Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present Edited by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Small (review)

This volume is useful for historians who wish to establish the themes of their work with the resonance of a million years or establish a connection between our present condition and the movement and settlement of populations and the exploitation of the environment that began in the Upper Paleolithic and was manifested in the Neolithic ten thousand years ago. Similar to recent experiments in writing big history, which starts its narrative with nothing less than the beginning of the universe and the emergence of life itself, deep history aims at reenvisioning the human past and its conception.

Deep History is a collection of essays written by a range of prominent anthropologists, headed by contributing editors Andrew Shryock from the University of Michigan and Daniel Lord Small from Harvard. It includes shared contributions from notable scholars and pioneers such as world historian Felipe Fernández Armesto, theorist of human origins, and Clive Gamble, in addition to essays by “three historians, two anthropologists, a linguist, a primatologist, a geneticist, and three archaeologists.”

The professed hope of this cooperative volume is, on the one hand, modest. It merely seeks to elicit curiosity in the approaches and promises of an enhanced prehistory. On the other hand, beyond this modest hope and the renunciation of achieving “encyclopedism,” it seeks nothing less than “a new array of base metaphors for the writing of deep history.” Not only will this revolution of metaphors—equivalent to a revolution of myth and human significance—surpass flattened and foreshortened traditional history and open perspectives to the vastness and the interconnectedness of human experience, but their transfiguration of “man,” his history, and his prospects will also supply the narrative that has been missing since Darwin in 1859, once and for all clearing the deck of biblical myths of creation and fall.

The parts of Deep History indicate the scale of their renovation. In part I the editors, joined by Clive Gamble and historian-anthropologist Trautman, take up the question of defining and imagining deep history. Part II takes up “frames” for doing history in deep time, connecting ways in which humans have lived and thought in “body,” joined to “energy and ecosystems,” and expressed themselves through developing language. In part III, poetically titled “The Shared Substance,” they look at body and ecology, examining the elemental and diversifying roles of food and “deep kinship” in human life. In part IV, on the basis of the past half century of work on prehistory, they acknowledge and yet contradict the seminal work of early Near Eastern and pre-European social-material historian Gordon Childe, who formulated the Neolithic Revolution and the Urban Revolution as linear material, social, and intellectual stages in human development. Individual pieces report new findings on “migration,” “goods,” and the “scale” of human of numbers and the volume of transactions, taking up complex issues surrounding the formation of political hierarchies, the expansive power of chiefdoms, the control of resources, the organization of production, the rise of inequality, and the regulation of the flow of power and goods.

The editors confess that they leave out essays devoted to fecund topics such as “climate, music, and art, and religion, law, and violence, technology and sex,” and to this list I would add considerations of representation, ritual, sacrifice, and myth. In the same breath the editors claim to “surmount the metaphor of ontogeny” (which rests on beginnings, falls, decisive moments, and acts) with metaphors that allow us “to better comprehend the immensity of time and the dynamics of connectedness that both propels and constrains change.” Their tools include such analytical devices as “kinshipping, webs, fractals, trees, spirals, extensions, and scalar extensions.”

Regardless of whether social historians share the editors’ assumptions, they will find fertile material for the amplification and thickening of their own inquires. Historians, who are dependent on the theories of contemporary anthropology, will find provocative topics such as the making and the distribution...