About

Philip L. Kohl is Professor of Anthropology and the Kathryn W. Davis Professor of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College. He received his B.A. in Greek and Latin from Columbia University in 1969 and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University in 1974. He is the author of L'Asie Centrale; des origines a l'age du Fer (Central Asia: Palaeolithic Beginnings to the Iron Age) (Paris, 1984) and The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia (Cambridge 2007); editor of The Bronze Age Civilization of Central Asia: Recent Soviet Discoveries (M.E. Sharpe, 1981) and Recent Discoveries in Transcaucasia (special issue of "Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology" (M.E. Sharpe, 1992)); and co-editor of Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge 1995) with Clare Fawcett and Selective Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of National Pasts (Chicago in press) with M. Kozelsky and N. Ben-Yehuda. He is the author of more than 140 articles and reviews on the archaeology of the Ancient Near East and has conducted fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Daghestan, Russia.

Mission

Kohl believes that a primary task of the prehistorian should be to write culture-history on a spatially and temporally grand scale in an effort to detect large, macro-historical processes of interaction and shared development. The prehistorian must take advantage of the only real strength of the archaeological record: its coarse-grained, spatial and temporal macro-perspective on the basic practical activities carried out by different groups, and then attempt to discern how these various activities related to one another or were interconnected. Archaeologically defined 'cultures' were caught up in shared historical processes that extended far beyond the areas they occupied. Cultural evolution did not proceed principally through internal developments and local adaptations to restricted environmental settings, but occurred as a product of these shared interconnections and experiences. Cultures can change dramatically over very short periods of time, particularly as they get caught up in larger processes that can overwhelm and transform them. Such large-scale processes, involving the development of new technologies and economies and the large-scale movements of materials through various forms of exchange and of peoples through their migrations, were at work throughout later prehistory and profoundly affected the countless archaeological cultures that have been defined by generations of archaeologists. Processes of interconnection that developed in later prehistory have continued to accelerate and expand over time to our qualitatively distinct era of globalization. Both then and now peoples constantly engage in exchanging material objects, ideas, and inventions and learning from each other. Although differing in scale, structure, speed of communication, and technological level of development, the cultures of later prehistory and of our own era of globalization inevitably share this critical feature of interdependency. One important lesson of this shared story of cultural evolution is that there is no single people or ethnic group in the past or in the present that is qualitatively exceptional in its disproportionate contribution to this cumulative record of technological advance and control over nature. Correspondingly, nationalist distortions of the archaeological record that suggest otherwise must be critically evaluated.

News