Scireadr will have its first meeting tomorrow night. We’ll be discussing A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I’ve never taken part in a book club like this before, so I’m preparing. I don’t have answers. I don’t know if I need answers, what I need are questions so I’m making some notes that I can pick up with my phone tomorrow night. Feel free to add questions or comments below.
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Note: Giulio Magli was one of the examiners of my thesis, so his book is hardly likely to get a bad review.
This review rounds off a trilogy to go with Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings and People and the Sky. Like the other two books this could be said to be part of a World Archaeoastronomy approach, but Giulio Magli adds a twist. Some of this is down to the approach he’s taken to archaeoastronomical sites, but he also adds a bit more.
Magli’s approach is similar to what I would have done if I was writing an introduction to archaeoastronomy book. He tackles the sites around the world. So take a deep breath because in his opening section of twelve chapters — slightly over half the book — he covers. Palaeolithic Europe, Prehistoric Britain, the temples of Malta, Egypt, Babylon, East North America with the Hopewell and Cahokia, West North America with Chaco and the Anasazi, Northern Mexico and Tenochtitlan, The rest of Mesoamerica and Palenque, The Incas, Nazca and Polynesia. That leaves massive holes where you would expect to find India, China, Korea and Japan and a lack of African material. That’s more due to the state of play in academic archaeoastronomy at the moment than a fault of Magli. In general Africa has been greatly overlooked and there’s not a lot of integration between Asian astronomy and the rest of the world. It’s getting better, but it’s still under-represented compared to the Mayans and Prehistoric Europe.
If this had been the sum total of the book I wouldn’t be that enthusiastic about it. It’s not bad. It’s written from an astronomical point of view with some amusing digs against archaeologists. If you were interested in archaeoastronomy and approaching it from astronomy and not anthropology I’d recommend this over Aveni or Krupp’s book as an introduction to the field. What really marks out the book as worth reading is section 2.
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I could draw up quite a list of people who won’t like this book. Adam Stout purports to be an unapologetic relativist (more of that later). His history of archaeology in Britain, mainly in the inter-war period, comes from this position and is allied to his interest in alternative pasts such as druidry and earth mysteries. If you think the history of archaeology is primarily a story of how our knowledge of the past came to be more accurate, you’ll struggle with this. If you think the success of people such as OGS Crawford and Mortimer Wheeler was down to employing scientific methodology you’ll struggle with this. If you think the only sane response to modern druids is mockery you may struggle with this. I certainly disagree with a few of the author’s characterisations of archaeology. Despite (or even because?) of this it’s a challenging and engaging view of the development of archaeology.
The first point of difference between myself and Stout is a matter of how Political with a capital P archaeology is. I accept that archaeology is a political action, but so is going down to the shops to buy a loaf of bread. I might be reifying abstract ideologies and reinforcing economic roles in society, but if I want to critique those ideologies and roles, I don’t think I’d start by analysing my shopping list. Adam Stout starts with an account of writing against the backdrop of the Occupation of Iraq. He states that the cover story for May 2003 ‘PREHISTORIC WAR’ was cashing in on the war fever in the USA. It might, but as a counter-example I’ll offer a quote from the introduction to Whiteley and Hays-Gilpin’s new book:
A war is raging in the Middle East as you read this introduction or, at least, one is imminent and the world is on high alert. We can assert this with some certainty, regardless of the shelf life of this volume, because this condition has characterised the region for most of the last 1000 years.Whiteley and Hays-Gilpin 2008:11
I can’t say Archaeology magazine wasn’t using the war to boost sales. I suspect it wasn’t an openly cynical ploy to use the deaths of thousands of people as a sales drive. Equally I wouldn’t be surprised if someone wanted to put war in a historical perspective but didn’t think about what the upcoming event would mean for many people’s lives. It’s hard to say because if you want to publish on war when the USA isn’t either contemplating invading somewhere or else actually invading somewhere you have a very small window to aim for. One difference between us then is that I think the interest in war reflected public opinion rather than led it. This matters because it shows how Stout works from the position that archaeologists are largely working in the service of the state. This is point of departure for most of the book, the creation of archaeological authority.
The first part is most explicitly about the creation of archaeological authority. It’s fertile ground for anyone who wants to find evidence of self-congratulation amongst academics. It’s the strongest section of the book because it’s most clearly here that Stout marshalls the evidence to demonstrate his point. He’s able to draw on letters from various protagonists to show that political machinations were a major part of the academic archaeological programme of the the 1920s and 1930s. I was fascinated to see how a group of motivated people effectively collaborated to take the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia and take it for their own use as a national society. Yet while Stout is making a point, it doesn’t come across as axe-grinding.
The second part is, for me the least satisfying of the four. It tackles a fight against diffusionism as propsed by anthropologists. Again the handling of the politics is very good, but I’m not sure how well it squares with the content. Stout’s argument is that archaeologists were eager to show inexorable progress to the modern era, and that diffusionism was a threat to this. In the case of someone like Childe, I’d argue that diffusion was the means by which progress occured.
The third section is a case study of Stonehenge. If you’ve wondered where the modern Druids came from and how they decided to claim Stonehenge, then this is essential reading. Once again the politics are covered well, as are some of the beliefs of the 20th century Druids.
The fourth section is about The Old Straight Track and the challenge from other interpretations of the past and the challenge to archaeology. It provides some interesting examples of how unwanted interpretations could be neutered and the emphasis of archaeology as something vocational. Stout hints at the challenge being in part that ley-hunters were contextualising sites into their place within the wider landscape and fact-obsessed archaeology was less theorised at this time. It is fair comment, though I doubt it would be popular amongst many archaeologists.
My biggest concern with most of the sections is that the conflict is seen as political rather than factual. Possibly for reasons of space there’s little examination of the archaeological content. In the case of ley-hunting, to what extent was the statistical likelihood of leys occurring known at the time The Old Straight Track was published? What were the archaeological objections? The second section in particular would have benefitted more from a discussion of the content as well as the context.
Another concern is that Stout never goes beyond prehistory. To some extent this is criticising him for not writing a book which he didn’t intend to write, after all the title is Creating Prehistory. At the same time the reader could come away with the impression that archaeology in Britain was almost entirely the archaeology of prehistoric Britain. Romans are occasionally mentioned, but the effects of Roman or Medieval archaeology on the development of prehistoric archaeology aren’t really tackled.
This may be where the difference between his relativist position and my own matters. He sees history and archaeology as a matter of telling stories. Even if this is the case, stories have forms. The Iliad is not going to be rendered into a limerick. Similarly scientific explanations have forms, and there is no real tackling of methodology or theory in Stout’s book. If you think coherence to reality played a part, even if it not the sole part, then there’s a big hole in the history. It cannot be dismissed simply as a matter of incommensurable epistemologies as Stout himself shows.
Stout argues that better is not necessarily more accurate, using the example of Maiden Castle. On page 235 he uses Niall Sharples’ account of Maiden castle to show how Wheeler was capable of spinning his own tales based on his own prejudices. This I agree with, but I would also ask how we can accept Sharples’ explanation as more correct. The answer lies in the methodology of archaeology which has developed, in part from Wheeler’s own work. The method Wheeler used gave some of the tools to undermine his work. In contrast I don’t see that possibility from Iolo Morgawg’s work. Even if science were only story, it’s clearly a different sort of story.
Another matter I’d like to see Stout explore would be the development of archaeology as an anti-religious science. Archaeology as Whiteley and Hays-Gilpin (2008:20n1) say tends to shy away from religion. Certainly archaeologists are happy to diagnose anything they can’t understand as being ‘ritual’, but once it’s in that box study is often closed. They put this down to science and religion being competitors in claims for discerning truth in the first half of the 20th century. In chapter nine The Esoteric Revival Stout attributes the negative view many of the inter-war archaeologists had towards early religion as being due to their atheism. Perhaps more could be made of the conflict between science and religion at the time, and hence the antagonism to the religious claims of contemporary druids, which then fed back into views about the past.
Nonetheless while it’s clear that I don’t agree with some of Stout’s conclusions I still think there’s much to like about the book. For a start it’s readable. It’s clear that he’s written the book because he wants to be understood and make a difference rather than pad out a CV. It’s also well-argued. I might not agree with the arguments, but it’s not a matter of plucking ideas from the air. Stout clearly has done the reading, got the references and uses them to back up his claims. Hence while it is possible to disagree with him, it’s not a good idea to simply dismiss his work. It’s also a genuinely novel piece of work. There are many books which take to a greater or less extent the whole of the history of archaeology as their subject. Quite a few a clearly attempts to produce theory textbooks in a very dull way. In contrast the more focussed approach Stout takes enables him to look more closely the processes that created academic archaeology. If anything I’d like to see an tighter focus still. There are the seeds of four interesting books on the development of archaeology. Most importantly it’s the least telelogical history of archaeology I’ve read. Many histories of archaeology could be subtitled How did we get to the wonderful state we’re in today?. This book in contrast is focussed on the inter-war years rather than the eventual outcome. This puts him smartly out of step with anyone who mistakenly believes history of archaeology is a branch of archaeology rather than history of science.
It’s not the one book you need if you’re studying the history of archaeology in the UK, but it is perhaps the one book you need to read as a companion to a history of archaeology.
See also:
Whiteley, D.S. and Hays-Gilpin, K. 2008 ‘Religions beyond Icon, Burial and Monument: An Introduction’, Belief in the Past: Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion. eds. D.S.Whiteley and K.Hays-Gilpin, Left Coast Press:California, 11–22.
Find it at WorldCat or LibraryThing.
In short, the best archaeopolitics book I’ve read since Edward Fox’s Sacred Geography. I was kindly sent a review copy by the publishers and I have a feeling that they were hoping for a bit more than that, so I’ll add a bit more.
It’s subtitled “The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World” The ancient world here is pretty much Greece, Rome and Egypt, which means she doesn’t have a lot to say about the stripping of sites in Africa, the Americas or Asia. To some extent that’s a bit of a shame, but by focussing tightly on a few examples Waxman is able to go into the details of how the market for illicit antiquities works. You have to keep a close eye on what’s happening as I get the impression that one of the inspirations for the antiquities trade was the three-card trick. The book is four parts. She opens by looking at Egypt and the attitude of the Louvre.
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I’ll put this link up before I forget. Michael E. Smith is looking for what you think are the best new archaeology books. It made me realise that this year I don’t think I’ve really taken much time out to read for pleasure. I’ve got a couple of new Anthony Aveni books which I haven’t had chance to read yet. However, I think top of the list will be Adam Stout’s Creating prehistory : Druids, ley hunters and archaeologists in pre-war Britain. I attended a talk by him when it was work in progress and I thought it was an interesting take on the history of archaeology. Quite a few histories emphasis the development of scientific progress in archaeology, the context being what came before and what when after. Stout’s view strikes me as being a bit more, archaeological for want of a better word. He was emphasising the social context of archaeology including the actions of antiquarians. I can’t remember if it was him or Ronald Hutton who suggested that, in the UK, archaeology supplanted antiquarian use of prehistoric sites — rather than grew from it.
I don’t think it’s going to be a universally popular book and I’ll be surprised if I agree with all of it. On the other hand I think he’ll have had a go at string an argument together and, last time I read something by him, he’s capable of writing without it being like sandpaper on the eyes. Having said that the first sentence of the sample chapter looks odd. Hopefully he explained what the Universal Bond was in an earlier chapter.
Anyway, if you have an opinion an what you think is the best new archaeology book, leave him a comment.
Google+Let’s begin at the very beginning Smail on Deep History at Times Higher Education.
A review at the New York Times.
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I bought this a while ago when it came out in paperback because Sainsbury’s had it on special offer. I’ve read it, but haven’t commented on it for a few reasons. Partly because I seem to have bought a faulty copy. The God Delusion is a vicious angry screed against religion, or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know because my version is, in contrast, polite and reasoned. By and large that makes it a more dangerous book, because although I don’t think there’s anything particularly new in it, it is presented well and puts forward both a positive view of atheism and why Dawkins thinks religion is a problem. To the joy of theists though there are a couple of disappointing sections.
One is use of the term Neville Chamberlain Atheist. I don’t like it. It’s inelegant. It’s used describe those who would appease relgious demands by equating them with the British Prime Minister who initially appeased Hitler, but then took a stand and decided to take Britain to war, despite a large number of people in Parliament still favouring appeasement. It’s not just the equation with Neville Chamberlain that I don’t think works. There’s an unspoken implication that fundamentalists are similar to Nazis. I don’t think that works either. The Nazis were openly unpleasant people and you couldn’t be a Nazi if you belonged to certain groups. Fundamentalists are in contrast more insidious. They have room to police everyone in their belief system. Whether or not Dawkins is to blame for the term is uncertain from the book, because he also cites Michael Ruse in this section so it’s possible he got the term from him. I haven’t read Ruse’s article because it appeared in Playboy and I’m not really willing to ask for it on inter-library loan. Orac has said something similar (about Neville Chamberlain, not Playboy), and Saint Gasoline disagrees. Personally I’d argue that the term should be something more like Tony Blair Atheist after someone who respects another’s beliefs despite the lack of evidence and assists them in inflicting damage on other people because of faith and poltical expediency.
While that was inelegant another section was truly bad. I didn’t like is the bit on God as a meme at all. He describes an experiment similar to Chinese Whispers. In one experiment a group of children demonstrate how to make a Chinese junk from paper by origami to another group. This group then teaches a third generation and so on. In another experiment one group of children draw a junk and pass the drawing along to a second generation to copy and so on. He predicts that by the time you get to the tenth generation the origami method will still be transmitted with high fidelity whilst the drawing will have mutuated. Similarly because religion is an imitated series of practices rather than an end product religion too can be transmitted by a meme.
This sounds reasonable, or at least it did in 1999 when Dawkins first described the experiment in the preface to The Meme Machine. He hadn’t actually run the experiment at the time but you can’t do everything. Moving on to 2006 and the Junk appears again. Dawkins still hasn’t done the experiment but nonetheless argues from the results about how culture propagates. This bothers me deeply because I thought that one of the things about experiments is that you need to do them. I appreciate he’s a busy man and he may not have the time. But he has chosen to write on the subject. Would it be reasonable for me to talk about heredity based on my thought experiment? Would it still be reasonable for me to recycle the same thought experiment seven years later without doing it? If a creationist did this they would be mocked mercilessly. Thankfully the meme concept has absolutely no bearing on the existence or otherwise of gods, but it sticks out as a low point in what is otherwise a very good book. I suppose this would at least indicate that I’m thinking about his arguments rather than purely accepting them in his authority, which is just as well as the rest of his arguments are all sound and rational.
One of the sections I particularly liked was on the Hitler was an Atheist / Christian argument. I assumed Hitler was a Christian because he said so. This isn’t enough for Dawkins and here he goes much more deeply into Hitler’s beliefs and concludes that the evidence is shaky enough that you can’t be certain he was a Christian. He may have used Christianity as a vehicle for his beliefs, but it wasn’t necessarily a belief he shared. This is where he demonstrates that he has a right to be indignant when people refer to him as a fundamentalist. This is much more representative of the thought in the book and the two points I bring up above cover around six pages of the four hundred and twenty in the book.
I’ll be honest it’s not radically changed my view of atheism, because it expresses a lot of what I thought anyway. However if you live in a less atheist-friendly environment like Texas I can see how publishing books like this and outing yourself can help. While Dawkins is firmly anti-religion he is also pro-human and the world might be a better place if a few more people were like that.
Google+Phil sent me a link to the Amazon UK page for the new book by Richard Littlejohn. He’s a hack for the Daily Mail, a news organisation that makes Fox News look fair and balanced, so I thought that Phil’s recent trip to Syria had left him with mental trauma. Not so. You’d expect the book to pick up mixed reviews. On the contrary it’s picking up wide acclaim, and masses of five star votes. Here’s a sample of the 5/5 reviews:
No-one else can express such complex right wing views in such a monosyllabic form.
To buy only one copy of this book would be a crime.With this insightful, visionary, and — I am not ashamed to say — celestially inspirational commentary on modern life, Richard Littlejohn has rendered the entire canon of Western literature, philosophy and ethical discourse entirely moot.
Littlejohn’s book is so brilliant that when, as is inevitable in modern Britain, a gay immigrant made an attempt to steal it from my bag it literally burnt his hands and made them dissolve a little bit.
There are those who credit Plato with defining that obscure and fluctuating artefact which has been termed the ‘western mind’. Perhaps we might admit the philosophies of Jesus of Galillee and Freidrich Nietzche into that élite club of thinkers who have contributed to its further elucidation — but never before has a work emerged of which we can triumphantly declaim: Plato is obscured, we have our new republic!
I recently died and went to heaven. This book bought me back.
Littlejohn steamroles through everything wrong with our country– keeping people safe, re-using rubbish, etc.- in a brilliant style that evokes Dickens at his best.
Furthermore, I have read Tolstoy, and yes, this does indeed turn into Tolstoy– i forget where exactly, but somewhere between pages 204 and 206.
Having created a new paradigm in non-fiction literature, as awesome in its sweep as it is remarkable in its vision, the only question that remains is where will Littlejohn go from here?
If you like LittleJohns opinions I urge you to get somebody to read it out aloud for you, priceless!
If you only buy one ill-focussed, obvious, pointless rant at the expense of easy targets who would probably need to board up their windows if any of the people who support Littlejohn could actually read, then make it this one.
The reviews are amazing, and there’s over seventy of them.
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I did have some qualms about reviewing this book before it arrived. It’s a free review copy, so I was wondering what to do if it turned out to be awful. I tend not to write negative reviews if I can help it, unless something is surprisingly bad, because I prefer to spend my time talking about things which deserve attention. Fortunately this remains an unsolved puzzle, because Archaeology is a Brand! by Cornelius Holtorf and illustrated by Quentin Drew is (unsurprisingly) good.
In fact I shall be cheerfully taking ideas out of this book for a few posts in the future. The reason is that this book tackles an under-appreciated aspect of archaeology, it’s public perception. Holtorf argues that archaeology is in an enviable position compared to other academic subjects as it is one of the few fields which seems to enjoy mass appeal. Yet despite this the public perception of archaeology seems to remain a major problem for some in the profession. In one of the many quotable passages he says:
I have given up counting the number of exhibitions, educational events and publications that are shouting into the reader’s face that “the real archaeologist works practically never like Indiana Jones/Lara Croft.” Translated, that means as much as “If you happen to be interested in archaeology because of Indiana Jones/Lara Croft, then this isn’t for you!” Archaeology is thus suddenly outed as a different kind of ‘person’ that you thought and hoped it was, a person that lacks some of the traits you found most appealing.
Well so what? He continues:
It is the equivalent to Greenpeace beginning a public presentation about its work by stating that “the real Greenpeace activist works practically never in a small rubber-dinghy fighting illegal whalers.” Although true, this would achieve nothing except alienate an initially favourable audience before it has had an opportunity to hear what you actually want to convey.p134
Cornelius Holtorf argues that the public perception of archaeology is of huge value, and that understanding how archaeology is received by the public could be a major asset in public communication. Archaeologists simply don’t know how well-loved they are.
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Why read? These days it’s mainly work. This in contrast was for pleasure, and it is a pleasure. I’ve has this for a while but I haven’t written a review because I wanted to be able to refer back to the book as I wrote — and I mislaid it.
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe, better known as a Professor of Iron Age Archaeology rather than an ancient historian. It’s a tale of the man who discovered Britain, because Natives don’t count. Pytheas did count because he was a Greek from the city of Massalia, modern day Marseilles, who tried to go as far north as he could.
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