Becoming human : The archaeological challenge

IT MIGHT SEEM PRESUMPTUOUS, in delivering the British Academy lecture, to consider the human condition, a theme which has preoccupied the greatest philosophers. Yet while archaeologists can claim no special or exclusive insights into human nature, we can claim to offer information about the processes and events which have made us what we are. Here I want to speak of two related challenges arising from this theme: the challenge of archaeology, and the challenge for archaeology. The first is the challenge which archaeology makes to the public (on the basis of a narrative which only a small part of the wider community knows and accepts) to understand how we humans have come to take our special place in the living world. The first glimpse of this perspective was offered by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859) and, more explicitly, in The Descent of Man (1871). But while his insights were penetrating, he was not yet in possession of many of the facts. We know enough now to give a coherent narrative of prehistory and early history, far beyond anything which Darwin (or for that matter Marx) could offer. It carries with it interesting implications. I am often surprised by how little of it is generally known to the wider public (or even to my academic colleagues), a circumstance which explains, no doubt, the success of unashamed sensationalists, like the popular writer Graham Hancock,