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‘A Cybernetic Wasteland’? Rationality, Emotion and Mesolithic Foraging

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2014

S. J. Mithen
S. J. Mithen
Affiliation:
The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 62 Sidney Street, Cambridge CB2 3JW
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Extract

In a recent discussion of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, Julian Thomas decribed the Mesolithic as a ‘cybernetic wasteland’ (1988, 64). By this he was presumably referring to the picture we gain of Mesolithic society when ‘human behaviour [is seen] in terms of adaptive responses to environmental pressures’ (ibid., 59), which Thomas states as the basis of Mesolithic research. Is he justified in the use of this damning phrase? When archaeologists see human behaviour in an ecological framework do they deny people their humanity by turning them into robots, helpless ‘victims of externally-imposed circumstances’ (ibid., 61).

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , 1991 , pp. 9 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1991

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