to express his racist assumptions of the biological basis of white supremacy, juggling anthropometric measurements to lend scientific weight to his prejudices. Within the ranks of the society was an unofficial and informal circle known as the Cannibal Club, with Hunt in the chair calling his comrades to order with a gavel fashioned in the form of a negro's head. Knox was later to resign from his teaching position at Edinburgh University when he was implicated in the notorious criminal activities of Burke and Hare. These partners in crime graduated from grave-robbing to murder in their attempts to keep up with the medical demand for human corpses for dissection. Knox had unwittingly received some of Burke and Hare's unfortunate victims on to his own dissecting table. Despite the scandal surrounding Knox's name, other individuals with anthropological interests did not even bother to obtain their human subjects through middle men but did the dirty work themselves; some even took a certain relish in indulging in this grisly pastime.

The anthropologist James Urry has collected a whole host of grim tales of early anthropologists who behaved no better then the necromancers of the Middle Ages in their respect for the dead. He cites the case of the Russian explorer and ethnographer Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, who was pursuing science of a most dubious kind in the coastal regions of New Guinea in 1871. He was assisted in his research by a Swedish sailor named Will Olsson and also had a young male Polynesian servant, simply called 'Boy' in his writings. When the boy died from malaria, Miklouho-Maclay was anxious to dispose of the body, fearing that the locals might think he had been personally responsible. Before dumping the corpse in the sea, he was determined to preserve what he could for science. This sordid act is described in its perpetrator's own account, quoted by Urry:

In thinking of the best way to perform the operation, I discovered, to my chagrin, that I did not have a vessel large enough to contain a whole brain. Expecting the natives to appear every hour, most likely with grave intentions, I gave up, not without regret, the idea of preserving the Polynesian's brain but not the chance to obtain a preparation of the larynx with all the muscles, the tongue, etc., as I had promised my former teacher, Professor H. now living in Strasbourg, the larynx of a dark man with all the muscles. Preparing anatomical instruments and a jug with spirit, I returned to Boy's room and cut out the larynx with the tongue and all the muscles. A bit of skin from the forehead and head with hair went into my collection. Olsson, shaking with his fear of the dead man, was holding a candle and Boy's head. As I was cutting the plexus brachialis, Boy's hand made a small movement and Olsson, mortally afraid that I was cutting a man still alive, dropped the candle, and we were left in darkness.

Such was the callous nature of the operator that whilst sailing out in his boat to dump the corpse of 'Boy', he was so distracted by the marine life that he went into a sort of scientific reverie deep enough for him to temporarily forget that the corpse was on board. Having surreptitiously and successfully thrown 'Boy' overboard, and satisfied that the sharks would do the rest, he returned to shore to relax over a cup of tea.

A comparable example of total disregard for the remains of native people, this time from South America, has been brought to light by the Oxford anthropologist Peter Rivière. It concerns the activities of a German traveller in British Guiana in the 1840s named Richard Schomburgk. Despite being aware that the local Indians considered their dead to be sacrosanct, he was determined to raid their final resting places in the name of science. With a partner in crime he dug up a skeleton of a Warao Indian, later presented to the Anatomy Museum in Berlin. On another occasion they obtained two recently buried Macusi Indian skeletons, both of which had been buried for no more than a year. During this particular instance of body-snatching the two were nearly caught red-handed and quickly had to hide both the skeletons and their digging tools under a bush until they could be safely retrieved later. Unlike his Russian counterpart in New Guinea, Schomburgk, as Rivière points out, seems to have had mixed feelings about what he had done and wrote that he 'was glad when the wicked work was finally and successfully accomplished'. In this act we can see a clear parallel with Burke and Hare, with the distinction that these mortal remains were snatched not to be dissected in a morgue but rather to be displayed in a museum.

Urry describes what is probably the most savage and appalling example of the immoral actions routinely pursued by civilised medical and scientific institutions on the mortal remains of natives. William Lanney and Truganini, described as the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines, had asked to be buried in peace when their time came. In 1869 Lanney died, and despite his wishes his corpse became the property of scientists. Urry gives an account of what took place next:

In the morgue the body was viciously mutilated: the head, hands and feet removed and only the torso and limbs were left to bury. However, on the same night as the interment, two groups planned to exhume even these remains. Discovering their rivals had beaten them to the body, the leader of the other group smashed down the door to the morgue where the remains had been removed, only to discover 'a few particles of flesh' remained.

This pack of wild scientific dogs each carried off a piece of the corpse; one took an ear, another the nose, yet another a part of an arm, and the greatest prize of all -- the head -- was never seen again. A particularly sinister postscript to the story consists of the making of a tobacco pouch out of Lanney's skin by Dr Stockwell, who was the Chief House Surgeon of the Colonial Hospital as well as a distinguished member of the Royal Society of Tasmania. It is impossible not to make parallels between this particular act and the hawking of combs made from Apache bones in the Wild West, as well as more recent examples, such as the making of lampshades from the skin of Jews under the Nazi regime. Truganini died in 1876 and was duly buried. But her skeleton was later dug up so that it could be displayed in the museum of the Royal Society of Tasmania. One can imagine Dr Stockwell admiring her skeleton whilst puffing away on his pipe with tobacco drawn from the pouch made from her countryman's skin. Finally in 1976 descendants of the Aboriginal Tasmanians regained control over her remains, which were then cremated and her ashes given up to the sea.

It was by no means the case that instances of body-snatching were restricted to the minor players in the development of anthropology. In fact many of the most important figures of this academic discipline on both sides of the Atlantic (whose work is still both admired in the profession and obligatory reading for students of anthropology) were involved. Even Franz Boas, one of the founding fathers of American anthropology, was implicated in such dubious goings-on. In the 1890s during the early part of his career he actually plundered native American graves and sold their skulls to subsidise his fieldwork. The morality of the actions of anthropologists of the British school was equally questionable. The leading Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Haddon even practised grave-robbing closer to home when he plundered a disused church in the west of Ireland, making off with a sack full of skulls. Such practices did not die out in the nineteenth century and possession by the spirit of science has led more recent scholars to commit acts of sacrilege. According to his own account, the palaeoanthropologist Don Johanson, best known as the man who found the remains of the australopithicene individual known as 'Lucy', together with a colleague named Tom Gray stole a femur from a family burial place in Ethiopia belonging to the Afar people. The reason behind this was that Johanson wanted a modern bone to compare with a fossil bone he had recently found, and for him, this seems to have provided sufficient justification for committing the act.

In this dark and morally dubious undercurrent of anthropology -- having more in common with necromancy than science as normally understood -- we can see in a microcosm the parameters of the whole strategy by which civilisation justifies its own savagery. The anthropologist, as an emissary of civilised man, can undertake such acts of grave-robbing in the name of science when he is dealing with the mortal remains of 'savages'. Were they attempting to do the same in the cemeteries of their own civilised cities they would be shunned as individuals devoid of moral conscience. If our moral superiority to 'primitives' and prehistoric 'cavemen' is to be cast in doubt by the bringing to light of such nefarious goings-on among scientists, what of the notion of social evolution and progress on a more general level? Can that be easily demonstrated? The belief in social and cultural progress is an essential component of the modern myth which would have us believe in a clear-cut distinction between prehistoric inertia and civilised momentum. Without underpinning civilisation with the notion of progress there would simply be no explanation for our claims for superiority over those outside the mainstream of human development (tribal societies) or before it (prehistoric societies). The belief in social progress is so integral a part of modern culture that it is often seen as an almost natural idea and as such has often been accepted unquestionably as a fact. In reality, it is largely an innovation of eighteenth-century Europe; before that it played a relatively minor role in human affairs. For many scientists and laymen alike the idea has an almost religious aura and attachment to it is often as fervent as the faith of religious believers.

The American anthropologist (not, to my knowledge, a grave-robber) Alfred Kroeber, rejected the notion that the sheer mass of knowledge that has accumulated throughout history could be considered as real evidence of progress. Much that passes for proof of social evolution can be dismissed as ethnocentricity. Yet even Kroeber could not let go of his own belief in the idea of progress. Whilst rightly dismissing the quantitative argument (i.e. that the inevitable accumulation of knowledge through history could be seen as evidence of progress in itself), he nevertheless sought to demonstrate a qualitative difference between modern civilised societies and other cultures. In order to advance this argument he argued that tribal cultures (and, by extension, prehistoric cultures) not only have no equivalent to our modern science, mechanics and technology but also have not 'evolved' beyond a reliance on magic and superstition -- practices which we are said to have outgrown. In other words, we have something positive that they do not possess (science and technology) and they have something negative that we no longer possess (magic and superstition).

Leaving his point about science and technology to one side for a moment, let us look a little more closely at the question of magic and allied practices. Contrary to what many adherents of social progress would like to believe, magic, occultism and a whole host of what Kroeber would call superstitious practices are rife throughout the civilised world. As a belief system astrology may have been cast aside by the inexorable surge of modern rationalism and science, but if this is so, a great many people do not seem to have noticed it. Astrology has an enormous following, from the highest echelons of power (e.g. Nancy Reagan and members of the British Royal Family) to the readers of the hugely popular tabloid horoscopes. Avoiding walking underneath ladders, touching wood and the use of personal and team mascots are all practices as superstitious as anything found in tribal societies. As for magic itself, the old view of anthropologists on the subject, exemplified by Sir James Frazer's description of it as a 'bastard science', is now universally rejected. Many more recent anthropologists have seen magic and divination as coherent systems of belief. Sir Edward Evans Pritchard, who was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford for many years, stated that the oracular form of decision-making used by the Azande people of Africa was 'as good a way of conducting one's affairs as any other I know'. The idea that magical thought is adhered to only by the most superstitious and poorly educated of people is, like the idea of social progress itself, a recent innovation. We need only look back as far as the seventeenth century to find the leading intellectuals of the day espousing magical and hermetic philosophies. The advance of modern science was achieved only at the considerable cost of the loss of much important magical research. As the philosopher of science Paul ...