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Geoarchaeology, Climate Change, and Sustainability
Quaternary Science Reviews 30 (2011) 3535–3536
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Quaternary Science Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quascirev
Book Review Geoarchaeology, Climate Change, and Sustainability, Antony G. Brown, Laura S. Basell, Karl W. Butzer (Eds.), Geological Sociey of America Special Paper, 476 (2011) (viiD194 pp.; paperback: US$80), ISBN: 978-0-8137-2476-8 This volume comprises 14 articles based on presentations at a Geoarchaeology conference held at Exeter University, UK, in September 2006. Timescales covered range from the early Middle Pleistocene (i.e., the Lower Palaeolithic) to the Holocene (including historical time), with emphasis on the latter. Nine of the articles relate to Britain, reflecting the range of research efforts undertaken over the past decade, as a result of extensive funding from the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund (ALSF). This scheme, introduced by the UK government in 2002, was resourced by a tax (or ‘levy’) on producers of aggregate to encourage the recycling of construction materials. The ALSF provided, amongst other activities, for research into aggregate-related archaeology and Quaternary science, its aims including mitigation of the environmental impact of aggregate production, for example by detailed study of the landscape in and around potential quarry sites before production begins, and fieldwork in existing quarries to maximise the scientific return from the temporary sections thus exposed. The ALSF has benefitted the careers of many young researchers, including Laura Basell who edited this volume. However, this scheme was abolished at the end of March 2011, a few weeks before the volume was published; taxation of aggregate extraction continues, but the funds thus generated will in future be absorbed into general UK government revenue rather than being earmarked to fund aggregate-related research. Many articles in this volume present ‘snapshots’ of work in progress. The five-year lead time to publication has meant that in a number of cases more detailed papers on the same topics have since been published; some papers in this volume have indeed been updated to include citation of these other works. However, in other cases, the referencing has not been updated and so was already several years out of date at the time of publication. The choice of publication medium seems strange; this collection of papers would arguably have better suited a volume in the series British Archaeological Reports, which would also probably have resulted in a much shorter lead time. The production of a GSA Special Paper was presumably intended to increase international impact, but many of the articles have clearly been written for a local (British) audience; for example, there are many instances where sites or other place names have been mentioned in the text but are not marked on any map, presumably because authors have assumed that readers will know where they are. Non-UK readers may also struggle to appreciate the significance of some papers, which document detailed evidence without setting it in any wider context. Two of the papers, by Ingrid Ward (formerly of English Heritage, the advisory body that managed the ALSF) and by Antony Brown (one of the editors) review the ALSF scheme and, in the latter case,
doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2011.08.011
the wider history of aggregate-related archaeology in the UK. Both make recommendations for how ALSF funding may be used in future, notwithstanding the abolition of the scheme. Brown indeed suggests that the future in this research field lies in widespread use of laser scanning technology to capture three-dimensional images of quarry sections. However, I have never understood the scientific value of such imagery; in my view more emphasis should be placed on basic field skills, such as section logging and sampling for dating, sedimentological skills including clast lithological analysis, and the identification and sampling of fossil evidence that may yield palaeo-environmental and chronological control. Starting at the long-timescale end of the record, Pope and Roberts describe the Lower Palaeolithic site of Valdoe in Sussex, southern England. The deposits here are considered contemporaneous with those at the adjacent and well-documented locality of Boxgrove, the only site in Britain to have yielded early Middle Pleistocene human remains. However, a more detailed description of Valdoe, by Pope et al. (2009), has already been published. Three papers discuss the Palaeolithic Rivers of South–West Britain (PRoSWeB) project, led by Antony Brown, and related activities, supplementing the already extensive output from this project (e.g., Brown et al., 2009, 2010; Basell et al., 2011). The Quaternary terrace staircases of the rivers of SW England have long been underresearched relative to the rest of the country. The ALSF-funded PRoSWeB project has sought to rectify this; this reviewer has a particular interest, having also worked on this topic independently. Basell et al. discuss these long-timescale fluvial sequences, which probably extend back in time to the earliest Pleistocene (Westaway, 2010, 2011), and the related archaeology. Basell et al. explain at length the techniques that they have employed, which include extensive use of OSL dating. This led them previously to deduce very young ages for high fluvial terraces, and thus to infer very high rates of landscape development in the region. In the present volume, Basell et al. discuss at length their OSL dating procedures, before concluding that, due to a variety of sources of systematic error, much of their dataset underestimates the true ages of the terrace deposits (cf. Westaway, 2010, whose previously published terrace chronology, based on correlation of these fluvial terraces with dated raised beaches and karstic levels in adjacent localities, is very similar to that now constructed by the PRoSWeB team). Basell et al. have also undertaken extensive analysis of the disposition of these fluvial terraces using digital elevation models. However, despite this detailed work, they did not notice that the existing published terrace scheme (by Edwards and Scrivener, 1999) for the region’s largest river, the Exe, was miscorrelated; instead of being oriented parallel to the modern river, these terraces diverge downstream from it, as is apparent from simple plotting of a long-profile projection (Westaway, 2011): once again, a disconnect between technology-led research and the application of a basic skill.
3536
Book Review / Quaternary Science Reviews 30 (2011) 3535–3536
In the second paper on this topic, Hosfield presents his view that concentrations of Palaeolithic handaxes in fluvial sediments (e.g., in the rivers of SW and southern England) are often governed by hydrology, rather than reflecting human occupation sites. These cobble-sized objects thus tend to become incorporated into fluvial gravels at points where continued downstream transport as bedload is inhibited by changes to the hydrology, notably at lithologicallycontrolled decreases in downstream gradient and at tributary confluences. This is an important viewpoint, but the same argument has already been published elsewhere (e.g., Ashton and Hosfield, 2010). Finally, Bennett et al. discuss in great detail the latest Pleistocene and Holocene sedimentary and archaeological records from the Exe valley. They thus infer that Exe Terrace 3 developed around the Last Glacial Maximum (i.e., during Marine Isotope Stage or MIS 2) and Terrace 1 in the mid-Holocene, having formed the active Exe floodplain during the Early Bronze Age; Terrace 2 is thus probably latest Pleistocene or Early Holocene. In contrast, Basell et al. infer that Terrace 3 of this river formed during MIS 3 and terraces 2 and 1 during MIS 2. Along with the miscorrelation noted above, these significant differences in chronology demonstrate that further work on this fluvial sequence is clearly needed. Most of the other papers summarise geoarchaeological investigations into Holocene sediments and related archaeology. Thus Passmore et al. examine the valley of the River Till in Northumberland (northeast England), Knight and Burningham investigate coastal sites in NW Ireland, Haslett describes estuarine sedimentation in South Wales, Dupin unravels the complex Holocene development, in relation to human habitation, of the Khuzestan Plain of SW Iran, and Thornbush and Desloges describe the history of human occupation of part of Ontario province, Canada, in relation to fluctuations in the level of the Great Lakes due to ice-damming and glacioisostasy. In addition Schuldenrein and Aiuvalasit describe geoarchaeological rescue operations accompanying the construction of a new underground railway line in New York; however, this work did not result in the recovery of any artefacts, let alone of human remains. The most intriguing of these Holocene studies, by GakiPapanastassiou et al., concerns the location of Ithaca, the home of the hero Odysseus from the ancient Greek legends, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The island of Ithaca is located off SW Greece, east of the larger island of Kefalonia, and has been identified by most scholars with Homer’s Ithaca. However, some recent accounts, notably that by Bittlestone et al. (2005), have proposed that the western part of Kefalonia, called the Paliki Peninsula, was a separate island w3000 years ago and was the true Homerian Ithaca. The snag with this argument is that, although the Paliki Peninsula is separated from the rest of Kefalonia by only a narrow isthmus, the land surface there is w200 m above sea-level. Gaki-Papanastassiou et al. point out that the known rates of crustal deformation in and around SW Greece cannot possibly account for hundreds of metres of uplift in such a short time; the alternative possibility that a former palaeostrait was buried beneath hundreds of metres of landslide talus on such a short timescale is equally implausible. The arguments put forward by Gaki-Papanastassiou et al. are well presented and come across as entirely sound, but represent the scholarly equivalent of ‘using a sledgehammer to crack a nut’, giving rather too much credence to ridiculous previously published suggestions that would perhaps be best ignored. The remaining paper in this volume, and evidently its most controversial content, is by Karl Butzer, who reviews, from a Mediterranean perspective, the themes in the volume title: geoarchaeology in relation to climate change and sustainability. He begins by noting that that many different subject specialists, including Earth scientists and archaeologists, contribute to geoarchaeology, and that this diversity of expertise is most welcome. Nonetheless, he is then highly critical of geological publications that have engaged
with this field, for example by proposing climatic causes for changing patterns of civilization in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, without fully explaining what is wrong with any of these articles. However, howlers in this field are certainly not confined to the geological side, and the role of Earth scientists is surely crucial in verifying whether the sedimentary contexts of artefacts are natural deposits and in determining their environment of deposition. Butzer then turns on the widely-held view that human activity over thousands of years has caused environmental degradation in the Mediterranean region. He argues that some indicators, such as increased agricultural production and numbers of tourist visitors, would seem to refute this. However, tourists tend not to go to the parts of the Mediterranean that have been devastated by past human activity, such as the region of Basilicata in SE Italy where deforestation for agriculture has created a badland landscape subject to rapid and uncontrollable erosion. Butzer concludes by arguing that geoarchaeologists should engage in wider issues, such as predicting the consequences of anthropogenic global warming. I can indeed imagine someone applying Butzer’s reasoning to argue to environmentalists that, for example, deforestation of the Amazon Basin is resulting in increased agricultural production and so does not count as environmental degradation at all. This raises the question of whether the views of archaeologists about such matters would really carry great weight; is this not why most Quaternary research is undertaken by multidisciplinary teams, as exemplified by many of the publications in this volume? There is, nonetheless, certainly plenty of material in this particular article to set searching questions to students. In summary, this is an interesting volume with a great diversity of material including some significant papers, although due to the slow production much of its content duplicates existing publications and some of its content is now redundant following the abolition of the ALSF scheme. Regrettably, its impact is therefore likely to be rather less than if publication had been expedited three or four years earlier.
References Ashton, N., Hosfield, R., 2010. Mapping the human record in the British early Palaeolithic: evidence from the Solent River system. Journal of Quaternary Science 25, 737–753. Basell, L.S., Brown, A.G., Toms, P.S. (Eds.), 2011. The Quaternary of the Exe Valley and Adjoining Areas: Field Guide. The Quaternary Research Association, London p. 163. Bittlestone, R., Diggle, J., Underhill, J., 2005. Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 598. Brown, A.G., Basell, L.S., Toms, P.S., Bennett, J.A., Hosfield, R.T., Scrivener, R.C., 2010. Later Pleistocene evolution of the Exe valley: a chronostratigraphic model of terrace formation and its implications for Palaeolithic archaeology. Quaternary Science Reviews 29, 897–912. Brown, A.G., Basell, L.S., Toms, P.S., Scrivener, R.C., 2009. A budget approach to Pleistocene terraces: preliminary studies using the Middle Exe in SW England. UK. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 120, 275–281. Edwards, R.A., Scrivener, R.C., 1999. Geology of the Country Around Exeter. Memoir for 1:50,000 Geological Map Sheet 325 (England and Wales). The Stationery Office, London, p. 183. Pope, M.I., Roberts, M.B., Maxted, A., Jones, P., 2009. Lower Palaeolithic archaeology at the Valdoe, West Sussex. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 75, 56–86. Westaway, R., 2010. Cenozoic uplift of southwest England. Journal of Quaternary Science 25, 419–432. Westaway, R., 2011. Quaternary fluvial sequences and landscape evolution in Devon and Somerset. In: Basell, L.S., Brown, A.G., Toms, P.S. (Eds.), The Quaternary of the Exe Valley and Adjoining Areas: Field Guide. The Quaternary Research Association, London, pp. 27–46.
Rob Westaway The Open University, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected]. Available online 30 August 2011
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Quaternary Science Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quascirev
Book Review Geoarchaeology, Climate Change, and Sustainability, Antony G. Brown, Laura S. Basell, Karl W. Butzer (Eds.), Geological Sociey of America Special Paper, 476 (2011) (viiD194 pp.; paperback: US$80), ISBN: 978-0-8137-2476-8 This volume comprises 14 articles based on presentations at a Geoarchaeology conference held at Exeter University, UK, in September 2006. Timescales covered range from the early Middle Pleistocene (i.e., the Lower Palaeolithic) to the Holocene (including historical time), with emphasis on the latter. Nine of the articles relate to Britain, reflecting the range of research efforts undertaken over the past decade, as a result of extensive funding from the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund (ALSF). This scheme, introduced by the UK government in 2002, was resourced by a tax (or ‘levy’) on producers of aggregate to encourage the recycling of construction materials. The ALSF provided, amongst other activities, for research into aggregate-related archaeology and Quaternary science, its aims including mitigation of the environmental impact of aggregate production, for example by detailed study of the landscape in and around potential quarry sites before production begins, and fieldwork in existing quarries to maximise the scientific return from the temporary sections thus exposed. The ALSF has benefitted the careers of many young researchers, including Laura Basell who edited this volume. However, this scheme was abolished at the end of March 2011, a few weeks before the volume was published; taxation of aggregate extraction continues, but the funds thus generated will in future be absorbed into general UK government revenue rather than being earmarked to fund aggregate-related research. Many articles in this volume present ‘snapshots’ of work in progress. The five-year lead time to publication has meant that in a number of cases more detailed papers on the same topics have since been published; some papers in this volume have indeed been updated to include citation of these other works. However, in other cases, the referencing has not been updated and so was already several years out of date at the time of publication. The choice of publication medium seems strange; this collection of papers would arguably have better suited a volume in the series British Archaeological Reports, which would also probably have resulted in a much shorter lead time. The production of a GSA Special Paper was presumably intended to increase international impact, but many of the articles have clearly been written for a local (British) audience; for example, there are many instances where sites or other place names have been mentioned in the text but are not marked on any map, presumably because authors have assumed that readers will know where they are. Non-UK readers may also struggle to appreciate the significance of some papers, which document detailed evidence without setting it in any wider context. Two of the papers, by Ingrid Ward (formerly of English Heritage, the advisory body that managed the ALSF) and by Antony Brown (one of the editors) review the ALSF scheme and, in the latter case,
doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2011.08.011
the wider history of aggregate-related archaeology in the UK. Both make recommendations for how ALSF funding may be used in future, notwithstanding the abolition of the scheme. Brown indeed suggests that the future in this research field lies in widespread use of laser scanning technology to capture three-dimensional images of quarry sections. However, I have never understood the scientific value of such imagery; in my view more emphasis should be placed on basic field skills, such as section logging and sampling for dating, sedimentological skills including clast lithological analysis, and the identification and sampling of fossil evidence that may yield palaeo-environmental and chronological control. Starting at the long-timescale end of the record, Pope and Roberts describe the Lower Palaeolithic site of Valdoe in Sussex, southern England. The deposits here are considered contemporaneous with those at the adjacent and well-documented locality of Boxgrove, the only site in Britain to have yielded early Middle Pleistocene human remains. However, a more detailed description of Valdoe, by Pope et al. (2009), has already been published. Three papers discuss the Palaeolithic Rivers of South–West Britain (PRoSWeB) project, led by Antony Brown, and related activities, supplementing the already extensive output from this project (e.g., Brown et al., 2009, 2010; Basell et al., 2011). The Quaternary terrace staircases of the rivers of SW England have long been underresearched relative to the rest of the country. The ALSF-funded PRoSWeB project has sought to rectify this; this reviewer has a particular interest, having also worked on this topic independently. Basell et al. discuss these long-timescale fluvial sequences, which probably extend back in time to the earliest Pleistocene (Westaway, 2010, 2011), and the related archaeology. Basell et al. explain at length the techniques that they have employed, which include extensive use of OSL dating. This led them previously to deduce very young ages for high fluvial terraces, and thus to infer very high rates of landscape development in the region. In the present volume, Basell et al. discuss at length their OSL dating procedures, before concluding that, due to a variety of sources of systematic error, much of their dataset underestimates the true ages of the terrace deposits (cf. Westaway, 2010, whose previously published terrace chronology, based on correlation of these fluvial terraces with dated raised beaches and karstic levels in adjacent localities, is very similar to that now constructed by the PRoSWeB team). Basell et al. have also undertaken extensive analysis of the disposition of these fluvial terraces using digital elevation models. However, despite this detailed work, they did not notice that the existing published terrace scheme (by Edwards and Scrivener, 1999) for the region’s largest river, the Exe, was miscorrelated; instead of being oriented parallel to the modern river, these terraces diverge downstream from it, as is apparent from simple plotting of a long-profile projection (Westaway, 2011): once again, a disconnect between technology-led research and the application of a basic skill.
3536
Book Review / Quaternary Science Reviews 30 (2011) 3535–3536
In the second paper on this topic, Hosfield presents his view that concentrations of Palaeolithic handaxes in fluvial sediments (e.g., in the rivers of SW and southern England) are often governed by hydrology, rather than reflecting human occupation sites. These cobble-sized objects thus tend to become incorporated into fluvial gravels at points where continued downstream transport as bedload is inhibited by changes to the hydrology, notably at lithologicallycontrolled decreases in downstream gradient and at tributary confluences. This is an important viewpoint, but the same argument has already been published elsewhere (e.g., Ashton and Hosfield, 2010). Finally, Bennett et al. discuss in great detail the latest Pleistocene and Holocene sedimentary and archaeological records from the Exe valley. They thus infer that Exe Terrace 3 developed around the Last Glacial Maximum (i.e., during Marine Isotope Stage or MIS 2) and Terrace 1 in the mid-Holocene, having formed the active Exe floodplain during the Early Bronze Age; Terrace 2 is thus probably latest Pleistocene or Early Holocene. In contrast, Basell et al. infer that Terrace 3 of this river formed during MIS 3 and terraces 2 and 1 during MIS 2. Along with the miscorrelation noted above, these significant differences in chronology demonstrate that further work on this fluvial sequence is clearly needed. Most of the other papers summarise geoarchaeological investigations into Holocene sediments and related archaeology. Thus Passmore et al. examine the valley of the River Till in Northumberland (northeast England), Knight and Burningham investigate coastal sites in NW Ireland, Haslett describes estuarine sedimentation in South Wales, Dupin unravels the complex Holocene development, in relation to human habitation, of the Khuzestan Plain of SW Iran, and Thornbush and Desloges describe the history of human occupation of part of Ontario province, Canada, in relation to fluctuations in the level of the Great Lakes due to ice-damming and glacioisostasy. In addition Schuldenrein and Aiuvalasit describe geoarchaeological rescue operations accompanying the construction of a new underground railway line in New York; however, this work did not result in the recovery of any artefacts, let alone of human remains. The most intriguing of these Holocene studies, by GakiPapanastassiou et al., concerns the location of Ithaca, the home of the hero Odysseus from the ancient Greek legends, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The island of Ithaca is located off SW Greece, east of the larger island of Kefalonia, and has been identified by most scholars with Homer’s Ithaca. However, some recent accounts, notably that by Bittlestone et al. (2005), have proposed that the western part of Kefalonia, called the Paliki Peninsula, was a separate island w3000 years ago and was the true Homerian Ithaca. The snag with this argument is that, although the Paliki Peninsula is separated from the rest of Kefalonia by only a narrow isthmus, the land surface there is w200 m above sea-level. Gaki-Papanastassiou et al. point out that the known rates of crustal deformation in and around SW Greece cannot possibly account for hundreds of metres of uplift in such a short time; the alternative possibility that a former palaeostrait was buried beneath hundreds of metres of landslide talus on such a short timescale is equally implausible. The arguments put forward by Gaki-Papanastassiou et al. are well presented and come across as entirely sound, but represent the scholarly equivalent of ‘using a sledgehammer to crack a nut’, giving rather too much credence to ridiculous previously published suggestions that would perhaps be best ignored. The remaining paper in this volume, and evidently its most controversial content, is by Karl Butzer, who reviews, from a Mediterranean perspective, the themes in the volume title: geoarchaeology in relation to climate change and sustainability. He begins by noting that that many different subject specialists, including Earth scientists and archaeologists, contribute to geoarchaeology, and that this diversity of expertise is most welcome. Nonetheless, he is then highly critical of geological publications that have engaged
with this field, for example by proposing climatic causes for changing patterns of civilization in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, without fully explaining what is wrong with any of these articles. However, howlers in this field are certainly not confined to the geological side, and the role of Earth scientists is surely crucial in verifying whether the sedimentary contexts of artefacts are natural deposits and in determining their environment of deposition. Butzer then turns on the widely-held view that human activity over thousands of years has caused environmental degradation in the Mediterranean region. He argues that some indicators, such as increased agricultural production and numbers of tourist visitors, would seem to refute this. However, tourists tend not to go to the parts of the Mediterranean that have been devastated by past human activity, such as the region of Basilicata in SE Italy where deforestation for agriculture has created a badland landscape subject to rapid and uncontrollable erosion. Butzer concludes by arguing that geoarchaeologists should engage in wider issues, such as predicting the consequences of anthropogenic global warming. I can indeed imagine someone applying Butzer’s reasoning to argue to environmentalists that, for example, deforestation of the Amazon Basin is resulting in increased agricultural production and so does not count as environmental degradation at all. This raises the question of whether the views of archaeologists about such matters would really carry great weight; is this not why most Quaternary research is undertaken by multidisciplinary teams, as exemplified by many of the publications in this volume? There is, nonetheless, certainly plenty of material in this particular article to set searching questions to students. In summary, this is an interesting volume with a great diversity of material including some significant papers, although due to the slow production much of its content duplicates existing publications and some of its content is now redundant following the abolition of the ALSF scheme. Regrettably, its impact is therefore likely to be rather less than if publication had been expedited three or four years earlier.
References Ashton, N., Hosfield, R., 2010. Mapping the human record in the British early Palaeolithic: evidence from the Solent River system. Journal of Quaternary Science 25, 737–753. Basell, L.S., Brown, A.G., Toms, P.S. (Eds.), 2011. The Quaternary of the Exe Valley and Adjoining Areas: Field Guide. The Quaternary Research Association, London p. 163. Bittlestone, R., Diggle, J., Underhill, J., 2005. Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 598. Brown, A.G., Basell, L.S., Toms, P.S., Bennett, J.A., Hosfield, R.T., Scrivener, R.C., 2010. Later Pleistocene evolution of the Exe valley: a chronostratigraphic model of terrace formation and its implications for Palaeolithic archaeology. Quaternary Science Reviews 29, 897–912. Brown, A.G., Basell, L.S., Toms, P.S., Scrivener, R.C., 2009. A budget approach to Pleistocene terraces: preliminary studies using the Middle Exe in SW England. UK. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 120, 275–281. Edwards, R.A., Scrivener, R.C., 1999. Geology of the Country Around Exeter. Memoir for 1:50,000 Geological Map Sheet 325 (England and Wales). The Stationery Office, London, p. 183. Pope, M.I., Roberts, M.B., Maxted, A., Jones, P., 2009. Lower Palaeolithic archaeology at the Valdoe, West Sussex. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 75, 56–86. Westaway, R., 2010. Cenozoic uplift of southwest England. Journal of Quaternary Science 25, 419–432. Westaway, R., 2011. Quaternary fluvial sequences and landscape evolution in Devon and Somerset. In: Basell, L.S., Brown, A.G., Toms, P.S. (Eds.), The Quaternary of the Exe Valley and Adjoining Areas: Field Guide. The Quaternary Research Association, London, pp. 27–46.
Rob Westaway The Open University, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected]. Available online 30 August 2011