I began this book with a digested read that boiled the contribution of prehistory down to the inevitability of well-directed change. This of course was an unfair caricature. Although prehistoric evidence has often provided an illustrated guide to the idea of progress, archaeologists left much of this baggage behind in the last century. But not everyone has caught up. The caricature still defines the broader landscapes of that imaginary geographical place I call Originsland where the history of human desire is the force that drives change onward. But in Originsland archaeologists are only one small tribe with a quiet voice. They are outnumbered and drowned-out by bigger battalions investigating our conventional history and technological achievements in order to inform a public past. In this company human prehistory provides little more than a convenient starting point for familiar descriptions of change.

Change driven by human desire is classical in origin. Aristotle, for example, asserted that only agriculture can civilise humans (Pagden 1986:91). Civil society, he argued, required a change in the way the Earth was roamed and its resources taken. The benefits of civilisation were good government, strong laws, moral codes and a world ordered by the written word.