In a recent essay published by Aeon Magazine, Maria Stavrinaki, author of Transfixed by Prehistory, discusses prehistory in the atomic age. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full essay. An excerpt appears below:

“While the atomic age starts with a sudden explosion, prehistory begins without a sound. It starts as a mute dawn stretching across geological time, heard only by those excavating landscapes and tombs for traces of our distant hominin ancestors. No two eras from human history began more differently than the atomic age and the prehistoric period. And yet, despite the difference in their temporal constitution and their positions at the extremities of human time – one in the deep past, the other in the 20th century – a reciprocal analogical relationship exists between them. We have learned to imagine one through the other. This analogical relationship has left a lasting mark on the Western historical consciousness, which appears across politics, art and culture, philosophy, and the human and social sciences.”