David Miles - The Tale of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain

I've been looking forward to reading The Tale of the Axe for some time as there is a lack of popular studies of the stone age tools that our ancestors used for much of human history. As the subtitle of David Miles' book suggests, these tools were fundamental to the transformation of human society from nomadic hunter-gathering to sedentary farming communities.

Disappointingly, however, stone age technology is not really the subject of the book. In fact the title is a bit of a misnomer, as there is no real tale of the axe here. Instead this is a decent over-view of how our understanding of ancient human history has developed and a summary of contemporary understanding, which particularly focuses on the British Isles.

Unfortunately the book suffers from trying to do too much, and becomes a bit of a mish-mash of ideas and subjects. There is quite a bit of skipping back and forth, and at times I was frustrated because I didn't really get what the author was arguing. It is refreshing to see someone engaging critically with the work of Gordon Childe and the ideas of Engels in the context of archaeology, but I didn't really find out whether he found them useful or not. Instead Miles appears to take bits and pieces of what he finds useful and apply them to particular situations without really giving me a sense of his actual framework.

While there is actually much of interest here (and some absolutely stunning photos and illustrations) I was quite frustrated by the book and the author's style. His tendency to throw in random facts and contemporary quotations was deeply distracting and left me annoyed rather than illuminated.

These criticisms aside, David Miles' book does have some interesting details and he draws on his long career as an archaeologist to illuminate specific sites and periods. But ultimately I was disappointed.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain BC
Bellwood - First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies
Mazoyer & Roudart - A History of World Agriculture from the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis
Lewis-Williams - The Mind in the Cave
Mithen - To the Islands
Green - A Landscape Revealed: 10,000 Years on a Chalkland Farm
Reynolds - Ancient Farming
Flannery & Marcus - The Creation of Inequality

Bruce Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture

Dark Emu is a remarkable book that deserves to be widely read and discussed. Firstly it is a fascinating discussion of the history and culture of Australia's Aboriginal people before European colonial arrival. But it is also a brilliant, and very readable, account of how that history was distorted, covered-up and forgotten in order for the colonial powers to develop their own political and economic structures that benefited a new capitalist order.

I suspect that most people who pick up Dark Emu might believe, at best naively, that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers before the arrival of Europeans. Using primary and secondary sources Bruce Pascoe shows that this is completely erroneous and, Pascoe argues, prevents us developing a clearer understanding of both historical Aboriginal society and how that relates to contemporary political, environmental and social politics:

Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy was a hunter-gather system or one of burgeoning agriculture is not the central issue. The crucial point is that we have never discussed it as a nation. The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession. Every Land Rights application hinges on the idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did nothing more than collect available resources and therefore had no managed interaction with the land... If we look at the evidence... and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their closes and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.

Contrary to perceived wisdom, Aboriginal, pre-contact society was not just one of nomadic hunter-gatherers, though, as Pascoe points out that does not mean there were no communities like this.

It may be that not all Aboriginal peoples were involved in these practices, but if the testament of explorers and first witnesses is to be believed, mos Aboriginal Australians were, at the very least, in the early states of an agricultural society, and, it could be argued, ahead of many other parts of the world.

But the crucial thing is that Aboriginal societies were dynamic - they changed and evolved. And in most areas, by the time of European arrival, Aboriginal communities had developed complex systems of agriculture, aquaculture and villages.  For instance, Pascoe describes the work of archaeologist Heather Builth who shows how a complex system of fish traps at Brewarrina, in NW New South Wales, supported a community of about 10,000 people in a "more or less sedentary life in this town". With such a large population, people would have needed to store food and Builth shows how food was smoked and stored and "formed the basis of trade with regions in New South Wlaes, South Australia and other parts of Victoria".

The evidence for complex human society (particularly agriculture) from archaeological sources as well as records of early European colonists and explorers is incredible. What is even more shocking is the way that this evidence is dismissed, ignored and hidden. Part of the reason for this is the racism of the European eyewitnesses. There is an incredible example of this from the accounts of James Kirby who , in 1843, explored an area which not not yet seen European colonisation. He describes (using racist language) an ingenious fishing device whereby people fished with an rod in tension that when triggered by a fish, "threw the fish over the head of the black [the Aboriginal fisher], who would then in a most lazy manner reach back his hand, undo the fish, and set the loop again". Kirby interprets this in the most racist way. Rather than be amazed at the semi-automated fishing system, he says he has "often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true".

All human societies transform the landscape they inhabit. This is not usually recognised about the Aboriginal people because of the inherent racist assumption that they were savages who existed simply through an negative relationship with their environment. Again, the opposite is true. In one of the most fascinating sections of the book, a section that has particular resonance given the recent horrific wildfires in Australia, Pascoe shows how Aboriginal agriculture frequently relied on regular firing of the bush to encourage conditions for improved farming. Europeans, on arrival, feared fire and so they didn't use it to clear land. Ironically this encourages the conditions for more power fires, and undermined the fertility of the land itself: "Changing the timing and intensity of fires radically changed the nature of the country, so that what had been productive agricultural land became scrub within a decade." Fire was "part of a planned program of cropping or". This has implications for how we understand the Australian landscape. Pascoe quotes archaeologist Rhys Jones:

What do we want to conserve, the environment as it was in 1788 or do we yearn for an environment without mas, as it might have been 30,000 or more years ago? If the former then we must do what the Aborigines did and burn at regular intervals under controlled conditions. 

But this also has implications for continued agricultural practices that, driven by the desire to maximise profits, encourage environmental degradation and make fires more likely.

Pascoe doesn't pretend that Aboriginal societies were without conflict. Though he does point out that judging Aboriginal society by standards of European "civilisation" means that you miss the democratic, sustainable, non-hierarchical society that was able to provide for the needs of thousands of people for centuries. Nonetheless I think Pascoe is guilty of some naivety when it comes to understanding why, for instance, European societies were brutal and exploitative, and Aboriginal societies were not. It is clear, for instance, that class society had not developed in Aboriginal communities - historical development elsewhere in the world demonstrates that the invention of agricultural allows the creation of a surplus which can (I emphasise can) lead to the development of class society. When European colonialists arrived and smashed up Aboriginal society any further development was ended. What Pascoe makes clear is that had this development not been prevented, the peoples of Australia may well have begun the long historical road to further evolution of society - the had clearly already begun to develop complex agricultural based societies. But it is not inevitable that any future development would have retained social mores that made Aboriginal society so different to that which supplanted it.

Pascoe's use of source material shows what had long been hidden. Aboriginal societies, prior to the arrival of Europeans, were complex and extensive. But I am not sure how unique this is. Pascoe makes some reference to other pre-capitalist, indigenous societies. This could have been developed more and I think would have illuminated the way that capitalism has only succeeded through the destruction of other modes of production. Unfortunately for the limited analysis of this aspect of his argument Pascoe relies on the work of Gavin Menzies, whose work has been discredited.

However this does not discredit the arguments that Pascoe is making. In fact, I'd suggest that Dark Emu is one of the most important contributions to understanding the Aboriginal history that has been hidden and forgotten. It is also a powerful critique of contemporary Australian society - a society where the very land burns because profit is more important than people.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Cronon - Changes in the Land
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance

Philip Parker - The Northmen's Fury

Say the word "Viking" and most people in Britain will immediately think of raids. murder and pillaging, and possibly, remembering back to their school history lessons, 1066. To be honest, for a few hundred years after around 800 CE that was pretty much what most people who lived in Northern Europe would have thought too, before they ran for the hills. Picking up Philip Parker's book before a recent trip to Denmark I was looking to find out a bit more than the superficial depiction of the Vikings as raiders and explorers.

The vikings burst onto the scene with their raid on the abbey at Lindisfarne in North Eastern England. But this is a particularly English understanding, because the Vikings had clearly been around much longer. But rapidly, viking influence grew and by the ninth century covered almost all of Scandinavia, large parts of the British Isles, bits of Ireland, Iceland and the Baltic coast. By the time of peak Viking expansion they had spread into Russia, reached Constantinople, and were semi permanently in parts of the Mediterranean. They had also reached Greenland and the Americas - trying to maintain and create mini-versions of Viking society back in Scandinavia.

It's a phenomenal expansion, and understanding how it happened ought to be a core part of any history of the Vikings. So I was disappointed to find that Parker's book didn't really get to the heart of an explanation. His account focused very much on the raids and colonies, but often became little more than a list of kings and battles. Any historian of the period will be limited by the material available and Parker uses the material there is well - but this tends to focus on kings and battles. But I would have liked a little more on the organisation of viking societies, the economic base of their economy (in particular I felt their agriculture was neglected) and social relations. It was notable that most of the book was about viking men - and women tended to just have roles as wives (or occasionally fighters).

The most interesting bits of the book were the accounts of exploratory missions and the far flung settlements in Greenland, the Americas and Asia. These were incredible voyages and involved masterful pieces of navigation and combat. In particular I learnt that the Viking presence in Vinland (probably Newfoundland) was much bigger than I had previously understood. They clearly also visited for supplies (especially firewood) extremely regularly from Iceland and Greenland.

So I did get a lot out of the book, but I was left unsatisfied by it and would have liked much more on the functioning of viking society, which would help illuminate the reasons behind the raiding; as well as the decline of viking society - for instance, an deeper engagement with those, like Jared Diamond, who argues that the end of the Vikings in Greenland was singularly due to their failure to adapt to the local environment.

Related Reviews

Rodger - The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649
Diamond - Collapse; How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
McAnany & Yoffee - Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
Gaiman - Norse Mythology

Ian Gilligan - Climate, Clothing & Agriculture in Prehistory

Precisely why humans made the transition to agriculture from their historic hunter-gatherer and forager modes of production is a discussion that is endlessly varied and fascinating, if frequently unsatisfying. So it is refreshing to read a genuinely new and incisive incursion into the debate by Ian Gilligan an academic at Sydney University whose specialism is the study of clothing in historical contexts. Gilligan's book focuses on clothing, but covers diverse ground - from the extinction of the Neanderthals, to the way pre-historic tools were used to make clothing, as well as the evolution of early agriculture.

Gilligan's argument is that the development of clothing in pre-history was a key, unrecognised, part of shaping the transition to agriculture. He also shows how the world's climate historically proved central to this. It is rather obvious that colder climates would encourage inhabitants to cover themselves to gain warmth. But the point that Gilligan makes is that the need to wear clothing is driven by a changing climate, which then has wider consequences. He shows how, through history, different groups of people have responded to the need for clothing, beginning with an overview of the science of clothing and precisely how they warm us. This might seem esoteric, but it allows us to gain deeper understandings of how people acted in particularly historical circumstances. For instance, the earliest covering (simple clothing) is simply a fur or skin draped over the body - a cloak for instance.  But this only gives a certain level of protection. Complex clothing requires more complex tools, and also, Gilligan suggests, further human development:

We also lack any indication that complex clothing was invented before our own species appeared... In the northern hemisphere, early hominins appear to have contracted south-wards during the ice ages... despite the fact that these environments were often quite well-stocked with food resources... By implication, clothing was restricted to simple clothing... and indeed we find an absence of the requisite technologies: we find plenty of scrapers, but few blades and no needles.

Later hominins were able to develop clothing into much more complex arrangements - encasing limbs and so on, and using multiple layers to protect themselves, and presumably exploit resources of colder climates. History however doesn't progress in a series of steps forward. Intriguingly Gilligan points out that clothing was frequently abandoned when no longer required as people preferred being naked. But

at the end of the last ice age: some people were wearing complex cloths. Whereas simple loose clothing does not present such a problem with humidity and perspiration, the full enclosure created by complex clothing prevents moisture from escaping very easily. For those people who wanted to keep on wearing cloth, one option was to change back to simple garments. But dropping clothes altogether was no longer an option, for a couple of reasons - including modesty.

Gilligan can only provide scanty evidence for this transition "from shivering to shame". But there may be some truth in it and there certainly appears to have been a change in terms of materials at this point in pre-history. Gilligan describes the "textile revolution" as humanity moved towards woven clothing at the end of the ice-age which solved the problem of moisture. From this point onward we begin to see direct evidence of clothing in the fossil record and some of these are fascinating.

Gilligan argues that the demands of these new clothing would have been an important imperative towards the transition to agriculture. It is commonly thought that people starting farming because it produced more food. But the reality is different - agriculture can actually have the opposite effect through reducing food to a small number of crops and leaving communities reliant on farming success. It also requires a lot more hard work and many historic societies (and even relatively contemporary communities of hunter-gatherers) resisted the transition on the basis of the amount of labour.

Gilligan shows how much of what we know about early agriculture and animal/plant domestication provides evidence for at least being driven by the need to provide material as opposed to simply food. In many cases (eg rearing of animals) food might have been a happy by-product, or a secondary reason. I think Gilligan makes a compelling case. Not least because today people frequently forget or ignore the way that agriculture was (and is) integral to producing material as well as food.

I was less convinced by his argument that a further by-product of the adoption of clothing was to drive a psychological sense of "enclosure". As he writes:

In the broadest sense, agriculture is a likely development among people who are enclosed psychologically by clothes and whose worldview reflects their enclosure. In relation to ethnography this means that agriculture will have no great appeal to people who remain naked.

Since Gilligan has spent the majority of the book showing how the transition to agriculture arises in part out of a need to solve an environmental issue this feels more like shoehorning a psychological answer into a debate that is essentially about the economics (in a broad sense) of early prehistory. It also neglects some examples of how foraging communities did develop early forms of agriculture - eg the planting of seeds which they returned to later in the year. Such communities were likely, on Gilligan's evidence, to be naked.

This criticism aside, Gilligan's book is a really interesting read. It's aimed at the general reader and is very accessible. I was disappointed with some of the images which looked fascinating but where hard to interpret as they are reproduced very small. But this shouldn't detract interested parties from reading a book that covers a huge amount of ground in debating a crucial aspect of human history.

Related Reviews

Bellwood - First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies
Flannery & Marcus: The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire
Anthony - The Horse, The Wheel and Language
Reynolds - Ancient Farming

Pryor - Farmers in Prehistoric Britain

Nur Masalha - Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History

The Israeli state's war against the Palestinians is a travesty that continues to anger millions of people around the globe. Every atrocity that hits the news can be guaranteed in Britain to provoke protests that call for justice for the Palestinian people. Jeremy Corbyn's ongoing support for the Palestinians has meant that the question of Zionism - the ideology behind the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 - has become a major issue for the left and the Labour Party, as right-wing enemies of Corbyn seek to undermine him by portraying opposition to Zionism as the same as Antisemitism. I reject that equation and believe that socialists must show full solidarity with the Palestinian people, combined with an absolute rejection of antisemitism and all forms of bigotry and racism.

Nur Masalha's new book is an important contribution to our understanding of the history of the region. As Masalha argues, this history is contested and differing understandings of that history have been deployed by both the British colonial powers and the Israeli state since 1948.

Masalha writes in his introduction that:

Some Arab writers and artists promoting the political and national cause of Palestine or pan-Arabism create meta-narratives to depict Palestinian national identity or Arab nationalism as being more ancient that they actually are. Moreover, until the advent of anachronistic European political Zionism at the turn of the 20th century the people of Palestine...included Arab Muslims, Arab Christians and Arab Jews. Being a rendering of the Israeli Zionist/Palestinian conflict, historically speaking the binary of Arab versus Jew in Palestine is deeply misleading.

Masalha continues a few pages later to argue that "the Zionist liberal coloniser has often sought to combine 'settler-colonisation' with 'democracy' - two contradictory projects - and this tendency has in recent decade contributed to the emergence of the 'New Histories' of Israel." This new history, however, is a continuation of the process of hiding the real history of the region and Palestine itself.

The book begins with a detailed examination of the notion of "Palestine" from the bronze-age onwards. Masalha traces the origins of the term Palestine and shows, at different points, how it has been used by contemporaries to identify a place and a people. This contrasts, he argues, with ideological histories that base themselves in biblical texts, and have been used to undermine or subsume Palestinian history into an "invented tradition". For instance, Masalha explains that there is "no material history or archaeological or empirical evidence" for the 'Kingdom of David'. Nor, for instance, despite the systematic exploration and excavation of Egypt, is there any evidence for the Old Testament story of Moses "leading the 'Israelite tribes' from Egypt to 'Cana'an'." Indeed the name Cana'an is itself a "late literary construct". In contrast,

Palestine was the name used most commonly, consistently and continuously for over 1200 years throughout classical and Late Antiquity, from the highlight of classical Athenian civilisation in 500 BC until the end of the Byzantine period and the occupation of Palestine by the Muslim armies in 637-638 AD.

Despite the book's title, there is not a great deal of day-to-day history here. Instead Masalha studies the concept of Palestine, how it is discussed and understood by contemporaries. He cites many accounts, from different authors of many different backgrounds to show how Palestine has existed historically. All this is an important backdrop to the final third of the book which looks at the way that Palestine in the colonial period has been used and then denigrated. Masalha writes that the

English Industrial Revolution of the 18th century and rise of European capitalism impacted on the economy of Palestine directly and profoundly. These new forces also contributed to the reorientation of Palestine towards Europe and creation of a new political economy and statehood in mid-18th century Palestine.

But with British colonial rule came divide and rule. In contrast to the earlier, "fluid" boundaries in Jerusalem, for instance, "separating the lives of Palestinian Christians, Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Muslims", Masalha quotes one historian Salim Tamari writing about Jerusalem that the "quarter system signalling the division of the Old City into confessional bounded domains was introduced and imposed retroactively on the city by British colonial regulations."

Masalha shows how it was the support by the most powerful colonial power of the time for Zionist plans that made them mainstream. This was done, Masalha argues, out of a combination of colonial and domestic interests on the part of the British.

Few British politicians cared about Jewish people or their history. Many were openly antisemitic and wanted to encourage Jews to leave Europe. Others were religious evangelicals. But all were motivated primarily by a need to strengthen Britain's imperial project. To make it work they had to create a racist myth that denied the Palestinians their history and even their existence. Lord Shaftesbury, Chairman of the Palestine Exploration Fund said, in an oft repeated phrase, that Palestine was "a country without a people" for "a people without a country". Shaftesbury was a key figure in "biblical restorationism" and politicians like him believed that a "'Jewish Palestine' would be convenient for a British protectorate there along the main route to India". The motivation by the British was not out of altruism for Jews facing pogroms and racism, but to protect their imperial interests.

The creation of the Israeli state in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War Two was accompanied by the systematic destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages. New settlements were created on the ruins, and Masalha describes the ways that places were renamed as part of a creation of identity. As the author writes, "this massive appropriation of Palestinian heritage provided support for the European Jewish colonisers' claim to represent an indigenous people returning to its homeland after 200 years of exile." Later Masalha argues that this creation of a historical identity is key to the contemporary ideology of the Israeli state, "the treatment of the cultural heritage of Palestine as a tool for Zionist settler purposes is central to Israeli educational policies, the Israeli biblical academy and the Israeli government's renaming projects."

Masalha clearly demonstrates the way that the history of Palestine, a history where Jews, Arabs, Christians and others lived together peacefully for long periods of time, has been ignored, erased and destroyed in the interests of the modern Israeli state. This is detailed history that restores the forgotten past in the interests of a more just future for everyone, from all backgrounds and religions, in the Middle East.

I do however want to note a couple of minor problems. Firstly the book is difficult to follow in places, primarily because there are no maps which makes it hard to understand where various places are, particularly as names change frequently. I hope the publishers amend this for the paperback. Secondly in many places Masalha has included multiple examples to prove his argument, often leading to several pages of bullet pointed comments that are tiresome to read and unnecessary.

Those criticisms aside, this is an important work of history that has great contemporary relevance. I hope it is widely read and discussed.

Related Reviews

Levi - If Not Now, When?
Rose - The Myths of Zionism

James C. Scott - Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

This fascinating new book takes a new look at an age old question of ancient history. Precisely when, where and why did early humans move from effectively nomadic existence to a sedentary one? Why did they make this transition that would lead to the first "states"? Traditionally historians argue the key issue is agriculture, and that farming led directly to sedentary life, and then to the rise of states and civilisation.

But this book by James C. Scott argues that while there is some truth to this, reality was often more complex. Of course the "neolithic revolution" was a fundamental transformation for human society. As Scott writes:

The domestication of plants as represented ultimately by fixed-field farming.. enmeshed us in an annual set of routines that organised our work life, our settlement patterns, our social structure... The harvest itself sets in train another sequence of routines: in the case of cereal crops, cutting,m bundling, threshing, gleaning, separation of straw, winnowing chaff, sieving, drying, sorting - most of which has historically been coded as women;'s work... Once Homo sapiens took that fateful step into agriculture, our species entered an austere monastery who taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of a few plants.

None of this is particularly new,  but the key question here is "why" did this happen? Scott answers this complex question with a number of points. Firstly he shows that domestication predates sedentary life. Animals and plants were used and managed even when humans were still living nomadic hunter-gatherer lives. He also points out that a transition to agriculture actually requires a lot more work from individuals.

Sometimes Scott is guilty of coming across as though he is the first author to highlight some of these things. But authors like MArshall Sahlins and Richard Lee showed in their studies of contempoary nomadic cultures that communities were well aware that agriculture requires more work per calorie. Its something I myself wrote about in Land and Labour. But Scott does well to show how blurred the distinction between nomadism, agriculture and sedetary life is.

Scott argues points to a number of societies that made the transition back to nomadic culture from sedentary society (the Dakota and Cheyenne nation of North America is a classic example though they did this when horses became available from Spanish colonists). He also argues, and I think rightly, that many early states were vulnerable because of their reliance on agriculture - and that the historical "collapse" of these societies is less the disasters that Jared Diamond has implied and more a transition back to earlier social organisation. In this context its good to see McAnany and Yoffee's book Questioning Collapse getting recognition.

Scott's book really excels when he talks about the nature of early states. I was particularly taken by his idea of "political crops" particularly wheat, barley, rice, millet and maize. These are easy to quantify, ripen at set times and the produce can be easily measured and transported (they're also relatively light for moving in bulk). Students of Karl Marx's Labour Theory of Value might be intrigued by the following example:

Units of grain served as standards of measurement and value for trade and tribute against which the value of other commodities was calculated - including labour. The daily food ration of the lowest class of labourers in Umma, Mesopotamia, was almost exactly two litres of barley measured out in the beveled bowls that are among the most ubiquitous archaeological finds.

I was less convinced of the role that Scott attributes to coercion in the early states. He writes that "when other forms of unfree labour [in addition to slavery] such as debt bondage, forced resettlement, and corvee labour, are taken into account, the importance of coerced labour for the maintenance and expansion of the grain-labour module at the core of the state is hard to deny."

Here I think Scott is slightly guilty of over-emphasising the coercive nature of the state. Writing about Mesopotamia again he says,

The dense concentration of grain and manpower on the only soils capable of sustaining them in such numbers... maximized the possibilities of appropriate, stratification, and inequality. The state form colonizes this nucleus as its productive based, scales it up, intensifies it, and occasionally it adds infrastructure... in the interest of fattening and protecting the goose that lays the golden eggs... one can think of these forms of intensification as elite niche-construction: modifying the landscape and ecology so as to enrich the productivity of its habitat.

Rightly Scott understands that the agricultural surplus is central to the functioning of the state. But to often he sees this as arising only out of coercion by the ruling classes. In other words the mass of the population don't really want to live in a "state" and have to be forced to do so. But precisely because residents would receive benefits from a state - protection from raiding, the organisation of food distribution, maintenance and building of irrigation systems etc - they might not necessarily all have to be coerced all the time. The ruling class doesn't only have a stick at its disposal, they also can dangle carrots.

That's not to say that everyone wanted to live in an unequal society. Agriculture gives human society a surplus which can lead to a class of society and the development of a state. But crucially it doesn't always. Flannery and Marcus' marvellous book The Creation of Inequality shows that early societies, both sedentary and nomadic resisted the development of inequality in numerous innovative ways. The rise of states was not inevitable, but when it did happen it eventually led to the erosion of the majority of other forms of social organisation.

All in all there is much of interest in this book, its easy to read, it made me rethink how and why the transition to agriculture takes place, and its full of fascinating details. Scott beings together a lot of material from many different sources. My slight disagreements about emphasis are not intended to prevent anyone from getting and enjoying this book.

Related Reviews

Bellwood - The First Farmers
Martin - The Death of Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots
Flannery and Marcus - The Creation of Inequality
McAnany and Yoffee - Questioning Collapse
Childe - What Happened in History?
Harper - The Fate of Rome

Martin Green - A Landscape Revealed: 10,000 Years on a Chalkland Farm

While seemingly a rather specialised topic, Martin Green's history of the neolithic, bronze and iron ages as understood through studies of the pre-history of his farm in Cranborne Chase contains a wealth of information. The Chase, an area roughly north-east of Blanford Forum in Dorset contains hundreds of locations of archaeological interest. Many of these are part of what should be understood as a cultural landscape, with sites frequently placed in relation to others.

Green is a farmer, but he has an immense skill and knowledge as an archaeologist and decades of work has led him to make some extremely significant finds. While some of the locations mentioned in this book such as the two iron age forts at Hod Hill and Hambledon Hill are well know (and well worth visiting) many others are either less well visited, or simply exist as crop marks or excavations.

I was inspired enough by Green's account of Knowlton Henge to visit. As the author explains this ruined 12th century Norman church was built in the midst of a large Neolithic henge. It does not take much expertise to understand the way the Christian church was trying to usurp "pagan" traditions here.

The book is full of fascinating details; from the explanation of archaeological method (including a chapter by Dr. Michael Allen on the links between snails and archaeological investigations) to the way modern science allows us to follow the travels of individuals thousands of years ago through the study of their bones. It is also extremely well illustrated.

This isn't a book for the casual reader, but for someone exploring the pre-history of Dorset its invaluable.

John Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt: Volume 2

The first volume of John Romer's history of Ancient Egypt is a brilliant examination of the rise of the Egyptian state from hunter-gatherer communities. So I was excited to read the follow up volume some four years later. Here Romer looks at more familiar periods, yet unlike the first volume this history covers the period when there are written records, on the monuments, tombs and papyrus remains. Some of these will be familiar to students of the period, but to the casual reader they offer fascinating insights into the lives of people in the pharaonic state.

It is sobering to realise that much of the grand building work of the Eygptians was done with the simplest of bronze age tools. That they could erect enormous Pyramids and build elaborate tombs, filling them with materials from around the Middle East, is because of the enormous surplus of grain that the Nile could provide. This enabled the Pharaohs to employ large numbers of workers, as well as build major trade networks. Both of these aspects are themes of Romer's books and its fascinating to see how we can trace these networks that stretch hundreds of miles away from the Nile.

But what is central to Romer's history is the Egyptian state and how its very nature was shaped by the world it arose from. Take his description of the workers that produced the Great Pyramid at Giza. It was

a vast product of the labours of large numbers of those small gangs who cuts its stones with integrity and care and set them as straight and true as the irrigation ditches in the Nile fields.

Those small-sized gangs, were working in state-wide coordinating and under a consistent and masterful direction. So whilst the rural nature of that workforce is apparent in the qualities of each and every stone they laid, so the firm and subtle manner of the pharaonic administration is equally apparent in the Great Pyramid's astonishing accuracy and consistency over long years of construction. This... had been a state whose culture had not been founded on brute force or notions of national boundaries, but whose identify had flowed outwards from the royal residence, the courtly rituals, its building yards and craftsmen's workshops.

In other words, this was a state that was very different from that imagined by film-makers in Hollywood which transferred the ideals of 20th century capitalism back three or four thousand years. Romer spends much of this book examining how we have viewed ancient Egypt through the lens of contemporary thought, and the book deals, to a certain extent on how our understanding has been transformed as Egyptology has itself been shaped and re-shaped.

One part of this, as noted in the quote above, is that Romer points out that the Ancient Egyptians had no concept of "Egypt". Nations meant nothing. So while this was a class society, based on exploitation, it wasn't a class society in the way we think of capitalism or European feudalism.

Writing about the military imagery on the tomb of Ankhtifi, a governor, nobleman and senior figure overseeing farming and religion under King Neferkare (approx 2200 BCE) Romer noes that

Rather than the generals leading conquering armies up and down the valley of the Nile... these images and texts are more likely to record the exploits of little bands of local militia patrolling the various regions of the lower Nile, maintaining, in the absence of central state control, the ancient pharaonic virtue of good order for their local populace.... the fearful links between war, nationhood and sovereignty..were not yet forged; those very concepts.. had no existence in that distant past. There are as many donkeys as soldiers drawn on the walls of Ankhtifi's tomb chapel... where fine food, civic welfare and the good life are presented as their owners' ambitions and accomplishments.

In other words, Ancient Egyptian society cannot be understood in terms of contemporary social relationships or culture. It has to be understood in its own context. This might seem obvious, but Romer shows how countless historians and archaeologists have made this mistake in the past, and continue to do so.

It is particularly important to understand this when looking at the things that the ancient Egyptians revered. For instance, they are know for their luxurious grave goods, expensive jewellery and so on.

Yet, this was "a society without money, in which nothing was counted as explicitly economic or political" and "the prime purpose of the acquisition of such goods was not to gain prestige or possessions in the modern manner".

To explain this, Romer looks at a treasure trove found buried  full of goods that had been imported from far away. The chests of treasure are

best seen as holding goods brought from regions far outside the orbit of the state and buried seed-like in the house of a court god, between the seen and unseen world - an act that had beautifully expressed a concept which is explicitly stated in later texts, that the domain of pharaoh encompasses all earthly things.

While Egypt was a class society, its rulers maintained their rule and their position by performing a real function for the mass of society - keeping things on track, organised and balanced. The production of material goods had real benefits for a minority, but this was not the driving force of society as a whole.

John Romer focuses on the nature of the Egyptian state, so those looking for a history of daily life in Ancient Egypt won't really find it here. Nor is this quite as readable as the first volume as there is much less of a historical narrative. Nevertheless together with volume one, this is an essential read that puts other works on the period in a very real context. I hope it isn't four years before the final volume arrives.

Related Reviews

Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid
Romer - Ancient Lives: The Story of Pharaohs' Tombmakers

David Lewis-Williams - The Mind in the Cave

This fascinating book is an attempt to answer a surprisingly complex question. Why did our Paleolithic ancestors make cave art? The beautiful images reproduced here frequently show a startling attention to detail, use of colour, the natural shape of the rocks and were often made in near complete darkness. But why was this done? David Lewis-Williams argues that this was not art in the sense that we understand it. Nor was it necessarily representational, but the art filled a social function for the communities that made the images.

Lewis-Williams begins with a fascinating history of the study of these images. I was surprised to find how important Marxism had been to this study, and the author's analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, including that of famous thinkers like Claude Levi-Strauss is a useful introduction to their ideas.

Lewis-Williams argues that while art varies in terms of meaning and use through history, and indeed how we perceive things such as the colour spectrum is socially determined, there is one universal for anatomically modern humans, which is that we all (and we all have) experience a the same "full spectrum of consciousness". Describing the various stages that people go through in altered consciousness states, Lewis-Williams points out that "all people experience the states characteristic of the autistic trajectory. And they experience them in terms of their own culture and value system; this is what has been called the 'domestication of trance'."

Lewis-Williams argues that this means that we can trace some universals to the images on cave-walls, and understand them in terms of how various cultures have related to states of altered consciousness. Discussing the San people who made rock painting into the modern time, as part of  shamanistic religion, he points out that

Much of the painted and engraved imagery, even that which appears relastic' is shot through with these metaphors and shows signs of having been 'processed' by the human mind as it shifted back and forth along the spectrum of consciousness. The same metaphors necessarily structured the explanations of images that San people provided. The San explained the images in their own terms, not the languages of anthropologists.

So the images made by the San people represented things that meant some thing to them collectively, which is not necessarily the same thing that we might "see" when we look at them. But because altered states, or trances, produced visions that the mind interprets in terms of how the world is understood, the images painted would be of things (or shapes) that originated in their world view.

Art, cosmos and spiritual experience coalesced. The San fused the 'abstract' experiences of altered states with the materiality of the world in which they lived.

So the paintings made in the "social space" of the caves were the result of interactions between the social ideas of the group and their world-view. Lewis-Williams argues that this meant that the images were more than images, they were insights into a spirit world, or actual embodiments of that world over-lapping with the contemporary world. He writes that a "set of animals already carried... symbolic meaning for west European anatomically modern communities. It now became important for those people to fix their images of another world, belief in which was one of the key traits that distinguished them from the Neanderthals."

Lewis-Williams argues that it was the process of doing this, creating the art, that paved the way for new social relations that "we consider fully modern". I remained unconvinced by this conclusion, as I think the "images" are more likely to represent the cultural output of a community and thus reflect social relations rather than create them. But as Lewis-Williams correctly points out, we cannot every know a correct answer when trying to understand what the images mean. His book however is a fascinating insight into the reasons that humans have created cave-art and painting through history and by hunter-gatherer communities in modern times. It is well worth a read.

Related Reviews

Mithen - After the Ice: A Global Human History
Stringer - The Origin of Our Species

Francis Pryor - Flag Fen: Life and Death of a Prehistoric Landscape

I read Flag Fen: Life and Death of a Prehistoric Landscape in preparation for a long-awaited trip to visit Flag Fen itself. I should say at the start that I thoroughly recommend a visit to this extraordinary site, which brings to life the bronze age remains hidden beneath this part of the countryside and displays the incredible finds well. It is an excellent afternoon out and the recreation of bronze age droveways (for instance) are worth visiting both for the insights into historic farming and for the wildlife attracted to the hedges, fields and areas around the lake.

Flag Fen is an excellent introduction to the site. Much of it is an extensive re-write of Francis Pryor's earlier guides to the site and contains updates, additional material and corrections. The introductory chapters are a useful guide to the development of the unique fens of this part of England which help the reader understand both how the Flag Fen archaeological remains survived and the landscape which you travel through to visit the site. Pryor is also at pains to point out that climate change will almost certainly lead to this part of the world being drowned before the century is out. Visit the site while you have time and try to do something about climate inaction in the meantime would be my conclusion!

For the non-specialist reader, the most fascinating parts of the book will be the discussion of the archaeological process that began with Pryor stumbling over a piece of worked bronze age wood in a muddy ditch and ended with the extensive site we see today at Flag Fen. Its difficult for us to understand what has been uncovered - for most people archaeological remains are things that are recognisable to us from our own experience, so Pryor is at pains to point out that we cannot always view the past life this, writing about the Iron Age at Flag Fen, but its applicable to the earlier period, he notes,

we must beware of assuming that they must always have acted like us, only more ancient. 2,500 years is a very long time indeed, and I suspect we would find life in the Iron Age far stranger than just living in a round-house and eating off coarse pottery. I am convinced we would find that their whole system of beliefs, standards and values was based on a view of history that was entirely alien to us.

This is an important point. It is no surprise that when archaeologists first looked at the sodden timbers buried at Flag Fen they assumed they had found a house, or something similar. Instead the remains are now understood as a massive long causeway of over 60,000 timbers, and a gigantic platform which sat above the surrounded marsh. Around these two enormous wooden structures were scattered the votive offerings of bronze and iron-age people - bent and broken swords, pins, knives and the occasional animal and human skeleton. The book, it should be said, is well illustrated with pictures to explain this, including the incredible shears (and their case) found at the site.

As I said, the book is chiefly an account of the finds made at the site and thus must be read in that context. As with all of his popular writing, Pryor is readable and clear. Occasionally, as elsewhere, I found his still a little over-bearing, but in this case he probably has an excuse - after-all he has been chiefly responsible for making sure that Flag Fen was turned into the important historical site it is now.

Sadly the book finishes on a downer. The Fens are continually being drained and buildings encroach. While climate change alters sea-levels, the drying Fens will also lead to the destruction of other, hidden remains. Pryor suggests that within 30 years it will all be gone even if future archaeologists get the funding to dig in this area.

Unlike other books by Francis Pryor this is probably not one that most people will read without visiting Flag Fen itself. His other books (see below) are likely to be more useful for the casual reader that this highly specific work.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Farmers in Ancient Britain
Pryor - Birth of Modern Britain
Pryor - Britain AD
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages
Pryor - Making of the British Landscape
Pryor - Seahenge
Reynolds - Ancient Farming

David W. Anthony - The Horse, The Wheel and Language

David W. Anthony has produced an important, stimulating and very detailed book. It is likely, for those interested in the origins of language and the archaeology of early communities in eastern Europe, to be a standard work for many years to come.

Anthony begins by looking at where language comes from, and how languages change. By knowing a language at a particularly point in history, we can trace it backwards, recreating its predecessors, and in turn, using this discovered language to find further insights to its ancient speakers.

Some linguists remain skeptical, arguing that there are too many generalisations and too many unanswered questions. But Anthony makes a very strong case that we can, and have, reconstructed key parts of the Proto Indo European (PIE) language that is the far predecessor of most of the key European and Asian languages that exist today. "If we cannot regard reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as literally 'real', it is at least a close approximation of a prehistoric reality."

Since PIE was never written down, we can never know for sure. But one test is that work on PIE has lead to the reconstruction of further words in languages that developed from it. These have since been confirmed by archaeological evidence.

The discussion on language is merely the introduction to a much larger work. Having constructed PIE, the author then discusses the people who spoke it. How and where they lived. We can tell from the language something about them, they had cattle, sheep, pigs and most importantly horses. They lived in an area were the wildlife included otters, beaver, wolf and bees.

The biggest clue appears to be the words in PIE for wheeled vehicles and their component parts. Archaeology gives us accurate dates for the development of the wheel which mean that "late Proto-Indo-European was spoken after about 4000-3500 BCE", so PIE spread outwards into Europe into a landscape densely populated by people speaking "hundreds" of different languages, most of them farming.

Once Anthony has narrowed down the geographic area of the PIE speakers (which is roughly that of the Eurasian Steppes, north of the Black Sea) much of the remainder of the book is a detailed explanation of what we know about the various communities. These is heavily archaeological and in places becomes reduced to lists of the contents of various burial sites in such detail that the wider historical story is obscured somewhat. The non-specialist such as myself may find this confusing, but we can be distracted by the many maps, photographs and line drawings of graves and grave-goods.

Having said that, the book is worth sticking with. Some of the sections are real gems. I was particularly taken by the chapter that details the archaeology of ancient horses. The author has spent years studying the effects of bits upon horse teeth. With this knowledge he can try to say from animals remains which communities had domesticated the horse for riding (or use in chariots) and which hunted the animal for food. I was also taken by the description of the nomadic communities of wagon based pastrolists, whose economies involved groups of people who farmed and mined metal ores, as well as those moving about the steppes herding animals.

In places this book isn't an easy read. There is overwhelming detail in places, and this sometimes obscures the bigger picture. It will be an excellent resource for students of archaeology, and not just those interested in Eastern Europe. For the layman, there are plenty of fascinating nuggets and a general approach to history, language and archaeology that is well worth reading.

Alan D. McMillan & Eldon Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada

Perhaps the first thing that strikes readers of this history of the Canadian First Nations peoples, is the sheer variety of ways of life that existed before the arrival of Europeans. From the Arctic peoples who lived in extreme cold, hunted seals, fished and gathered very little food, to those living on the plains, hunting bison or engaging in farming and those living from the vast salmon runs of the West Coast, or hunting and gathering in the extensive forests of the east.

An extremely crude version of Canadian (indeed North American) aboriginal history would simply separate the periods into that pre-European arrival and then post-European time. Some First Nations people have their own version of this, the "Dog Days" versus the "Horse Days", remembering a time when positions were moved with the help of Dogs and then, after European's had introduced horses, a time when travel (as well as hunting) was changed.

But what this book demonstrates is that there is an enormously history of those who arrived in the Americas via the Bering land bridge some 12,000 years ago. They arrived in a "Terra Nullius", a land empty of people, but stocked full of flora and fauna. The authors discuss at length how the first people arrived - contrasting the tradition view of an overland crossing with a suggestion that many people would have travelled along the coast lines. Over the intervening time span, humans spread to every corner of the continent, and adapted to live in a myriad of different ways.

Over time, the aboriginal cultures developed and changed. Some died out, victims of hunger or conflict with other groups. This process accelerated as Europeans arrived, particularly as a result of the diseases that came with them, but also as a result of violence and war. Thus the societies that existing at the point of European contact were not ones that had been fixed for thousands of years. They were the result of the First Nations own history, a history that would have continued on its own path had it not been interrupted by European arrival.

Contact with the global economy transformed aboriginal life. In part the existence of metal tools, guns and horses had an immediate effect on life. But so did the particular nature of the relationship. Many Europeans on the west and east coasts wanted enormous quantities of furs or skins. Purchasing these from the native people, transformed those societies. Now they hunted not for food, or to satisfy needs, but to produce commodities for trade. In one case mentioned in the book, warfare took place that may have annihilated the St. Lawrence Iroquois, as a rival group the Stadaconans tried to monopolise trade with the French.

At the core of this book is a detailed examination of the changing life of different First Nations peoples. This is rooted in archaeology and anthropology, but also the culture and knowledge that we have from encounters with these people since European Contact. Indeed, each section begins with an extensive look at the history of the different groups, then finishes with a history of the time of European contact and finishes by bringing the history up-to-date by discussing the group's experience during the "global era".

I found this later part quite illuminating. The struggles of the First Nations people against the emerging nation state of Canada, were struggles for survival. They were also struggles to protect a heritage. Even in the 20th and 21st centuries, First Nations peoples continue to have to fight for their rights and compensation for how they were treated in the past. Even as late as the 1980s remnants of old Indian Acts several restricted the rights of "Indians" to move, to drink or to work. Much has changed, but much must still change. The First Nations people are not a living museum, they are a people with a rich history which continues to develop. The great strength of this book is to link that history to today, and present a continuity of struggle.

Related Reviews

Fagan - The First North Americans
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance 
Cronon - Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists & the Ecology of New EnglandTully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Chris Stringer - Homo Britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain

Chris Stringer's Homo Britannicus is a short, popular introduction to the history of humans living in the region that we now know as the British Isles. Anyone silly enough to infer from the title that this is a history that gives justification to the lunatics of the far right who believe that being British means tracing your ancestry back to some far distinct British caveman, will be disappointed. Instead what Stringer does is to present the evidence that humans in Britain have come and gone over an immense period of time, stretching back to well before the most recent Ice Age. In addition, the geography of Britain has changed substantially - not just from changing sea levels, but also through the erosion of a chalk ridge that connected south east England to north western France.

Human history goes back a long way, and Stringer takes us through the complex and often conflicting scientific evidence for our earliest history. The timescale is enormous. We have clear evidence that early species of humans were using stone tools in Africa more than two million years back. Even in British sites, evidence such as the "vole clock" place the tool use at one site as long ago as 700,000 years.

The "vole clock" is one of the fascinating examples of the archaeological process that Stringer uses to illustrate how scientists know so much about the ancient past. Here, the different species of voles, known to have evolved or gone extinct at specific points in the past, are used to date contemporary human remains. Much of the book is based on the work of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project. Indeed the last section is a series of descriptions of those involved in the project, and how they came to work in this career. It is notable that only one of the AHOB scientists is a woman, reflecting a wider problem of female under-representation in science.

Stringer tells us the story of human history (as well as that of our cousins such as the Neanderthals) but he also tells us about the voyage of discovery that science has also gone through. From early scientists trying to explain the presence of hippo bones in England or linking the age of the Earth to Noah's flood, Stringer shows us not just what we know, but how we know it.

For anyone wanting an entertaining introduction to our early history, as well as insights into the work of archaeologists, there probably isn't a better book. While the section on climate change at the end felt a little like a polemic shoe-horned in, it doesn't detract too much from a more general discussion on the position of humans in a wider natural world. It's also the first work of anthropology that I have ever read, which begins with the description of ancient women and children eating warm, moist hippo brains.

The paperback has some wonderful illustrations, but if possible you might want to try and get the hard-back which has even more photographs and diagrams.

Related Reviews

Stringer - The Origin of our Species

Adrienne Mayor - The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

"The giant ogre Skiron used to throw victims off a rocky cliff near Megara until the hero Theseus threw Skiron over the precipice. After a very long period of time 'his bones were tossed between sea and earth and finally hardened into rock'." - Ovid, Metamorphoses.

"It is a matter of observation that the stature of the entire human race is becoming smaller... When a mountain in Crete was cleft by an Earthquake, a skeleton 46 cubits long was found, which some people thought must be that of Orion and others of [giant] Otus... Augustus preserved the bodies of two giants (Secundilla and Pusio) over 10 feet tall at Sallust's Gardens in Rome." - Pliny the Elder, Natural History.

I have to admit that when I first received Adrienne Mayor's book I assumed it was a work of pseudo-science, exploring perhaps some invented history of Greeks and Romans living simultaneously with extinct ancient creatures. However, despite the somewhat unusual presentation (I thought the book looked like a cheap self-published work, and several of the drawings are very amateurish and add little to the text) this turns out to be an exceedingly interesting book that rapidly convinced me of the authors' central thesis.

Mayor begins with a simple argument. In many of the areas of the ancient world around the Mediterranean fossils are easily found. In the wider areas that were influenced by the Greeks and Romans or known to them through travelers and traders, even more extensive remains are common. How did the ancient people understand these?

The two quotes above demonstrate that to a certain extent, many of the ancients had a surprisingly good grasp of how such remains might be formed. Lacking an understanding of the age of the world, they could not comprehend the timescales necessary to create fossils, but they could understand them as the remains of long dead creatures or races. Frequently the remains themselves were interpreted as human, though they were usually from mammoths or similar animals. In a lovely demonstration, Mayor rearranges the bones of a model mammoth to show how they could be altered to look like a large tall humanoid. An ogre, or an ancient hero.

In the Gobi desert remains of dinosaurs like Protoceratops are frequently found, often with eggs in their nests. Mayor shows how the shape of these dinosaurs with their curved beaks, long tales and crested skull could easily be morphed or interpreted as the classic ancient image of a griffin, with a bird like head and wings and lion's body. She then offers us evidence from ancient texts and archaeological remains to show how the ancients clearly thought that griffins did live in parts of the desert. With only a small amount of speculation Mayor adds that the legends that griffins guarded piles of gold could be understood by the flecks of the metal often found with the remains.

Some of the evidence that Mayor has produced is fairly convincing. A pottery vessel with depicting a hero fighting a monster easily resolves itself into an image of a dinosaur skull protruding from the earth. Another image of a human fighting a griffin seems unremarkable until you notice that the griffin, unlike the man, appears to be growing from the ground. A suggestion that the artist understood about bones found under the earth?

Mayor seems to know her classical sources well, and frequently lists sites were bones would have been found eroding from the ground, particularly on the Mediterranean coasts. It has to be said she builds an impressive argument.

But what did the ancients actually understand about these bones? Mayor demonstrates that many of them, including some of the most well known philosophers thought they were the remains of ancient beasts and the ogres who populated the earth before they died out at the hands of heroes like Hercules. While explaining this though, we learn that many of the ancients had a rudimentary understanding that species could evolve, change and go extinct. However while there were those in ancient times who understood these bones as remains of ancient humans or mythical creatures there were also those who saw them as being other animals. Mayor quotes a statement by Plutarch where he identifies some bones as those of a species of elephant (1,700 years before a modern scientist would make the same links). Notably though, prior to the discovery of contemporary elephants by the Greeks, these same remains were interpreted as a vanished monster known as Neades.

It is interesting to speculate whether the myths of giant humans or creatures like centaurs or griffins came first, or were they the result of people seeing fossil remains and creating myths. What it undoubtedly true though, is that in ancient times these remains were often venerated and debated as much as we would today. In fact, Mayor describes a period which is almost a "bone craze" as ancient cities and temples located remains and identified them as famous local heroes putting them on display.

What becomes clear from Mayor's fascinating book, is not simply the way that ancient people tried to understand the world around them, but also how their ideas developed and changed. Sadly we have lost much of the evidence that would enable us to understand how the bones were displayed, though tantalising comments in ancient books clearly indicate that they were gawped at by tourists much as museum visitors might today. Mayor's book seems to have spurred other writers and scientists to look at old materials and books with different eyes, for the non-expert reader however it is a stimulating and informative look, not simply at how our ancestors understood fossils but how their ideas shaped the view of their own history and myth.

Related Reviews

Ward - The Call of Distant Mammoths
Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters

John Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

The very idea of Ancient Egypt conjures up some obvious images; the pyramids and Sphinx in Giza, frescoes and carvings showing boats plying the Nile or impressive statues and grave goods. This is not surprising, as these monuments are both impressive and photogenic. Yet they make up only a small part of Egypt's ancient history, a culmination of thousands of years of life near the Nile and the history of the area continued long after the pyramids were built into the era of classical Greece and Rome.

John Romer's earlier books have looked at particularly aspects of ancient Egypt. In particularly I was impressed by his exploration of the daily life of a section of Egypt's more ordinary population, the tomb builders who worked in the Valley of the Kings. That book Ancient Lives included a detailed description of some extended strike action by the workers. But Romer's latest book takes on a far larger task, an account of the whole history of Ancient Egypt. He is well qualified to do this having spent many years excavating and studying the period and this, the first volume of two, is a wonderful book that will set the standards for writing about Egypt for a long time.

Romer begins his tale with the earliest of people who live in the area that we now think of as Egypt. We know a little about the hunter-gatherer nomads who lived in the area, but the real story begins with the farming communities that hunted, grew food and fished on the northern shores of the Faiyum Oasis, a few hundred miles west of modern Cairo. The climate then was different and one of the factors that shaped the eventual growth of the ancient population was a changing environment that helped force the earliest farmers to the banks of the Nile. The arid conditions of the Egyptian desert preserve the legacy of these farmers from perhaps 7000 years ago. When excavated their grain bins were found to not only to contain grain, so well preserved that curators tried to germinate them later, but also the tools and reed baskets had also survived. Thus begins the story of a people who transformed the Nile region using the most rudimentary of tools, yet produced stunning buildings, tombs and artworks. The pyramids after all, were made with bronze age technology.

At the heart of John Romers' story though, is the tale of the growth of the Egyptian State. It took many centuries before what we know as ancient Egypt came to exist. Romer takes pains to explain the neolithic revolution that led to farming becoming the dominant mode of production along the Nile. But he also argues that the particular nature of the Nile, the extreme fertility of the soil meant that those farmers could support a large non-agricultural work force at a very early point in history. Here-in lies the secret of the rapid growth of the Egyptian state, but also its ability to mobilise and sustain large numbers of workers in its monument building phase. During the building of the Great Pyramid, Romer estimates that a tenth of the working population were not working on the fields, but were engaged in building or providing the networks of exchange to support the pyramid builders.

Romer sees the development of this state as central to the development of the wider Egyptian world. While discussing King Narmer, the earliest Pharaoh who united Upper and Lower Egypt, Romer writes that:

"the formation of Narmer's state had provided the foundations of a truly orignal order for [a] society that would last for millennia and which, as Pharaoh's Egypt, became a wonder of the ancient world.... a commonly used term like 'kingdom' appears to be appropriate. Yet the Pharaonic state stands at the beginning of all that. It was created from the ground up, without the benefit of an exemplar and, indeed, without the aid of writing or the presence of a national faith."

In this development of the state, the King or Pharaoh comes to represent the very state itself. Indeed,

"when ancient Egyptian scribes referred to Pharaoh's kingdom in non-literary texts, they used terms like 'residence' - that is the royal residence - to denote the controlling centre of the networks of trade and traffic, tithing and taxing, that operated in the regions of the lower Nile."

Kings like Narmer were often portrayed as warlike and violent. Early Egyptian history certainly was violent, many of the kings of this period, including Narmer, where buried with hundreds of murdered people around them. They are often depicted in the act of vanquishing an enemy, yet much of the migration and spread of the people northwards from the sites where the early Egyptian state developed was marked by peaceful co-existence with those who had come from the Levant. Extensive trade networks developed and cultural ideas, such as design of buildings and farming were taken up and shared by communities from different areas. I liked for instance that in the midst of one enormous Naqqadrian cemetery lies a grave of an individual buried in a traditional way from the Middle East.

All this could only be supported by the agricultural produce from the Nile, and the earliest technological innovations were the irrigation channels and pools built along the banks to trap the annual flood. Such methods are still used in other parts of Africa and one reason we know something about ancient farming patterns is that they lasted until very recent times. The ancient state was never far from the farming and the water that allowed the desert kingdom to flourish. This is why on a giant mace head, archaeologists have found an image of "a man... wearing what would become the White Crown of Upper Egypt, in the act of opening a water channel with the stroke of a farmer's adze... it is improbable that this unique object.... does not reflect something of the age in which it had been made."

In the language of Historical Materialism, the immense surplus that could be obtained from agricultural on the banks of the Nile (sometimes two or three crops a year) meant that the forces of production developed rapidly. Within a few centuries of the early Naqqadrian state and the rule of Narmer, the enormous pyramids were being built. This required a complex and developed state to organise the networks of trade and distribution of food, as well as the movement of stone and metal from quarries and mines. Egypt then as an agricultural state and Romer argues convincingly that the ancient cities were not places as we might imagine them today, but places of residence of the state's workers. Those who oversaw the production process.

Towards the end of the book, Romer laments  that we know very little about these ancient people.

"Our real knowledge of these ancient people hardly extends beyond their pyramids, their tomb chapels and names and titularies. We know nothing, for example, of those who carried [Queen] Hetep-heres in her palanquin, and though we possess her very intestines, we know nothing of the woman or the queen at all."

It is for this reason that much of the this book is dominated by discussions of architecture, pottery or stonework. Yet this is never boring, Romer has tried to draw out a history of people based on what they did to shape the world around them in order to survive. As he aptly points out, the images they have left are less a depiction of what is taking place and more a depiction of the state itself. As the ancient Egyptian state matured, its monuments and buildings also evolved. The very act of building the enormous pyramids also shaped the state and created the conditions of further building works. Our vision of ancient Egypt is thus in turn a reflection of what the ancient state itself did. As Romer concludes, "the greater part of what survives from early Egypt is exactly what those ancient people took pains to store and thus preserve within the dryness of the desert."

John Romers' book is a unique and magnificent read. It is accessible and well written, though if I have one minor criticism it is that the pictures seem old and of low-quality, a few higher resolution images of the objects being described would have been welcome. But this is a minor complaint about what is an essentially materialist account of the rise of the ancient Egyptian state. I recommend it, and look forward to the companion volume with great anticipation.

Related Reviews

John Romer - Ancient Lives; The Story of the Pharaohs' Tombmakers
Shaw - Ancient Egypt - A Very Short Introduction
Verner - The Pyramids: Their Archaeology and History
Kurth - The Temple of Edfu - A guide by an Ancient Egyptian Priest

Steve Burrow - The Tomb Builders in Wales 4000-3000 BC

The Tomb Builders is a companion book to Shadowland. Both deal with very distinct, but linked periods of ancient history. They concentrate on the region we now know as Wales, though as I remarked when reviewing Shadowland it is a problem of modern nationalism that we are trying to understand an areas region through a nation unknown during the period covered.

In fact, Burrows makes it clear that any delineation between those living and tomb building in what is now known as Wales and elsewhere in what is now known as Europe is impossible. Influences on tomb styles in Wales come from Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall (and wider England) and northern France. Burrows looks at these different styles and traces the links they represent with a much wider human landscape. He examines for instance, the way that these ancient people must have traded or exchanged tools from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Given that some of these tombs date from five or six millennia ago we know very little about their use. Excavation has taught us much. So we can speculate with reasonable accuracy on how the dead were interred (usually after the bodies had lost most, or all of their flesh) and how some tombs were repeatedly reused. We also know that some tombs were not re-opened, and others were revisited hundreds of years after they had been sealed, for further burials, or internment of ashes.

As with the stone circles discussed in Shadowland, Burrow shows that often the wider landscape had a important role in the choice of position for tombs. The burrows and cairns surrounding them were positioned often so that they commanded a prominent position along mountain routes and valleys.

The era of the tomb builders ended fairly abruptly as communities grew in size and larger scale monuments became more common. Burrows also links this with a rise in the use of single-occupancy burials, perhaps reflecting a change in culture. The tombs as we see them today are often very different from the covered mounds that were originally built and their antiquity often belays the fact that they may well have only been in use as tombs for a few centuries, as radiocarbon evidence from the bones found inside shows.

Nonetheless, the tombs themselves had an important role in the longer term culture of those who lived in the region. This was true of ancient times, but also true of much more recent communities. Burrows finishes this short book with a quick look at some of the more recent myths and legends associated with the burial places.

This is an excellent introduction to the ancient history of Wales, beautifully illustrated and the author is not afraid to argue his own point of view, even if it is not universally accepted (he argues for instance, that a passage tomb at Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey was deliberately lined up with the midsummer solstice. This is a view first put forward in the early 20th century and has been much debated since.) For anyone interested in the period, or visiting sites like Tinkinswood I'd recommend this read.

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Burrow - Shadowland
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J.S. Weiner - The Piltdown Forgery

In December 1912, Charles Dawson and Arthur Woodward announced an enormous scientific discovery to a packed lecture room. Hundreds of scientists were fascinated because the find could offer proof of Darwin's evolutionary theory and because in those days of scientific racism, some were hoping that a European proto-human might be found to counter the ancient remains that had hither-to only been found in Asia.

Piltdown Man has become synonymous with archaeological and anthropological forgery, yet the story of how the hoax was uncovered is a fascinating tale of scientific investigation. This contrasts with the way that some sections of the scientific community hailed the revelations at the time despite some serious doubts about the finds and the discoverer.

Almost as soon as the discovery was announced, it courted controversy. Some argued that the two pieces were not from the same skeleton, others muttered darker allegations. David Waterson, Professor of Anatomy for instance, "found it hard to conceive of a functional association between a jaw [bone] so similar to that of a chimpanzee and a cranium in all essentials human."

The problem was several-fold. Firstly at the beginnings of the twentieth century there were very few ways of determining an item's age. For particularly ancient finds, the best way of doing so was to date it from surrounding geography and geology, as well as other contemporary items that could be dated by other means. Today, a few hours of carbon dating would have exposed the Piltdown hoax very quickly. In 1912 things were much more complicated. Secondly since the scientists did not really know what an early human might look like the differences in the structure of the jaw-bone to that of a modern human were merely assumed to be because the bone came from an early evolutionary stage. Finally the hoaxer and gone to extreme lengths to make the find look genuine. The bones were stained in ways that were difficult to detect with contemporary instruments. The pieces were scattered and other, more unusual finds were associated with them. Finally, the principle discoverer, Charles Dawson was notoriously bad at recording his finds and keeping records.

J.S. Weiner was one of the scientists who gathered together all of the scientific proof that the Piltdown remains were a forgery and this is the classic history of the expose. Despite effectively being a documentation of a scientific investigation that is wholly negative, it contains a wealth of detail for the reader, and dare I say it, lessons for scientists from multiple disciplines today.

Most of the first half of the book is an account of the discovery and unveiling of the various finds associated with Piltdown, followed by a detailed marshaling of the evidence against an ancient age for the bones. Firstly Weiner argues that the gravels were the remains were "found" were completely "unfossiliferous" (a rather wonderful word there). Secondly he describes an ingenious dating method used before carbon-dating which dates a bone by the amount of fluorine it has absorbed since internment. This is one of the gems of science in this book and was a bit of a revelation to me. Weiner documents the expose of the various types of staining of the bones and other remains that was designed to make them appear old and finally he argues that "our scrutiny of the accounts of the digging up of the various fragment has given us no confidence that anything did come from undisturbed soil, despite Dawson's assertions."

The order of this is important. Weiner goes to great lengths to make the reader feel that he has proved the forgery scientifically. Once that has been accomplished, Weiner, in the second half of the book, sets out an argument that demolishes Charles Dawson's claims to a scientific authority.

When this book was first published in 1955 most of the principle people who had been involved had died. Nonetheless, Weiner remains careful not to point the finger to much. In fact, by starting with the science he avoids the book becoming simply a collection of allegations and gossip aimed at some of those involved. Having said that, Weiner does demonstrate that Charles Dawson in particular had a very bad reputation amongst his colleagues (amateur and professional) and a series of dubious discoveries to his name. These discoveries seem laughable today, and I cannot document them here. I would direct the interested reader to this short piece or Weiner's book.

It appears that several of Dawson's contemporaries (again, amateur and professional) never believed that the Piltdown was real. In fact one, Harry Morris, claimed to have overheard a conversation by Dawson that a fossil tooth, that was important to the identification of the bones as ancient, was "imported from France". Dawson was accused of "salting the mine", a damning allegation that matched other, contemporary criticisms of him for "plagiarism" and lack of scientific rigour.

Since Weiner and his colleagues proved the Piltdown hoax there has been much speculation about who was the perpetrator of the crime. Circumstantial evidence as well as some witness statements make it almost certain that Charles Dawson was the guilty party. Weiner points out that there may have been others involved, or a single other person who led a willing Dawson along. However Weiner also shows convincingly that this unknown other party must have been extremely knowledgeable in a variety of scientific disciplines as well as knowing Dawson's movements very well.

While there will always be a lingering doubt over Dawson's role, he died long before the truth came out. A more interesting question is why the doubts that did exist were never allowed to be part of the scientific discourse around the discovery. In some cases personal conflict was an important part. Harry Morris for instance seems to have had an ongoing feud with Dawson and while his own notes show clear belief in forgery from day one, he didn't declaim this publicly. Part of the problem was that the Piltdown theory backed up Morris' own wider theories of human history in southern England.

Weiner's book then shouldn't simply be seen as an attempt to expose a criminal, though it reads like an archaeological detective novel. Instead it is a wonderful explanation of the importance of the scientific method. The mistakes that were made by scientists in the early 1900s may have had their roots in racial beliefs, mistaken scientific knowledge, or simply a desire to be associated with a breakthrough discovery. Dawson himself exhibited what Weiner calls an "anxiety for recognition" - never a good thing for a scientist.

More importantly the final expose of the Piltdown forgery demonstrates how important it is for scientists to have a well rounded knowledge, rather than specialising too much. Bringing together archaeology, anthropology, chemistry, physics and history as well as being prepared to search through old cupboards and bookshelves, Weiner's and his colleagues exposed a sad episode in the history of science. But they may have made us all clearer on our own history in the process.

This review is of the 1955 edition of The Piltdown Forgery. The re-publication in 2003 had a new introduction and afterword by Chris Stringer which no-doubt puts the debates into a modern context. I would suggest that readers interested in reading Weiner's book try and find the edition with the Stringer pieces. This can be ordered as print-on-demand from the publisher here.

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