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Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture First Edition

by Lynne Kelly (Author)
3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 8 ratings
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In this book, Lynne Kelly explores the role of formal knowledge systems in small-scale oral cultures in both historic and archaeological contexts. In the first part, she examines knowledge systems within historically recorded oral cultures, showing how the link between power and the control of knowledge is established. Analyzing the material mnemonic devices used by documented oral cultures, she demonstrates how early societies maintained a vast corpus of pragmatic information concerning animal behavior, plant properties, navigation, astronomy, genealogies, laws and trade agreements, among other matters. In the second part Kelly turns to the archaeological record of three sites, Chaco Canyon, Poverty Point and Stonehenge, offering new insights into the purpose of the monuments and associated decorated objects. This book demonstrates how an understanding of rational intellect, pragmatic knowledge and mnemonic technologies in prehistoric societies offers a new tool for analysis of monumental structures built by non-literature cultures.
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  1. ISBN-10
    1107059372
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1107059375
  3. Edition
    First Edition
  4. Publisher
    Cambridge University Press
  5. Publication date
    May 19, 2015
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    7.5 x 1 x 10.5 inches
  8. Print length
    300 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Book Description

This book explores the role of formal knowledge systems in small-scale oral cultures in both historic and archaeological contexts.

About the Author

Lynne Kelly is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Arts, Communication and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She is the author of ten books on education, one novel and three popular science titles. Kelly is interested in the question of how non-literate cultures memorise so much about their environment in the absence of writing, which has led her to research the mnemonic technologies of oral cultures.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press; First Edition (May 19, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 300 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1107059372
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1107059375
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.79 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 1 x 10.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 8 ratings

About the author

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Lynne Kelly

Lynne Kelly

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I am a science writer and academic fascinated by just how humans manage to know so much stuff - and how we can all learn more.

My new book, 'The Knowledge Gene' will come out on 3 September 2024. It explains how humans have been genetically encoded to use music, art, story and our connection to our physical world to store vast amounts of knowledge as a community. It also explains why evolution has maintained neurodivergence is a portion of the population worldwide. We are no longer using the potential that evolution ensured we had because we have sidelined so many of our innate skills - especially music, art and memory palaces.

In the more recent of my previous books, 'The Memory Code' tells the story of the extraordinary memory methods used by Indigenous cultures the world over, and why that explains the purpose of monuments like Stonehenge. Then 'Memory Craft' explains the way you can implement these memory techniques in contemporary life to memorise almost anything and keep your brain active.

'Songlines: the power and promise' and 'Songlines for Younger Readers' were written with Indigenous coauthor, Margo Neale. They offer an Indigenous and non-indigenous perspective on the way Australian Aboriginal songlines work to store vast amounts of information in memory.

My PhD research provided the foundation for these books. Cambridge University Press has published the academic version, 'Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies' giving a solid peer-reviewed academic reasoning for my ideas.

Writing dominates my life. I started with educational books - 10 of them - logical because I was a teacher. I wrote a novel, 'Avenging Janie' and then three popular science books: 'The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal', 'Crocodile: evolution's greatest survivor' and 'Spiders: learning to love them'. I overcame my arachnophobia a bit too well and now I am obsessed by spiders. I simply adore the gorgeous critters.

But it will be knowledge systems which will dominate my writing for many years to come. I simply love the stuff!

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3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

Troithulu
5.0 out of 5 stars Good stuff!
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2015
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I've recently finished my first read of this book, written by Dr. Lynne Kelly, and a scholarly well-sourced work it is!

It lays out a theory concerning the nature of certain archaeological findings, with no pseudoscience or other nonsense given serious attention, and those mentioned only in passing. It's a theory that draws analogies between the use of mnemonic technologies in modern non-literate (very, very different from being illiterate in literate societies) cultures, and the same use, with many commonalities across cultures, of those technologies to build and maintain sophisticated bodies of cultural and, yes, scientific knowledge.

The general idea is that power is, and likely was in prehistoric periods, held by elites who maintain that power without apparent coercion or obvious material wealth by restricting the use and preservation of knowledge using monuments, story, song, ritual, and dance, art, and small material objects as mnemonic foci, like rock art and carved stone balls or baked clay items that may be hand-held.

This includes those societies often thought to be egalitarian in nature, often mistakenly so, in which elders hold authority by dint of their monopoly on restricted knowledge attainable only by initiation.

Using as case studies such monuments as Stonehenge, Poverty Point, Chaco canyon, and contemporary traditionally non-literate cultures, such as indigenous Australian cultures, African secret societies, and the Pueblo cultures of the American southwest, the case is made, I think, and with much left open for discussion and discovery, that prehistoric cultures would need a wide, robust body of knowledge in order to survive. Such cultures simply would not have done so without mnemonic transmission of that knowledge allowing it to span generations without the benefit of writing, using mostly fallible human memory and memory foci.

Our ancestors were no dummies, or we just wouldn't be here today to study them. Living in a dangerous world without modern science or written records requires a vast body of lore, especially of the natural world and societal laws.

I found this book entertaining, informative, and very conducive to a further, deeper, closer, and better look at the archaeological record than perhaps has been done so far, with so much more to discover to flesh out the data and answer remaining questions suggested therein.

Well done, Dr. Kelly! Good stuff.
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Bethe
5.0 out of 5 stars A creation story
Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2016
The subtitle of this mind-bending book is key for me. "Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture." In my own work, I've used geometry as a creation mnemonic in ancient Greek mythology. Gaia is "the Word," the beginning of creation. Mnemosyne, her daughter is Memory, the mistress of mnemonics. Her offspring are the nine dancing Muses--the arts and sciences. Lynne Kelly makes this a living tradition we can access--something that we can access as a human population to turn toward peace, cooperation, and self-respect. Especially in our schools.
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Tony Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars Place & time + artefact markings + song & dance -> knowledge-based humanity
Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2015
A close colleague and I were fortunate to attend Lynne Kelly's last public presentation based on her PhD research before an appearance embargo while her serious academic publisher ran its course, producing this book based on that thesis. We each immediately recognised its profound implications for our own areas of focus. While reading the Kindle version (on trains and in chapter rotation with three others), attending the book launch and several more presentations to local audiences, I have come to see Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies as pointing to as powerful an organising framework for Lynne's husband and collaborator Damian's field of archaeology as plate tectonics has for geology. It has also provided a basis for restoring some balance to recently all-consuming regrets about what the abuse of white collar privilege is doing to our current social dynamic.

What becomes clear through reading this book is that vast shared knowledge is fundamental to what differentiates humanity from all that came before, as all the other claimed special attributes of humans crumble in the face of closer examination. We are the first on this planet and maybe the only agents in the universe who can and do aspire to know everything. Sadly a lot of previously vital local knowledge has been obliterated by waves of colonisation both blinded and empowered by doctrines encoded in written language by technologies which ensured their persistence way beyond their relevance.

Lynne Kelly's thesis is focused on the big enough topic of transition from mobile cultures, that we are starting to see as less than accurately labeled hunter-gatherer, to agricultural settlement, in the process necessarily discussing what we can know about our more mobile ancestors, with respect to which Lynne had the benefit of being based in Australia where such knowledge remains in living memory of some elders. My first hints that there was more to know about traditional knowledge came coincidentally via my MSc coördinator, Helen Verran, whose study of the mathematical systems of the Yolŋu nation of northeast Arnhem Land is the first reference in Lynne's book. After publishing the autobiography of a family friend of the stolen generations, I was introduced to the work of John Bradley with the Yanuwa across the Gulf at Borroloola:  Singing Saltwater Country . Bradley's work is cited extensively in Knowledge and Power and he was one of Lynne's PhD examiners. Increasingly focused on the white fella problem of the third round of British-Australian genocide, Henry Reynolds's  Forgotten War  and Richard Trudgen’s  Why Warriors Lie Down and Die: Towards an Understanding of Why the Aboriginal People of Arnhem Land Face the Greatest Crisis in Health and Education Since European Contact- Djambatj Mala were part of my aforementioned chapter rotation.

Missionary zeal blinkered much reporting of early contact, framing what were essential and practical indigenous knowledge systems in religious terms when what was truly sacred was the means for preserving knowledge essential to maintaining ancient and viable cultures. Creation stories seem to have been understood for what they were, memorable story telling which could preserve fragments of lived history within useful life advice. How that transitioned from using natural landscape to index knowledge for a more mobile society to the likes of what we now call monuments to do the same for early settled agriculturalists is the story Lynne Kelly sets out in academic detail, with many more connections to other disciplines left hanging, at least for now. Aboriginal sacred places do not reflect any religious notions of sacredness, but are sacred in the way a university library should be.

Another key to this great story is the distinction between common and restricted knowledge, a separation made essential by the importance and difficulty of maintaining knowledge that was needed on longer time cycles. Restricted knowledge is/was indexed at restricted places through restricted ceremonies in which the concepts of initiation and elders loom large, but which come down to a lot of hard work. Even more than oft-vilified levels of initiation into craft societies and others, notions of secret men's business and secret women's business are today seen as offensive to simplistic democratic ideals, let alone any notion of sexuality that contravene's Hollywood's idealisation of the week. Over 50,000 years, Australians learnt to sustainably manage natural resources and preserve a culture with practices now inaccurately characterised by the mono-linguistic occupying regime as abusive and used as pretext for a third round of genocide in which refusal to allow a role for indigenous language use has become a cancer. Aboriginals must be allowed to speak for themselves and be heard. We have more to learn form them than they have from us, as the very existence of Lynne Kelly's book makes clear.

Lynne's central thesis proposes a set of ten indicators which she then uses to assess her own claims for selected sites from Chaco Canyon to Stonehenge as exemplars of the mobile-settled transition evidenced by comparable "monuments" around the world. In particular, she contends that there is no evidence of material exports from these very expensive constructions, so the societies must have seen the value of preserving and sharing knowledge as worth the cost. This gave carriers of restricted knowledge the power to commandeer significant resources both for that construction and for the complex ceremonies required to communicate that knowledge in the absence of written language. Her period of focus, the dates of which are place dependent, ends when the knowledge is power regime of elders becomes subservient to chiefs and kings asserting authority.

Much essential animal behaviour is keyed to place and time, so it is unsurprising that neurologists have confirmed that mnemonic systems for connecting memories with places lie deep in our oldest evolutionary brain structures. While it keeps getting rediscovered, having been condemned to obscurity by the printing press, the "method of loci" is a technique used by Homer and many since to recall stories by mapping them onto real or imagined places and going on a mental journey to recall them, or going walkabout following a songline. Lynne argues persuasively that the flat-bottomed ditches surrounding neolithic monuments were restricted performance spaces which enabled those recall methods used much earlier by mobile cultures to be replicated by settled cultures. Beyond the need to accurately preserve vital knowledge by requiring initiates to invest heavily in learning, this process entailed some risk that knowledge could be lost if its custodian elder died before a successor was fully trained, but also the benefit that knowledge could be updated without changing the prompts, most unlike the printing press and maybe more akin to the potential of the internet.

We know but, given the wealth of modern media, often overlook how much easier it is to memorise songs and performances than plain speech. It is therefore no surprise that Lynne Kelly reminds us that song, dance and other ritualistic devices were fundamental to the reliable communication of vital survival knowledge. Anyone who has seen aboriginal youngsters do a kangaroo dance will also recognise how simple evocative performance can say more than words ever could. Lynne convincingly argues that such techniques extend beyond the sharing of common knowledge into the domain of restricted knowledge where accuracy of recall is even more important. This is entirely consistent with Richard Trudgen's description of communication breakdown between the Yolŋu and Balanda (white fellas) where ignorance of specialised language extensions impedes identification of communication problems. Those for whom an indigenous language is their first language need to reach initiate levels to have the basics needed for comprehending academic English.

More than places can serve as mnemonic reminders to which to anchor important stories that need to be passed on accurately. Lynne identifies intricate designs on portable items as having a similar role, with the to our eyes abstract designs embodying the flexibility of interpretation to be used to evoke memories of different knowledge in different contexts. Trudgen points to problematic consequences of the Yolŋu's cultural prioritisation of accurate recall when dealing with Balanda who expect recall of meaning to trump literal recall. Lynne Kelly observes the universality of message sticks used to carry communication between neighbouring clans where the carrier may not fully appreciate the restricted knowledge implication in the words they pass on. Such communications included calling corroborees at which common and restricted knowledge was shared and traded with great ceremony. With wood more available but less preserved than stone, totem poles and wood henges are indicative of intermediate stages as mobile cultures became more settled.

How could a teacher and science writer from Castlemaine in peri-urban Victoria discover such an important conceptual bridge that cements knowledge technologies in their proper place as the epistemic cut defining humanity? Lynne had been commissioned to do a book on crocodilians rather than her preferred spiders and, looking for an angle due to their only being 22 species to work with, decided on a whim to look to indigenous cultures' stories as a light entry. What she found was that their knowledge at least matched accepted scientific knowledge. Soon enrolled for an English department PhD, she was pointed to orality as complement to literacy. Later her husband insisted she accompany him to Stonehenge and it all clicked, though not without the deep fact checking that a completed PhD and academic publication entail. So it took somebody who started in physics to redefine archaeology, somebody with an open mind who had not locked herself in any silo, although she does now expect what flows from this work to define the rest of her life. Let it be long.
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Top reviews from other countries

Esmeralda Fernandes
1.0 out of 5 stars The contents of the book is amazing as is the author however…
Reviewed in Canada on August 19, 2023
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 The book has been water damaged or moisture damaged. The cover is in good shape but all the pages are wrinkled with water damage.
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Elvis
5.0 out of 5 stars Most Important Book About History
Reviewed in Germany on January 5, 2020
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If you would pick one book about history, that would give you an understaning about indigenous / oral culture (our ancestors), this book would be it.

This book transformed my way of looking at the "primitve" cultures who turned out to be hihgly sophisticated intellectuals. I learned a lot and the only downside is the price which makes this book highly unacessible to the general population and my missing liver.
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