C.F.C. Hawkes - The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe to the Mycenean Age

THIS book is an attempt, based upon the findings of archaeology, to trace in outline the early foundations of human culture in Europe. The period so covered is there illumined by no written record of its own. In fact, whereas in its later phases such record begins to be available in the Near East, to which the West came to owe so much, the ages of European genesis are wholly prehistoric. But though, compared with the historians, the prehistorians task has its obvious disabilities, yet priority to historic time itself contains an ultimate advantage. For the significance of human doings and institutions does not begin with their written history, and he who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a State or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them. That remark was made by Aristotle in introducing his treatise on Politics, and whether or no we can call prehistoric man a political animal, it at least brings out the vital importance of prehistory in the study of human kind. And there is no true cleavage between history and prehistory: the verbal distinction between them rests simply on the presence or absence of written material in our equipment for their pursuit. It is indeed often said that there are peoples which have no history. But all peoples have culture which can be assessed and accounted for, and beyond the scope of history this is the business of archaeology, which thus carries out for the peoples of the past the work which anthropology does for those who have remained without history until the present, in its critical sifting of not only diffusion among them, but functional interlocking within them, of living elements of culture. And the further archaeology can go towards fixing events of the human past in definite order of time, the greater will be its contribution to the anthropologists, no less than to the historians, knowledge of humanity.