A detailed and highly referenced account of the problems with conventioanl archaeological interpretation both of interactions with "primitive" people in recorded history and of the archaelogical record going back over 10,000 years and potentially 100,000 years since the human brain evolved.

The authors discuss the implications of alternative views of the record and use that to offer both a model of different modes of development that actually occured and why we may have ended up where we seem to be today "stuck" in a single paradigm of linear progress and invevitable unsustainable growth ofhuman civilization - which of course is now crashing into some more of less hard planetary limits.