Patricia A. McAnany & Norman Yoffee - Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire

Jared Diamond's books have become phenomenal bestsellers. Both Guns, Germs and Steel and the more recent Collapse have sold in their thousands and are regularly referenced, quoted and used as academic texts. Diamond has been, and should be praised for his attempts to look at human society and history with a critical eye. Famously he quotes a Papua New Guinean, Yali, in the first book, who questions why it is that white people have all the goods and his people have none. In trying to answer this complex question, Diamond challenges many assumptions. Not least some attitudes of racial superiority from the whites against those with darker skins.

However, many people clearly feel that Diamonds reductionism is inadequate. I felt that Collapse was less persuasive than Guns, Germs and Steel. In my review of it though, I complained that I didn't like the way that Diamond could point the finger at irrational behaviour in historical societies, without a similar critique of the irrationality at the heart of modern capitalism.

In Questioning Collapse, a wide range of anthropologists, archaeologists and social scientists offer their responses to Diamonds books. Most of these responses are very critical indeed. The advertising campaign for Collapse centred on Diamond's version of the story of the end of the civilisation on Easter Island. Diamond located the collapse here, in the irrational destruction of the islands forests. "What did the person who cut the last tree down think?" was the question posed by the advertising agency. Yet the title to the chapter on Easter Island in this volume refers to the "Myth" of ecocide on Easter Island. The authors conclude that "there is no evidence that the island represents a case of 'ecocide' where a large population crashed from environmental ruin before Europeans arrived".

Instead, this version of the Easter Island story is one were the European arrival was the trigger for population crash on the islands, instead, "as the idea of 'ecocide' has gained currency, the victims of cultural and physical extermination have been turned into the perpetrators of their own demise!"

Similar arguments are thrown up in other chapters. The author of the chapter responding to Diamond's thoughts on the "Archaeology of the American Southwest" is very critical of Diamond's methods. He accuses Diamond of "completely ignoring" thousands of years of history. The story of "environmental mismanagement" by indigenous people that Diamond offers, this author suggests, ends up justifying the actions of the colonizers. After all, if the native people couldn't manage the land properly, than those who came after them could. Thus, despite the evidence of thousands of years of successful farming in the desert, we are led to believe that the indigenous people were "failures" whereas those who green the desert of the American south-west with golf courses are somehow successful.

Several essays remind us that many of the civilisations that Diamond classes as failures, have survived far longer than those that he considers successes. The decline of the Norse society in Greenland, long enough to provide "four additional generations" is, longer than several twentieth-century European states have lasted. The city of Uruk in Mesopotamia, "flourished, though not without its ups and downs, for more than 3,000 years", hardly an example of a mismanaged environment.

What these authors are trying to do, is to avoid looking for simple answers to difficult questions. Several of them ask, what do we actually mean by collapse? In Mesopotamia, or South America in the case of the Maya, civilisations declined, and populations decreased enormously. But this does not necessarily mean the end of civilisation. Hundreds of thousands of people still speak Maya, and even play a version of the ancient ball-game. Is this actually a Collapse?

Changes to human societies, and even their collapse is down to many factors. Sometimes environmental questions play a role. Though more often, the determining factor is not the climate, but the political and economic setup. The "choices" a society can make are constrained by the social forces within those societies. Some Maya cities did decline rapidly in the face of drought. Others continued to thrive or expand, despite suffering from similar environmental problems. Those that survived were ones that adapted and changed, often because new forces were able to force rulers to behave differently, or stand aside. As in the case of the American people in the south-west, Diamond's failure to explain their own history, ends up misunderstanding the nature of the decline of their society. It ends up letting those who re-shaped America in their own interests, off the hook. Consistently Diamond is accused of misrepresenting the realities of the societies he examines, in the case of south America David Cahill argues, for instance, that he "misrepresents, perhaps unintentionally, the complexity and achievements of Incan or Andean civilization".

These essays are stimulating and informative. They are also unusual in that the authors are presented not simply as academics, but as people engaged in real dialogues and discussions with the people and places that they study. Several, such as Michael Wilcox who wrote the chapter on the indigenous people of the south-west of America, are also part of the communities they study. His chapter is both an academic critique of Diamond's work and a personal cry of rage at the attitudes that many academics have taken towards his people.

This is not to say the essays are perfect. I was struck reading the book that rarely are Diamond's ideas laid open. It would be more useful if some of the authors had said "on page X, Diamond argues this, but we believe this other thing". Too many of the responses are generalised critiques of Diamond's positions, not detailed challenges to his ideas.

These are not academic spats. There are real questions of how groups of humans can and do survive environmental catastrophe. These have important lessons for our own times. As the authors of the chapter on Easter Island finish, the "real story here is one of human ingenuity and success that lasted more than 500 years on one of the world's most remote human outposts."

I would recommend this book to those interested in the fates of human societies facing environmental and social changes. But I would also encourage people to read Jared Diamond's books alongside them, at least for reference. Diamond builds up a powerful case and we can all learn from the challenges to his arguments and ideas.

Related Reviews


Diamond - Collapse

This review of Questioning Collapse by a anthropology academic is also useful and can mark the start point for interested readers who want to reader more about the debates that have sprung up as a result of the publication of QC.

Peter J. Reynolds - Ancient Farming

This short book is a useful look into what we know about how people in the neolithic, bronze and iron ages, farmed. Beginning with a section on the evidence that archaeologists use to try and piece together the lives of ancient farmers, the book moves on then to look at the development of agriculture and how farming itself took place.

The sections on the development of the earliest ploughs are some of the most interesting, in part because the work is informed by experimental archaeology and farming that takes place at the Butser Ancient Farm. Here they recreate ancient tools and experiment with how the worked. They also try and apply some of what the know of farming to the past, so for instance, archaeological sites with a post hole, surrounded by a depression in the earth may well be sites of ancient hay stacks. In the more recent past, these tended to be made in a similar way, built around a central pole fixed in the earth. Some of this the author points out, may be conjecture, but other evidence is more convincing. The scratch marks on ancient plough tips matching those made after farming with modern copies proving, with little doubt, that this was the original purpose for these tools.

The final chapter deals with the seasonal life of an ancient farming. Unsurprisingly it is very similar to life for many farmers today, in terms of the times of sowing, harvest and ploughing. The tools are different, the scale is different and today farming is driven as much by the profit motive as by the need to feed people, but there is much that remains the same. A useful introduction to this subject.

Steven Mithen - To the Islands

Before reviewing this book, I want to mention how I came about it. On holiday just south of Oban on the west coast of Scotland, I visited Kilmartin. This small village is the centre of an enormous concentration of neolithic sites, including several impressive cairns, a few stone circles and not a few standing stones and inscribed rocks. Kilmartin has a very impressive museum including an extraordinary bookshop specialising in particular ancient history. I encourage readers who are fascinated by the Mesolithic and neolithic periods of history to visit and support both the museum and its bookshop.

I was lucky to find Steven Mithen's book there, because holidaying on an island very near many of the places mentioned inside, helped me picture and understand his work more. Mithen is the author of After the Ice a book that I consider one of the best introduction to the lives of ancient humans living in the post ice-age world. His latest book, To the Islands is much less an academic work and more of a archaeological autobiography. Mithen describes how his career has been tied to the people of the Mesolithic era since the earliest days of his PhD studies. The Mesolithic people were the hunter-gathers who spread across the world at the end of the last ice-age. They lived, in a myriad of different ways depending on the landscape they inhabited, before with the arrival of agricultural practices, the “neolithic revolution” led to a new mode of production.

Mithen believes that to understand the people of the Mesolithic requires a detailed understanding of their lives in the context of the environment and landscape they inhabit. The fish they could catch, the deer they could hunt, the trees and plants that surrounded them, the way they would have been inspired by the land itself. His early research using computer models to predict how hunter-gatherers might exploit the natural resources, led to repeated visits to the Hebrides to try and understand the lives of these people.

Mithen is enchanted by the Hebrides, their culture, the environment and the modern people, as well as the historical inhabitants. The remoteness of many of the islands, despite the popularity of places like Jura as modern holiday destinations, has helped protect many important prehistoric sites. This remoteness leads to further problems. Mesolithic archaeology cannot rely on hunting for visible remains like stone circles. Rather, the archaeologists must look for more subtle clues. Shell middens – the piles of waste left by prehistoric peoples as they extracted food from limpets and mussels are gradually covered by grass. Rabbits can dig out the prehistoric shells, littering them outside the entrances to their warrens and provide a clue for archaeologists. Other clues can be found in subtle surface bumps, or as Mithen tries to show, simply looking at the landscape and trying to get the mindset of an ancient hunter-gatherer. What would you look for as a hunter-gatherer on a Scottish island? Easy access to fish, woodlands and shelter? Where might you sit?

In the decades of research and excavation that Mithen does, with dozens of students and helpers, he gradually comes to understand more about the prehistoric life. On several occasions, Mithen quotes an earlier archaeologist, Lewis Binford about how archaeologists must “recalibrate their perspective of hunters and gatherers from the five foot excavation unit at a single site to an area of more than 300,000 square kilometres”. 

With this view, Mithen shows how hunter-gatherer life in the Hebrides was spread over island after island. One a source for flint for tools, others a good place to fish or find shellfish, another a ideal hunting ground. Life then wasn't stagnant, nor was it necessarily based in one place, instead it was spread across time and space. The landscape was a living part of human life, not a separate thing.

Mithen's book is wonderful. By choosing the autobiographical format, he has shown how archaeological understanding must develop over time, how intellectual ideas must be challenged and developed regularly to allow for new data and information.

For those amateur archaeologists, two things will be particularly pleasing about Mithen's book and his work. One is the detailed descriptions of the archaeological processes, how and where they sink trenches, why it takes so long and costs so much. The other is the importance he gives to amateurs. Countless times he visits local people and is shown their collections of Mesolithic tools. He frequently relies on local knowledge from farmers and others to find the best sites and is clearly inspired by the way that people are interested in the history of their place, even thousands of years ago.

One thought popped into my head repeatedly while reading this book. The world of academia that Mithen inhabits, a world of grant applications and quests for funding, is one that must be getting tighter and tighter. In fact his search for funding and support for his work makes up an important theme of the book. I don't doubt it is easier to get money to dig up a site of national importance or a famous image. But archaoeological work must rest on all history, even the small charcoal remains and broken tools that dominate the historical record from our hunter-gatherer past.

As funding gets further squeezed by Tory cuts and as education gets still further restricted to those who can afford it, how will academic subjects like archaeology cope? Mithen describes the passion and enthusiasm of his students and helpers. But if there is no cash to fund digs, how will the next generation of archaeologists develop and learn? Mithen is clearly someone prepared to fight for his subject in the wider world. We'll need him and others like him in the struggle to understand our past, but also to ensure that in the future we can continue to learn.

Related Reviews

Mithen - The Singing Neanderthals
Mithen - After the Ice

Thomas C. Patterson - Karl Marx, Anthropologist

Thomas Patterson sets out to argue that central to Marx's understanding of the world, history and society was what we might now call anthropology. In one sense this should be no surprise - the study of society and how it changes does after all centre upon an understanding on what makes humans tick.

Marx was fascinated by human society in all its forms. Both Engels and he devoured contemporary books and research on archaeology, anthropology and related subjects. Patterson points out, that between 1879 and 1882, Marx filled 450 pages of notes "on topics as diverse as prehistoric Europe, the history of India, Dutch colonialism, family and gender in Roman society and American Indian societies". In part this is no doubt a result of the fascination that Marx had with history and people. But this was also a time when Marx was feverishly working on other topics, and Patterson argues that this reading reflected not just an interest, but as part of an attempt to understand non-capitalist and pre-capitalist societies. This was not a separate interest, but as part of a wider attempt to grapple with human history. In particular, Patterson argues, that Marx was trying to understand the potential for "alternative pathways of development for capitalist societies by the 1870s and for non-industrial and non-Western societies more than a decade earlier".

Marx and Engels also had a great fascination with other important subjects that were shaking up the intellectuals of Victorian England. One of these was evolution, and Marx devoured Darwin. "Absolutely splendid" was how Marx described The Origin of the Species in a letter to Engels, less than a month after its publication. Marx was critical, but he also saw how "Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and the plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, "inventions" and Malthusian "struggle for existence."

This was not to argue that the social structures visible around them were mirrored in nature, but rather that Darwin and other scientists tended to reflect social ideas in their work. Their ability to locate the new scientific explanations and ideas in a wider understanding of society meant that Marx and Engels could be incredibly perceptive. Patterson demonstrates this by comparing Engels' little known pamphlet The Part Played By Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man to modern understandings of human evolution and the development of language and so on. Patterson concludes that Engels "got it right!" in his argument that the ability of proto-humans to use their hands as tools, helped to develop and encourage both this and their wider cogitative abilities. Of course, these ideas on the part of Engels were broad brushstrokes, and as with other areas of his scientific writing, Engels was often wrong. But what matters here is the approach to a subject and the attempts to link science with wider social questions.

Patterson's book is fascinating if a little hard going in places. Occasionally it feels to academic and the reader new to Marx's work (or indeed wider philosophical writings) might find some of it quite difficult. I was disappointed with the price-tag. Twenty pounds for a book of only 200 pages is a little steep, but clearly this is aimed at the academic market. This brings a second minor point - Patterson has an extensive and very useful bibliography. The one obvious missing Marxist from this is Chris Harman who had a great fascination with anthropology and wider human history. His writings I think would have fascinated Patterson and backed up some of his wider arguments. I cannot help but feel though that his absence reflects the fact that Harman was never an academic. In this context though, Harman's grounding in revolutionary practice would also have been useful to the author.

Related Links

Chris Harman reviewed an earlier book by Patterson, Marx's Ghost - Conversations with Archaeologists. You can read that here.
This review of Karl Marx, Anthropologist by an actual anthropologist is worth reading.

Francis Pryor - The Making of the British Landscape

The British landscape is far from natural. Almost nothing that we see as our cars and trains cross the countryside is natural in a truely historic sense. Trees and hedges have been planted, farms and fields laid out. Roads planned and forests cleared. By arguing that the landscape around the islands of cities on the British Isles is not natural, Francis Pryor is following the lead of Oliver Rackham's interesting book The History of the Countryside, which I reviewed here.

However, Francis Pryor takes this much further. While Rackham acknowledges the human actions that have created the countryside, Pryor puts human activity at the centre of the story. No mere list of plants, animals and types of forest or waterway for Pryor. Instead his archaeologist approach is to try and understand why and how our ancestors changed the natural world. Pryor doesn't deny the importance of other environmental changes, but argues that these are secondary to the influence of human beings.

At the heart of much of Pryor's other books is a sense of continuity. This continuity between ancient life and more modern times occassionaly seems a bit laboured. But in the case of the countryside, Pryor shows how the world outside our windows is in many cases, truely ancient. We all learnt at school that modern roads often follow the routes of Roman Roads. But those Roman routes often took the same paths as far more ancient pathways. Trading routes of Bronze and Iron Age peoples. Similarly with the edges of agricultural areas, boundaries often stretch back far in time.

The major transformation of the British Landscape took place thousands of years ago - with the clearance of the forests that spread following the last iceage. These were cleared as long ago as 3000 BCE. The ancients transformed the landscape. Even today the bumps and ditches can hide significant ancient activites.

Pryor's story takes us through the changes of Roman times, though here again he is keen to stress that life for the majority of people on these Islands changed little, before and after the invasion. Continuity, particularly in rural life was the reality. Though the Roman's brought with them much, particularly tools and implements that had significant impacts of ancient life. Then we move onto the changes in Medieval times, in a particularly fascinating chapter Pryor takes us through the detailed agricultural evidence that demonstrates the planning that went into the creation of open field or stripping farming schemes in parts of Britain.

Pryor is keen to argue against the notion of revolution. He doesn't appear to like the term, and clearly thinks that when it is applied to agriculture and industry it is particularly inappropriate. But I think he's mistaken. Revolutions are not the short, brief affairs beloved of some historians. They are long drawn out events that bring fundamental change, but aren't always obvious at the time. Take events in Egypt at the moment. The fall of Mubarak was merely the first stage in a much larger revolutionary story.

It would be wrong to characterise agricultural revolutions as sudden events. Though changes could be sudden - imagine the impact of a new type of plough when it arrives in a village for the first time. But the introduction of open field systems or their enclosure later on, led to fundamental changes, not just in agriculture, but in terms of property relations, life in the cities and so on. These are revolutions in the truest sense of the word.

That criticism aside, there is lots here of those whose interest are the changes that took place in Britain over the centuries. Because Pryor doesn't pretend that the landscape is only trees, fields and forests, he discusses such interesting topics as the impact of landscape gardening in country houses, the arrival of tourism in the Lake District or the planning of new towns in post World War II Britain.

Once again Francis Pryor has written a fascinating work of history, that will inspire and excite everyone with an interest in social history, it deserves a wide readership.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain AD
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages
Pryor - Britain BC

Rosemary Hill - Stonehenge

It is rare that I express disappointment with a book. Usually I am aware enough of the contents to feel that I know what I am about to read, so it is unusual to find myself criticising one.

However, it may be that my own criticisms of this book are misplaced. The Wonders of the World series has been extremely enjoyable and I would encourage others to read these short books. There are links to previous reviews below.

Rosemary Hill's book though suffers from not really being about it's subject matter. Now this is true of all the series to a lesser extent. You can't really discuss the Temple of Jerusalem or the Colosseum without mentioning their impact on society and cultures that have come along after they were built, or destroyed.

But this book on Stonehenge suffers from seeming to barely mention any detail about Stonehenge at all. Apart from the very first chapter, and some of the later chapters which deal with modern archaeology. We learn very little about the monument itself. Hill is correct of course to point out that there are many unknowns about Stonehenge. Any book about the place could and indeed should point to the controversies that still exist. Instead we're treated to large chunks about the influence of Stonehenge on various different cultural stages of British history - the Antiquarians, The Romantics and so on. Stonehenge as an idea, has had a big impact - its influence extended to the architects who put together major bits of Bath and Covent Garden for instance.

Hill tells this story particularly well, but I for one found myself not really caring much. The various different suggestions about the origins of the monument that have been put forward by various scientists, amateurs and crackpots over the years are also interesting, but they reflect more of contemporary history, than illuminate the past.

However, I do think Hill does her story of Stonehenge well. I can't fault that, and I did enjoy her account of the more recent history of the monument - the changing social attitudes to conservation of ancient places, access rights and so on. Her final chapter has plenty of ammunition that can be used against recent governments (including I think the Coalition that is in place while I write this) for their attitudes to places like Stonehenge.

But I did feel disappointed. There should have been more about Stonehenge itself and the people who built it, as well as the epic monumental landscape that it is a central part of. Readers who might like more of that, are encouraged to search out Francis Pryor's excellent book Britain BC, which delves into some of this.

Related Reviews in the Wonders of the World series


Watkin - The Roman Forum
Fenlon - Piazza San Marco
Tillotson – Taj Mahal
Goldhill - The Temple of Jerusalem
Gere - The Tomb of Agamemnon
Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Marcel Mazoyer & Laurence Roudart - A History of World Agriculture from the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis

Depsite how we in the modern world might view agriculture, it is

more than simply another branch of industry. For those of us living in the developed world, the vast majority of us have little or nothing to do with the production of food, or indeed other crops. Today, those doing the farming work that feeds us all, comprise, in the developed world at least, somewhere around 5% of the populations.

However, for the vast majority of human history and indeed for most of the undeveloped world, this is not the case. Most people were involved in the production of food, and in most historical societies, almost all of the work that took place within a community was related to food production.

Mazoyer and Roudart's work is an examination of the history of agriculture - from the earliest hunter-gatherers who would have nurtured and protected plants, to the slash and burn cultivation that replaced them, through the various permanent "post-forest agrarian" cultures that saw the growth and strengthen of class society, to feudal and eventually capitalist agriculture. It is a monumental book, both readable and interesting as well as in depth and well researched.

There is a temptation to see agricultural history as a linear path. Indeed my summary of the book in the previous paragraph makes that very mistake. But development of agriculture wasn't linear, though it did develop along definite paths and through particular stages. The reasons for moving from one form to a more developed form are complex and varied. Sometimes people didn't move on - which is why today there are still hunter-gatherer communities or people practising slash and burn cultivation. More developed agriculture is not necessarily easier work - though it will invariably provide a greater surplus. Nor is there necessarily a straight dividing line. Hunter-gatherers will have planted and harvested grains. Slash and Burn cultivators would have gathered nuts and hunted game.

Often though, population pressures and growth were a key factor - in particular with the switch from slash and burn to more permanent agriculture. The authors document these processes, along with all the other factors to show just why the world of farming changed when it did. There is a wealth of technical detail - some of it obscure to those of us who've never seen a field of corn harvested. But what is fascinating is the way there is often repetition of tools and practises across many different continents. What is also amazing is the way some primitive methods still dominate - the simple scratch plough (the ard) still being used by hundreds of thousands today, even though it was replaced hundreds of years ago elsewhere.

But this book is also part polemic. The authors are trying to explain why it is, despite technical innovation and cheaper materials, the "difference in productivity between the least efficient agriculture in the world, practiced exclusively with manual implements ... and the best-equipped and most efficient agriculture has increased dramatically. The gap has widened from 1 to 10 in the interwar period to 1 to 2000 at the end of the twentieth century".

They continue by pointing out that "One third of the world's peasants, or more than 400 million of the working population, work not only with strictly manual tools but without fertilizer, feed for livestock, pesticides, and specially selected varieties of plants and breeds of animals". One billion people get their food from peasants farming like this.

The root of this is of course wealth. The poorest farmers simply cannot afford to lift themselves out of the situation they are in, to obtain the most advanced equipment, fertilizers and seeds. They cannot compete against the cheaper priced crops from the developed world, and face sinking back into poverty and starvation.

So the last chapters of the book look at alternate economic strategies to solve this problem. This is, I would argue the weakest section. The authors aren't naive enough to believe that simple controls on the import of cheap foodstuffs are enough to raise prices in the home market. But they have no other option. The problem is, that they aren't discussing agriculture in the context of capitalism - and the inherent power that the richest nations have over the poorest. Whatever rules may be created by a United Nations body, the rules of colonialism and imperialism will make the poorest pay.

But these are minor criticisms of a tremendously important book. This solid investigation into the basis for human societies throughout the last 20,000 years is ammunition for those of us who believe a genuine materialist history of humans is possible. By examining in such detail different cultures and societies, we can put together an understanding of human development, and failure which will help us understand the enormous challenges for the future.

Eleanor Burke Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance

Eleanor Burke Leacock's collection of essays, Myths of Male Dominance (Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally) is one of the most important works for those who argue that the way we live our lives today is not the natural order of things. Leacock's articles are a powerful defence of the Marxist notion of "Primitive Communism" - the idea that in humanity's past, our societies were egalitarian, private property was unknown in a general sense and class differences nonexistent. Most interestingly, this means that there were also differences in the way that men and women related - monogamy has not always been the natural way of doing things, men have not always been dominant in relationships or society, and different attitudes to sexuality have been far more common that most commentators would have us believe.

Leacock's own research was centred on a Canadian tribe called the Montagnais-Naskapi. These were people who, in their hunter-gather past had lived in a "primitive communist" society. What is almost unique about them, is that this lifestyle had been extremely well documented by the Europeans who encountered them. The Montagnais had lived by collected the fruit and berries of their local area, as well as hunting the plentiful game at different times of the year. European traders arrived in the 1600s and began to trade goods, with the Montagnais in exchange for vast quantities of furs - beaver and the like.

This caused a fundamental transformation of Montagnais life. From a society were private property was almost unknown, were decision making was a collective process and status in society was not based on property or any form of economic power, the Montagnais were transformed into a people were private property (in this case the animal traps and the associated areas of rivers / land) formed part of their lives. This introduction of private property changed all the other relationships in their society, as did the cynical and regular interference of Jesuit missionaries. The Jesuits who documented the lives of the indigenous people, also attempted to introduce more European things - like leaders, monogamy, physical beating of children and so on. Prompting one Montagnais to say "You Jesuit's love only your own children, we love all of them".

By the time Leacock was able to live with the Montagnais, a surprising amount of their earlier social relations still existed. She describes how hard she found it to understand the collective decision making process as someone who has only lived in a society with leaders and social hierarchies.

These experiences and the documentary evidence of a people with a completely different set of relations of productions to those we see in the vast majority of the world today shape most essays in this book. Leacock looks at the role of women in Montagnais society - and similar societies around the world, family relations and so on. She also look critically at the ideas of two of the thinkers who have most often dominated this form of discussion for the left - Lewis Morgan and Fredrich Engels.

Collected here is her introduction to Lewis Morgan's classic book of anthropology - Ancient Society. The book itself informed Engels' own work (as well as Marx) in particular, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Leacock wrote a classic introduction to this as well, of which sadly only part is in here.

Rather impressively, Leacock also includes articles and critical responses from other anthropologists - together with her reactions. This is of great interest, in part because she is a born polemicist, but also because it is fascinating to see her ideas tested, and passing the test.

For anyone with an interest in ancient cultures, this is a fascinating book. However it should also be required reading for everyone who wants to argue, or dares to believe that the "natural" relationships that we experience under capitalism are anything but natural.

Related Reviews

Dee - The Red in the Rainbow - - Sexuality, Socialism & LGBT Liberation

Engels - Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Frederick Engels - The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Frederick Engels' book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was an incredible achievement. It shows Engels' and Marx's fascination by every aspect of human life and history. Engels shows a deep knowledge of his subject, which while dated by today's understanding, must have meant he was at the forefront of contemporary anthropological work.

Origin is an attempt to demonstrate that the way in which human society is organised has radically changed through the years. Human's haven't always lived in a society that is based on competition, earlier societies, particularly those we would now call hunter-gathering communities, were Engels argued based on primitive communism. In these there was no private property of land or materials and this meant that human relationships were based on eglatarian principles.

Engels' starting point for much of his work are the writings of Lewis Morgan, who was the first person to propose a stagiest history for humans, arguing, based on his understanding of langugages around the world, that people tended to follow a particular set of social organisations through the centuries. These three stages, savagery, barbarism and civilisation had with them a particular set of social organisations, particular those to do with the family and marriage.

Engels is particularly keen to show that the subjagated position of women under capitalism, was not something that was always true. He writes "That woman was the slave of man at the commencement of society is one of the most absurd notions that have come down to us from the Enlightenment".

Engels, following Morgan, writes that the modern family arises as part and parcel of the development of private property relations. Because in the first instance, material objects (such as tools) and the produce of agriculture end up in the hands of males in society (due to the division of labour that takes place as women take on the primary role of bringing up children) this leads to the male lineage becoming important for the inheritance of wealth. This then, for Engels is the world historic defeat of the female sex. It is also a defeat for males to, as it creates a situation were no one can be happy. Engels is at his best when he demonstrates, that we live in a world were monogamy is held up to be the ideal, but is not the reality (particularly for men) and this situation will continue until the means of production are once again held in common - and the individual family ceases to be the basic economic unit in society.

Much of the central arguments of Engels work, on the social relationships between people in ancient societies and their languages can be shown to be flawed. But this doesn't invalidate the central themes of his book, that the rise of class societies and the associated move towards private property leads to radically different family relations.

The section on the state is the most useful here. Engels shows how the state machinary develops as classes arise, with the needs of one group (the ruling class) to protect its interests and its wealth. Engels contrasts the complex machinary of the state, with its police and judges and so on, with the "child like simplicity" of earlier societies that needed no such armed bodies of men. This state, Engels argues needs to be smashed and placed in a musuem alongside the "spinning wheel and the bronze axe". This will require a revolution in property relations, and the creation of a world which holds the means of production in common.

This new world would bring with it the emancipation of women. Only when women are able to take a full part in production within society will they truely hold an equal position in society - in other words, when women are free to do what they want, because of socialised childcare, because of full access to abortion and contraception and because they are not held back by artificial social constructs like the family under capitalism.

Engels work is still inspirational, if a little complex at times. It's worth perservering with, because it is the first real attempt by a Marxist to grapple with some of the complex questions thrown up by human history. If you get a copy, it's worth finding an edition that has an introduction that takes up some of the anthropological questions and develops these. The Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock wrote an introduction that did this, though I am not aware that it is in print. Part of it was reprinted in her collection Myths of Male Dominance, which I will review shortly. It is also mostly available here at Google Books.

Related Reviews

Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb
Engels - The Condition of the Working Class in England
Dee - The Red in the Rainbow - Sexuality, Socialism & LGBT Liberation

Hunt - The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Wolfgang Behringer - A Cultural History of Climate

The interaction between society and the natural world should be a major preoccupation for everyone these days. The way in which humans interact with the world around us, and the way in which we are in turn effected by the changing world has particular significance in an era of global warming.

However this isn't simply true of our modern, industrialised world. Towards the end of this book, the author shows how recently scientists have debated whether or not increased methane emissions as a result of the agricultural revolution, may have "already prevented a new ice age in the more distant past". Whatever the truth in this, and the author characteristically remains neutral about his own conclusions, all the evidence cited shows that it is the result of the during latest stage of human society that emissions have reached the extent that dramatic warming may occur.

At it's best, this book is a wonderful exploration of how human society has been impacted in the past by climatic changes. Take the collapse of the Mayan society as a result of the fairly rapid changing of their climate and the onset of extreme droughts - "The Maya did not die out as an ethnicity, but the nobility and priesthood disappeared from the scene". Behringer brings a wealth of evidence and anecdote to the discussion.

Unfortunately, despite the scope of the book, some of the sections are very short (the important discussion about the Mayan civilisation receives just over one page). In his discussions on the importance of weather and climate to human history, Behringer comes close in places to seeing climate, if not as the only factor leading to social change, then as the one that lies close to the root causes. For instance while he concedes that the years of repeated bad weather preceding the French Revolution wasn't the only factor that caused that radical transformation, but all the other factors - the "explosive cocktail" - were "compounded by a cluster of phenomena characteristic of the Little Ice Age".

The climate aspect though does provide some interesting insights. While discussing the Enlightenment, Behringer argues that during those years, "every harvest failure due to bad weather became a test for the Enlightenment". Not simply because the new sciences must explain the world, but because those representatives of the old order were quick to try and rouse the population against the new establishment.

Behringer is at his best when examining aspects of social history and the links with climate. From Witch hunting to the painting of landscapes there is much here to intrigue and cause debate. In particular there are some useful pen portraits that discuss why particular civilisations rose and why they may have fallen. At a time when we've just experienced the impact of a fairly minor volcanic eruption, Behringer shows how huge amounts of volcanic material entering the atmosphere have caused major social problems for many of our ancestors.

But his argument becomes increasingly weak the more he writes about modern climate science and society. Partly there is little new here, but Behringer clearly believes that little can be done to reduce emissions and transform industry. In part this is because he views the discussion through the prism of the failure of Kyoto. But it is also because he clearly has no sense of the potential for social transformation arising from new mass movements inspired in part, by the failure of the politicians to deal with climate change.

Strangely though, for a book written in 2006, there is one glaring scientific and social problem. Increasingly in the last five or so years, scientists have been warning about runaway climate change, tipping points and feedback mechanisms. These occur when the processes unleashed by global warming - the melting of ice caps - feed back on themselves and cause more warming. Surprisingly, given that this is a discussion on historic climate change, Behringer gives no time to examples of ancient "abrupt" climate change. None of this is discussed, and it allows the author to erroneously and dangerously claim that "The world will not come to and end. If it becomes warmer, we will get used to it".

This statement is simply not true. Many scientists and environmentalists are concerned that runaway climate change could result in a planet that is too hot to sustain human society. Sadly in the last quarter of his book, Behringer ends up arming those who argue that we don't need to do anything and can simply carry on as we have been doing.

David Watkin - The Roman Forum

I started this volume of the excellent Wonders of the World series prepared to dislike it. Perhaps I shouldn't read press releases, but when I read that David Watkin's book "celebrates the Forum as it should be seen - etched in the haunting engravings of Piranesi", my heart sank.

The Roman Forum is, for most people, the heart of Rome. It is the place you can go and feel like you're wandering down the Roman streets like the ancients did. This isn't new of course, Watkins shows us how countless tourists have done just that for centuries.

So I was skeptical about a book that seems to imply that the Forum as it is today was somehow wrong and should be appreciated through a return to romantic etchings from centuries ago. Indeed I thought, how can you discuss objectively such a historical setting, if your starting point is that only a particular artist can portray it correctly.

I have to admit that I was wrong. At least partly. What Watkin has done is very clever. He's exposed the myth that is the Forum and laid the basis for a different way of looking at the remains. Firstly he makes the point that little of what we see is real. Much of the most famous monuments, such as the famous Temple of the Vestal Virgins (pictured) are modern reconstructions, using only small amounts of the original materials. In the case of the Arch of Titus, little remains of the original (with the exception of the famous panels) and it is, according to Watkins "largely a nineteenth-century monument". Piranesi's etchings are important, because they are one of the best visualations of what these ruins looked like before various figures through history destroyed, damaged and rebuilt the area in an attempt to recreate it.


Secondly he shows how even quite recent archaeological practice has destroyed many buildings and remains of great importance in the rush to show the real Forum. This is an interesting and important debate. When you take a historical area like the Roman Forum, at what point should it be preserved? Do we want to see the Roman Forum of 2000 years ago? Or the Forum 500 years ago? The Forum has been lived in for thousands of years. The more modern buildings built in the 13th or 14th Centuries are as much a part of its history as those of Julius Caesar.

This is what the visitor won't see. I think the point that Watkin is making is that visitors are sold an illusion. The idea that the Forum has been frozen in time and they can see it as it was at the height of the Roman Empire. Of course, the Forum changed constantly, particularly in Roman times. Buildings were added, extended and destroyed and Watkin takes us through this history to try and illuminate what we see when we stand there.

So I admit that my first impressions of this book were incorrect. But there are problems with it. Firstly, this is not a history book. It is a book of architectural history that leaves the social and human history of the place out. This is a shame, because the Forum is, above all, a social place. But it can be frustrating for the lay reader. If you don't have a background in architecture and just want to understand more of what you are seeing, what is the non-specialist to make of sentences like this one, describing the Basilica of Maxentius;

"the whole of the north aisle with its central apse and its three arched exedrae with giant coffered barrel vaults which served to buttress the central groin-vaulted nave".

Rare is it that I have to resort quite so often to the dictionary to make it through whole paragraphs. This is a shame, because the rest of the Wonders of the World series that I've read have been tremendously accessible and open to the ordinary reader and this one feels just a little too pompous in places.

What this book does well is make the reader think about the history of places like the Forum differently. How we excavate and display history is important. How we preserve it and interpret it is subject to ongoing debate. So it's an interesting book to take with you to Rome, if only to feel sad has been lost.

Oh, and if you really want to walk down Roman streets visit Ostia Antica. It's a short train journey from Rome. Absolutely deserted and has a fantastic little restaurant in the middle.

Related Reviews in the Wonders of the World series

Fenlon - Piazza San Marco
Tillotson – Taj Mahal
Goldhill - The Temple of Jerusalem
Gere - The Tomb of Agamemnon
Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Clive Finlayson - The Humans Who Went Extinct, Why Neanderthals died out and we survived

Why the world is dominated by us and not Neanderthals, is a surprisingly complex question. Traditionally, we've been given an image of Neanderthals as lumbering idiots, not capable of withstanding the superior brain power and agility of our own ancestors. The reality is of course, far more complex.

The fossil records doesn't show any evidence that Neanderthals were ruthlessly displaced by our ancestors. What it does show, is that Neanderthal society was surprisingly complex, lasted (in the case of a small group in Gibraltar) as recently as 28,000 years ago. These were tool makers and hunters, not the stupid brutes portrayed in countless cartoons.

This is a fascinating look at our own peculiar history - how we developed, how tools transformed our ability to survive, but also occasionally limited our ability to adapt. The surprising role of climate change in getting us to were we are now is clearly explained.

Finlayson looks at why the Neanderthals went extinct and we didn't. There is every evidence that our ancestors and Neanderthals lived close together at the same time, though no evidence that they interbreed. Certainly they would have encountered each other while hunting or moving to different scavenging grounds.

So what happened to the Neanderthals? At a time of extremely primitive technology, environmental changes would have forced great changes upon human societies. In particular, the favoured hunting grounds of the Neanderthals, where areas where small tree coverage allowed for "ambush hunting". A colder climate forced the trees back, reducing areas available for hunting.

Alternate periods of warming and cooling would repeatedly isolate and then reunite populations. Obviously, some populations might not survive the changes, and the process would gradually reduce the overall population.

Luck has played a great hand in our own evolution. While some populations of our ancestors would have died out, a combination of luck, further developed bodies and the development of better technologies, as well as a wider global spread helped us survive.

Ruminating further on what survival means, Finlayson sees worrying parallels with today's changing planet. However he also points out, that it is all too easy to think that we are were we are today, because we are the product of "successful genes". Our genes are successful, only in the sense that we have made it to this point. "There were many highly successful lineages that went extinct because their luck ran out - the Neanderthals and other populations of proto-Ancestors among them".

More of the branches of our ancestral tree vanished than survived. It is only a small fraction of human existence on the planet since the development of agriculture, the point that fundamentally changed us. In that time, Finlayson argues we've lost contact with our biological heritage. There is a mismatch he argues, between our current methods of organising our lives, and the biology that evolved over millions of years.

In a sense I agree. This is close to the argument that Marxists put about a "metabolic rift" - that we have become alienated from the natural world that we are utterly dependent on. But there is a danger with Finlayson's argument - that we are simply the products of our biology. We have a unique ability to transform the world around us. At the moment, the present society we have created threatens to undermine the very ecology that is the basis for life on this planet. But we do also have in our power to transform our way of organising society and avoiding the fate of the Neanderthals.

Related Reviews

Mithen - After the Ice, A Global Human History

Buy it here.

Francis Pryor - Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons

In the simplistic view of British History, there was a brief period around 2000 years ago of stability, civilisation and prosperity with the arrival of the Romans. Either side of these few centuries was chaos, poverty and war.

In particular, the departure of the Roman's we are led to believe led to the collapse of civilisation followed by the brutal arrival of the Anglo Saxons. These Saxon's pushed aside the natives and established themselves as the new British. From such noble stock are the current denizens of this island descended.

Francis Pryor's book, which might loosely form the middle part of a trilogy, sets out to argue that this view of history is nonsense. Partly his argument is common sense. Why, with the departure of the Roman's would people simply abandon the towns and cities they had lived in, and disappear back into an earlier mode of existence?

Instead, Pryor argues persuasively that reality was very different. Firstly he explains that the Roman invasion actually impacted very little on the vast bulk of the population. Most people continued to farm as they had done, with perhaps better goods or more variety of items being available in the local market. This is explained in terms of the archaeological record by the continuity that the remains show. There aren't a series of breaks as the Roman's arrive and then leave in most places. Even in the new towns, there is often continuity between pre-Roman and Roman buildings.

A similar process takes place as the Roman's leave. Most places are left relatively undisturbed with minor changes - in particular coins vanish as the Roman market disappears. Bartering would have returned. The most common archaeological remains - pots - revert to simpler and local designs.

It should be pointed out that these aren't just Francis Pryor's ideas. He quotes numerous other archaeologists to back up his case and builds an extensive case. Here he summarises a fellow archaeologist, Dr. Richard Reece;

"He [Reece] sees no evidence for chaos or social collapse, because communities were resuming a pattern of life that had not died out and that was already well-established prior to the Roman interlude."

Following the Roman departure, there simply wasn't an Anglo-Saxon invasion. Certainly there was an Anglo-Saxon influence. But this wasn't out of the ordinary. There must have been trading networks, as well as other contacts between people living on the British Islands and the Continent for thousands of years. Pryor shows that the evidence for an Anglo-Saxon invasion is more in the minds of chroniclers and their more modern followers, than in the archaeological record.

There are numerous examples. Perhaps the most interesting is that from a farming point of view there is a great continuation of farming methods from before Roman times to more recent eras. A series of invasions by a new people, that displaced the earlier inhabitants, would have led to a change in the pollen records. Instead, either any invaders immediately learnt traditional methods of crop growing, or they didn't exist.

Pryor's is a easy to follow account. Despite the book's subtitle, there is little in here about King Arthur. The evidence for this individual is very limited. More likely King Arthur was a propaganda figure, invented for the interests of a particular elite - elements of his story tie in with much longer established myths and traditions and it's not uncommon for those trying to establish legitimacy to add existing legends to their own newer tales.

Francis Pryor's version of British history is less exciting that the one that we are used too. There are less invasions and populations often stay in one place, quietly farming for dozens of generations. Yet it is clearly a more believable history - one which puts ordinary people at the heart of things for the last two thousand years.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain BC
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages

Mary Beard - Pompeii, The Life of A Roman Town

There is a danger with books of archaeology, particularly those that are about sites like Pompeii, where we know alot about the day to day lives of the inhabitants. The danger is that the author and the reader becomes obsessed with the minutiae of the historical people. We end up trying to imagine how our lives are similar, or how "they" did they things that "we" do now.

In and of itself there is nothing wrong with this - though I remember once my mother pointing out to me, while I did some history homework, that when I looked at the past, I should remember that people like us were the people who grew the crops, rather than those that lived in the castles. We can learn alot by imagining how people ate, bathed, travelled and all the rest of those crucial things - but if that's all we do, then we can seriously limit the lessons that history can teach us.

Now Mary Beard's latest book doesn't fall into this trap. There is much here for the casual reader to enjoy, and much to make sure the visitor to Pompeii gets a more fulfilling understanding of what happened in a Roman town. But this book has so much more to offer.

Firstly, Mary takes on those, like the guides on the site, who encourage us to imagine Pompeii as a typical Roman town, suddenly interrupted and deserted. Preserved like a fly in amber, at its moment of death. Of course this is partly true - we have found "loaves of bread found in the oven, abandoned as they baked; the team of painters who scarpered in the middle of redecorating a room, leaving behind their pots of paint".

But those who lived in Pompeii knew what might have been coming, they had after all the experience of an earlier eruption - indeed much of the repair work going on may have been left over from the damage that that caused. Those who remained were likely to be only a small proportion of those who considered the city their home.

Mary Beard brings us the latest in theories and discoveries from the city's remains. Interesting, she often tells us what "some" historians think, and what "others" believe, but refuses to come down on either side, siting lack of evidence, or other plausible theories. The archaeological world that she describes is often one where lack of evidence hasn't stopped someone coming up with a theory to explain something. Of course we also learn how much we don't know. How did the participants react to animal sacrifice, who paid for it, what happened to the carcases afterwards?

Something that comes across strongly from Mary's writings is the class element to Roman society. In some ways, this aspect is obvious - school children learn that Roman had an emperor and slaves, and all the different strata's between. What Mary brings to life is the reality of what this meant for people in Rome.

Here she writes about Roman sex life, comparing it to the way they ate their food.

"... all Roman men married. Sexual fidelity to a wife was not prized or even particularly admired. In the search for pleasure, the wives, daughters and sons of other elite men were off-limits ... The bodies of slaves and, up to a point, of social inferiors, both men and women, were there for the taking. It was not simply that no one minded if a man slept with his slave. That was, in part at least, what slaves were for. Poorer citizens, with a less-ready supply of servile sexual labour, would no-doubt use prostitutes instead. As with dining, the rich provided for themselves 'in-house', while the poor looked outside."

Slave had little or nothing in Roman society, the poorest had little more, and their dwellings rarely had a kitchen or dining area as we know it. Consequently the poor ate out all the time, the rich could entertain and dine at home.

So writ large, in terms of sexual relationships and cooking we have the structure of Roman society and for me, this is far more illuminating than all the guesses about how people might have lived.

Mary Beard's book is a fascinating work on Pompeii. I wish I had had the chance to read it before my only visit. I am inspired to go again, and I will definitely take it with me when I do.

Giles Tillotson – Taj Mahal

Early on in this new book on the Taj Mahal, the author makes the point that the building has reached a level of recognition in the popular consciousness, far beyond anything that those who original built it could have imagined. The building has been used in India itself to advertise everything from “tea to hotels”.

Internationally of course, the very silhouette of the building represents India incarnate which is why, as the author writes, there is “no town in midland Britain without at least one Taj Mahal takeaway”.

Surprisingly perhaps, the Taj Mahal doesn’t have that long a history, though the stories that have grown up around it would fill a book far longer than this one.

The one thing that most people know about the Taj, is that it is a tomb. Built in the 1630s by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, the Taj Mahal’s huge dome covers the grave of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal who died during the birth of the couple’s fourteenth child. Shah Jahan himself was buried next too her, unusually off-centre in this most symmetrical of buildings.

As Tillotson says - “The construction of the tomb… the effort, the cost and the splendid result have all been taken as further evidence of the power of Shah Jahan’s grief”. For many, these facts alone make the Taj Mahal the greatest monument to love – indeed it is why that arch-manipulator of the media, Princess Diana, could use it as a backdrop to send a message of loneliness on a visit to India with her then husband, Prince Charles.

For most readers in Britain the history of India will started with Britain’s involvement in that country, so Tillotson’s potted history of the Mughal emperors, Shah Jahan’s rise to power and his eventual house arrest by one of his sons, who assumed control of the throne, is informative and fascinating.

The wealth and power of the Mughal emperors is of course demonstrated by the Taj Mahal itself, but the design of the building came from a long tradition of Mughal architecture. This is often overlooked, and by the time of European involvement in the country, the building became the centre of a debate on it’s origin.

The somewhat racist attitudes of the white European colonials towards the Indian people meant that the Taj didn’t fit into either the Western sterotypes of backward India, nor to their ideas of art and architecture. The buildings very beauty became a problem for some of its visitors.

One of the earliest accounts by a Westerner, is from a French physician, Francois Bernier, who wrote from Dehli in 1663. For Bernier, the Taj Mahal doesn’t fit any established European tradition, though he is at pains to describe its layout and dimensions in terms of Parisian landmarks. While “liking Mughal architecture regardless”, Bernier comes away confused and worried that “I may have imbibed an Indian taste”.

Several similar accounts are described in the book – and we get a sense that many western colonials were disorientated by the Taj Mahal – it must have symbolished a different India – one that was at odds with the prevailing attitudes of the time.

Later on some learned architects went so far as to consider Mughal buldings to be of no value at all. Edwin Lutyens came to the country in 1912 to plan the new “Imperial City” for the colonial masters. He came away from a study tour of the country declaring that “I d not believe that there is any real Indian architecture”.

Perhaps it is this sort of view that has allowed many since the creation of the building to argue that there must have been European involvement in its design and erection. The author deals ably with these and other myths – his answers illuminating our own views of the building and the stories that have grown up with it.

The last chapters of the book deal with the historical and cultural legacy of the Taj Mahal. As a new wonder of the world, the building symbolises more that its collected history and culture – which is why there continue to be debates and argument over who should control it and how it should be looked after.

The building was originally designed to be self sufficient – raising funds from the fruits grown in its extensive and sumptuous gardens. Now, some eight thousand people a day visit the Taj Mahal – their cash is a major source of revenue, which no doubt creates its own problems and arguments.

Considering how famous the Taj Mahal is, few in the western world will have any idea of its real history. This history deserves to be told, not simply because it is fascinating, but really because the Taj Mahal doesn’t have a history of its own. The buildings history is intertwined with the history of the Mughal emperors as well as the rise and fall of the British Empire.

Its cultural imagery says much about the movement of millions of Indian people around the world, and their reception in places like the UK. The Taj’s image as a monument to love and a destination for honeymoon couples tells us much about ourselves and our own hopes, and the arguments that go on about it’s future give indications about the vested interests that arise around any famous place.

Giles Tillotson’s book is an excellent introduction to all of this, and it comes highly recommended.

Related Reviews (Other books in the Wonders of the World series)

Fenlon - Piazza San Marco
Goldhill - The Temple of Jerusalem
Gere - The Tomb of Agamemnon
Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Neil Faulkner - Rome: Empire of the Eagles

There is an oft quoted rhetorical question from Monty Python's Life of Brian, which goes something like "So, apart from the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine and education, what have the Roman's ever done for us?"

The view of the Roman Empire as an essentially benevolent force that brought stability, peace and prosperity to the areas of the globe it touched is one that pervades many accounts of the time. Neil Faulkner's new book is an attempt to redress that balance.

Faulkner points out that the Roman empire was rooted in violence. Essentially a top-heavy civilisation its capital and major cities were net consumers of wealth from every other area of the Empire. Millions of slaves, raw materials, crops and goods were needed by the Romans and regular military expansion was needed both to find new areas of surplus value, and protect those existing ones.

For Faulkner, the essential dynamic of the Roman period was a military one - he writes in his introduction that:

"Rome was a dynamic system of military imperialism - of robbery with violence - and that its rise and fall, its conquests and defeats, its revolutions and civil wars can best be understood as manifestations of this."

Faulkner writes from a Marxist and anti-imperialist point of view. Though he explicitly points out that his position isn't a "orthodox" Marxist interpretation. However it is one that is fundamentally anti-imperialist and is coloured by his understanding that empires in the past and in their more contemporary clothes are never forces that operate in the interests of the people they seek to rule.

For me (and other reviews - see this ISJ review) the problem is that if Faulkner's dynamic seems to fit events, it does so because it is quite superficial. I don't have an expert academic understanding of Rome, but Faulkner seems to ignore some key aspects of Roman social life - the centrality of the slave economy and the surplus value if creates is conspicuous by the lack of detail here, and I think this is a major error. Little is said about how much the artisans, labourers or the urban poor contributed to the creation of value for the Roman emperors and if continual expansion was so important for the Romans, why are their some periods where this wasn't Imperial strategy?

More worrying though is the way that Faulkner's analysis essentially leads to a history of Rome through the roles of important men. Particularly the Emperors. There is no doubt of course that the individual characters of certain Emperors did alter the external and internal priorities of Rome. But I think Faulkner goes too far.

Elsewhere I lauded Michael Parenti's book. Faulkner argues that Parenti comes down too much on the side of Caesar as a representative of the poor and dispossessed. Fualkner points out that Julius Caesar was as much of an imperialist, warmonger and brutal practitioner of genocide. This is true. But that doesn't stop Caesar being interested in the poor people of Rome, as a method of strengthening his position in the Roman Ruling class and pushing his vision of the Roman empire.

For Marx, Class Struggle is the motor of history, yet in this book the motor is the military conquest. Surely we should be asking how does the military side of things allow the Roman rulers to continue to exploit those who create the wealth of Rome? All too often we are left with the view that the Roman army went somewhere, defeated a massive native army, stripped the country bare, established some Roman settlements and that was that. This doesn't feel too much like a rounded explanation to me.

This isn't to say that Faulkner's book isn't worth reading. The opening chapters that explain the development of Rome from town to city state are fascinating, as too is the general arc of the narrative, about how the internal economic dynamics of the Empire led to its weakening and eventual slow collapse. The detail of the last centuries of the Empire was new to me, and filled in a lot of gaps - particularly for instance, why the ruins we see are usually from the middle period of Rome's history, rather than the later days.

I'd recommend this for those who want a more in-depth understanding of the Roman dynamic, but read it with an open mind. The "interpretive narrative" that Faulkner offers needs debate, discussion and fleshing out, but all our understanding of this important period of history will be improved by that debate.

Simon Goldhill - The Temple of Jerusalem

As with the other books in the "Wonders of the World" series, Simon Goldhill concentrates on a single building from history, and examines it's architectural, historical, social and cultural impact. Unlike most of the others, his task is made much harder by the simple fact that the Temple of Jerusalem was pretty much flattened on 28th August 70AD (in the morning we're told).

The Temple of Jerusalem was the most important place for the whole of the Jewish religion. Preceding it, had been at least two other Temples, but this final one, built by King Herod, diminished all others in size and scale. 144,000 square metres in area, and 32 metres in height, the only part that survives now is one of the massive walls that held it in place. The Western Wall, that is now known as the "wailing wall". The Temple only stood for 90 years. For almost 2000 years Jews from around the world have travelled to the wall to pray, and mourn the loss of the Temple.

For the Jews the Temple holds a special significance. But the area at the heart of Jerusalem, holds significance for the other two, key religions from the area - Christianity and Islam. For this reason, the Temple as a building (and the Temple as an Idea) hold special importance for millions around the globe. And now, as then, this significance creates ideological, as well as religious importance.

Goldhill describes then the limited knowledge we have of the building. What archaeologists have discovered and what the few historical writings that describe the building tell us. We know a surprising amount about the Temple rituals - depicted with great accuracy in Jewish holy books. But the meat of his book, is to examine how the building has been fought over (by Christian, Jewish and Islamic troops) and how the Idea of the Temple has developed through the years. He argues that for Christians, the promise of rebuilding the Temple in the future, becomes linked with the idea of Jesus as personification of the Temple. It's image becomes part and parcel of actual buildings now - witness the "Temple Church" in London.

In one example Jewish revolutionaries against the Roman occupation placed an image of the Temple on the coins they minted - a sign of the ideological importance of the building. Everyone from the Crusaders and the Freemasons (though their contribution is decidedly a-historical) have grasped at the concept of the Temple in one form or another.

Finally, Goldhill finishes with the 1967 Israeli war to capture Jerusalem from the Arabs. He makes the point that how you view the story, will be coloured by the readers politics (and events since then).

For a building that hardly existed on a historical timescale, the Temple has perhaps more than any other ancient building shaped our current times. I'd recommend this book if only because it gives a better understanding of some of the great political, social and religious movements in our own times.

Related Reviews

Gere - The Tomb of Agamemnon
Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Mary Beard - The Roman Triumph

Unusually for a classical historian, Mary Beard seems to be adept at bringing to life complex periods of history. Her humourous and immensely entertaining blog, uses the past to shed light on the present and often explains the past through the lens of current events.

Her latest book, The Roman Triumph, examines what is actually quite a niche in Roman History. The Triumph, was the much emmulated procession through the heart of Rome to celebrate a general's military victories. While this might seem an unusual subject to make the subject of a complete book, Mary Beard argues that the Triumph "had an impact far beyond the commemoration of victory, and on aspects of Roman life as diverse as the apotheosis of emperors and the passion of erotic pursuit".

The author documents extensively how the Triumph became the subject of ancient historical study and poetry. Images of Triumphs were carved into sculpture and reliefs and lists of those victories Generals who celebrated the Triumph were carved into tablets and displayed at the centre of the Roman capital.

However the study of the Triumph is not simply a study of what happened, who celebrated them and the event's history. It is also a study of how we examine history, and actually what history is. In this regard, Mary Beard is remarkably critical of some modern historians who, it seems, often repeat unsubstantiated information about the Triumph as if it was historical fact. She describes a "process of conjecture, wild extrapolation, and over-confidence" being "how many of the "fact's" of the triumph are made."

There are many other fascinating aspects to this book. I found it interesting how the notion of "Invented Tradition" plays it's role in both the historical development of the Triumph itself and it's study through the ages. The role of the Triumph in creating an image of Roman, for the Roman people itself is also somethign that comes through the work. The Triumph wasn't "intended to reward private brigandage", only those victories that fitted the Roman ideal would be marked in public in this way - military victories in Roman civil wars rarely were celebrated by Triumph. "Romans only belonged on the winning side" of the ceremony is how Beard puts it.

For the Roman people, the Triumph wasn't always simply about celebration. It could be an occasion for sympathy towards prisoners or amusement at the lack of captured trophies.

While military leaders from Napoleon to Hitler have used parades to celebrate conquests, today military victory isn't marked in quite the same way, (though it's tempting to think of George Bush's "Mission Accomplished" display on the aircraft carrier in the Gulf as a mistaken Triumphal display).

What Mary Beard's book does though is remind us that we are part of a long history. A history that is often coloured by the times we live in, but a history that has shaped the our perception of ourselves. Through is insightful and entertaining book, she thus reasserts the importance of studying the past, if only to illuminate our own present.

Cathy Gere – The Tomb of Agamemnon (*)

The story of Agamemnon, the King who led the Greeks to the siege of Troy is one that deserves reading. Possibly of far greater interest and excitement is the story of how the ancient city of Mycanae was named as the hero’s place of burial.

This story is fascinating because it shows how history and archaeology are often the battleground for more contemporary ideologies, and that far from being independent investigators of the past, archaeologists can suffer the same desires for fame and fortune as anyone else.

In 1876, the German archaeologist (Wikipedia describes him as a “treasurer hunter”, which is both accurate and amusing) Heinrich Schliemann, in search of the aforementioned fame and fortune discovered a spectacular trove of buried gold artifacts covering several bodies. Schliemann immediately announced that the location of the burial, in the ancient city of Mycanae was that of King Agamemnon.

The public response was amazing. Front page news on The Times and newspapers across the globe, fame, fortune and celebrity belonged to Schliemann. Few questioned that the 3000 year old grave goods were anything but what he said they were. Even fewer questioned his destructive methods of investigation.

The truth did eventually emerge - partly as the era of Colonial archaeology disappeared and local archaeologists did a more thorough and critical study of the sites. But in the creation of the idea that Mycanae was the lost city of Agamemnon, Schliemann brought into the world a more lasting idea.

Tourists still visit the lost city, some no-doubt still believing that Agamemnon did come from here. But the idea of a ancient “super hero”, gloried in battle and carrying before him all his foes, to be betrayed and murdered by those closest to him inspired many more. Poets, writers and politicians over the decades following the excavation traveled to Mycanae. For some this was a near divine moment of inspiration. For others the ancient Swastika symbols inspired more terrible ideas – as shown by the signatures of Goebbels, Himmler and Goering in the guest book of a nearby hotel.

Since the Second World War, theories about those who lived at Mycanae, now identified with Bronze Age Greece, have waxed and waned at great speed. First seen as the home of some sort of Aryan super-hero, then re-imagined as a place of “pacifism and democracy”, the site is now viewed as a place of war and defence.

Cathy Gere’s book is an immensely readable account of the way that Mycanae has been imagined throughout history. Anyone who reads it, will only be inspired to read further and visit the place. The most remarkable fact that she brings out however, is that the first people to dream of what had happened in those ruins weren’t the western archaeologists desperate for riches. Rather it was the ancient Greeks themselves, those who returned there long after the Bronze Age civilisations had vanished. Just as the modern tourists must stare at the ruins and wonder, those Greeks couldn’t comprehend the giant walls of the city. For them, only a hero from their greatest epics could have lived there, and so the myth was born.

(*) Full title – The Tomb Of Agamemnon, Mycenae and the Search for a Hero

There is a fascinating interview with Mary Beard, editor of the Wonders of the World series, of which "The Tomb of Agamemnon" is part, here.

Related Reviews

Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

John Romer - Ancient Lives; The Story of the Pharaohs' Tombmakers

Whenever you wander around an ancient place, be it Roman, Egyptian or Greek. Or visit some long ruined castle or cave, it is impossible not to gaze around and imagine what it must have been like for the people who lived there.

This is doubly problematic for those who have been lucky enough to visit the Pyramids. After all, no-one lived there. These were the tombs of the richest of Egyptian society. The people who made these places died, in the most, forgotten. The ordinary people of Egypt who created the wealth of the Egyptian Pharaohs leave few if any markers.

However for those who created the beautifully engraved and decorated tombs of the Valley of the Kings in southern Egypt. This is not true. For hundreds of years, men and women of the village that is now known as Deir El Medina lived and worked on the tombs and we are lucky enough to have a wealth of detailed accounts of their lives, as well as much more circumstantial evidence to back up the documents that have been discovered.

In the last hundred years or so, Archaeologists have discovered dozens of papyrus scrolls, which detail in minutiae the lives of these tomb builders. It seems that the foremen of the working gangs were meticulous in the day to day detail they recorded.

"Year one, on the twelfth day of the first month of summer, the boulder of flint was found on the right" wrote Scribe Kenhirkhopeshef, who was in charge of keeping the work journal of the tomb of the Great Ramses (who died in 1212BC). Each day he recorded the depth of digging, the number of wicks used by the quarrymen lamps and other details of the dig. Writing mostly on flakes of stone, the scribe recorded the 13 years work on the tomb of Rameses' successor. We know he sat and watched the workers from a niche cut into the rock above the tomb because he scratched "Sitting Place of the Scribe Kenhirkhopeshef" on the rock beside his seat.

While hard, the work was rewarding for the villagers. They held a priority place in Egyptian society - the important job of creating the resting place for the Pharaoh's corpse as the king travelled into the here-after. As such they got better food rations and more beer than most ordinary people. Though this didn't always mean the villagers lived in perfect harmony. Court records record the arguments and legal wrangling that must always occur in tight-knit communities where food might be short and possessions few. We hear about the rows and the fights, and the occasional murder.

Romer has brought together the most compelling stories of these people. To use a cliche, he brings them to life. For me though, the most lifelike the workers become is when they are forced, perhaps for the first time in history, to struggle together.

During the reign of King Ramesses III (around 1160BC to 1170BC) rations went short. Probably through robbery by bureaucrats in Thebes. The tombmakers did what their brothers and sisters of generations to come have done, they used the only weapon available to them - they downed tools.

"Tempers finally broke on 14 November 1152BC, in the 29th year of the King, when the two gangs stopped their work and marched together out of the Great Place. The senior men, the two foremen, their deputies and the Scribe Amennakht had no idea where they had gone."

They went and found the local elders to demand rations and the next day headed for the temple of Ramses II, where the Mayor promised food. However, this wasn't forthcoming (not the last time a bureaucrat's promises came to nothing) and the strike continued. The next day, we learn that the missing rations were given to the men, and they returned to work. This victory seems to have given them confidence as further strikes are recorded necessitating the Pharaohs' Vizier to visit the village later in the year to examine what was causing the problems.

I could go on in great detail about similar events. The rise and fall of the village, matching the rise and fall of the power of the Pharaohs is here in detail and the final chapter brings the story up to date - detailing the discovery of the village and it's records, as well as information on how the story was decoded.

This is a fascinating bit of history - my only minor quibble, is that there is little on how the works were decoded.... the scratch markings reproduced here, carrying so much information are impossible to understand... I'd love more information on how they related to hieroglyphics, and how we know what they say. This is a minor criticism though of a fascinating book - perfect for anyone who believes that history should not be about kings and queens, but those that created their wealth, and in the words of Brecht built "Thebes of the Seven Gates".