Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Reading.
By the end of this rich and multilayered book, I was dazzled and
hungry for more. Mithen has succeeded where other archaeologists
have failed: He transports the reader back into the past, showing
evocatively how humans adapted to 15,000 years worth of
environmental change.
*Discover*
Mithen did a huge amount of research to produce this curiously
encyclopedic work. The book is empirically authoritative but
quirkily postmodern… [A] truly provocative and ambitious work…
After the Ice is a book that should be read and then exasperatingly
argued about… And it does evoke the real excitement of doing Stone
Age archaeology (from the digging to the debating the meaning of
the finds): the passion to learn that has driven so many
prehistorians and dreamers.
*Science*
After the Ice offers a fascinating whirlwind tour of an
underappreciated segment of human history… The prose is lively and
evocative as Mithen unfolds a compelling story… The cumulative
effect of this book should be a profound new appreciation of a
largely unknown and crucially important period of our past. If you
want to find out what you don’t know about the grand sweep of human
history, there is not a better place to start.
*American Scientist*
The resulting floods, spread of forests and retreat of the deserts
set up the planet we know today. Mithen’s exhaustive explanation of
how human beings began living in small, mobile groups and then
permanent villages and the resultant creation of civilisation is a
big tale that’s worth staying with.
*The Herald [Glasgow, Scotland, UK]*
This massive and clever book opens modern scholarship about the
distant past to nonspecialists. Buyers of this book will get their
money’s worth. It comes with a generous supply of maps and pictures
of artifacts and digs, some of which are in color… Erudite and also
quirky, Mithen summarizes the work of contemporary archaeologists,
often by recounting his own visits to archaeological sites and
drawing on insights from recent research on paleoclimates and human
genetics… This impressive book stands out as the new standard
work.
*The Historian*
With the help of a fictional guide dubbed John Lubbock, modeled
after a Victorian naturalist who wrote a popular book called
Prehistoric Times, Mithen embarks on a vivid tour of the warming
world as it emerged from the last ice age. In the process, he lends
a you-are-there immediacy to an era in which humans invented
farming, settled in towns, and created civilization as we know
it.
*Discover*
In an ambitious undertaking, archaeologist Mithen describes 15,000
years of ancient history from 20,000 to 5,000 B.C.… Mithen explores
how studying the abrupt transition between the ice age and a period
of global warming could provide clues to the effects of climate
changes going on today.
*Science News*
The author successfully achieved his goal of presenting a great
deal of information about a pivotal point in our history in a
thorough and easily digestible manner… This successful compilation
of human history from 20,000–5,000 BC should not be overlooked as a
key reference and welcome addition to any library of an interested
novice, undergraduate student of prehistory, or seasoned
archaeologist looking for a well written synthesis.
*Paleoanthropology*
Using an unorthodox narrative device, Mithen explores why, how, and
where farming displaced hunting and gathering. Mithen conjures John
Lubbock, an English author of a once-popular 1865 history of the
Stone Age, and sends him back in time to visit dozens of excavation
sites around the world as they appeared when inhabited. Lubbock’s
transcontinental perambulations permit Mithen (a practicing
archaeologist who describes his digs in Scotland) to underscore one
causal factor in the agricultural revolution: the fluctuations of
climate at the end of the last Ice Age. Weather, sea level, and
zones of plant and animal life changed dramatically in the 15,000
years of Lubbock’s walkabout, and Mithen explains how environmental
volatility is scientifically known as he sketches Lubbock observing
the various ‘living’ human communities that have been uncovered. A
successful marriage of fact and imagination.
*Booklist*
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