A Christmas gift I’ve received for the last few years is a subscription to ‘Current Archaeology’, a monthly magazine which is full of articles, reviews, reports on… archaeology! It’s interesting, well written, varied, very current, has a nice engagement with readers, has great photographs and illustrations and diagrams, and is the sort of magazine that takes a good long while to read because it has so much in it, and also one you can go back to if you develop[ a new interest in a particular period. One useful thing it does is refer back to articles in previous copies with a reference number of the particular edition.
In the current edition there is a fascinating article by Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes entitled ‘Neanderthal neighbours – tracing evidence for our closest hominim relatives in Britain.’ It’s a period of history I am fascinated by and I was fascinated by Rebecca’s article which was so engagingly written that when, at the end of the article I saw she had written a book, I mentioned it to my husband. It was just a casual conversation but he secretly went and bought it for me! It is ‘Kindred:Neanderthal, life, love death and art’. I read in bed before I go to sleep, so that night I dived in, knowing that I would find it interesting and well-written, but never guessing that it would be so interesting and so beautifully and fantastically well written, that I think it is now topping the list of my favourite best-ever books.
It’s physically a beautiful book to hold and the quality of the cover and pages and the style is lovely – plus the illustrations at the head of each chapter. The chapters cover the areas the title suggests but from an interesting perspective, as their titles indicate:
- The First Face
- The River Fells the tree
- Bodies Growing
- Bodies Living
- Ice and Fire
- The Rocks Remain
- Material World
- Eat and Live
- Chez Neanderthal
- Into the Land
- Beautiful Things
- Minds Inside
- Many Ways to Die
- Time Travellers in the Blood
- Denouements
- Immortal Beloved
At the beginning of each chapter there is a small line drawing, for example, for the introduction there is an image looking out of a cave, down over the countryside with a single small figure in silhouette. There is a brief prologue I guess you might call it to each chapter, which is a beautifully written imagining of some aspect of what we will read. For chapter two, the reader is invited to imagine themselves ‘in the place before time’; our mother is before us, and then with a rustle of footsteps, our grandmother appears, ‘maybe you spoke to her last week, or twenty years ago, or maybe you only know her from a blurred photograph.’ Our grandmother holds our mother’s hand, and then turns and behind her is her mother, and then her mother and so on, a line of women linked and bonded. It is a wonderful, startling and yet moving image. After the brief imagined scene as an introduction, the rest of each chapter is a mixture of archaeology, science, forensics, history, geology – some of it is really tricky and complex stuff, and to be honest, some of it I don’t quite understand or follow! However, I do understand most of it and the beauty of the way it is written keeps me engrossed so I do follow the sense of what is being said even if I don’t fully comprehend each little detail.
I almost wish I kept a commonplace book, and maybe I will start one, because there are so many lovely phrases, comical and amusing turns of speech, interesting observations and thoughts and speculations, that I keep thinking I should jot them down. Maybe when I finish the book, I will read it again, and make note of some of the things which I have read out to my husband – as we do when we find something special in whatever we are reading. I’m on Chapter 10 now, I’m not hurrying, it’s not a book I can gallop through, but I am enjoying every page – and I hope my book club is too because I have recommended it as our next read!
Lois Elsden 