Archaeology:

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These questions were posed by Paul Gauguin in a famous canvas painted in Tahiti that heralded the beginning of the modernist era. But they are also the questions asked by modern prchistorians in their quest to reconstruct the human story. In Figuring It Out, Colin Renfrew investigates the profound covergence between the two disciplines, drawing illuminating parallels between the way the modern artist seeks to understand the world by acting upon it, and the way the archacologist seeks to understand the world through the material traces of such actions. What does the ''sapient paradox''--the fact that 30,000 years passed before anatomically modern humans began to change their world--have to tell us about the unfolding of the history of our specics? Why do we now find Cycladic sculpture beautiful when, merely a century ago, such work would not have been thought suitable for display in an art museum? And how is it that, in the light of MarcelDuchamp's revolutionary gallery-based gestures, the prehistoric footsteps at Lactoli have been admitted as art too, albeit of an involuntary kind? Professor Renfrew uses these questions as a springboard for his examination of the history of the human condition, a subject that can only be properly understood, he argues, through the idea of process, of Homosapiens' active material engagement with their world. Central to his exploration is a group of leading contemporary art