I believe some of the difficulty we have in understanding the establishment of the first farming communities in Europe is with the word “colonization.” We have a natural tendency to think of “colonization” as it has happened within the last few centuries. In the case of the colonization of the Americas, for example, the colonists came relatively quickly, and in increasingly vast numbers. They had vastly superior technical, political, and war-making skills, compared with those of the Indians. There was not much mixing with the Indians. The case in Europe five or six thousand years ago must have been very different. I wonder if it is even proper to call people “colonists” who move some miles to a new region, settle down and farm it for some years, then move on again, generation after generation? The ideas and the things which these new people carried were only _potentially_ superior. The ideas and things and the people had to prove themselves in their adaptation to each new environment. Once this was done another link to the chain would be added, and then the forest-dwellers and other indigenous folk of Europe along the way might accept the new ideas and things. It is quite reasonable to expect that there must have been much mixture of the migrants and the indigenes along the way; the Peterborough and Skara Brae assemblages we mentioned above would seem to be clear traces of such fused cultures. Sometimes, especially if the migrants were moving by boat, long distances may have been covered in a short time. Remember, however, we seem to have about three thousand years between the early Syro-Cilician villages and Windmill Hill. Let me repeat Professor Childe again. “The peoples of the West were not slavish imitators: they adapted the gifts from the East ... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines.” Childe is of course completely conscious of the fact that his “peoples of the West” were in part the descendants of migrants who came originally from the “East,” bringing their “gifts” with them. This was the late prehistoric achievement of Europe--to take new ideas and things and some migrant peoples and, by mixing them with the old in its own environments, to forge a new and unique series of cultures. What we know of the ways of men suggests to us that when the details of the later prehistory of further Asia and Africa are learned, their stories will be just as exciting. THE Conquest of Civilization [Illustration] Now we must return to the Near East again. We are coming to the point where history is about to begin. I am going to stick pretty close to Iraq and Egypt in this chapter. These countries will perhaps be the most interesting to most of us, for the foundations of western civilization were laid in the river lands of the Tigris and Euphrates and of the Nile. I shall probably stick closest of all to Iraq, because things first happened there and also because I know it best.