Prehistories for Modernity

Chapter 7 considers the discovery, after the First World War, of the prehistoric Near East and explores its far-reaching impact on discourses on the origins of humans, their migrations, and the migration of civilizations, on time and its scale, and the relationship between recorded history and prehistory. The chapter focuses on two sites of excavations: the Middle and Lower Stone Age hangouts of the Wadi al-Mugharah on Mount Carmel in Palestine, situated near the developing town of Haifa, and the late Neolithic Tell Arpachiyah in northern Iraq, bordering Mosul. Both engendered considerable scholarly, popular, and political attention, and both demonstrate the variety and scope within prehistory and its immense stretch, covering at least 500,000 years. Near Eastern prehistory relativized senses of time, dwarfed history, and contested biblical narratives and temporality. The chapter examines the excavations in the Carmel caves against the backdrop of mandatory development policies and modernization. It demonstrates how discoveries of rich Palaeolithic tool cultures spurred comparisons between modern humans and hominins. It sets the representations of Neanderthals in broader debates on prehistoric people and their humanity, paying special attention to the attitudes of prehistorians such as Dorothy A. Garrod who conducted the Carmel excavations and Jacquetta Hawkes, a popularizer of prehistory in her poetry and autobiographical writing on prehistoric women. Neolithic Arpachiyah, too, spurred analogies by its excavators, chiefly Max Mallowan, between prehistoric and contemporary Mesopotamia and the multi-ethnic population of the newly independent Iraq, and of Syria.