Kent Flannery & Joyce Marcus - The Creation of Inequality

Subtitled How Our Prehistoric Ancestors set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire this is a very important, and extremely well researched book that traces the development of human society from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to class divided, unequal societies like monarchies.

The authors argue that the first human societies where ones dominated by generosity, sharing and altruism. These societies also hand numerous internal checks to try and protect that egalitarian nature. For instance, both Eskimo and !Kung people have been shown to have used marked hunting arrows to determine who killed an animal. But the !Kung mixed up these arrows so no one really knew who had been the successful hunter. These two societies, and many other hunter-gatherer communities used ridicule and humour to downplay success and prevent anyone gaining a position above others. While successful hunters were cherished, they were expected to downplay their skills and share the fruits of their victories.

Flannery and Marcus have tried not to use studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers. Understanding that almost all of these groups are now changed by their contact with globalised capitalism, the authors instead have looked at records from the earliest encounters with hunter-gatherers. They then attempt to look at historical evidence for similar behaviour in the past. In fact, the greatest strength of this book is its rigorous attempt to find evidence for all aspects of the author's theories at different stages of human history and in different places.

As hunter-gatherers developed technology and skills, their social organisation developed as well. With the development of clan based societies, it was possible for inequality to appear. At first this was simply the difference between someone who had skills or experience over those who didn't. But with the rise of agriculture, the ability to store surplus food meant that "Big Men" could arise who could give others food. In time, some of these people, or even whole lineages could crystallise out into a wider class.

The authors then explore how these early unequal societies might become monarchies or other types of stratified groups, discussing how groups learn from each other, destroy each other, or even revert back to different social organisations.

This is a very important book, and I encourage everyone who has an interest in early human societies to read it. This review deliberately doesn't do the book, or the authors justice as I have written a more detailed and lengthier review for elsewhere.

My extended review of this book for the International Socialism Journal 140 can be read here.

Related Reviews

Stringer - Homo Britannicus
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Engels - Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

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

John Reader - Cities

Çatal Hüyük a large Turkish neolithic site has been described as the world's first city. Stretching back over 9000 years, at times up to 10,000 people might have lived there. Certainly it is a site of immense historic and social importance. John Reader argues it wasn't a city, more of an overgrown village, and indeed, after reading this sweeping history of "cities" it is hard to see how such a neolithic site could be a city in the sense that we understand today.

Nonetheless, permanent settlements like Çatal Hüyük were extremely important. True permanent settlement could only occur when agriculture developed. Only then could a surplus be provided that could support non-agricultural workers. Reader argues though that the dynamic was more complex and that early urban areas encouraged the further development of agriculture, rather than the other way around.

But Çatal Hüyük is remarkable in one other respect. It is the site of the first known example of art, where humans portrayed themselves within a recognisable landscape. The Çatal Hüyük wall painting includes the outline of a nearby volcano as well as buildings. The painters deliberately noted a site of economic importance - the volcano which provided the rich soil that enabled farmers to support the city.

Here then is the real importance of the city; once humanity moves towards an urban environment, that urbanisation dominates and shapes both people, and the world around them.

While much of Readers' book concentrates on the development of the modern city, the chapters on ancient cities are fascinating. An extended discussion of Rome, for instance, brings home just how much the economic dynamics of that Empire worked. In particular the way that Rome was absolutely in hock to countries that could supply the vast amounts of grain needed to feed the population. Here environment, politics and economics combine to give Rome both its power, but also its strategic weakness.

As early as 1200 CE a network of European cities was in place. Some of them came from older cities, many of them much newer, and again rooted in the development of agriculture and trading. The growth of these cities was rooted in the surrounding agriculture, but they were also dependent on the surroundings to maintain the population. As Reader explains:

"The fact is that until recently (and then only in the developed world) more people died in cities than were born in them. So here is another way that the city parasites the countryside.... Just as city-dwellers could not produce their own food, nor could they raise enough children to replace the citizens who died... the Agricultural Revolution had not only powered the Industrial Revolution - it had also fuelled the Demographic Revolution that filled the cities."

And fill them it did. London went from a population of about 80,000 in 1551 to 865,000 just 250 years later. This despite London's birthrate being 13% lower than in the countryside, and a 50% higher death rate.

Much of the discussion of modern cities concentrates on trends that we still see today - housing, pollution, transport and other "problems". There is a fascinating discussion about sewage that mirrors much of debates that inspired Karl Marx's own concerns around the degradation of agricultural soil and the "waste" of human excrement in the Thames. Reader looks at similar cases in Paris and notes a more rational approach to the question, which will fascinate anyone who has read John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology. 

This book was written in 2005 and in its ecological discussion it is perhaps most dated. Few today might share Reader's optimism that we can deal with environmental crisis through technological innovation. But that said, he does explore solutions in terms of solar cell technology.Similarly, Reader's discussions on the links between the urban environment (and the domestication of animals) with the growth of disease and epidemics are very interesting.

Unfortunately the greatest weakness of this book comes with the discussion of the future. Reader rightly concludes that the future lies in cities; but rather like Leo Hollis' more recent book on the city; he looks to enlightened planning procedures and politicians as the answer to over-crowding and pollution. No one should dismiss these factors and Reader rightly points to some of the weaknesses.

But what is missing here again is any sense of the city as a site of class struggle. This is not to simply glorify revolution, strikes or workers' protest. But a sense of the way that cities themselves have been shaped by mass movements. It was the fear of revolution, for instance, that lead to Baron Haussman designing Paris' enormous boulevards to make it harder to build barricades. 

Nor is there any sense of the collective struggles that fought to improve slums, reduce rents which helped lead to the building of public housing in Britain in the 20th century. Certainly there is no mention of the struggles that have come from those on the periphery of the developing worlds' great cities - struggles that have been fought over water and electricity, and problem stand more of a chance of shaping the future cities than many an enlightened planning officer.

Related Reviews

Hollis - Cities are Good for you
Harvey - Rebel Cities

Robert Harris - Imperium

Novels set in Ancient Rome are always hampered by the perceptions that people have of life there 2000 years ago. For many years Roman history has suffered from being the history of great men. Of senators, generals and of course Emperors. That's not to say that novels based around such individuals cannot be entertaining and informative.

Nonetheless because the history (and the documents) we have of the period tend to be those of “great” individuals, novels tend to follow similar paths, if only because the material available to form the backdrop for such lives is more readily accessible.

Robert Harris has now written a number of novels set in the ancient past. I wasn't overly impressed with the first of these Pompeii. But Imperium is a much stronger novel. Even though it centres on some of the most important figures of the late Republic, Harris avoids the trap of forgetting about the majority of the population because his narrator is Tiro, the extremely talented slave of the famous lawyer and counsel, Marcus Cicero.

Harris has done his research well. Many of the events in this book (which is in effect two linked shorter stories) are based in reality. The novel itself is supposed to be a biography of Cicero, and such a book (at least according to Plutarch) did exist, though tragically it has been lost to us since. Cicero is portrayed not simply as a brilliant orator. He also holds a mind of tactical genius and a singular determination to reach the peaks of power that were offered during Republican Rome.

Thus while centring on a particularly dramatic legal case (of extreme corruption and abuse of power by a Roman governor) and a political intrigue several years later, the main thread of the story is Cicero's struggle to achieve recognised greatness, seen through the eyes of his most important slave.

The backdrop to this is the decline of Republican Rome and the beginnings of the rise of the era of the Emperors. But behind all of this are the interests and struggles of Rome's different classes. The ruling class are aloof from the majority of the population, though a middling layer (of whom Cicero is a New Man) form a link between the top of the system and the masses below. Cicero's clients include those from the lower levels of society who often have been failed by the system as well as those who are more wealthy but seek redress. The masses by and large are a stage army, who give their loyalty to those politicians who have managed to either offer them the most in the way of bread and circuses or improved their lot. In Harris' telling Cicero is a man of the people, struggling against the excesses of the aristocracy and hence beloved by many ordinary people.

While Harris captures the limitations of Rome's democracy and brilliantly portrays the excesses and corruption of the majority of the ruling class, his portrayal of the dynamics of the mass of the population seems rather more one dimensional. This is very much exposed in the references to Grachuss, the reforming politician who was murdered by the ruling class for attempting to redistribute land in the interest of the masses. It is in these short paragraphs where you get a feel for how mass, class interests could shape Roman politics in a way that is absent elsewhere in the story.

Ultimately though this is the tale of a few individuals, despite Rome being the backdrop. Harris gives the reader a plausible tale of what life was like, the sights, smells, over-crowding and problems in the ancient capital. The dreams of freedom of Tiro are poignant and seem real, and if on occasion there are plot devices that seem a little contrived to ensure that our narrator can be present at some of the most important events in Roman history, this can be excused in the interest of a great storyline.

Unfortunately the afterword tells us nothing of what is based on known history and what is speculation and Robert Harris despite acknowledging his reliance on more recent scholarship he fails to direct the reader to more works that might allow those whose interest has been pricked in the history, to learn more. This is a shame because Imperium is an excellent read and could well put many on the path to a deeper study of Roman history.

Related Reading

Harris - Lustrum

Graves - I, Claudius

Graves - Claudius the God

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

Brian S. Roper - The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation

Just what "democracy" is has varied enormously throughout history. In the developed world we are told that "our" democracy is the envy of the world, yet as this new history demonstrates, at various times in the past people have had very different and often far more expanded franchises than we have today.

Indeed modern representative democracy is actually very limited. You only have to look at the way that the 2008 economic crisis was caused by completely unaccountable people. Bankers whose actions might have consequences for millions of people were completely unaccountable to wider society. Or, as Brain Roper points out, you could examine the 2004 US election were "business contributed $1,503 million to political parties compared with $61.6 million from trade unions". More recently you might muse on the fact that almost no-one in Britain voted for a Tory-Liberal coalition, yet the inadequate election system we have produced just that.

Roper begins his survey of the history of democracy with the ancient world. He argues that ancient Greece's democracy was surprisingly advanced. In fact, "for the first and only sustained period in history the producers or labouring citizens ruled." Citizens he says, "faced no major obstacles to significant involvement in public affairs based on social position or wealth". Though children, women or slaves were of course excluded. Nonetheless, this is far in advance of the rights of many early democracies such as Britain, which only extended the franchise to women in the early 20th century. Roper is absolutely correct to argue that:

"Athenian democracy... rested on historically specific social foundations in which the peasant citizen played a central role."

I stress this because one of the important themes of Roper's book is not just that "democracy" changes through history, but that it does so based on particular historical circumstances. With the decline of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic, Roper argues that democracy effectively disappeared and it was only with the revolutionary struggles against feudalism that democracy reappears. This democracy then must itself be struggled for and extended.

At the heart of Roper's book is an examination of how this process takes place. He looks in detail at three bourgeois revolutions - England, America and France to try and understand how modern states appeared and how democracy became central to them. What might be termed bourgeois democracy is a direct product of these revolutions, in particular the American Revolution. Roper examines how the victorious American bourgeoisie constructed a democratic system that both protected the status quo and limited the potential for movements from below to challenge their authority. It was a democracy that had protecting property relations at its core.

But Roper doesn't ignore another aspect to these movements, which is the way that in revolutionary struggles democracy from below appears. During the English Civil War for instance, the mass of the population that took part in the fighting began to develop its own ideas for how society should be run. The Putney Debates in 1647 were an example of representatives of different social forces within the revolution trying to lay out their own visions of how people could partake in society. The more radical elements were destroyed by Cromwell, but the episode serves to show that the democratic traditions that came out of the bourgeois revolutions were not automatic. Instead they represent different class interests.

The strongest sections of this book are those where Roper shows how revolutionary movements throw up the potential for new forms of participatory democracy in the modern world. In particular he looks at the way the Paris Commune demonstrated to revolutionaries like Marx and Engels how a socialist society might be organised, based on representatives paid the same rate and working people and accountable through recall by their electors. Roper quotes Marx's pamphlet, The Civil War in France:

"[The Commune was] a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour."

The second example that the author discusses is the Russian Revolution. This is important he argues, because "it showed that it was possible for the working class to take power and run society." In a few pages Roper discusses the successes of the revolution and the functioning of the soviets, the gatherings of elected representatives that both led the revolution and then began to re-organise society. He also then shows how the revolution was isolated and destroyed by the rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy.

It is easy to critique democracy. After all, democracy fails to deliver economic or political justice for the majority of those within society. But such criticisms are not necessarily revolutionary. The Marxist critique outlined by Roper is important because it points the way forward, to a society where democracy is based upon an entirely different method of organising society. Under capitalism he points out, democracy can never work properly because society is based on the fundamental antagonism between two classes, the exploitation of one by the other, true democracy can only flourish when this antagonism is destroyed.

While Ropers' book is excellent there are a number of criticisms I would make. Firstly Roper concentrates very much on democracy within class society. To this end he ignores the democratic decision making processes that must have existed within pre-class societies. Hunter-gatherer communities have frequently been shown to have high levels of participation in decision making.

Secondly, Roper argues that feudal society was fundamentally undemocratic. This is absolutely right. There was a strict social hierarchy that rested on brute force. Yet within feudal society there were, on a very localised level, often some examples of democracy. Peasants in feudal villages often met annually to redistribute strips of land. Another example might be the daily "parliament" of the community on the island of St. Kilda. We should be wary of arguing that this implied there was any sort of democratic base to feudalism, but it does demonstrate that once again ordinary people did try to organise to improve their lot.

Finally Roper quite rightly argues that democracy is a product of revolutionary times and that we see the best, participatory democracy evolve during moments of revolutionary struggle. This is not just a product of this high points, but also of most working class struggles - at the lowest level, the "strike committee" is one example.

These criticisms aside, Brian S. Roper has produced a useful and interesting over-view of the history of an idea. It is one that will be useful as we try to understand the processes taking place around the world, particularly in the Arab Revolutions, as millions struggle against dictators, for democracy, freedom and social justice.

Related Reviews

Foot - The Vote
Vallance - A Radical History of Britain

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.

Related Reviews

Burrow - Shadowland
Pryor - Britain BC

Francis Pryor - Farmers in Prehistoric Britain

Much of what is known about early, or ancient farming is the subject of informed conjecture. Because anthropologists have been able to study contemporary communities, the lives of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies is fairly well understood, at least in generalities. But because agricultural communities have, over time, developed or adopted improved techniques and technologies, we don't necessarily understand much about how the earliest farmers lived and worked the land. Indeed as Francis Pryor points out farming may have been through various historical stages, it is also very much dependent on the landscape and area in which it is practised. Farming on the British Isles, off the coast of Western Europe in 3500 BCE was very different to farming life in the fertile crescent when wheat was first domesticated.

Farmers in Prehistoric Britain is a short, but important work that tries to understand a small part of ancient farming history. Pryor concentrates on the areas of his expertise, in particular the Flag Fen site near Peterbourgh which Pryor has been the principle excavator and publicist for over the years. Perhaps uniquely for archaeologists, Pryor is also a practising farmer. Since his early work at Flag Fen he has refined his understanding of ancient agriculture, because he has learnt how to breed sheep and cattle. His life in a farming community has produced insights into the way that agriculture could have been.

This doesn't always follow. For instance, being an astronomer in the 21st century does not necessarily give an insight into the life of Galileo contemplating the heavens under a regime that was noted for disliking heresy. Farming is different in many ways, as despite technological advances, insights into the behaviour of (say) sheep when confronted by a sheepdog for the first time, are likely to be similar to those for ancient shepherds. In a couple of cases here, Pryor describes how he only recognised certain features of Bronze Age farms as a result of his own use of drove-ways to separate sheep as part of the annual cycle of the farm.

Much of what Pryor argues about the practise and life of ancient farmers is linked with his wider themes, that appear in most of his other books, of ancient ritual landscapes. These he argues mean that ancient people considered themselves part of a much wider use of land and Pryor extends this analogy to some of the buildings and sites he discusses – a separation existed between (say) locations devoted to life and burial, but they were intimately linked.

The nascent nature of agricultural remains is a significant problem for those studying ancient agriculture. Pryor spends sometime explaining why hedges don't leave traces for instance, and so much of this book is devoted to some detailed discussion of the practice of archaeology in this context. I found some of this a little complicated, but readers who work in the field will no doubt find it useful and illuminating.

I want to finish this review by quoting a couple of the conclusions of the book, because they are quite amazing. Firstly, Pryor argues that livestock farming was the “dominant form of farming in Britain between, say, 4500 and 600 BC”. This is important because most people when discussing agriculture probably imagine fields of wheat. Pryor is at pains to point out that this was unlikely, despite “intensive” farming, the production of foods (at least in the British Isles until the Iron Age) such as wheat was likely to have been done on small plots. Cattle and sheep rearing was the large scale agriculture of this era of British farming. For instance, he argues that the agricultural visible parts of Flag Fen supported a population of 2000-3000 sheep. This is large scale farming, that needed (and could support) a big human population, as well as a wider infrastructure to use and distribute the wool, hides and meat.

The “millennium or so of intensive livestock farming in large parts of lowland Britain” described by Pryor lead to a “Bronze Age bonanza”. Overtime, population increases and the gradual improvement of farm techniques meant that eventually, the “population of animals suddenly passed a critical threshold and it became necessary to parcel-up the landscape more formally”. This began a very different era of farming and society for Bronze Age people. Over the millennia described here, the countryside of England was transformed. From a wooded landscape to a artificial one, hunter-gatherer, neolithic and Bronze Age men and women fundamentally altered and started to create the world we live in today. Pryor's book is a good introduction to these changes and the mechanics of how ancient farmers albeit in a small part of the world, may well have practiced their daily lives.

Note that this book is out of print, but can be found in various second hand sources. Parts of it are explored in more detail in several of Pryor's other works. I'd particularly recommend Britain BC and Seahenge for this and other material.

Related Reviews

Reynolds - Ancient Farming

Pryor - Britain BC

Pryor - Seahenge
Pryor - Making of the British Landscape
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages
Pryor - Flag Fen

Aubrey Burl - Stonehenge

Aubrey Burl is one of the world's experts on stone circles, and that he has a encyclopedic knowledge of the sites, locations, history and documents of these ancient monuments is clear throughout this book. While aimed at the layman, or the person interested in Britain's most recognisable monument, the book is teeming with detail that will allow the reader to develop their interests further, and probably forms a useful starting point for the professional wanting to get to grips with the subject. This should make for a very interesting book, but unfortunately it turns out that Stonehenge is actually rather difficult to read and in places could put the less enthused reader off. But lets start with some of the history covered by Burl's work.

Stone circles are a very important part of ancient history. Our ancestors built rather a lot of these circles, around 1300 Burl says. They stretch from the enormous Stonehenge to smaller circles the length and breadth of the British Isles. These cannot be separated, either in time, or in design from sites in Northern France and Burl draws out the links, arguing convincingly that there was a clear interchange of ideas and experiences amongst the peoples of the time. As an aside, I was also particularly interested read about the miniature "rectangles and triangles" that pop up in the south-west of England, on a rather different scale to the massive central stones of Salisbury plain; Burl tells us that triangles of stones on Exmoor (he names at least four sites) have "midget stones camouflaged like winter-white stoats peeping from long grass".

One of the central themes of Burl's book is the longevity of Stonehenge. By this I mean not just that it has stood (and gradually fallen into disrepair) for thousands of years, but that the history of the site is many hundreds of years old. Burl shows how the site became first sacred in Mesolithic times, with four wooden pillars (sited where today's visitor's car park is) this, over many generations seems to have attracted generations of builders who erected a variety of cursuses, barrows, banked ditches and stone circles of various types. Burl is overly contemptuous of visitors who only gaze at the enormous stones and ignore the smaller markings that record the location of these far older, and perhaps more significant bits of Stonehenges' history. On my last visit to Stonehenge I was impressed though to find that the visitors guides did point out many of these features, and I fear the author is a little more churlish than he should be.

Burl examines many of the "theories" and "myths" of Stonehenge. He looks at the arguments about whether it was an observatory to predict eclipses (and debunks them well in my opinion) he argues that the circle (and others around the country) would have lined up stones with important events, like the midsummer sun, but were based on careful measurement, rather than an attempt to predict the future. He also argues, again very convincingly, that the Sarsen stones must have arrived at Salisbury plain by glacial action, rather than the long distance work that would have been required to get the stones there from the mountains of Wales. Here he is at his most polemic, arguing that it would have been illogical to take the stones such great distances without first reducing them to appropriate sizes. Whether we can see into the ancient person's mind as accurately as this, and knowing that religious activity is often not rational, I am less convinced by this aspect of Burl's argument as by him pointing out precisely how difficult and dangerous the journey would be.

But there are problems with this book. It feels disjointed and a little repetitive in places. While Burl has used described the story of Stonehenge in chronological order (though he does begin with attempts to understand it from early on) the story skips back and forth a little, and I found it difficult to understand at times which bits of the site were being described. Burl's writing is a strange mix of scientific argument and literary quotations. At times he includes long lists of archaeological writings. For example, on page 284, Burl writes; "Many Stonehenge students favoured a standing Altar stone - Charleton (1663), pp32, 52, and much later Hawkins (1966), p56; Atkinson (1979), p57; Richards (1991), p61...." he continues to list a further nine page references. This is just academic posturing and while no-doubt interesting to the expert, will only put off the casual reader. It would have been better put in a foot note (perhaps Burl needs a different editor) and given that on the same page, there is a further list of those who supported a "supine" Altar student, it doesn't leave me really wanting to recommend a book that has many interesting parts to it.

Finally, a note on language. Burl favours a flowery prose but at times it is inaccessible; "the feasting had been prolonged and epicurean". Why not say "they feasted extensively on their best food"? No wonder people think that historical experts can be lofty, or live in ivory towers unable to talk to the masses.

If you are a serious student of archaeology and stone circles, Aubrey Burl's book is probably a must read. If you want a introduction to the subject that doesn't talk down to the reader and makes it easier to understand the monument in its landscape I would start with Francis Pryor's book Britain BC.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain BC
Hill - Stonehenge (Wonders of the World series) 
Burrow - Shadowland

Fernand Braudel - The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

Fernand Braudel is one of those historians whose work looms large over his area of specialty. Braudel however was a historian whose work knows few limits and his influence is enormous. References to his writings and ideas crop up regularly in books and their bibliographies. He is also, rightly, associated with a new wave of historical teaching, helping to sweep clear the stuffy corridors of European academia, though he was himself pushed to the fringes by those who he challenged, spending some years teaching in South America.

This book is one that is probably his most accessible. Certainly, it is shorter than his three volume Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 which might be considered his most important work.

For Braudel, the Mediterranean Sea was one of the key factors in the development of human civilisation. In a latter chapter in this book, while writing of the Roman Empire, Braudel says that "The Mediterranean did indeed operate as a mechanism tending to bring together the countries scattered round its immense perimeter. But the sea did not itself spin the web in which it was captured alive." He then continues;

"But the very fact that the Mediterranean, while in thrall to Rome, was still a living entity with a healthy pulse of its own, meant that all its cultural goods continued to circulate, mingling ideas and beliefs, and bringing about a uniformity in material civilization which has left traces still visible today."

In other words, Braudel's thesis is that the Sea permitted, through trade and the exchange of ideas, widely diverse cultures and communities to mix, mingle and come together. On this is based he argues, the triumph of the Roman Empire, the strength of Ancient Greece and the spread of civilisation, ideas and experience from East to West.

It would take a naive student of history to argue against this. There is no doubt that the Mediterranean permitted travel and communication over enormous distances, in a way that wasn't possible in other parts of the ancient world. However, I think that Braudel uses this to substitute for any other attempt to understand human society. He seems at odds when trying to understand the dynamics of particular civilisations. He makes, for instance, no attempt to explain the underlying dynamics of particular economies. So he discusses Ancient Greece and barely mentions slavery, even though when mentioning Ancient Greek currency he quotes the value of a "woman skilled at doing many tasks" as being four oxen.

This isn't a superficial problem. It means that Braudel cannot get to grips with changing dynamics of civilisation. The Roman Empire peaked at a much larger than say the Greek city states, not because they were more vicious Imperialists, but because the economic dynamic of their society was more efficient at extracting surplus value from slaves. Occasionally the author gets close to a deeper understanding. His discussion on why their was no industrial revolution in the ancient world, despite their understanding of technology and science, lays the blame in an economic system - slavery - that meant innovation was unnecessary. This is an argument that owes much to the Marxist ideas of historical change, but it seems that Braudel is consciously trying to find a explanation of history that avoids Marxism, or perhaps is cherry picking ideas in an attempt to create a new historical method.

As a result of these problems, Braudel can be immensely frustrating. Here's a comment he makes on the Greek city states, which were he says, "a strange little world, very different from the medieval town in western Europe. The latter was quite separate from the countryside; it was self-contained". Even under modern capitalism, cities are still linked to the countryside. Medieval towns were even more closer to rural areas. Economically they were very dependent on peasants coming into urban areas to sell produce. In fact towns grew up around the market, and were not cutting themselves off.

Braudel is quick to see economic systems in terms of a simplistic understanding of economic dynamics. He declares the city of Carthage as "capitalist" because it is based on trade. Again a superficial explanation of a more complex dynamic.

The sheer scope of Braudel's history here is impressive. Yet it is necessarily superficial. He covers pre-class societies up to the fall of Ancient Rome. As a result I found that his prose was at times dull. The author crams detail in, leaving the reader lost and breathless. It is almost like Braudel is making up for historical superficiality through declaring his immense personal knowledge a particular time.

Of course, the book is dated, but this is not a criticism of Braudel. He clearly bases his work on some of the most up to date writings and ideas available. Today though, some of this seems very dated. Does anyone today believe that the existence of "megalithic monuments" in places as diverse and distant as northern Europe, Thailand, India and Madagascar imply a "civilization of huge stones... propagated by sea"?

While Braudel's work is clearly of importance, it seems weak and superficial to me. At points I found the writing a real struggle, though perhaps this is a problem of translation rather than writing. His book is less an explanation of the importance of the Mediterranean Sea and more a collection of interesting facts about different societies. His attempts to gather this into a grand narrative are unconvincing.

Steve Burrow - Shadowland: Wales 3000-1500BC

Produced by the National Museum of Wales, this is a lavishly illustrated, short but comprehensive guide to a distinctive period of Welsh history. 3000BC to 1500BC effectively corresponds with the end of the stone age and the late bronze age.

The title of the book, Shadowland, sets the tone for Steve Burrow's explanation of these fifteen centuries. The people, he argues, are like shadows on the Welsh landscape. Almost nothing of their daily lives has been found. Few homes, few farms, few implements. Even the relatively common post-holes that normally mark the locations of ancients homes are few and far between. This is not to say the lands were unpopulated. What these people did leave us were extensive funerary remains. We also know a great deal about specific areas of their lives - extensive copper mining at Great Orme for instance. We can infer a great deal, but we cannot say much specifically about their lives.

Burrows takes us sytematically through what we do know. From the shapes of flint knives and tools, to the standardised burials we find, surprisingly, that there tended to be common styles or fashions across what is now Wales. It is tempting to view this as a common culture, but Burrows argues that it is unlikely that there was a single unified cultural set of beliefs across the area. Rather there was an extensive trading and communication network throughout Wales and England, stretching into the European continent.

This network is best imagined through the enormous distances that the stones for Stonehenge were brought from Wales. But goods, ore, designs and on occasion funeral soil appears to have been moved, often great distances, to places of use or symbolic importance.

This cultural unity is unusal when compared to even a few years later. At the end of the book, Burrow's makes the point that by the time of the Roman arrival, they described Wales as being dominated by just four tribes or kingdoms. Very different to the period under consideration.

The book takes up many recent debates and arguments in archaeology. Burrow's argues that there probably weren't a specific "beaker people" for instance, despite the preponderance of this style of pottery across the region.

Despite the occasional academic feel to the book, this is a readable introduction to the period. It's a tragedy of modern nationalism that we feel the need to examine an areas pre-history through the lens of a country that didn't exist thousands of years ago, whose people and economy couldn't have been seperated out geographically in the way, say the British Isle and Europe can be. Nonetheless, this is a good book to read if you're trying to get to grips with early human history in these isles. I shall look forward to reading the authors, earlier, companion book.

Related Reviews

Burrow - The Tomb Builders
Pryor - Britain BC

Francis Pryor - Seahenge: A Quest for Life and Death in Bronze Age Britain

Readers may remember the excitement near the end of 1999 when a wooden circle was discovered on a Norfolk beach. Surrounding a central, uprooted tree stump, a circle of timber looked like a wooden Stonehenge. Quickly the media dubbed it Seahenge and the name has stuck. This irritates some students of archaeology, as the circle is not a henge in the sense that Stonehenge is. Rather the timber circle was actually made of planks, touching to form a continuous wall. It's only after thousands of years of action from water that we see the timber reduced to stumps, and the appearance of a henge.

Francis Pryor's book is much more than an exploration of what Seahenge was, and what it was for. It is a deep, semi-autobiographical trawl through the way that studies of the Bronze Age have changed during the last hundred years. Pryor is now one of the foremost archaeologists of the Bronze Age, and he has helped over see a changing view of the way that the people of that era lived, worshipped, farmed and died.

This book begins with Seahenge, but rapidly looks at a number of sites that Pryor has concentrated on. In particular, the Flag Fen site near Peterborough, which Pryor has been instrumental in excavating, exploring and bringing to the attention of the public. As he discusses his involvement with these sites, he teaches the reader how he, looks at the Bronze Age landscape. For Pryor, it is not enough to look at a site or a find in isolation, you have to understand it in the context of the wider world of the people who lived there, or buried the item in the ground. This means looking at the importance of boundaries, roads, paths and the edges of water. Pryor shows us how Bronze Age people might have seen the world around them, based on the layout of their farms and the positions of their buildings. His archaeological research is practical, and his statements, while they occasionally border on whimsy, frequently are based on experience. Pryor knows that you can't have a central chimney on a Bronze Age round house, because he's tried it and had to flee the recreation as it filled with dense smoke. Pryor begins with Seahenge, but he finishes there too. You cannot explain Seahenge without understanding the wider Bronze Age experience, and this is one of the reasons that the book is so strong - the author is giving us the intellectual basis to understand Seahenge. You cannot explain a monument (if that is the right word) like this, without this. It would be like trying to sum up the Magna Carta, or Karl Marx's thought in a single sentence.

This is a practical book, in the sense that Pryor is a hands on writer. He talks as he works, we learn the detail of how to excavate a trench. One of the things I particularly like is the way that Pryor never forgets everyone who is involved in a dig. From the driver of the JCB to the people who work the metal detectors, Pryor sees archaeology as a collective effort, a democratic one too, if his descriptions of the working meetings are anything to go by. This is reflected in Pryor's own view of history:

"At the end of the second season in 1972 I gave a paper at a conference in Newcastle, in which I described the emerging picture of well-regulated life in the Bronze Age. No sooner had I stepped down from the stage than half a dozen academics declared that such order and organisation could only be due to the presence of a powerful political elite, who controlled those otherwise unruly prehistoric Fen folk. I don't know why, but this assumption irritated me. Why couldn't they control the way they behaved themselves? Why do some always have to look for a ruling class, just because ordinary people seem to be running their lives efficiently and well?"

There are some interesting bits here. Pryor discusses the neolithic revolution, the moment in human history, when agriculture transformed our ways of life and pushed us in the direction of class society and the accumulation of ever greater wealth. He points out that this was less of a revolution than a gradual process, agriculture having its roots in early experiences, even of hunter-gathering communities. While the transformation was revolutionary, it was not a process that happened overnight, nor was it simultaneous everywhere. This view feels more natural, though I think Pryor underplays the importance of the term revolution in this context. The development of agriculture and the transition to a life dominated by sedentary life, rather than movement was a culmination of what had happened before, but it was also a break from it. Humans constantly develop their forces of production, sometimes they transform their situation into a new mode of production. Hunter-gathering had elements of agriculture to it, but it is a fundamentally different system to one based on agriculture.

But these are really the minor quibbles of a Marxist obsessed with early farming. Pryor's book is one of the best introductions I've ever read into Bronze Age history and archaeology. If it doesn't make you want to read more, or visit the stones of Carnac in Brittany, or Flag Fen itself, then I really cannot imagine what will. Most of all though, Pryor is a writer who likes people. Those that lived, worshipped and were sometimes buried at the sites he describes are real, rounded individuals who lived in the midst of a landscape they tried to shape and understand. For this reason alone, Pryor is an archaeologist who, it feels to me is on the right side.


Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain BC 
Pryor - Britain AD
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages
Pryor - The Making of the British Landscape

David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber has produced an important and stimulating book. It is a radical book that clearly has its roots in the anti-capitalist movements that the author has been part of. But it is more than simply a book that is designed to challenge capitalism. Graeber is attempt to argue that the conventional way of looking at the world is wrong, and that the way we have lived our lives in the past has been very different to how we do today.

Debt, Graeber argues, means a very specific thing to us today. It is an obligation that we accept we have to someone else, be that someone a bank or a loan shark. The obligation we feel is the sense that the debt (usually money, though not always) must always be paid back. Graeber contrasts this, with how obligations have been viewed in the past. For most of human history we have organised our lives through hunting and gathering of foods. In these societies, the obligations we had were never the result of someone making a loan with their own material interests. There were no hunter-gatherer loan sharks. Graeber illustrates this well with an example from a well documents group of hunter-gatherers, the Innuit.

One person who lived with and studied the Innuit described returning empty handed from a hunt. Fearing hunger, he found a successful hunter giving him several hundred pounds of meat. The man objected to his thanks.

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."
Such attitudes do not simply come from shortages. Other anthropologists such as Eleanor Burke Leacock have documented how hunter-gatherer tribes share food out, even when there isn't enough for everyone. In other words, the obligations people feel are rooted in their collective life, not out of self-interest.

The way these attitudes change is a great theme of Graeber's book and would be difficult to cover here. He is at pains to argue that debt as a general notion has existed throughout history, though most of the time it has been more to do with human social relations than with material gains. These social debts might be the obligations you take on when marrying someone - the promise to feed and look after them. They might also be the money you give as a dowry - not a payment, but a donation towards the cost of living. Over time, Graeber argues and in many ways, such social obligations take root as material debts.

Graeber upsets a great many apple-carts. One of which is in his discussion of Adam Smith and the conventional economics that have flowed from his ideas. In trying to answer the question "what is money?", Smith and others always answer in similar ways. "Imagine a world without money. We'd have to survive with barter. I have a bag of nails, you have a loaf of bread. I must exchange bread for nails. This barter economy is cumbersome, so money develops". I paraphrase, but you get the idea.

Graeber argues that there is no evidence for "barter economies". Those who say for instance, that when the Roman Empire declined in an area, society "returned to a barter economy" are placing their vision of what they think happened over reality. The truth is that Roman money disappeared, but in its place remained alternative currencies, sometimes virtual ones. "Barter economies" says Graeber did not exist, exchange took place through elaborate systems of credit. With the development of urban economies rather than early agricultural ones, people might need bread, and only have nails, but the loaves would have a particular value assigned to them, as did nails. Graeber cites plenty of examples of societies which have distributed goods to people who need them, waiting for future payment when fishermen returned with their catch or the nails were manufactured.

So explains that after the Romans left, villages might no longer have Roman money. But they did have Roman prices. They might value a sheep as so many pieces of gold and bread as so many pieces of silver, and this allowed exchange to take place. Money wasn't real, debt existed by in a concrete sense of credit. Not an abstract one. Presumably the person who failed to come good on his or her debt was eventually refused assistance.

All this is very interesting, and it certainly seems plausible. The problem with the book for me was that I don't think that Graeber really gets a handle on what drives human economies. It isn't debt, nor is it finance. Production exists because people need to provide for their material needs and the way that production is organised determines all the other aspects of their society. The way that the forces of production in society develop, challenging and changing the relations in society ultimately helps bring about change. This is a very short explanation of historical materialism, but I think Graeber would have benefited from expressing his history in terms similar to this. Otherwise you are left feeling distinctly like human history being a series of events that are connected only through a gradual development of a money economy.

I also feel that Graeber misses out a class analysis. That's not to say he doesn't acknowledge the existence of classes. He is very clear that these do exist in society and critical of the attitudes of the rich towards the majority of society. But I don't think he explains what motivates people in different classes. Why do the rich behave like they do? Why are they so irrational in their behaviour?

Capitalism is a fundamentally different human society to earlier ones. Its economic dynamic is the need to accumulate wealth, for the sake of accumulation. This is not the same as earlier class societies. The lord of the manor did not go out and exploit the peasants for the sake of it. He did so until he had satisfied his needs. Capitalism exploits workers because it needs more wealth, to reinvest and restart the treadmill of production. This difference also shapes how we perceive ourselves and our relations to others. In this context debt between people takes on a different meaning under capitalism then it did in previous societies. We are atomised and individualised, set competing against each other.

That said, Graeber has some good insights into different eras of human history and it may well be my own personal predilections that lead me to think his chapters on hunter-gatherers are the most interesting. This is a book that will be debated and discussed at length and is worth study. While there are holes to pick and arguments to be had, the themes are generally of interest.

Readers wanting a more in depth critique of Graeber's book are directed towards this review here.

Chris Stringer - The Origin of Our Species

Trying to understand the development of the earliest humans is an extremely difficult task. What evidence there is, is limited to a  few fossilised bones from a handful of sites scattered across the world. Most of the other evidence comes from the DNA extracted from those bones, or a the stone tools that seem to have been produced in vast quantities by these early humans.

Chris Stringer's new book is probably one of the best introductions to the subject that I have read. His account is determindely materialistic. It is rooted in the evidence we have, and an understanding of the wider environmental conditions hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is also approachable, though I did find some of the sections on DNA needed re-reading at times, but they are rewarding if the reader perseveres. Rarely does a writer actually explain how the DNA is obtained and how it is studied.

Stringer has a long pedigree in terms of the academic study of ancient humans. He was one of the first scientists to argue for an Out of Africa hypothesis for modern humans. The idea that our species, Homo Sapiens, spread outwards from Africa, following earlier migrations by earlier species of humans. According to this theory, which it seems, is now fairly common currency the origin of Homo Sapiens was a fairly recent one and our immediate ancestors only left Africa around 100,000 years ago. Surprisingly it took some 65,000 more years before they reached Europe. Spreading initially eastwards, through the modern Middle East and into Asia.

Of course, with limited evidence controversry reigns. Stringer doesn't shy from giving both sides of a debate, though he never fails to give his point of view, backing it up with his own examples and evidence. Take the discussion about why the Neanderthals died out and were replaced by modern humans. Stringer cites the work of colleagues like Clive Finlayson, who argue that the Neanderthals were on a long decline and that their last homes, in Gibralter, were the last places they survived. The existence of their species ended by a changing climate to which they couldnt adapt.

Stringer's argument doesn't dismiss this, but builds on it. He argues that in some places modern humans may have pushed the Neanderthals out, in others the Neanderthals may have died out unable to adapt to a changing world. Modern humans may or may not have been present, but it seems unlikely that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens were always in competition, particularly given evidence that they may have exchanged ideas and interbred. This seems to me a more realistic answer. Trying to reduce the end of a intelligent species like our human ancestors, simply to climatic changes doesn't feel right. A more complex interaction with a changing world, with different groups struggling to adapt and one being better than the other seems much more logical.

Stringer also touches on other debates and discussions. How did language develop? Where did geographical differences in human bodies come from and when? How did changes in our bodies relate to changes in our behaviour and brains and vice versa? Many of these questions have surprisinly detailed answers given the lack of archaeological data. Chris Stringer has produced an excellent introduction to the subject. It is an excellent starting point for the debates and discussions around early human evolution.

Related Reviews

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

Brian Fagan - The First North Americans

Around 15,000 years tiny bands of people travelled across a narrow band of land between what is now the far eastern end of Russia and Alaska. The land bridge caused by the colder climate at the end of the last Ice Age allowed these hunter-gatherers to arrive in a new world. A vast area without humans, but teaming in animal and plant life.

Brian Fagan's book is a brilliant introduction to the history of the next 15,000 years told through the archaeological evidence that remains to us. The earliest arrivals into the American continents left little remains, we are limited to a few handfuls of their stone tools and little else. But these first Americans rapidly developed an astonishing variety of communities and were able to exploit the varied natural world in many different ways.

The story of the Native American's very much one of change. Often this was gradual, though, as Fagan points out, it could be very rapid. For thousands of years different groups remained as hunter-gatherers. The famous site of Head Smashed In a Native American hunting area in modern Canada where bison were driven off a cliff in their hundreds was used for 7000 years. However the "buffalo jump" here was part of a much larger and more complex community rather than simply being a site for killing animals.

One of the great strengths of this book are the brilliant illustrations. Many of these are black and white photographs as well as line-drawings and maps. However pride of place goes to the stunning colour plates, some of which, such as the images of the Mesa Verde, "Cliff Palace" in Colorado are stunning. I particular liked the images of the Clovis points - spear heads used by some of the very earliest peoples in America. These are shown in full colour in someones hand, helping the reader understand why these pointed stones must have been awesome weapons.

The later depiction of the Native American peoples as savages deliberately hides the very complex and advanced societies that they had developed. The arrival of agriculture initially of maize, spread rapidly through the continent and helped some of the groups develop complex, class societies which in turn produced some of the most fascinating archaeological sites. The communities that built the Hopewell mounds or the enormous earthworks at Poverty Point in Louisiana certainly must have had very complex social structures and organisation. Poverty Point was a tiered earthwork with some 35,000 cubic metres of soil. Fagan estimates that all this material, carried in woven baskets would have taken 1,350 people three years if they worked 70 days a year.

Fagan's book covers an enormous quantity of material, rapidly and thus out of necessity it glosses some details and he admits that it concentrates on the basics rather than reporting every archaeological debate and difference. Aimed at the general public as well as students and academics, this is an accessible introduction, though sometimes it tends towards academic jargon. The word "palimpsest" should, in my opinion, never be used if the author is striving to be accessible. Its use here on the first page of chapter one might well be considered off putting.

Fagan finishes by discussing the horrific impact of European arrival on the populations of the Americas. Here he documents the genocide and disease that destroyed thousands of people and generations of culture, often in a few months.

He also discusses the way that European demand for resources such as fur changed the dynamics of the existing cultures. Here I think he underestimates the way that the European notion of commodity ownership helped destroy hunter-gatherer cultures. Prior to European arrival resources or land were mostly for the use of the community or to solve people's needs. Once European traders arrived, the exchanging of resources such as fur, created a situation were commodities were important for their value in exchange rather than their ability to serve peoples' needs. I've discussed this further in my review of William Cronon's excellent book, Changes in the Land here.

But these are minor points that come at the end of a wonderful examination of the development of many different cultures across North America. I would heartily recommend this to anyone interested in the lives of hunter-gatherer communities and the evolution of the earliest class societies. The pictures and maps are particularly enlightening and Brian Fagan deserves credit for bringing them together.

Related Reviews

Fagan - Floods, Famines & Emperors - El Nino & the Fate of Civilisations
Fagan - The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilisation
Mithen - After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000 - 5,000 BC

David J. Breeze - The Antonine Wall

The northern-most frontier of the Roman Empire, marked out by the Antonine Wall is often overlooked by its more impressive southern cousin built by Hadrian. The history of the Antonine Wall is much shorter, and according to David Breeze, it was likely to have been built by a new Emperor, keen to extend his Imperial boundaries in order to win a triumph. But extending the borders like this didn't really win the Emperor much, Breeze points out that he conquered "territory which had once been Roman and, we might expect, had been kept under Roman surveillance ever since."

Unlike Hadrian's wall, much of Antonine's was constructed from turf, rather than stone. An impressive military way would have shadowed the wall, and forts and fortlets helped soldiers patrol and guard the approach. Again, as with Hadrian's wall, this was less of a military defence and more of a border or statement of power. Breeze locates the wall in a wider "military landscape", with Roman forts, settlements and patrols extending over a wider area, north and south of the actual border line.

For those academically interested, there is a wealth of detail here - distances and sizes, lists of military forces based at particular points and so the like. There is also a smidgen of humour, I liked that the chapter dealing with the day to day life of the soldiers stationed on the wall, is called "Life on the Edge". For those soldiers who may have served, or originated in Africa, as evidence of ancient cooking styles implies, this cold northerly location at the most extreme end of the Empire must have felt very isolated indeed. Very much an edge between the known and unknown.

Sadly little of Antonine's wall survive. Extensive parts have fallen foul of the plough, but Breeze's book provides a useful guide to the best places to view the wall. From personal experience I recommend Rough Castle, not simply for the remains, but because of the sense of the wider landscape that the Romans would have been located in. This is a useful introduction to the history of this part of the Roman world and some of the debates and discussions that are still absorbing academic minds. Breeze is honest enough to admit that he has emphasised the evidence that backs his own theories, but I suspect that much of this would mean little to the lay reader anyway, and is unlikely to detract from a useful introduction to a small part of Roman Britain.

Related Reviews


Watkins - The Roman Forum
Parenti - The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Beard - Pompeii; The Life of a Roman Town
Beard - The Roman Triumph