Jan Turek: První Evropané. Archeologie počátků evropské identity. Academia, Praha 2026.

If one were to characterise Jan Turek's Prvn Evropan (First Europeans) in a single sentence, it would perhaps be best described as an archaeological essay on the long-term cultural foundations of Europe.The book is far more than a conventional synthesis of European prehistory.Rather, it represents an ambitious attempt to interpret the emergence of European civilisation through the transformative processes associated mainly with the Neolithic.Although the volume is published only in Czech, it deserves particular attention from an international audience interested in current Central European archaeological thought and in broader debates concerning the cultural significance of early agricultural societies.The book is substantial in both physical and intellectual scope.Richly illustrated and stylistically polished, it combines scientific synthesis with essayistic reflection and occasionally openly philosophical commentary.Turek is already well known internationally for his work on European prehistory, monumentality, Bell Beaker archaeology, gender, and symbolic systems.Many themes familiar from his earlier scholarly publications reappear here, yet transformed into a more accessible and synthetic form.The result is neither a popularisation in the simplistic sense nor a narrowly academic monograph.Rather, the book occupies an intermediate genre that has become relatively rare among contemporary Central European scholars: a deeply informed civilisational essay grounded in archaeological evidence.The chronological emphasis placed throughout the volume on the Neolithic is hardly accidental.These periods are presented as formative stages in the emergence of specifically European cultural patterns, but they also reflect the author's own long-term scholarly specialisation in the archaeology of the European Copper Age and specifically Bell Beaker societies.The central argument is introduced already in the preface.Turek explicitly frames the Neolithic as the decisive threshold in the formation of European cultural identity.The first farmers are presented not merely as one prehistoric population among many, but as the creators of enduring cultural patterns that still shape Europe today: attitudes toward landscape, domesticated food, alcohol consumption, kinship, monumentality, social hierarchy, warfare, gender, mobility, and religion.Throughout the volume, archaeology is repeatedly mobilised not simply as a method for reconstructing the past, but as a means of reflecting critically on the contemporary world, including the Anthropocene, ecological crisis, globalisation, pandemics, and the future sustainability of civilisation itself.This broad interpretative ambition gives the book its coherence.Individual chapters often move far beyond the descriptive presentation of archaeological data and instead ask how long-term historical processes shaped specifically European mentalities and social habits.The final chapter, significantly entitled What Makes Us Europeans, synthesises these reflections into a larger argument concerning migration, hybridity, openness, and the shared cultural inheritance of Europe.Turek explicitly rejects ethnically essentialist conceptions of Europe and emphasises the continent's millennia-long history of population movement, admixture, and cultural synthesis instead.Such reflections inevitably resonate with current political debates, yet the author generally avoids simplistic ideological formulations and grounds his interpretations in archaeological and archaeogenetic discourse. Humans, animals, and the making of cultureThe first chapter introduces the tension between nature and culture as one of the book's recurring themes.Turek forcefully rejects romantic notions of primordial harmony between humans and nature and instead presents humanity as a fundamentally transformative species.Human evolution is described through the development of cooperation, technology, hunting strategies, cooking practices, and eventually domestication.Particularly memorable are the sections devoted to the domestication