Conference keynote address

Narratives

Professor Robin Dennell (University of Sheffield)

Whether we like it or not, most of us as prehistorians are story-tellers, and narratives are an integral part of writing prehistory as a 'story' about the past. The media likes stories, especially ones about human evolution, as great epics of endurance and drama, both in the process of obtaining the evidence, and what it is supposed to mean. This of course means that the media is also selective in its choice of narratives, in terms of what is deemed to make 'good' TV/film, and what the public is supposed to enjoy or able to understand. The public likes stories, and we undoubtedly fill the niche, less poetically, than the one previously occupied by Virgil and Homer. Our own attitudes tend to be more ambiguous and latent. A few of us do well – or at least, are well-known by - writing narrative prehistory for the public. Many of us, however, would protest that we are not writing or subscribing to any particular narrative, and rightly maintain that whilst we are all products of our times, we are also autonomous, often disagree with one another, and should not be labelled as supporting a particular story-line about the past. For this reason, it is occasionally useful to look at the output of a previous generation, and examine what narratives were told, explicitly or implicitly. Sometimes, the results of such retrospection are sobering, particularly in narratives of human evolution. We may well repeat some of their mistakes, but might avoid some by being more self-critical, as well as critical of narratives that appear to make a 'good' story. In particular, it would help if those best known for telling a particular story at a continental level would engage more with the detail of regional data, and if regional experts were more pro-active in challenging larger scale narratives. Examples will be used from palaeoanthropology, past and present, to underline some of these points.