home > book reviews > Graeme Warren
Google > Graeme Warren


Books

Books : reviews

Graeme Warren.
Mesolithic Lives in Scotland.
Tempus. 2005

The mesolithic, or middle stone age, dates from the end of the last Ice Age at c.9600 BC until the adoption of farming at approximately 4000 BC. At this time, varied communities of hunter-gatherers settled the space now called Scotland. These groups lived from the wild resources available in the diverse, striking and changing landscapes that surrounded them. For approximately half of Scotland’s past it has been a land of hunter-gatherers: and yet the stories of those lives are rarely told.

This book seeks to redress some of this loss. Introducing a rich variety of evidence, from pollen analysis through to deliberate deposition of human bones, Graeme Warren’s account focuses on understandings of landscape, skilled practices such as seafaring, scales of community, and the routines that constituted the fundamental rhythms of life. Other discussions include environmental and landscape change, appropriate scales and methods of analysis, and interpreting mesolithic stone tool manufacture. Written for the general reader, evening class student, undergraduate or postgraduate student and a professional audience, and including the latest research, this book offers a vivid archaeology of the distant past that can be found in some very familiar places in the Scottish landscape.

Sinead B. McCartan, Rick Schulting, Graeme Warren, Peter Woodman.
Mesolithic Horizons volume I.
Oxbow Books. 2009

Sinead B. McCartan, Rick Schulting, Graeme Warren, Peter Woodman.
Mesolithic Horizons volume II.
Oxbow Books. 2009

Bill Finlayson, Graeme Warren.
The Diversity of Hunter-Gatherer Pasts.
Oxbow. 2017

This thought provoking collection of new research papers explores the extent of variation amongst hunting and gathering peoples past and present and the considerable analytical challenges presented by this diversity. This problem is especially important in archaeology, where increasing empirical evidence illustrates ways of life that are not easily encompassed within the range of variation recognised in the contemporary world of surviving hunter-gatherers. Put simply, how do past hunter-gatherers fit into our understandings of hunter-gatherers? Furthermore, given the inevitable archaeological reliance on analogy, it is important to ask whether conceptions of hunter-gatherers based on contemporary societies restrict our comprehension of past diversity and of how this changes over the long term. Discussion of hunter-gatherers shows them to be varied and flexible, but modelling of contemporary hunter-gatherers has not only reduced them into essential categories, but has also portrayed them as static and without history. It is often said that the study of hunter-gatherers can provide insight into past forms of social organisation and behaviour; unfortunately too often it has limited our understandings of these societies. In contrast, contributors here explore past hunter-gatherer diversity over time and space to provide critical perspectives on general models of ‘hunter-gatherers’ and attempt to provide new perspectives on hunter-gatherer societies from the greater diversity present in the past.

Graeme Warren.
Hunter-Gatherer Ireland: making connections in an island world.
Oxbow. 2022

Hunter-Gatherer Ireland explores the Irish Mesolithic: the period after the end of the last Ice Age when Ireland was home to hunter-gatherer communities, with most of our evidence from about 10,000–6,000 years ago. At this time, Ireland was an island world, with striking similarities and differences to its European neighbours – not least in terms of the terrestrial ecology created by its island status. To understand the communities of hunter-gatherers who lived there, we must consider the connections established between people and the other beings and materials with which they shared the world, and through which they grew into it. Understanding the Mesolithic in Ireland therefore means paying attention to the animals, plants, spirits and things with which hunting and gathering groups experienced life.

Hunter-Gatherer Ireland provides an account of what happened during the Mesolithic in Ireland, not just in terms of the subsistence acts of hunting and gathering, but by addressing the decisions made by people in the past and the changes they created and experienced. These include the nature of contact and connection within and beyond the island, the influence of hunter-gatherers on the landscapes of Ireland and, critically, the choices hunter-gatherers made about what kinds of social environments they might live in.