After The Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC

Environmental History, Apr 2007 by Swidler, Eva

After The Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC. By Steven Mithen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. xiii 622 pages. Includes illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. Paper $18.95.

After the Ice is an encyclopedic volume of more than six hundred large-format pages, covering fifteen thousand years of the human presence on every continent except Antarctica. The thrust of the narrative, a few caveats by the author notwithstanding, is that the global warming which prompted the waning of the last Ice Age also prompted humans to cross a social Rubicon from a timeless prehistory where "little of significance happened" and people lived "just as their ancestors had been doing for millions of years" (p. 3) into the modern world of historicity, agriculture, towns, and civilization.

This book, by a prominent prehistorian, has a number of aims to which many environmental historians will find themselves sympathetic, specifically the attempt to digest and popularize a field for a general audience, and the desire to convince the readership that prime environmental lessons for today may be drawn from the study of the past. In Mithen's case, his most important historical conclusion seems to be that climate change, and global warming in particular, was the instigator and foundation of human society as we know it; the most important corollary lesson is that the looming change in the planet's temperature will in all likelihood have consequences we cannot dream of. Other reflections revolve around the relative worth of civilization and its benefits on the one hand, and, on the other, the social conflicts and environmental degradation which Mithen sees as intrinsic to any group of humans of more than a couple of hundred souls.

The literary device of a modern-day visitor to both the Stone Age past and to archaeological digs of this century, combined with observations from the Victorian writer John Lubbock, Mithen's own personal stories, and synopses of the academic literature, makes for a disorienting text. This unfortunate structure, combined with the overwhelming volume of environmental and archaeological details, makes it difficult to discern the points in the book where a theoretical question is being posed, an interesting generalization is being offered, or an argument is being made. No matter how intent the reader, it is nigh impossible to see the forest for the five hundred pages of trees. Graphics, too, are lost opportunities to give structure to the sprawling content, and fail to bring the subject matter to life; the maps give nothing more than geographic coordinates of famous sites, and photographs are largely grainy affairs of archaeologists at work.

A disciplinary divide may well be part of what is at work here; the expected audience, many of the reviewing journals, and the author, all seem to be drawn from an empiricist natural science tradition where a format of large sections of data presentation, shorn of apparent interpretation, is the norm. (Mithen is Head of the School of Human and Environmental Sciences at the University of Reading, and the three blurbs on the back cover are all from scientific journals.) Even suspending a historian's desire for a grander explanatory structure within which to nest the "facts" of history, the volume's approach to human society displays a methodological naivete which renders it almost irrelevant to readers from the social sciences or humanities. Environmental determinism and, implicitly, "human nature," are the only explanations concretely offered for the course of events following the Last Glacial Maximum, (including the appearance of agriculture), when indeed an explanation for the list of facts is offered.

Environmental history's recent flirtations with Big History should make this volume, with its envelope-pushing subtitle of history twenty thousand years ago, of almost automatic interest, although the primary use of this work to historians will be as a reference book to look up archaeological details. In case anyone is in doubt as to Mithen's approach to understanding human change and society, he writes in his closing pages: "Indeed, by 5000 BC there was very little left for later history to do; all the groundwork for the modern world had been completed. History had simply to unfold until it reached the present day" (p. 506).

Indeed.

Eva Swidler teaches at Villanova and Saint Joseph's universities in Philadelphia. Her interests within environmental history include historiography, agriculture, and archaeology.