Published by Maney (c) European Association of Archaeologists Binford, L.R. 1978. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press. David, N. & Kramer, C. 2001. Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marciniak, A. 2005. Placing Animals in the Neolithic: Social Zooarchaeology of Prehistoric Farming Communities. London: UCL Press. Parker Pearson, M. 2000. Eating Money: A Study in the Ethnoarchaeology of Food. Archaeological Dialogues, 7:217–232. Zeder, M. 1991. Feeding Cities: Specialized Animal Economy in the Ancient Near East. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. DAVID ORTON University of Cambridge, UK DOI 10.1179/146195713X13524807245859 Monica L. Smith. A Prehistory of Ordinary People (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2010, 211pp., 22 figs., pbk, ISBN 978-0-8165-2695-6) The goal of this book is mainly to demon- strate that ‘the individual human cognitive capacity for memory and planning in everyday activities set the stage for the eventual development of social complexity’ (p. 2), and, consequently, to ‘write a pre- history of ordinary people whose lives are usually traced only in the collective’ (p. xiv). The book attempts to do this in five chapters which deal with the origins of multitasking, how individuals deal with food, goods and work, as well as the relationship between multitasking and social complexity. To systematically analyse the role of non-elite persons in the emergence of complex societies as well as to see how their lives changed with various forms of social organization, is a task most interesting and welcome, but also overwhelming. Unfortunately, the book does not show sufficient concern for the current state of research. This would have been important for two reasons. First, it would have made clear what the approach owes to earlier works and where it claims to innovate – a clarification all the more necessary, as, on the one hand, it is suggested that the approach is highly innovative – by creating ‘an explanatory rubric for social activities that applies to human behaviour in the broadest possible sense’ (p. 16), which also solves the old problem of free will versus social constraint (p. x), – while, on the other hand, its theoretical stance is sup- ported with countless case studies and interpretations taken from other authors (p. 8, 15, 20, 29, 40, 148–9, 172–3 and passim). Second, the book ignores many important works in archaeology and in the social sciences in general, and is based on concepts and approaches that have already been the subject of serious criticism, without any concern for that criticism. I will focus here on some aspects of this latter point, which I present cross-cutting the chapters. The concept of the individual. In this book, the individual is presented as the universal form of personhood: it character- izes humanity in all places and at all times (pp. 6–52 and passim), hence the ahistori- cal character of the approach. Archaeologists who think otherwise are considered guilty of attributing to ordinary people ‘a kind of herdlike mentality’ (p. 6). This stance disregards anthropological, sociological, and political science works (echoed by several archaeological studies) that have investigated different concepts of Reviews 175