Archaeology, Language, and History: Essays on Culture and Ethnicity

(Hardback)

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Ever since Darwin, the world has been struggling with the mystery of human diversity. As the historian Peter Bowler has written, an evolutionary interpretation of the history of life on the earth must inevitably extend itself to include the origins of the human race. But this has proved to be a difficult and controversial task. Understanding human origins means accounting not only for the obvious differences between people and cultures around the world, but also for the unity of Homo sapiens as a single biological species. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution. Because so much of who we are is learned rather than genetically predetermined, a satisfactory understanding of human evolution--to use old parlance--must account both for the human body and the human soul. At any single moment of time, it is always possible to find instances where people seem to live in their own world, speak in their own distinctive ways, and have their own exclusive cultural traits and practices. Over the course of time, however, it is not so easy to find places where these dimensions of our diversity stay together. The essays in this collection show why we must stop thinking that race, language, and culture go together, and why we should be wary of the commonsense beliefs that human races exist and that people who speak different languages come from fundamentally different biological lineages.

Reviews

"Archaeology, Language, and History should be read by all serious students of human evolution and genetic diversity--areas revolutionized by an infusion of molecular genetics....This book makes it clear that human population geneticists have much to learn from linguistics and anthropologists and need to reevaluate their assumptions about the role of language in human history and population structure. Given that the Human Genome Project now embraces studies of human genetic variation as one of its top priorities, this book is both timely and important--so read and learn!"-Alan R. Templeton Professor of Biology & Genetics Washington University, St. Louis, MO
"This is a remarkable book. Through compelling illustrations the collected chapters dispel any lingering expectations that language and culture and biology might co-vary in simple, predictable fashion. The authors develop subtle and nuanced approaches to understanding human interactions, past and present, in which the very nature of community is at issue."-Janet Dixon Keller Professor of Anthropology University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Recommended for graduate students and professionals in anthropology and archaeology.-Choice
"Recommended for graduate students and professionals in anthropology and archaeology."-Choice

Author Bio

JOHN EDWARD TERRELL is Curator of Oceanic Archaeology and Ethnology at the Field Museum of Natural History and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Chicago./e