Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, sociology, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in history, cultural studies, art, archaeology, and related fields.

The Idea of Prehistory by Glyn Daniel is a book by a Welsh scientist and archaeologist who taught at Cambridge University, where he specialized in the European Neolithic period.

The Neolithic or New Stone Age is an archaeological period, the final division of the Stone Age in Europe, Asia and Africa.

The Neolithic began about 12,000 years ago when farming appeared in the Near East, and later in other parts of the world.

The TU Library collection includes several other books about different aspects of prehistory.

Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools over three million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems.

The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared around 5,000 years ago.

One student of Professor Daniel recalled his teaching approach:

Glyn gave us both a digestible synthesis from his own archaeological experience and promised a deliciously indigestible gastronomic foray under expert guidance. We longed to travel with him. He seemed marvellously erudite, witty, warm and sophisticated — he would introduce us into this Franco-Celtic world — and indeed he did. […] I learnt something from him then which I never quite forgot — how to be a good patron or sponsor and when to apply the boot or the carrot. I didn’t of course realize it at the time but it stays with me twenty years later. In the fog of boredom induced by many of the lectures of that period Glyn stood out as someone who could keep you awake. As a raconteur, for Welsh will and sheer oratory, he could not be bettered. The past, his backward-looking curiosity, came alive for us through his own intense interest. Generations of us learnt from him how to relax· as a lecturer, how to speak directly to an audience and how to involve that audience in the story. He didn’t gaze out above our heads, nor did he pace the floor, and his clarity and simplicity were in counterbalance to the growing Americanization of the jargon-laden New Archaeology which began to invade Cambridge just after I graduated. One of the saddest aspects of that invasion was that it became fashionable to deride Glyn’s scholarship and to ignore his real contribution to archaeology. He was concerned with human beings in a personal sense, in the past as in the present, in contrast to the prevalent interest in institutions and groups where the influence of individuals became lost in the generalizations of the social sciences. […] Moreover his ideas , stated clearly and concisely in simple English, were not valued by later generations accustomed to woolly thought and verbiage. The new professionalism of the seventies which demanded that archaeologists should be Super People — competent excavators, scientists and social theorists — bred a generation who wanted their heroes either to excavate in beards and boots or to pontificate in beards and sandals. Glyn, clean-shaven, urbane and debonair, did not fit these images and the value of his scholarly work on the history of our own discipline was buried beneath the values of the New Archaeology, where anecdote and a strong sense of the importance of the individual take second place. Most if not all older archaeologists risk this devaluation of their work as fashions change, since our view of the Past is endlessly mutable. What Glyn produced was a historical framework of reference for British archaeologists which offers both an explanation and a sense of belonging to the emerging discipline within which he worked. We may want to believe that we are scientists but we need to be reminded at the same time that we are human, concerned with the past of humanity and it is this concern that we inherit from Glyn.

The book The Idea of Prehistory notes:

The material which the prehistorian uses which he interprets is, by definition, and by fact, unwritten. It is the unwritten remains of the early past of man, the mute, silent witness of the origins and early development of prehistory tools, weapons, houses, temples, paintings, tombs, farms, fields, forts, watermflls in a word it is all archaeological material. It is then, first a record of artifacts, of things made and fashioned by man, and, second, a record of associated features that are not artifacts, such evidence of the flora and fauna that surrounded early man and that he utilized, or his own bones and skin and hair.

The prehistorian is then an archaeologist, indeed has to be an archaeologist, and an archaeologist all the time; so much so that quite often the phrase prehistoric archaeology is used synonymously with prehistory. […]

Rather too often one finds people people who ought to know better who pretend not to understand the distinction between prehistorian and archaeologist, and of course it would only be splitting very thin hairs indeed to say that there was any difference between a prehistorian and a prehistoric archaeologist But there is an essential difference between prehistory and archaeology; an archaeologist is a person who studies the material remains of the past with the aim of wresting the facts of history from them, and he can work in any period from the Upper Paleolithic of the caves to the Late Medieval of the Gothic cathedrals or the late nineteenth century of the archaeology of disused railways.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)