The World at 18 000 BP

Involving contributions from archaeology, geology, ethnography, anthropology and prehistory, The World at 18 000 BP: Low Latitudes (second of the two volumes, and originally published in 1990) surveys the world scene 18,000 years ago. Following an introduction (common to the two volumes) on the diversity of human adaptations at the last glacial maximum, Volume 1 covers high latitudes: Europe, Asia and the New World. Volume 2 covers low latitudes: Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and Australasia.

The volumes contain contributions from leading specialists on regional records. Each discusses the pertinent environmental settings, archaeological data, and cultural adaptations. This sampler of the way we were 18,000 years ago affords Pleistocene specialists a multidisciplinary conspectus revealing the diversity of past cultural practices as well as the innate universality of human nature. By stressing both the diversity and the similarity in human cultural practices, the authors contribute invaluable data for both theoretical constructs and a sound empirical basis for global culture history. The global nature of the work also reveals the covert biases hitherto present in reconstructions of the past and perceptions of past cultural change.

This is a fully international and thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of a key topic for the wide range of disciplines concerned with human prehistory and Quaternary environmental reconstruction.

Clive Gamble is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton, UK. Gamble’s main research interests are the archaeology of human origins, the social life of the earliest humans and the timing of their global colonisation.

Olga Soffer is Professor Emerita at the Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her primary areas of research interest combine anthropology, archaeology, and palaeontology.