Last week the internationally recognised archaeologist Professor Evžen Neustupný left us
Remember his life and work with us through extracts from an interview with him from 2014.
"At first I worked on methodology: my book on archaeological method was published twice in Cambridge. Now I am working out archaeological theory; I argue that artefacts and human beings together form a single entity. Artefacts do not exist without people, but people do not exist without artefacts either. A great many specialists deny this and claim that they do not need artefacts to understand human thought. They study the human world exclusively on the basis of words in written texts and ignore artefacts; only occasionally do they mention their general categories. That leads above all to an abstract interest in the human being (the individual) or an abstract interest in human communities."
"I am interested, for instance, in how objects created by human beings reproduce themselves in contrast to natural objects. The latter renew themselves according to Darwin's rules, but with artefacts it is different. One person can pass on an object, and the knowledge of how to make it, to another person who is not their descendant. A natural object changes only through a natural process that takes a very long time. In archaeology we have cases where a complex human culture changes within a few decades. And those are the questions my theory of artefacts examines. It follows from it, for instance, that it is impossible to create an artefact without waste arising at the same time; that cannot be avoided. The theory is of considerable significance for the present day too. The set of such theses currently being worked out is called the theory of the human world. It is the counterpart to the theory of living nature, which explains the phase of the Earth that preceded the human world."
Evžen Neustupný was born in 1933 in Prague and is the son of another significant Czech archaeologist, Jiří Neustupný. He studied prehistory and Egyptology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. From 1957 he worked at the Institute of Archaeology of the Czechoslovak (later Czech) Academy of Sciences in Prague as a researcher, and from 1990 to 1993 as its director. From 1996 he worked at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. In 1998 he founded the Department of Archaeology of the Faculty of Arts of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. Through his work he helped make Czechoslovak and Czech archaeology a field of international reach.
