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Archaeometry: Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium
Journal of Archaeological Science 1992,19,467-474
Book Reviews The Emergence of Civilization: From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture, Cities, and the State in the Near East. C. K. Maisels. 1990. xx+ 395 pp., including 64 figures, 14 tables, 21 maps. London: Routledge. ~45.00. ISBNO-415-00168-4. This is an ambitious book dealing with one of the most fundamental and fascinating questions in archaeology. Why did human beings abandon their nomadic, hunting and gathering way of life which was millions of years old and within a few thousand years become “civilized”, living in cities and growing their own food, with all the trappings of modem society, writing, political hierarchies, religion, trade, and so on? These crucial stagesin the evolution of human society first occurred in the Near East and in this work Charles Maisels has investigated the theoretical and factual background to what Gordon Childe called the Neolithic and Urban revolutions. This book is based on the Ph.D. thesis submitted in 1984 for the Department of Social Anthropology in the University of Edinburgh entitled “The origins of settlement, agriculture and the city-state in Mesopotamia.” The resultant publication is, as the author has admitted, “neither a textbook nor a comprehensive survey” and cannot be used as such. Much important information has been omitted such as the remarkable discovery of statuettes at Ain Ghazal and the early or pre-Ubaid levelsat Tell Oueili. The reader should also be aware that some of the information that is included is out-of-date and that many of the interpretations given are not accepted by other specialistsin the field. The intention of the book is to examine the actual and potential forms of human society in the course of the emergence of civilization. In this endeavour Charles Maisels has invoked the evidence of excavations and of ancient texts, parallels from history and ethnography, and recent anthropological theories. The result is a wide ranging study which draws on the religion of Shang China, the horticulture of the Trobriand islanders, and the kinship structure of the Nuer. While the author successfullydraws attention to the shortcomings of earlier theories, his own explanations are not so clearly expressed. There is a lot of interesting material in this book and the extensive bibliography should prove useful to those wishing to pursue subjects further. The scopeof the investigation is most impressive and is justified by the convincing proposal that the urbanization of the Mesopotamian lowlands was part of a continuing and almost inevitable processwhich started with the changes in food acquisition some 5000 years earlier. Although aware of the dangers of relating the scant scrapsof artifactual and textual evidence of the Mesopotamian past to modern social anthropological theory, Charles Maisels has not shrunk from this daunting task and has proposed that various forms of social organization can be recognized in the archaeological data. It is notoriously difficult to marry anthropological theory with archaeological data and so this attempt should be given its due praise. Unfortunately, this book is not easy to read and is marred by a convoluted often opaque style, using words of five syllables such as instantiation or floristically when more common words would have made the ideas more accessible.Despite the importance of the subject and the considerable extent and depth of the author’s erudition, this volume is unlikely to command a wide audience. Michael Roaf Oxford
Archaeometry: Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium Edited by Y. Maniatis. 1989. pp. 718, numerous illus. Amsterdam: Elsevier. $147.25. ISBN O-8176-2822-4. The volume consists of a number of papers which were presented at the 25th International Symposium of Archaeometry, held at the National Centre for Physical Sciences“Demokritos” in Athens 19-23 May 1986. The range of material incorporated into this volume reflects the 467 030Gl4O3/92/040467/08%03.00/0
0 1992AcademicPressLimited
BOOK REVIEWS wide variety of applications directed to scientific archaeological research. The papers are drawn from wide geographical sources and are divided into six sections; Inorganic Dating, Organic Dating, Technology of Non-metals, Metallurgy-Metals-Numismatics, Prospection, Provenance and finally a theme session“The Transition from Neolithic to Early Bronze Age in the Aegean”. Each section covers a reasonably balanced representation of current applications, and includes some interesting papers on interdisciplinary and interactive studies, particularly in the field of prospection: for example, two separate papers deal with the contribution of magnetometry to the investigation of tumuli in Romania and Bulgaria, as an aid or alternative to excavation in understanding the structures within the mounds. The paper by Kapokakis et al., presents an interesting integrated approach using a variety of surveying techniques during excavation, illustrating the irreversible nature of excavation, and stressing the importance of combining several surveying techniques to optimise the results from such studies. The Inorganic Dating section contains two particularly relevant papers contributing to the study to TL dating; the contribution by Hornyak presents a three-dimensional spectrophotometer for the analysis of TL data, which, together with a paper on the effects of ground temperature fluctuations on TL accuracy (Christodoulides) illustrate the emphasis on the study of specific problems of a technique, in order to increase its accuracy and extend its application. Studies of ceramics and glassdominate the Non-metal Technology section, but it also includes papers on identifying waxes and resins,analysis of pigments. The Provenance section is concerned mainly with pottery, but also includes flint, marble and glass.The Metallurgy section incorporates a diverse collection of papers from Iron Age blacksmithing technology to X-ray fluorescence of early scientific instruments. The theme sessionis concerned primarily with chronological problems, identified as one of the main areas where the contribution of archaeometry is of greatest potential, by Colin Renfrew in his introduction. He also stressesthe cultural aspectsof transition as the other part of the problem, as it was a time of significant change in the area. Both of these aspectsare of primary importance in the papers presented for the theme session. Although the papers are of variable length and content, there are some which are useful reference points in the development of techniques, and to diverse applications of established ones. Researchis often site based, but consideration is given to alternative usesor sites, and there are a few technical papers which could have a wide relevance. The diversity of the volume and variable quality of the papers would make it of interest to many, but of possibly limited direct reference value to an individual specialist. However, this very diversity reflects the broad nature of Archaeometry, and servesto illustrate a few of the many servicesof scienceto archaeology. Romola Parish University ofDurham
Bad Year Economics: Cultural Responses to Risk and Uncertainty. Edited by P. Halstead and J. O’Shea. 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 145 pp., 40 figures, 19 tables. g30.00. ISBN 0-521-33021-l. Bad Year Economicsis a book that makes a valuable contribution to the field of archaeology; it is perhaps one of the few books in its serieswhich fully lives up to the name; “New Directions in Archaeology”. The individual chapters are all of consistently high quality, and the editors have done a good job in producing a well-integrated volume-one whose theme is a logical extension of previous research on subsistencein prehistory. There is a paradox that we need to consider at the outset, however. If over the last 20 years subsistencehas steadily come to hold a well-established position in the literature of prehistory, the actual results of subsistencestudies themselves, as more work is done each year, provide a mounting documentation of limitations. The seedsand bones recovered from a prehistoric site are seldom able to provide direct answers to economic questions that are of fundamental interest. For example, what is the proportion of a given diet that derives from cereals as opposed to other sources of food? What is the total area of land that a given household cultivates in any one year? Or what, at a given time and place, is the average yield per hectare for a specific crop? In other words, although much is said about subsistence, discourse
Book Reviews The Emergence of Civilization: From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture, Cities, and the State in the Near East. C. K. Maisels. 1990. xx+ 395 pp., including 64 figures, 14 tables, 21 maps. London: Routledge. ~45.00. ISBNO-415-00168-4. This is an ambitious book dealing with one of the most fundamental and fascinating questions in archaeology. Why did human beings abandon their nomadic, hunting and gathering way of life which was millions of years old and within a few thousand years become “civilized”, living in cities and growing their own food, with all the trappings of modem society, writing, political hierarchies, religion, trade, and so on? These crucial stagesin the evolution of human society first occurred in the Near East and in this work Charles Maisels has investigated the theoretical and factual background to what Gordon Childe called the Neolithic and Urban revolutions. This book is based on the Ph.D. thesis submitted in 1984 for the Department of Social Anthropology in the University of Edinburgh entitled “The origins of settlement, agriculture and the city-state in Mesopotamia.” The resultant publication is, as the author has admitted, “neither a textbook nor a comprehensive survey” and cannot be used as such. Much important information has been omitted such as the remarkable discovery of statuettes at Ain Ghazal and the early or pre-Ubaid levelsat Tell Oueili. The reader should also be aware that some of the information that is included is out-of-date and that many of the interpretations given are not accepted by other specialistsin the field. The intention of the book is to examine the actual and potential forms of human society in the course of the emergence of civilization. In this endeavour Charles Maisels has invoked the evidence of excavations and of ancient texts, parallels from history and ethnography, and recent anthropological theories. The result is a wide ranging study which draws on the religion of Shang China, the horticulture of the Trobriand islanders, and the kinship structure of the Nuer. While the author successfullydraws attention to the shortcomings of earlier theories, his own explanations are not so clearly expressed. There is a lot of interesting material in this book and the extensive bibliography should prove useful to those wishing to pursue subjects further. The scopeof the investigation is most impressive and is justified by the convincing proposal that the urbanization of the Mesopotamian lowlands was part of a continuing and almost inevitable processwhich started with the changes in food acquisition some 5000 years earlier. Although aware of the dangers of relating the scant scrapsof artifactual and textual evidence of the Mesopotamian past to modern social anthropological theory, Charles Maisels has not shrunk from this daunting task and has proposed that various forms of social organization can be recognized in the archaeological data. It is notoriously difficult to marry anthropological theory with archaeological data and so this attempt should be given its due praise. Unfortunately, this book is not easy to read and is marred by a convoluted often opaque style, using words of five syllables such as instantiation or floristically when more common words would have made the ideas more accessible.Despite the importance of the subject and the considerable extent and depth of the author’s erudition, this volume is unlikely to command a wide audience. Michael Roaf Oxford
Archaeometry: Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium Edited by Y. Maniatis. 1989. pp. 718, numerous illus. Amsterdam: Elsevier. $147.25. ISBN O-8176-2822-4. The volume consists of a number of papers which were presented at the 25th International Symposium of Archaeometry, held at the National Centre for Physical Sciences“Demokritos” in Athens 19-23 May 1986. The range of material incorporated into this volume reflects the 467 030Gl4O3/92/040467/08%03.00/0
0 1992AcademicPressLimited
BOOK REVIEWS wide variety of applications directed to scientific archaeological research. The papers are drawn from wide geographical sources and are divided into six sections; Inorganic Dating, Organic Dating, Technology of Non-metals, Metallurgy-Metals-Numismatics, Prospection, Provenance and finally a theme session“The Transition from Neolithic to Early Bronze Age in the Aegean”. Each section covers a reasonably balanced representation of current applications, and includes some interesting papers on interdisciplinary and interactive studies, particularly in the field of prospection: for example, two separate papers deal with the contribution of magnetometry to the investigation of tumuli in Romania and Bulgaria, as an aid or alternative to excavation in understanding the structures within the mounds. The paper by Kapokakis et al., presents an interesting integrated approach using a variety of surveying techniques during excavation, illustrating the irreversible nature of excavation, and stressing the importance of combining several surveying techniques to optimise the results from such studies. The Inorganic Dating section contains two particularly relevant papers contributing to the study to TL dating; the contribution by Hornyak presents a three-dimensional spectrophotometer for the analysis of TL data, which, together with a paper on the effects of ground temperature fluctuations on TL accuracy (Christodoulides) illustrate the emphasis on the study of specific problems of a technique, in order to increase its accuracy and extend its application. Studies of ceramics and glassdominate the Non-metal Technology section, but it also includes papers on identifying waxes and resins,analysis of pigments. The Provenance section is concerned mainly with pottery, but also includes flint, marble and glass.The Metallurgy section incorporates a diverse collection of papers from Iron Age blacksmithing technology to X-ray fluorescence of early scientific instruments. The theme sessionis concerned primarily with chronological problems, identified as one of the main areas where the contribution of archaeometry is of greatest potential, by Colin Renfrew in his introduction. He also stressesthe cultural aspectsof transition as the other part of the problem, as it was a time of significant change in the area. Both of these aspectsare of primary importance in the papers presented for the theme session. Although the papers are of variable length and content, there are some which are useful reference points in the development of techniques, and to diverse applications of established ones. Researchis often site based, but consideration is given to alternative usesor sites, and there are a few technical papers which could have a wide relevance. The diversity of the volume and variable quality of the papers would make it of interest to many, but of possibly limited direct reference value to an individual specialist. However, this very diversity reflects the broad nature of Archaeometry, and servesto illustrate a few of the many servicesof scienceto archaeology. Romola Parish University ofDurham
Bad Year Economics: Cultural Responses to Risk and Uncertainty. Edited by P. Halstead and J. O’Shea. 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 145 pp., 40 figures, 19 tables. g30.00. ISBN 0-521-33021-l. Bad Year Economicsis a book that makes a valuable contribution to the field of archaeology; it is perhaps one of the few books in its serieswhich fully lives up to the name; “New Directions in Archaeology”. The individual chapters are all of consistently high quality, and the editors have done a good job in producing a well-integrated volume-one whose theme is a logical extension of previous research on subsistencein prehistory. There is a paradox that we need to consider at the outset, however. If over the last 20 years subsistencehas steadily come to hold a well-established position in the literature of prehistory, the actual results of subsistencestudies themselves, as more work is done each year, provide a mounting documentation of limitations. The seedsand bones recovered from a prehistoric site are seldom able to provide direct answers to economic questions that are of fundamental interest. For example, what is the proportion of a given diet that derives from cereals as opposed to other sources of food? What is the total area of land that a given household cultivates in any one year? Or what, at a given time and place, is the average yield per hectare for a specific crop? In other words, although much is said about subsistence, discourse