Tue
07-Mar-2006

andrew sherratt

Professor Andrew Sherratt died on Friday 24 February 2006, of a sudden heart attack. He had a significant hand in designing our Archaeology and Anthropology course at Oxford and was a real big thinker in Old World prehistory, with a flair for the grand narratives. He wrote several papers on legal and illegal drugs, or "peculiar substances" as he called them, and their role in shaping social intercourse among ancient Europeans. These really influenced me profoundly, and they were really the first papers that brought the study of imbibing, ingesting and inhaling drugs into the mainstream of anthropological studies.

I also really enjoyed "Climatic cycles and behavioural revolutions" (Antiquity 71, 1997) in which he argues that if you take a broad perspective, the changes that brought about the beginning of farming were a continuation of those that had given rise to early modern human behaviour, increasing aridity centered on a particular geographical area, the Near East. One side of his argument is that climate is the driver of, rather than the backdrop to, changes in human biology and culture. The other side of his argument is that the Upper Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Urban Revolutions, as well as the subsequent appearance of the world's first empires and the three most influential world religions, all took place on the same portion of the earth's surface. He considers the geographical properties of the Levant. It is a narrow isthmus between two continental land masses, with the fertile crescent actually following the plate boundary. It is situated between Africa and Asia, important in prehistory, and between the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans, increasingly important in historic times, forming a crossroads that have focused demographic pressure and density of human contact with an unsual intensity. This unusual setting was matched by unusual events; in the shifts back and forth between glacial and interglacial periods, this region was the most hospitable, in between the extremes of cold north of the Mediterranean and the expanding Sahara in the south. The pronounced climatic instability that has been shown to characterise these periods then provides a spur for massive cultural innovations in human organisation and behaviour.