Product Description

A fantastic voyage through 15,000 years of history that laid the foundations for civilisation as we know it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41085 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 726 pages

Felipe Fenández-Armesto, Literary Review, July 2003
'For clarity of expression, fluency of language, vividness of imagination he is unrivalled in his field'

The Scotsman, 21 June 2003
'A big and important book ... ambitious and original and stimulating'

Mike Pitts, New Scientist, 12 July 2003
'A charming read and an up-to-date informative resource. After the Ice is an exceptional book'

Customer Reviews

Good, but a little too long (and contains time travel science fiction)
Steven Mithen tells the story about how agriculture was discovered on the different continents of the earth. He is a gifted writer and being a researcher he has a lot of stories to tell and a lot of information to give.

Sadly Mithen has chosen to dedicating a fairly equal number of chapters to each of the continents of the Earth. So when he gets to Australia and East Asia he ends up repeating himself telling the same story that he also told about some of the earlier continent. So frankly the end of the book is a little boring and I had to struggle to finish it up.

In an effort to keep the readers attention Mithen invents a time travelling Victorian paleoanthropologist named John Lubbock and allows him to visit some of the places described in the book. So he switches back and forth between facts and fiction. This doesn't really work because we never get to hear who Mithens version ofJohn Lubbock really is and frankly I did not buy a history book to read science fiction about time travelling Victorian paleoanthropologists. The least they could do is to mention Lubbock in the description on the back of the book.

But then again the first half is really exiting, so if you buy the book and read the first half then you still get a lot of knowledge and a really good experience for only 10£.

A genuinely enthralling study.
Most people have at least a passing interest in prehistory, and the origin of modern human civilisation, and they generally do not want to wade through, as Mithen aptly puts it 'jargon-laden prose' which only academics of archeology and the like will be able to comprehend. And now, the 'casual' reader has been catered for by Mithen in this hefty tome; 'After the Ice'. And indeed, it works very well, being a reletively simple read, and yet being stimulating and informative - it does not patronise the reader.
We are given a detailed glimpse of the past through a device that works rather well; Mithen uses a fellow named John Lubbock (who shares a common name with a Victorian archeologist) who wonderes the globe, stopping by at various hunter-gather campsites in order to learn of their day to day life. Sensibly, Mithen doesn't give this Lubbock chap a personality as such, nor does he engage with conversation with the ancient peoples, he is merely a by-stander, Mithen simply describes what he sees. As I said, the device works well, however whilst these sections are mostly a joy to read, they tend to grow somewhat repetetive, even rambling in some cases. Occasionally one suspects that the everyday behaviour these tripespeople were supposed exhibit isn't based on archeological evidence, and rather he is making an 'educated guess' on how these people went about their daily affairs; however it is nice to see the author inject some imagination into the book, rather relying completely on strict scientific fact.
The rest of the book is made up of descriptions of the excavation of various hunter-gatherer sites, and the evidence found therein. These sections are again, thrilling and endlessly fascinating, however as the book wares on, the endless discussions of old animal bones, so-called 'stone nodules' and scrpas of charcoal and other human waste can become very repetative, and even boring in some cases.
So prehaps the book is a tad too long, the main 'book' itself is 511 pages of rather small print. The rest of the book is extensively endnoted - one doesn't have to read these, but if you want a deeper and more complex read, the endnotes will provide more detail on various points, so one certainly can't complain about a lack of detail - but prehaps it's length and repetition of various similar points will render it tiresome for some less comitted readers.
The book generally fills the reader with a sense of wonder and awe, and leaves you in high spirits. Unfortunatelly, Mithen saw the need to blight the end of the book with a chapter looking to the fururte of the human race, and he makes several bleak and grim predictions about global-warming. Ending the book on this deeply pessemistic note was completely inappropriate, and other blighted an otherwise uplifting book.

All in all, this is a generally fascinating book, and will enlighten the interested casual reader to no end. Recommended - provided you are a commited reader, and are prepared to wade through some repetition.

Wonderful Wonderful Book
If you have even the remotest interest in history, archaeology, anthropology or sociology you NEED to have this book. Its brilliantly written, engaging and well researched (although the field is moving so fast some of the ideas a little outdated especailly in respect to the populating of the americas/clovis debate). It takes you on a journey in time around the world to look at our earliest ancestors from a unique first person perspective- and allows you to feel like you are actually THERE watching these distant peoples. I really cant praise this book enough.