Preface

Summary

This book has been developed from my Ph.D. thesis which I completed in December 1987. Yet its roots lie earlier and can be pinpointed to two not unrelated events. The first was on a hot and sticky day during the summer of 1978.1 sat with my brother in a shady spot near Les Eyzies and pondered the paintings of Font de Gaume after the first of many visits to that cave. How mysterious the prehistoric past appeared. What beauty the hunters must have found in their icy world, and within themselves, to make such art. The second occurred a couple of years later in the midst of a Yorkshire winter - the ice age had returned with a vengeance! Now an undergraduate at Sheffield University, I sat reading in my damp bedsit and was transfixed by Transformations, Renfrew and Cooke's book on mathematical approaches to culture change. I understood as little of the mathematics as I did of the French guide's descriptions of the cave paintings. But what an intriguing idea! Can the coldness of equations and computer programmes really help in studying the complexities of culture and the warmth of the human spirit as so perfectly expressed in the smudge of ochre and mark from a burnt stick on the walls of Font de Gaume? Now sitting in my positively post-glacial Cambridge study and with this book before me, I can still confess to ignorance, but also to a continuing fascination with the idea.

For having the chance to explore this idea I must first thank those who taught me archaeology at Sheffield, particularly Robin Dennell, Andrew Fleming, Robin Torrence and Richard Hodges.