ONE - THEORIZING NEOLITHIC ITALY

Summary

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

William Butler Yeats, Among School Children (Yeats 1962, p. 117)

He neglected friend and relatives, and when he met one of them in the street (going to or from his office) he found it hard to carry on a sensible conversation. He grew more and more appalled at how little people knew of the 1st of September 1973. … The Subject turned out to be just about inexhaustible. Who would have guessed that so much had happened on exactly the 1st of September 1973?

Tor Age Bringsvaerd, “The Man Who Collected the First of September, 1973” (Bringsvaerd 1976, p. 79)

A SENSE OF LOYALTY

I became an archaeologist because I wanted to study people. All too often, however, I find myself writing about things. Sometimes it's things for their own sake: “This field season we dug up 20,000 undecorated potsherds and 3 decorated ones. … ” Sometimes I write about people, but with the usual tacit proviso that people are important only as far as they can be related to the corpus of 20,003 potsherds.

As a way of seeing the past, this is unsatisfactory. Our archaeological bookshelf is littered with the textual equivalents of nineteenth-century museums, display cases with rows of rigidly positioned arrowheads with faded labels: humanity subordinated to the geometry of the glass box.