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Focusing on the British Isles, the author explores a period of huge societal change - the Neolithic, or 'New Stone Age' - through the most iconic artefact of its time: the polished stone axe, using an ancient stone axe-head brought to him by a local quarry worker as a guide to the revolution that changed the world. These formidable creations were not only crucial tools that enabled the first farmers to clear the forests, but also objects of great symbolic importance, signifying status and power, wrapped up in expressions of religion and politics. Mixing anecdote, ethnography and archaeological analysis, the author vividly demonstrates how the archaeology on the ground reveals to us the evolving worldview of a species increasingly altering their own landscape; settling down together, investing in agricultural plots, and collectively erecting massive ceremonial monuments to cement new communal identities.
As a direct result of the invention, and intensification, of agriculture, the planet entered the Anthropocene, or the current 'age of humanity': an era in which we are changing the world around us in significant, accelerating and often unpredictable ways. As the author poignantly concludes, our ancestors set us on the path to the modern world we live in; now seven billion humans must face the challenges that presents.
Preface
Prologue: A gift from the past
- Part One: The Emergence of Humans
- Part Two: The First Farmers
- Part Three: Crossing the Water to Britain
David Miles was the Director of the Oxford Archaeological Unit for many years, and worked on projects in Britain, France, Greece and the West Indies. In 1999 he became Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage, where he developed a maritime archaeology unit and a project to study the impact of slavery in England. He has written many books on archaeology, particularly on the Roman and Migration periods in Britain, and one on the origins of the British, The Tribes of Britain.
"'A powerful testimony to the value of archaeology in today's world"
– Brian Fagan
"Illuminating [...] As layered as the strata of an archaeological dig, this is a moving portrait of a people at a cultural and technological tipping point"
– Nature
"Colourful and lively writing and an eye to current issues and idioms play their part [...] This is first-person scholarship at its most humane"
– Literary Review
"[Miles] presents his scholarly findings with glints of good-humoured individuality which make his book pleasantly readable, even by lay persons"
– Spectator
"David Miles takes this archetypal artefact as a launchpad to explore a vast sweep of prehistory [...] with absorbing detail and an amiable turn of phrase [...] this new edition includes a thought-provoking afterword that brings the story up to date"
– Current Archaeology
