Professor Andrew Sherratt, Radical Old World prehistorian, dead at 59
Andrew Sherratt was an Old World prehistorian with an unusual breadth of knowledge, interests and vision. At a time when increasing specialisation has driven most prehistorians to focus on particular aspects of life in the distant past, he moved nimbly from settlement patterns and technology, through exchange and land use, to material symbols, language and cultures of consumption.
While expanding data sets and fascination with local process have encouraged concern with particular regions and periods of prehistory, Sherratt travelled fearlessly through space and time, drawing his hallmark diagrams with bold arrows.
He first achieved international recognition with his model of an Old World “Secondary Products Revolution”, published in Pattern of the Past, a 1981 volume honouring his mentor David Clarke. He argued that animals were first domesticated to secure a ready supply of carcass products. Only several millennia later were domestic animals exploited for their renewable “secondary” products of milk, wool and labour.
This revolution enabled early European farmers to colonise many agriculturally marginal areas of the Continent, sowed the seeds of later social inequality (the plough supporting a privileged minority) and created some of the necessary conditions for the development of pastoralism.
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