Every now and then a book appears on the shelf that I don’t like the look of for one reason or another. Perhaps the cover is a bit boring, I don’t like the title, or I’m not particularly interested in the subject. Based on the old adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and the fact that you can only put these things off for so long, I take a deep breath and begin reading. On most occasions I am pleasantly surprised by what I find. Here are two examples.

The Talking Ape by Robbins Burling. Boring cover – it’s red with white and yellow lettering. Rather disappointingly there is not an ape in sight. It might be a cliché but I expected there to be one! I flick through the book and still no pictures of apes, in fact only a handful of diagrams. It’s not looking good and I’m already thinking about making a cup of tea instead. However, my perseverance paid off – this is a great book and this is what I ended up writing:

The lack of direct evidence for the appearance and early development of language has led to much speculation and, as Robbins Burling states, although most of this has been highly sensible, a small amount has been rather fanciful. The Talking Ape is one of the most approachable books on the development of human language available. In it Robbins Burling explores the origins of human language and explains his theory on how we get from our primate cousins that cannot speak to modern humans who cannot keep quiet. The book examines the behaviour of primates, forms of animal communication and how these differ from human ones, human physical evolution, and the development of technology, whilst also providing comment on modern language and ‘What language has done to us’. From Burling’s point of view it is comprehension that is the key to human ability to use language since comprehension is the first part of a long process of understanding that leads to language.

The book poses and seeks to answer some very interesting questions which, Burling argues, are fundamental to the study of the evolution of language. Why, when we have at our disposal visual forms of communication, have we learnt to rely so heavily on verbal communication? Did language develop out of animal calls? When did the dreaded syntax being? Did language develop to aid subsistence provision (i.e. for survival) or did it, as the book argues, develop because of our need to get on with one another (social skills), to be able to negotiate, compete, manipulate and win over a lover. I agree with Iain Davidson’s comments, the book is: ‘Broad-ranging, deeply informed, intellectually sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable’.

Book number two is From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture by Cornelius Holtorf. Well, you couldn’t accuse this book jacket of being boring! Fluorescent yellow meets fuchsia pink perhaps symbolizing the culture clash between Stonehenge and Las Vegas. The title may sound a bit iffy but the people quoted on the back of the book (Michael Shanks, Neal Ascherson and Charles E. Orser Jr) seems to like it so I open the cover. Once again, I found the book much more readable and appealing than I had imagined and it wasn’t a pastiche of jargon and high-faluting ideas that attempted to justify archaeology’s recent ‘trendification’. This is how I see it:

Archaeology and history permeate places in our contemporary world, and minds, that would have been impossible to conceive of a hundred years ago, but what is it that we want from it. Do we want to be educated, bombarded with facts about the past, or are we looking for something much more meaningful to our everyday lives? From Stonehenge to Las Vegas is Cornelius Holtorf’s journey to find an answer to this question, to discover why archaeology remains so popular and seemingly relevant to today’s society, and what role it performs. In doing so he inevitably questions the role of archaeologists, and those that purport to bridge the gulf between the past and present, asking whether they are building on a vast database of knowledge about the past or whether archaeology as a science has become archaeology as popular culture. This book is for everyone who is interested in the past and wants to discover why they visit museums and ancient sites, why they watch Indiana Jones and Lara Croft with a longing to be like them, why they feel the need to travel to distant places to immerse themselves in the history of other cultures and whether archaeology is not so much about the past, but about how we remember and use it in the present.

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