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The Society does not accept responsibility for
opinions expressed by its contributors
Pattern and Progress: field systems of the second and
early first millennium BC in southern Britain (British
Archaeological Reports British Series 587, Oxford,
2013). By Julie English. 296 × 210 mm. vii + 204
pp. b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 1 4073 1195 1.
Price £39.00.
This book, based on a doctoral thesis supervised
by the late Peter Drewett and David Rudling,
investigates the chronological succession of Bronze
Age field systems and linear earthworks, for the
most part, in seven study areas within an area
bounded by Southampton, Stonehenge, Guildford
and Eastbourne. These include archaeologically
well-known sites — Plumpton Plain, Brigmerston/
Milston Down, Thundersbarrow, Woolbury, and the
Windover Hill field system. Setting these sites in their
chronological and landscape contexts has involved
the intricate task of synthesising and reinterpreting
a considerable variety of sources, old and new.
Pattern and Progress concludes with an interpretive
discussion of the two major components of
the sequence — coaxial field systems and the
smaller but more prominent field systems and
enclosures which replaced them. English’s approach
to interpreting coaxial systems is similar to my own.
She draws inferences from observed phenomena,
explores several potential explanatory contexts —
demographic, socio-political, agrarian, — and tries
to comprehend the mindset or ‘ideology’ behind
these remarkable layouts.
English’s work makes it abundantly clear that
Middle Bronze Age coaxial field systems were well
represented on the Wessex chalkland, fitting into
a pattern also documented by their neighbours
— the ditched coaxials unearthed (literally) by
DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2015.1044285
rescue archaeology on the southern and eastern
English lowlands (for which see David Yates’s
2007 Land, Power and Prestige) and the reaves of
upland Dartmoor. The chalkland coaxials evidently
share the strangeness of their fellows on other
geologies. For English, they express agrarian selfconfidence, and a kind of ‘success’. Yet at the
same time they were apparently not very ‘busy’; no
palaeo-environmentalist has envisaged vast fields
of waving corn. Their lynchets are strikingly low
and formless. The coaxial systems show few signs
of modification, yet sometimes their orientations
are changed, which seems an odd, fussy thing
to do, especially if the boundaries were hedged.
Furthermore, these ‘terrain oblivious’ boundaries
breast some very steep slopes, sometimes at 30
or 40 degree gradients. Contemporary settlements
are elusive and were evidently often unenclosed.
Gateways are hard to locate, and in many systems
there are few apparent internal lanes or droveways.
At the same time, these systems represented an
‘irreversible’ step change in landscape control, and
they must have seriously constrained freedom of
travel. One gets the curious impression that crops
were less important than coaxiality ….
These coaxials have their idiosyncracies. A few
are highly ‘infilled’, containing dense networks of
boundaries; the ‘chequerboard’ patterns displayed by
Thundersbarrow and Kingley Vale are actually quite
rare within coaxial systems. Within some, English
discerns ‘blocks’ each of roughly 15–25 ha. The long,
curving external boundaries of some of these coaxial
systems are in contrast, for instance, with Dartmoor’s
long straight ‘terminal’ reaves. There are glimpses
of the open pastures, communal thoroughfares and
carefully located burial mound cemeteries which
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LANDSCAPE HISTORY
must have complemented the coaxials; they reinforce
the sense that these are landscapes to be understood
on a Large Terrain scale.
The most striking phenomena picked out here
are the sets of fields known as ‘aggregated’,
‘agglomerated’, or ‘looped’ (the author really should
have standardised her terminology!). These field
sets, created in the Late Bronze Age, occupy small
zones within the coaxials, which they mostly slight.
Their lynchets are more prominent than those of
their predecessors, often forming ‘playing card’
field corners which can be massive and are often
staggered; here it seems that individual fields were
laid out one by one, at unknown intervals (possibly
not much longer than the proverbial ten minutes).
These field sets enclose more realistic acreages, in
terms of growing crops to feed families. Perhaps
the switch to aggregate field systems was yet another
element in the horizon of massive cultural change
at the Middle/Late Bronze Age transition. At any
rate, this ‘retrenchment’ raises, more obviously than
elsewhere, the issue of the ‘decline and fall’ of
coaxials — a question as mysterious as that of their
genesis. For the latter, English offers a couple of
brief, speculative suggestions about possible origins
on the Continent and in a Beaker cultural context.
Hmm, we’ll see.
This book has at least three textual lacunae, and
would be easier to read if the illustrations and text
were more closely integrated and cross-referenced.
Although little new light is shed on the difficult
interpretive issues around coaxials, Julie English
is to be congratulated on a piece of thoughtful,
meticulous analysis which constitutes a valuable
addition to the literature on British prehistoric
field systems.
University of Wales,
Trinity St David
ANDREW FLEMING
Britain Begins (Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2013). By Barry Cunliffe. 246 × 189 mm. 568 pp.
140 b/w illustrations, 152 maps and figures. ISBN
978 0 1996 7945 4. Price £25.00.
As the author explains, this book attempts to do two
things: first, to give an account of how past writers
tried to understand the peoples of these islands
and where they have come from; and, second, to
offer a narrative of how such peoples over the
some 12,000 years contributed to the formation
of Britain. As one might expect from such an
eminent archaeologist the result is a highly readable
and well-researched book which acknowledges
that there is still much to learn. (But oh dear —
what has happened to the scales on some of the
maps? Stonehenge is shown as about 30 km from
Woodhenge rather than just over 3 km away (fig.
6.1) and Scotland has expanded (fig. 6.29) with 40
km becoming 400 km!).
The first part analyses the development of
myths and legends about British ancestry which
have been proposed over the centuries, many of
which endured longer after they had been factually
disproved. The author covers the whole spectrum
in a way that is both enlightening and entertaining.
The bulk of the book is, however, concerned with
the second approach — tracing the people who
moved into these islands (or into the land mass
that preceded them) and the physical changes they
wrought, the cultures they introduced. When many
archaeologists in recent years have tended to play
down the influence of immigration and invasion
in favour of cultural exchange the author doesn’t
shy away (or so it seems to this reader) from
suggesting that successive influxes of people did
indeed make massive contributions as they were
gradually assimilated into the existing populations,
although significant cultural contributions could
also be introduced through the incursions of the
few intermarrying with the indigenous communities
or through trade.
The story begins earlier, with the first hunter
gatherers venturing in on fleeting visits as the ice
receded around 10,000 B.C., subsequently settling
as climatic conditions permitted. In this section, as
elsewhere throughout the book, the distribution of
archaeological artefacts helps to indicate regions of
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic activity. Not only are the
waves of newcomers set into the wider European
context but attempts are made to examine such
modern forms of evidence as DNA analysis,
the limitations and shortcomings of which are
fully explained. So the story continues, from the
Neolithic peoples who introduced agriculture about
4200 B.C., introducing, too, new forms of ritual
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involving the constriction of burial monuments
and causewayed enclosures: features which betray
a sense of community affirming ‘social obligations,
allegiances, and hierarchies’ (pp. 163–5). Through
phases of increased mobility, especially by sea,
one meets the Beaker peoples, the introduction
of bronze weaponry, the speaking of a Celtic
language by at least 2000 B.C., and the increasing
evidence of a warrior aristocracy emerging as the
elite around 1500 B.C. with territoriality expressed in
monuments to ancestors or gods, votive offerings
made in rivers and wetlands, man-made boundaries
and early hillforts, plus extensive coaxial field
systems (although climatic deterioration set in about
1000 B.C. bringing colder and wetter conditions
that perhaps fostered pastoral farming). Conflict
between regional groups seems to have increased
during the ninth century as iron weapons became
more plentiful. Regional patterns become more
pronounced — in the distribution of hillforts and
their aggrandisement not only as expressions of
power but almost certainly as defensive structures,
in styles of pottery and art, or in cultural expressions
such as the chariot burial practice of north-east
England, the use and types of coinage and so on.
The profound changes introduced by the
Romans are well known and the author continues
to discuss the coming of the Anglo-Saxons and the
subsequent Scandinavian settlers. For this reader,
the Anglo-Saxon period received barely sufficient
recognition, with limited mention of cemeteries, a
few settlement types and metalwork, although our
present understanding of the genetic evidence is
acknowledged. Here landscape and land use tend
to get lost — the emphasis is upon the mobility of
peoples, whether as invading immigrants or more
peaceful settlers, carriers of new cultural aspirations
with their fresh artefacts and genetic composition.
The scale of immigrations varied across Britain
and Ireland but, above all, the outcome was that
c. 990–c. 1010, in a second phase of raiding, much
of eastern Britain was taken over by a Danish elite
and the outcome was ‘to drive the consolidation of
political power among the indigenous populations.
In Britain disparate Anglo-Saxon, British, and
Danish kingdoms were brought together under a
single king’ (p. 483) and ‘the Scandinavian impact on
Britain in terms of population change was probably
greater than any other incursion at any time in the
previous history of the islands and was not matched
until the late twentieth century’ (p. 486), barely
interrupted by the low numbers that imposed a
Norman elite (also of Scandinavian origin) in 1066.
No doubt new archaeological projects will clarify
certain features but as a resume of present thought
this book is ambitious, thorough and extremely
useful to all with an interest in archaeology.
University of Birmingham
DELLA HOOKE
The Archaeology of the West Coast of South Africa
(British Archaeological Reports International Series
2526, Oxford, 2013). Edited by Antonieta Jerardino,
Antonia Malan and David Braun. 210 × 292 mm.
vi + 168 pp. 52 b/w illustrations, 12 tables. ISBN
978 1 4073 1144 9. Price £32.00.
This edited volume on recent work on the
archaeology of the West Coast of South Africa
presents a number of paradoxes. There is no doubt
that the Cape coasts represent some of the bestresearched parts of the African continent, outside
of Egypt, and where Egypt dominates in terms of
quantity and expended resources, the Cape region
more than makes up for this with the quality of
the research that has been undertaken. This volume
seeks to celebrate that history of innovative research
and to provide a summary of the current state of
affairs for the entire length of the human career,
whilst also serving to shift emphasis from the more
celebrated work on the southern coast to that of
the west.
As a statement of the current state of knowledge
across time and along the hundreds of kilometres of
the West Coast this is therefore an important volume
and the papers are of a uniformly high quality. They
are not summaries of the archaeological record
in its entirety but rather they offer vignettes into
specialised analyses of particular locations and
issues. Happily for this journal there is a healthy
discussion of landscapes and of archaeological
survey within those landscapes. It is also important
to point out that the term ‘coast’ is used in a fairly
liberal sense to include communities in the interior
who are regularly accessing coastal resources. As
the editors point out in their introduction, prior
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to the arrival of Europeans there was very little
maritime, as opposed to coastal, activity. Hence,
the interaction between the coast and its immediate
interior would have been extremely important.
There is remarkably even chronological coverage,
from Early Stone Age to the present, although
geographically there is a natural bias towards the
south with its more habitable environment and
proximity to Cape Town. It is noticeable that the one
chapter to have a sole focus on the Namaqualand
coast (Dewar and Orton) has a seemingly different
remit, one of documenting the kinds of cultural
materials available. This again reflects the much
greater wealth of research that has been undertaken
on the southern part of the West Coast.
Of particular note from a landscape perspective
was the chapter by Kandel and Conard examining
the Geelbek dunes. This unusual environment
meant that the mostly indigenous, stone tool using
human traces were sporadic and generally low in
density, but also that they had minimal means for
dating. Nevertheless, drawing on a mature long-term
research initiative, the chapter was able to explore
a number of extremely well-recorded scatters of
material and consider their meaning in the overall
use of landscape. Another important chapter is that
by Malan et al. who consider the West Coast since
A.D. 1600. This explores the range of engagements
between indigenous populations and Europeans
and also between coastal and interior communities.
It does seem to be a significantly longer chapter than
the rest, but this allows an examination of some
extremely significant encounters within colonial
landscapes.
It is important to end this review by considering
some of the paradoxes thrown up by the volume.
These begin with the beautiful images of the
front cover, indicating in colour important places
and engagements in the landscape, which are not
actually used by, or related to, the contents of the
book. This is quite a disappointment. Erlandson
in his brief concluding chapter challenges those
working on the West Coast to explore contemporary
environmental issues, such as the impacts of sea
level change and increased erosion, almost entirely
ignored in this volume. A further problem is that
the book provides a detailed and archaeologically
competent, even innovative, exploration of a stark
and quite distinctive landscape that has sponsored
LANDSCAPE HISTORY
various intriguing cultural manifestations, without
ever really attempting to consider a landscape
perspective, which investigates how humans
constructed their own cultural landscapes and
how they moved through these cultural constructs.
An obvious contrast would be between indigenous
and European perspectives on the meaning of
‘coast’. Such a dichotomy is also played out in a
final paradox. The Cape has long been the focus
of excellent archaeological activity, one which
rightly attracts international scholars because of
the weight of high-quality data that is available and
one which needs concerted efforts to protect, as
Deacon et al. point out. Yet, how can archaeology
sustain expenditure on this cultural heritage in the
fledgling democracy, when its work does not speak
directly to the majority of South Africa’s citizens?
These are challenges indeed.
University College, London
ANDREW REID
Silbury Hill. The largest prehistoric mound in Europe
(English Heritage, Swindon, 2013). Edited by Jim
Leary, David Field and Gill Campbell. 276 × 219
mm. 382 pp. 210 b/w and colour illustrations. ISBN
978 1 8480 2045 0. Price £100.00.
In their volume on Silbury Hill, Jim Leary, David
Field and Gill Campbell radically challenge the
model of the monument’s origins as a planned
‘grand design’. Instead, they regard the processes,
both the selection of its materials and the act
of building it, as the prime focus of the late
Neolithic people who constructed it over four to
five generations c. 2450 B.C. In this view, Silbury Hill
was always in a state of becoming a design statement
of a different type. There appears to be little activity
at the site in the Bronze and Iron Ages; but a small
town and a ritual complex grew up around the skirts
of the hill in the Romano-British period, and it was
later to become an Anglo-Saxon fortification.
One of the great strengths of the book is its
superb presentation of empirical detail which is
likely to be an indispensable resource for future
researchers. For example, the detailing of the
new Bayesian frameworked radio-carbon date
results, palaeoenvironmental evidence, analysis
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of the lithics and the mound’s stratigraphy are
accessibly presented and thoughtfully written. The
volume also includes reports on medieval water
management, and the historiography of antiquarian
and archaeological investigations of the site and
its wider landscape. There is, too, an excellent
account of the work of the Silbury Conservation
Project and Silbury Hill Project Board. Anyone
interested in gaining insight into the complexities
of dealing with a World Heritage Site which has
been investigated at various times over the last
250 years will be rewarded by the focus in Chapter
10 ‘The Conservation of Silbury Hill’. It outlines
the range of investigations into the causes of the
collapse of the monument — previous digging
into it was a major contributor —, and offers
engineering solutions for future conservationists
of the monument.
For this reviewer, and perhaps for readers of this
journal, Chapter 8 was of particular interest since
it is here that the key questions of interest about
Silbury Hill are addressed (at least in part): why
here?’, ‘why at all?’ and ‘why that shape?’. Problems
with the chapter are indicated in the gap between
the text on the dustcover which says that the book
offers ‘a reinterpretation of the construction of the
hill’ and the closing ‘Coda’ to the chapter which
says that the purpose of recent English Heritage
field interventions was ‘not designed to answer
pressing research questions about the nature of the
mound’. This lacuna between advertised intention
and actuality may underlie the authors’ tendency
to argue that the principal motivation for the
construction of the monument may have been
the phenomenological responses to the landscape
of its late Neolithic inhabitants, rather than more
pragmatic or functional interpretations.
Problems with that approach are signalled by two
aspects of the landscape in the immediate vicinity
of the Hill that are discussed in the section on
‘Water and stone’ in the same chapter. The first is
that, in terms of its slightly wider landscape content,
Silbury Hill lies at the confluence of two rivers
with significant consequences for the movement
of both people and animals past and to the site.
The second, more immediately local, consideration
is that the Hill is ringed by springs that emerge at a
constant temperature throughout the year therefore
extending growing seasons in the fields nearby.
The practical implications of this topography may
mean that an interpretation that relies simply on a
symbolic relationship between the Hill and water
may be too limited. Furthermore, a longer term
landscape history of that specialised geography
that includes the periods before the construction of
the monument may also have something valuable
to contribute. It is time for a research project that
tries to puts Silbury into a landscape of people
trying to make a living, rather than just a symbolic
or ritualised landscape.
The volume is beautifully illustrated throughout
with well-chosen photographs, illustrations and
diagrams, supplemented by large, well-presented
site plans which fold out from the back of the
book. The lavish production allows the authors to
offer a gradual, layered build-up of evidence and
interpretation in a style both scholarly and accessible
allowing both professional and amateur readily to
understand the history of that wonderful landscape
from the time of its construction to the present day.
University of Buckingham
DAVID JACQUES
The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor (Bloomsbury,
London, 2013). By Charles F. W. Higham. 216 ×
138 mm. 144 pp. 22 b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 1
7809 3419 8. Price £45.00.
Charles Higham is undoubtedly one of the giants of
South-East Asian archaeology and one of its most
capable synthesisers. His work on Khok Phanom
Di, Nong Nor, Ban Lum Khao, Noen U-Loke,
Non Muang Kao and other sites coupled with his
on-going use of human remains to establish a new
and robust chronological framework for South-East
Asian prehistoric sites, continue to shape the way
in which archaeologists understand the region. This
volume provides a summary of the now finished
Origins of Angkor (OA) project whilst highlighting
illustrative findings from other key sites. The OA
project approached the development of Angkorian
civilisation through a broad geographical and
temporal framework focusing primarily on the
establishment of the prehistoric cultural sequence
in Northeast Thailand. The OA’s work has already
been captured in six extensive volumes detailing
94
individual sites (or particular historical phases at
said sites).
As part of the Bloomsbury ‘Debates in Archaeology’ series The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor
probes four key questions in South-East Asian
prehistoric archaeology: Who was responsible for the
Neolithic Revolution (with a focus on the cultivation
of rice)? Who was responsible for the introduction
of metallurgy and what was its impact? When did
iron become a part of the technological repertoire
of the region and how did it change society? And
finally, what were the origins of the civilisation of
Angkor — both domestic and foreign? Higham
attempts to carefully balance the early twentiethcentury paradigm which favoured the study of
external stimulus (migration and diffusion) with
more recent work which has privileged internal
evolutions, adaptations, and social processes.
This volume does not have an overt focus on
landscape which will leave some of the readers of
this journal wanting. Higham begins by painting a
picture of developed hunter-gatherer communities
living along the environmentally rich South-East
Asian coastline into which rice farmers from
southern China penetrated; mixing with the local
population. Centuries later, Higham purports
that the spread of bronze expertise from China
brought differential access to exotic goods enabling
aggrandisers in the Neolithic communities to
achieve social success which they were unable to
pass on to their successors. Although the origins
of iron smelting in South-East Asia may never be
identified, according to Higham’s thesis, heightened
conflict and competition for scarce prestige resources during the Iron Age is demonstrated by
skeletal trauma, the presence of iron weaponry
and the emergence of defensive earthworks. The
author concludes his synthesis by promulgating
the notion that marked population growth during
the Iron Age was capitalised upon by military
elites who defeated rivals to found early states
— creating the conditions out of which Angkor
itself later emerged. He concludes, as others
have, that Angkor’s ‘foundations had nothing to
do with Alexander the Great or the Romans [as
once suggested by Europeans], but everything to
do with the ambitions of the indigenous people
interacting with and taking advantage of the new
ideas, technologies and exotic goods generated
LANDSCAPE HISTORY
with the rise of international exchange along the
Southern Silk Road’ (p. 113).
Higham’s 2003 The Civilization of Angkor provided
an overview of the changes occurring in South-East
Asia from the prehistoric period until Angkor’s fall
and its European (re) ‘discovery’. The Origins of
the Civilization of Angkor covers much of the same
ground as this previous volume, concluding with
the rise of Angkor rather than its later demise. The
main difference is that it usefully adds summaries
of key findings from the OA’s post-2003 work.
Yet, after the introduction, one has to wait until
page 87 before Angkor itself is mentioned — just
before the book comes to an abrupt halt. Those
seeking to understand the recent work on prehistoric
sites of Angkor itself or specifically of Cambodia
would need to supplement this book (which focuses
primarily on sites in Thailand) by looking at the
reports of excavations in Mimot, Laang Spean,
Lovea village, Phum Sophy, Koh Ta Meas and Prei
Khmeng in Angkor. If the reader is after a better
understanding of the early states which preceded
Angkor, Miriam Stark or Michael Vickery’s work
might provide a more comprehensive entry point.
Finally, if it is Angkor itself which intrigues the
reader, Higham’s earlier works affords a better
introduction.
University of Pretoria
BRITT BAILIE
Building the Great Stone Circles of the North (Windgather
Press, Oxford, 2013). Edited by Colin Richards. 246
× 185 mm. 320 pp. Numerous b/w and colour
illustrations, 16 tables. ISBN 978 1 905119 12 0.
Price £39.95.
The book provides a detailed account of the stone
circles of Scotland, demonstrating their importance
for a wider understanding of the British Neolithic.
It is extremely well written and an engaging read.
It skilfully weaves together the results of fieldwork
and excavation, with complex theoretical discussion.
To my mind, this is an exemplary example of
archaeological writing at its best. And it is well
illustrated with a wide selection of both drawings
and photographs. There has been a disturbing trend
within archaeology in recent years towards digitally
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produced drawings that represent sites at evergrowing scales of accuracy without due account of
what is being represented — representation rather
than interpretation. The use of colour in numerous
section drawings and plans within this book goes
someway to rectifying this trend, highlighting key
features under discussion and adding considerably
to the interpretations being made.
Stone circles have long held fascination for
antiquarians, archaeologists and the general public
alike. They remain largely enigmatic and yet represent one of the most visited categories of
prehistoric monuments in the British Isles. This
book seeks to explore this paradox by providing
us with new ways of thinking and interpreting
these mysterious monuments. It begins with a
discussion of the problems of interpreting stone
circles. Richards argues that rather than focusing
upon the classification and use of stone circles —
perhaps an impossible task — we should consider
their construction. He argues that the function of
stones circles can best be explored through the
social process of making, a process freed from
notions of an architectural design process, and more
closely aligned to a emergent vernacular tradition
of materials and their transformation.
Richards argues that a unifying feature of
all stone circles is the construction of space
and that this encirclement can be thought of
as a process of ‘wrapping’ or enclosure. This
process of ‘wrapping’ emphasises practice and
focuses attention back towards the creation and
construction of stone circles rather than upon there
typological classification or meaning. This concept
is explored and developed in subsequent chapters
though a range of sites and case studies.
The book uses the concept of wrapping to explore
two key regions: the Northern and Western Isles of
Scotland. Chapter 2 discusses stone circles in the
west of Scotland, including those of Machrie Moor,
Arran, Templewood, Kilmartin, Argyll and Cultoon,
Islay. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 focus upon Orkney, whilst
chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10 deal with the Western Isles
of Scotland, and particularly the complex of stone
circles at Calanais. In Chapter 2 Richards examines
the social process of construction. His account of
Templewood provides a thoughtful discussion of
the use and types of building materials in these
monuments, and its potential material significance.
This theme is continued in his discussion and
interpretation of the Ring of Brodgar (Chapter
4) where he argues that the construction of this
monument was formed by the bringing together of
multiple sources of stone from various locales within
in the island landscapes. Richards convincingly
argues that this process of construction created
social cohesion and inter-connectedness through
communal and inter-island effort.
Richards’ focus on the social significance of
the construction of stone circles, and in particular
his concept of wrapping, will make this book of
interest to prehistorians across the globe. Whilst the
concept of wrapping is interesting and convincingly
applied to the archaeological record — and clearly
could be equally applied to many other categories
of prehistoric monument — one remains sceptical
about its whole-scale application. That said, this
is a wonderful book and whilst it may not replace
Burls’ encyclopaedic work on stone circles, it
stands comfortably alongside this earlier work as a
significant contribution to the study of these most
enigmatic of prehistoric monuments.
University of Wales, Bangor
GARY ROBINSON
The Topography and the Landscape of Roman Dacia
(British Archaeological Reports, International Series
2501, Oxford, 2013). By Florin Fodorean. 295 × 208
mm. vii + 147 pp. 53 b/w illustrations, 1 colour.
ISBN 978 1 4073 1117 3. Price £30.00.
This useful, if slim, volume presents an updated
version of the author’s Romanian doctoral research.
Fodorean has structured the book around four
chapters covering the landscape and topography
of Roman Dacia and provides a welcome synopsis
of this understudied Roman province.
The first chapter begins with a summary of the
main scholarly works related to Roman roads before
introducing the ancient literary testimonia relating to
Dacia. It provides an analysis of Roman motives
for conquest before concluding with a description
of the sequence of conquest in relation to road
building.
The second chapter is organised around two
broad sections. The first summarises the ancient
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sources relating to the roads of Roman Dacia,
focusing primarily on the Tabula Peuteringeriana, the
medieval copy of a late antique Roman map. Here
Fodorean sketches the main arguments regarding
the map and its relation to ancient conceptions
of space, relying heavily on Talbert and Nicolet.
The second section focuses on evidence related to
Dacia specifically: sections of the Peutinger map,
and surviving inscriptions including milestones. The
chapter concludes with a description of the routes of
the three main Roman roads through the province.
If we think of roads as providing a skeletal
structure to the topography of a region, Fodorean
attempts to put the flesh on the body in his third
chapter. He populates the landscapes that the roads
traversed with discussions of various settlement
types: the legionary fortress at Potaissa and associated vicus, the city of Napoca and environs, and
surrounding dependent settlements and watch
towers. The analysis is firmly focused on the roads,
and this leads to a certain circularity. Most rural
settlements, we are told, occur close to identified
major Roman arteries (pp. 57–8), but elsewhere
we discover that there is a lack of micro-regional
topographic studies to populate the rural landscape
(p. 63). In other words, the known settlements are
close to roads because only the areas close to roads
have been examined. The absences may represent
a lack of archaeological knowledge rather than a
distinctive settlement pattern.
The last chapter tries to remedy this by studying
antiquarian and historical sources: three from
the nineteenth century, and limited sections of
the Peutinger map in more detail. Fodorean uses
these to populate the rural landscape of Dacia
with previously recognised sites to alleviate the
gaps in contemporary archaeological knowledge.
At times the text dissolves into descriptive lists of
proposed routeways, but he does highlight important methodological and institutional challenges
facing Romanian archaeologists since the 1950s. A
clear strength of this chapter is Fodorean’s effort to
situate these nineteenth-century maps within their
cultural and intellectual contexts. Less successful is
his critical engagement with how to read historical
maps for contemporary archaeological purposes.
The image quality is on the whole quite good —
especially in relation to the various maps — though
some of the photographs only serve to give a
LANDSCAPE HISTORY
general flavor of the Romanian landscape. It would
have been nice to have the images integrated more
fully with the text, rather than presented at the end
of the volume, but given that BAR places the onus
on the author and undertakes no in-house copyediting, this is perhaps an unfair niggle. The flaws
in the publication process become more important
in relation to the author’s use of English — at times
he is remarkably clear and precise, while at others
the meaning of the prose is difficult to untangle.
Professional copy-editing would have caught most
of these infelicities.
The book should appeal to students and
scholars of Roman provincial archaeology. As an
introduction to the landscape of Roman Dacia,
it provides an accessible overview. Fodorean is
obviously well versed in the scholarly literature
relating to Dacia, though he does not consider
theoretical approaches to landscape. He also has a
rather unreconstructed view of the civilising nature
of Roman control, equating built infrastructure
with a superiority in culture. This, coupled with his
tendency to quote extensively from the secondary
literature, can frustrate.
However, these criticisms should not detract
from the main benefit of the book: its summary
of the current state of knowledge regarding the
topography of Roman Dacia. Indeed, its greatest
merit is in the access it provides to Romanian
sources for English speakers. This volume highlights
the range and quality of scholarship undertaken in
Romania today. Given the increasing numbers of
English-language students participating in field
schools in Romania, this will serve not only as
a useful introduction but will help situate that
fieldwork in a Romanian, rather than a strictly
Roman, context.
University of Leicester
DAN STEWART
The Ruin of Roman Britain. An archaeological perspective
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013). By
James Gerrard. 252 × 180 mm. 361 pp. 113 b/w
illustrations. ISBN 978 1 1070 3863 9. Price £65.00.
The paradigmatic view of the ending of Roman
Britain is predicated on economic collapse following
REVIEWS
the withdrawal of Roman administration that
was compounded by climate change, plague
and significant immigration. In the anarchy that
followed, it is argued, all aspects of RomanoBritish governance, social relations and material
culture simply disappeared. Fifth- and sixth-century cultivators were reduced to hand-to-mouth
subsistence, their survival vulnerable to chaotic
political conditions as rival warlords tussled for
political control. In support of the thesis historians
and archaeologists have pointed to the swift disappearance from circulation of Roman coins,
the abandonment of urban centres which had
formerly been pivotal in underpinning exchange,
the proliferation of local, handmade pottery instead
of wheel-thrown wares transported from regional
manufactories, wholesale desertion of farms and
settlement, and the decline of magnificent stone
and brick villas into shabby decay or abandonment.
Of these, the cessation of Roman coin imports
is believed to have been the most damaging:
specialised agricultural products could no longer be
sold for cash in urban markets; access to imperial
markets was lost; and landholders and tenants
were forced into to a highly localised, subsistence
economy whose stresses eroded political stability.
Thus, the argument suggests, even if the agricultural
landscape was not depopulated, a wider economic,
social and political void provided the conditions
in which Germanic warriors could impose control
through their own, imported institutions.
James Gerrard’s innovative study persuasively
challenges that explanation of systemic shock.
Instead, he suggests that external factors such as
climate change and plague were too late to have
played any significant role in the destruction of
late Roman Britain. His rejection of two further
economic explanations is as convincing. A ‘slide and
bump’ explanation is, he argues, also unsatisfactory
since it is based on material changes like the shift
from stone to wooden buildings, from wheelthrown to handmade pottery, and changes in
the character of everyday artifacts. Instead, he
suggests, such judgements are teleological, based on
modern consumerist values that may not have been
relevant in a post-Roman context. A third economic
model, that of a ‘soft landing’, is predicated on
the loss in value of bronze and copper coins as
people were unable to convert assets into cash.
97
However, he argues, since the agricultural sector
that dominated economic production throughout
the first millennium A.D. was largely unmonetarised,
the presence or absence of coinage may not have
affected it very much at all. Indeed, the removal
of tax and rent burdens from sub-Roman peasant
producers may even have encouraged a ‘major’
agricultural transformation, that allowed farmers to
invest less labour in creating, and to retain a greater
proportion of, their surpluses, thus improving
rather than degrading standards of living (p.
103).
If the economic shifts of the fifth and sixth
centuries were not as destructive as the paradigm suggests, how are the changes of the fifth
and sixth centuries to be explained? Gerrard
usefully experiments with structural analysis of
state functions, especially the proposition that all
governance is underpinned by implicit violence
institutionalised in the state. When direct Roman
administration was removed in the early fifth century
so, too, was this aspect of statehood. The possibility
that anarchy might follow if laws were unenforced
may, he suggests, have stimulated the militarisation
of leadership as ‘indigenous elites adopted some
elements of martial display’ (p. 276). That is, that
leading members of regional elites gathered that
institutionalised violence to themselves in the
aftermath of the Roman withdrawal from Britain,
thereby assuring the general continuity and stability
of late British governance.
To this point, the argument is convincing. The
next step is more controversial. Gerrard argues
that the origins of each of the sub-Roman polities
led by such militarised elites, and which eventually
evolved into the middle Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,
lay in the enormous privately-owned estates that
they owned — essentially, that great estates became
self-governing units. His argument is predicated on
the premise that all rights of collective property
were eliminated after A.D. 43 by an incoming
Roman administration which regarded all land
as private property. That premise stands in fairly
direct contradiction to the conventional scholarly
consensus that prehistoric private and collective
property rights continued to be recognised and
governed through the period of Roman administration of Britain.
There is, however, so much that is solid in the
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LANDSCAPE HISTORY
larger part of the volume that the weakness of this
latter section can be discounted. Gerrard has made
a major contribution to the way we think not only
about the fourth to seventh centuries but also to
models of historical change.
University of Cambridge
SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN
Dark Age Liguria: regional identity and local power,
c.400–1020 (Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2013).
By Ross Balzaretti. 192 pp. 234 × 156 mm. 10 b/w
illustrations. ISBN 978 1 7809 3030 5. Price £16.99.
Man’s relationship with the environment is particularly revealing in the Middle Ages, when local
small-scale environmental exploitation provided the
primary means for subsistence and social mobility.
Difficulties lie in assessing the limited evidence for
man’s landscape interventions in this period.
Balzaretti’s short and agile volume assesses
contemporary texts, archaeological reports, antiquarian finds and post-medieval landscapes to reveal
the dynamic and diverse roles played by ecology in
this sometimes-overlooked corner of northwestern
Italy. It is divided into six rich chapters: ‘Sources
and debates’, ‘Historical ecology in the Apennines’,
Political and religious change’, ‘Genoa’, ‘Vara Valley’,
and ‘People without history’. The author sets Liguria
within such existing debates as the significance of
climactic change in the fifth to seventh centuries in
the region, and the centrality of Genoa to crossMediterranean connections in this period. Analysis
of archaeological pollen samples contextualised by
charters and legal edicts demonstrates early medieval
shifts in cultivated species as populations moved
from shore to inland locations: reduced alder and
willow on the one hand, and with increased plantago
lanceolata and hazel on the other, indicate clearance by
burning and the existence of wooded meadows. It is
hypothesised that these changes reflect the influence
of climate change on demographic shift. Balzaretti
notices the rise in number of chestnut trees, which
he interprets as an index for food consumption in a
poor economy (though other research has recently
shown that in other parts of Italy chestnuts —
both for wood and food — were regarded as quite
prestigious in the same period). He provides two
site-specific studies: Genoa (and its hinterland)
which administered Liguria, and a minor eastern
valley, the Varese, the latter an area of few records.
Balzaretti uses two methods: reading archaeology
against texts and ‘méthode régressive’ of later property
inventories to hypothesise about earlier ones and
of later medieval centres to imagine earlier power
networks. He opens up many possible explanations,
ultimately unverifiable. Throughout the book, there
is a strong focus on the valleys of eastern Liguria,
from which the dating of the pollen is fraught. The
evidence is then read against agricultural practices,
such as alnocultura (a type of land management by
clearance), which are attested only in the modern
period. This kind of thinking offers many possible
reconstructions of past ecology, but it raises
concerns about the big picture drawn from so
many chains of hypothesis and speculation. The
problems of pollen records aside, those valleys
may have been affected more profoundly than
other parts of Liguria by the worsening of weather
and flooding which Balzaretti shows for the early
Middle Ages; a catastrophic view first put forward
by earlier researchers.
For all Balzaretti’s efforts in reconstructing
what might have been, there is some inattention
to analysing what certainly was. The handles and
amphorae toe in fig. 6.7 are shown in an icecream tub, set on a trattoria table. They might be
‘late antique pottery’ from Scurtabò, as described,
perhaps even a Late Roman 1 and a North African
spatheion (fourth to sixth centuries) but the photo
does not show the handle or toe in profile and
gives no measuring scale, so neither Balzaretti nor
anyone else could possibly identify them properly
without heading back to the agriturismo whose
proprietor found them. Testi (or testelli), the flat
pottery pans used for chestnut flatbreads, are dated
to the seventh century but actually only appear in
the tenth century. The bronze frying pan found
at Rossiglione is evoked for its power to ‘conjure
images of dark-age omelettes’ (p. 36) but it is surely
more meaningful as an index of Lombard activity
in the hinterland of Genoa perhaps even before the
famous conquest of the city.
Overall, the book makes the case for distinct,
multiple concentrations of power and resources
in early medieval Liguria: in Genoa, of course,
with its Mediterranean cosmopolitanism and
REVIEWS
imports, and in certain inland valleys with access
to highlands, where an ecology of woodland,
pastures and carefully selected crops supported
small populations. The small-scale local economies
of each resemble those of prehistory more than
they do the Roman or later periods. The parallel is
convincing, reminding us that the Roman period
was atypical in so many ways; pre-modern life and
landscapes were characterised less by over-arching
systems and more by local environmental strategies.
The book outlines the strengths and challenges
of studying climactic variation in small agrarian
societies. Balzaretti’s knowledge of the place and its
peculiarities emerge in his expression of Ligurian
diversity and his obvious affection for it. The
book’s strength is in the questions it asks and the
possibilities it suggests for shedding light on the
obscure corners of past landscapes.
Istituto di Storia della
ENRICO GIANNICHEDDA
Cultura Materiale di Genova
Birkbeck College, University
CAROLINE GOODSON
of London
Early Medieval Art and Archaeology in the Northern
World: studies in honour of James Graham-Campbell
(Brill, Leiden, 2013). Edited by Andrew Reynolds
and Leslie Webster. 159 × 241mm. 1024 pp. 224
b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 9 0042 3503 8. Price
€ 249.00.
James Graham-Campbell has been a giant figure
in early medieval archaeology for as long as I can
remember. His Viking World (1980) was probably
one of the first scholarly works I possessed when
still at school, and I first met him, albeit briefly, in
the company of the late Martin Welch when, as a
nineteen-year-old undergraduate, I made an ill-fated
attempt to switch from Scandinavian Studies to
Medieval Archaeology at UCL. Since then his works
have been a constant on my intellectual horizon.
The volume under review, weighing in at over
a thousand pages, truly reflects his stature within
the field. With over forty contributions it is one of
those volumes which it is impossible to do justice
to in a short review. The book is divided into four
major sections entitled ‘Objects’ (by far the largest,
99
appropriately), ‘Hoards’, ‘Places’ and ‘Style Symbol
and Meaning’; the collection is bookended by
entertaining memoirs of James by David Wilson
(can one still find Golden Plover in restaurants?)
and Negley Harte.
The first section, ‘Objects’, has a number of
papers, as one would imagine, on James’s speciality,
‘Viking’ metalwork but also ranges much more
widely in early medieval studies including, inter
alia, a fascinating account of how a solidus of the
Emperor Heraclius found its way into the Wilton
Cross pendant by Marion Archibald (pp. 51–72), a
discussion of the material evidence for horse gear
in Wales, by Mark Redknap (pp. 177–210), and a
paper by Judy Jesch discussing the representation
of swords in skaldic verse (pp. 341–58). The
section on hoards includes a very important paper
by Gareth Williams reviewing the significance of
tenth-century hoards from across northern England
for understanding the silver economy of the age
(pp. 459–86), but also a comparative analysis from
Spain by James’s UCL colleague Wendy Davies
(pp. 541–59).
Readers of this journal may be more interested
in the section on ‘Places’ in which Andrew Reynolds
and Stuart Brookes revisit the tenth-century defence
network of Wessex, emphasising the role of reused
prehistoric monuments in functional rather than
purely symbolic terms (pp. 561–606); Helen Clarke
uses the Sandwich Custumal of c. 1300 to reinterpret
the landscape of the southern end of the Wantsum
Channel in the hope of shedding light on the Late
Saxon development of the port as a major base
for the royal fleet (pp. 607–30); and Mick Monk
examines the way in which agricultural practice
in Ireland may have changed in the course of
the Viking Age (pp. 685–718). The final section,
with its slightly sententious heading, includes an
interesting discussion of the role and function
of Insular metalwork, once it had been translated
to Norway by Viking raiders, by John Sheehan,
drawing heavily on the work of Lotte Hedeager
and Ross Samson (though sadly, but consistently,
misspelling the latter’s name) (pp. 809–24); a useful
paper by the excellent Birgit Arrhenius on the
interpretation of treasure from Birka (pp. 843–58);
while Else Roesdahl returns once more to the Jelling
monuments (pp. 859–76).
This volume contains a myriad of papers that
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LANDSCAPE HISTORY
will find themselves onto a whole range of reading
lists. The breadth of subject matter, which has
only been touched upon above, reflects James
Graham-Campbell’s own broad range of interests
and prolific output. As we have come to expect
from tomes in Brill’s Northern World series, of
which this is volume 58, the standard of proofreading leaves something to be desired (as well
as misspellings there are various items missing
from the bibliographies of some of the papers),
and the price is outrageous but doubtless many
university and museum libraries will have purchased
it and through them it will reach the readership it
deserves. This is a fitting tribute to the sometimes
irascible, often entertaining and always brilliant
James Graham-Campbell.
University of St Andrews
ALEX WOOLF
Wearmouth and Jarrow: Northumbrian monasteries in an
historic landscape (University of Hertfordshire Press,
Hatfield, 2013). By Sam Turner, Sarah Semple and
Alex Turner. 245 × 183 mm. xix + 244 pp. 124 b/w
and colour illustrations, 3 tables. ISBN 978 1 9092
9113 3. Price £20.00.
To historians with different interests, the word
‘Jarrow’ means two very different things: Bede
and his late seventh-century world, and the Jarrow
March of 1936. It might seem that one of the high
points of English cosmopolitan culture can have
little in common with one of the low points of
English working-class prosperity; but what they do
at least have in common is the place. It is a merit of
this attractive and beautifully illustrated book that it
takes both themes seriously, and shows — in ways
that are always fresh and sometimes unexpected
— how they make a common inheritance for
local people and a wider world. The contrast
between Monkwearmouth and Jarrow when Bede
knew them, and how they look today, is almost
comical, but it makes that ancient past of devotion,
scholarship and art even more important in helping
residents to build a sense of place.
The starting-point, however, was the Bedan
monasteries, the long campaign of excavation, study
and publication by Rosemary Cramp, and the bid
for Monkwearmouth and Jarrow to be recognised
as World Heritage Sites. The authors’ central aim
was to extend knowledge by applying new scientific
techniques, penetrating the ground and the historic
fabric visually without invading them physically.
Although they feel that their surveys `did not reveal
as much new information about the monasteries as
we had expected’, it does not look a meagre harvest
as presented here; in particular, the recognition of a
possible large boundary ditch around the monastic
core at Jarrow has exciting implications.
Perhaps the outstanding section is the petrological
analysis of the masonry in Benedict Biscop’s two
churches, including spectacular stone-by-stone
diagrams (figs 4.2, 4.17). This close study illuminates
the builders’ techniques, including the background
influence of woodworking seen, for instance, in
the baluster-shafts turned in fine-grained sandstone
quarried specially for the purpose. By far the most
important source, however, was Roman ruins.
The authors demonstrate that the Roman forts at
Wallsend (Segedunum) and South Shields (Arbeia)
were major sources of stone for both monasteries;
thus the squared blocks that are such a notable
feature of the east church at Jarrow seem to have
been lifted ready-made from Arbeia. While it may
be a matter for debate whether these Roman ruins
were precious resources controlled by kings —
rather than being, as I suspect myself, valueless until
Benedict Biscop needed them — these discoveries
(like Wilfrid’s works) make one suspect a purposeful
recycling of the pagan Roman past for the Christian
Roman present.
Beyond the petrological work, it is remarkable
how far non-invasive scanning techniques can
now enhance our knowledge of the early monastic
buildings. Laser scans of the eroded but crucially
important porch sculpture at Monkwearmouth (fig.
4.28) bring up features thought to have weathered
away, as well as preserving a record of every
minute detail for the future. Especially exciting is
the possibility of a crypt, resembling Wilfrid’s at
Hexham and Ripon, under the eastern church at
Jarrow (fig. 6.1): in this case we must hope that
future exploration will not be ‘non-invasive’.
If the impact of Roman monasticism transformed
the region in the seventh century, that of coalyards, industry, unemployment and civil defence
transformed it in the twentieth. These competing
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heritages are explored in a fascinating chapter
on public perceptions, drawing on interviews by
Sophie Laidler. It emerges that, while visitors and
certain groups of residents are well informed
about the monastic phase, the industrial heritage is
(unsurprisingly) more real to the local community
as a whole. Therein lies a dilemma: in cleaning and
‘sanitising’ the Anglo-Saxon monuments, is there a
danger of dislocating them from the more recent
landscapes in which, as parish churches, they have
had a focal place? More hopefully, as the authors
suggest, ‘public engagement and knowledge may
be strengthened by taking account of the ways in
which the local perceptions of Wearmouth and
Jarrow weave between the seventh- and twenty-first
centuries’.
Sadly, the World Heritage Site application was
rejected (at least this time round) while the book
was in press. Even so, the campaign has been amply
justified by the heightened awareness of historic
Tyne and Wear, both locally and nationally, that
has been achieved in the process. This book is a
central part of that achievement, and it deserves
to be widely read.
The Queen’s College, Oxford
JOHN BLAIR
Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages c. AD 600–
1150. A comparative archaeology (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2013). By Christopher Loveluck.
252 × 184 mm. 488 pp. 45 b/w illustrations. ISBN
978 1 1070 3763 2. Price £75.00.
Christopher Loveluck’s magisterial survey of the
emergence of medieval Europe from its origins in
the fading Roman Empire is a solid contribution
to the scholarship of the period. At its most
reductive, it offers a comprehensive overview of
the early medieval archaeology of small and larger
settlements, peasants and elites, and of commercial
enterprise across that area of north-west Europe
now included in five modern European countries:
France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and England.
More interesting, though, is Loveluck’s approach.
He locates his argument firmly in the increasingly
mainstream criticism of ‘unilinear views of fixed
trajectories for social change’ (p. 6) that explain
social change in north-west Europe across the
half millennium A.D. from c. 600 to c. 1100 in
simplistic ‘top-down’ models as a process driven
by immigrant, militarised elites. Instead he adopts
the view that is gradually gathering traction across
the discipline that free peasant producers, both
poorer and wealthier, were themselves a power-base
that enabled their active participation in large-scale
political, social, economic and cultural change.
Loveluck’s aim is explicitly framed in the terms:
to explore ‘how the power and intentions of elites
were confronted by the aspirations and actions of
the diverse rural peasantry’ (p. 4).
Having established both the geographic scope
and the premises of his argument, Loveluck
proceeds to discuss his methodological approach.
He focuses on archaeology as a source in its own
right, asking what the material evidence actually
says rather than attempting to fit it into a narrative
derived from early documents whose purpose was
not to offer as straightforward an account of events
as possible, but to use them to drive particular
political or religious agendas. The archaeology, he
suggests, can be used to ‘provide a broad context
into which exceptional insights from textual sources
can be placed’ (p. 3).
Loveluck divides his chosen period into two parts:
that of the Merovingian and Carolingian ascendancy
between about 600 and 900, and that of the Vikings
and Angevins between 900 and 1150. Within those
periods, he takes traditional themes and, moving
through a critique of the historiography of each,
goes on to develop his argument of complex
patterns of social change in which different social,
political and religious groupings, endogenous and
exogenous influences, time and tradition all play a
part. Within each chapter, that general proposition
is exemplified and anchored in detailed evidence
from specific sites. The approach means that it is
possible to present the argument in terms of a range
of different constituencies: small and large farming
communities, those wielding political leadership
and authority, and the mercantile populations of
towns and ports.
Loveluck’s conclusions should provide a rich
seam for future research. He suggests that the
dynamic tension between peasants, traders and
aristocracy that offered such a rich stimulus to
political, economic and social changes between the
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LANDSCAPE HISTORY
seventh and ninth centuries gave way in the tenth
and eleventh centuries to social dominance by urban
and other mercantile elites. In the end, he concludes
‘the tragedy for the rural peasantries of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries was that they lost many of
their freedoms, whereas the wealth and rights of
urban patricians were to increase’ (p. 367). Herein,
perhaps, lies the Achilles heel of the proposition —
it will be important for subsequent researchers to
avoid leaping across the narrow gap between that
conclusion and teleological arguments that aim to
locate the origins of western capitalism in those
developments.
This book is one of a number of substantial
recent publications which experiment with new
‘grand theories’ to explain the early medieval world.
They all acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly, that
existing models for the emergence of Anglo-Saxon
England — in which early medieval cultural change
is principally explained in terms of migration of elite
warbands from north-west Europe — have been so
challenged by recent archaeological, ecological and
linguistic research that they can no longer hold.
Scholars of early medieval Europe are in for a
thrilling, almost certainly bumpy, ride over the next
few years in which debates about discourses and
evidence are likely to be more energetic, stimulating
and challenging than they have been since, perhaps,
the late nineteenth century. This book will be at the
heart of those discussions.
University of Cambridge
SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN
Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England
(Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, 2013). Edited by
Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider. 234
× 156 mm. 318 pp. 10 b/w illustrations, 3 tables, 1
map. ISBN 978 1 8438 3877 7. Price £60.00.
This is one of two volumes to arise directly from
the MANCASS Easter conference of 2006. The
papers gathered here focus on the exercise, display
and mechanisms of royal authority in AngloSaxon England and provide some very welcome
insights and new perspectives on the subject of
early medieval kingship in England. After an
introduction by Ann Williams, Simon Keynes
works through the diplomatic material in careful
detail, exploring in particular the processes that lay
behind the drawing up of royal diplomas. Alexander
Rumble pulls together the evidence for the extent
of Anglo-Saxon documentation, positing (p. 196)
‘the existence of local royal archive-repositories in
various Anglo-Saxon administrative centres’, but
finding insufficient support for the notion ‘of a
sophisticated central registry of land title’. Three
contributions focus especially on Anglo-Saxon
law codes: Andrew Rabin takes the Anglo-Saxon
witness as his text, through which to explore
notions of legal authority; Ryan Lavelle, focusing
on Ine’s laws, assesses the practical and economic
realities of provisioning an itinerant king; and Alaric
Trousdale examines the delegation of power to
local potentates, as evidenced in particular by the
tenth-century codes of Edmund. While analysis
of written texts predominates, Carole Hough and
Barbara Yorke, respectively, also bring onomastic
and archaeological data to bear on questions relating
to such matters as the enactment and the display
of royal power.
It is a wide-ranging volume with much that
will appeal to readers of Landscape History. Several
chapters are likely to be of particular interest,
most obviously those by Hough and Yorke. The
former emphasises the conceptual difference
between the person of the king and the office of
kingship as expressed in legal codes, noting that
kings who make the laws are very rarely named
personally in the texts, while references to ‘the
king’ are frequent. Building on this observation,
she suggests ways of using toponymic corpora to
detect instances of the law in practice, arguing
that many instances of OE cyning ‘king’, in charter
bounds and place-names, might have arisen as
references to the office of kingship rather than to
an individual king, perhaps reflecting the forfeiture
of land in compensation for breaches of the law.
Yorke’s analysis of the different modes of kingly
mortuary practice through the Anglo-Saxon period
brings together archaeological and documentary
sources, placing the investigation of elite burial
into clear perspective. She provides a chronological
framework, relating it in part to wider social
changes, and is also able to identify some regional
variation. In examining the fiscal ramifications of
Ine’s laws and the practicalities of food render,
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Lavelle’s chapter also has important implications
for our understanding of the organisation of the
landscape, while Keynes’s analysis of the personnel
and processes involved in royal assemblies is
helpfully informative for the study of the venues
at which such events took place.
This is a thoroughly engaging book, exploring
different aspects of royal power in force. If there is
cause for slight disappointment, it is the knowledge
that papers from the 2006 conference dealing with
the insecurity, reduction or breakdown of royal
power have been published separately. While there
are no doubt sound academic and commercial
reasons for this, it leaves the reader eager for more.
Perhaps that is no bad thing, but it is a shame to
separate analyses of royal weakness from those of
royal strength in this way — it seems unlikely that the
perception and reality of strong and weak kingship
can always be straightforwardly disentangled. A
longer volume might also have made the imbalance
in the length of contributions less stark. At 165
pages, Keynes’s chapter (pp. 17–182) constitutes,
with its appendices, a very sizable part of the whole
volume. There is no doubting its worth, however,
and it will not detract from the excellence of some
of the shorter contributions. The book contains a
good deal of important analysis and will certainly
be of value to anyone with research interests in
early medieval history and Anglo-Saxon landscape.
University of Nottingham
JOHN BAKER
Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). By Sarah
Semple. 246 × 171 mm. 352 pp. 55 b/w and colour
illustrations. ISBN 978 0 1996 8310 9. Price £85.00.
This volume, based on Sarah Semple’s doctoral
research, examines how the communities of AngloSaxon England perceived and used prehistoric
monuments between A.D. 400 and A.D. 1100. The
key thesis is that this was knowing and intentional,
and that funerary reuse formed only one part of
this behaviour.
The volume is well structured, on a part-thematic
and part-chronological basis. After an initial chapter
that reviews previous work in the field, Chapter 2
explores regional variation in the reuse of prehistoric
monuments for burial in the period up to A.D. 800.
Important here is the complexity of practice, and
the existence of regional variation (explored through
case study areas in East Yorkshire, north Wiltshire
and West Sussex), as well as the fact that this practice
is also found throughout north-west Europe and
in Western Britain and Ireland (of which there is
a useful review). Semple therefore firmly situates
this reuse in both localised and cultural/political
practices, and also notes interesting chronological
shifts in practice, including a clear seventh-century
interest in reactivating ‘ancestral’ claims to land and
territories at a time of rapid political development.
(These might now be possible to refine further,
with more recent major publications on AngloSaxon chronology.) Although there is some slight
awkwardness where Semple tries to integrate both
historical and archaeological approaches to this
period when discussing ethnicity, this chapter
convincingly argues that this practice was not just
important for the elite, but played a key role in
the development and maintenance of more locally
based identities.
Chapter 3 focuses on pre-Christian attitudes
to the prehistoric, and draws on a variety of
evidence including place-names to explore this.
Clearly the most tentative chapter of the book,
this is nevertheless argued carefully and critically
to offer some interesting material on non-funerary
use of prehistoric monuments. Such attitudes
are further explored and developed in Chapter
4, which examines relations between churches
and prehistoric monuments. Again, the evidence
is carefully collected and examined (with further
details of the relevant sites given in appendices).
Semple notes that overall there is little evidence for
the ‘conversion’ of monuments into Christian sites,
in contrast to the mass of evidence for the reuse
of Roman sites, for which a useful review of the
evidence is presented.
Chapter 5 examines the literary and placename evidence for prehistoric monuments in the
mid- to later Saxon period, drawing on evidence
from wills, laws, poetry, stories, charters and
annals. Semple notes changes through this period,
whereby ancient features were clearly recognised and
accepted as ancient places, but within an increasingly
Christianised response. This culminates in barrows
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in particular becoming seen as suitable places for
execution and deviant burial in the later Anglo-Saxon
period. This theme is further explored in Chapter
6, where she notes the increasing association of old
barrows with heathenism and evil, and then hell and
damnation. Of twenty-seven known execution sites,
Semple documents that thirteen were associated
with mounds or barrows (of varying dates), eight
with linear earthworks and three with hillforts.
These monuments were being revived as places for
theatrical displays of elite power, aimed at reinforcing
mechanisms of state, particularly judicial power.
Mounds were also preferred as places of Late
Saxon assembly, and prehistoric sites sometimes
re-employed as estate centres or palaces.
This is thus a book that emphasises localised
responses and the changing relations with prehistoric
monuments through time. It uses data and evidence
well and carefully, and draws on a very broad range
of that evidence in exploring those themes. Aside
from a couple of minor editorial slips, it is very well
produced, and will define the terms of the debate
for some time to come.
University of Cambridge
SAM LUCY
The Archaeology of Japan: from the earliest rice farming
villages to the rise of the state (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2013). By Koji Mizoguchi. 279
× 216 mm. 392 pp. 94 b/w illustrations, 3 tables.
ISBN 978 0 5218 8490 7. Price £75.00.
When thinking of the archaeology of Japan,
English speakers are likely to be aware of its
earlier prehistoric archaeology; in particular the
archaeology of the Jomon period, a time of
affluent hunter-gatherers with an elaborate ceramic
tradition of flame-motif ceramic vessels and
other-worldly figurines, that bears easy comparison
to the Mesolithic archaeology of Denmark and
Scandinavia, or the so-called complex huntergatherer societies of the north-west coast of North
America. The later archaeology of Japan, however,
is as rich and deserving of attention. Between 900
B.C. and A.D. 700 the archaeological record of the
Yayoi and Kofun periods in Japan presents evidence
for the transition from the first full take-up of rice
agriculture in village communities through to the
rise of a state civilisation in which the individual,
in their own right, was the primary point of
recognition and interaction with the state itself. This
is the period covered by Koji Mizoguchi in this new
edition to the Cambridge World Archaeology series.
Readers of Mizoguchi’s earlier publications will
not be surprised to learn that this book takes an
explicitly theoretical approach drawing its inspiration
from the work of post-processual archaeologists,
on the one hand, and their focus on the active
use of material culture, and the German systems
theorist Niklas Luhman, on the other, whose focus
on evolving systems of communication (fields of
discourse) provides the theoretical spine of this
volume. This theoretical perspective is informed
in detail by a wealth of excavated evidence with
particular emphasis given to the construction of
landscapes and the material culture of burial. In a
larger context still, Mizoguchi situates his narrative
in terms of the driving forces that informed Japan’s
own historical understanding of its place and action
in the world from its opening-up in the Meiji period
from the 1860s, through Japan’s imperial project
in the mid-twentieth century, to the new, perhaps
more inwardly looking, narrative of today. In so
doing, he also comments on the potential role
of the archaeological record of rice agriculture
of the Yayoi period in the definition of what it
is to be Japanese and the origins of the Imperial
household in the creation and development of the
great keyhole-shaped tombs of the Kofun period.
Inevitably, perhaps, this highly detailed interplay
between theory and evidence means that this book
requires real concentration to read and digest and,
whilst the book is comprehensively illustrated
with line drawings of artefacts, large-scale plans
of excavated settlements and tombs, and overlay
maps, it is a pity that there are no photographs of
objects or sites themselves for those not familiar
with Japanese archaeological materials at first hand.
In very simple terms, Mizoguchi’s narrative
relates a process in which the annual rhythms of
rice agriculture in paddy fields created a social
life of intra-community dependency and equality
based on kin groupings, leading to the development
of increasingly elaborated exchanges of ceramic
and metal material items, maintained by a system
of ritual communications through burial that
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REVIEWS
masked the growing differences within and between
communities by use of a rhetoric of common
purpose and togetherness.
Through this trajectory of historical and social
change we can see that the process of Japanese
state formation is also the driver of significant
landscape developments at varying scales from
the early Yayoi villages with their regular spatial
structure of house clusters reflecting clan-type
sodalities that extended across villages, to later Yayoi
settlements in which certain residential communities
grew in size to become effective central places in
a region controlling the flow of goods and people,
and finally on to the end of the Kofun period
by which time one region had become the preeminent locus for development of a state centre.
Mizoguchi explores this transformation of spatial
relationships through the use of social network
analysis, modelling competing places (villages or
regions) as nodes with communications evidenced
by the flow of material goods between them at the
edges. The growth of certain villages during the
Yayoi, or the Kinki Core Region during the Kofun
period can be measured and accounted for by the
relative centrality of their topological relations as
reflected in the number and spread of connections
to other settlements or regions.
The one problem that I can see with such
a social network approach is that it presumes
that all nodes are potentially equal points on a
uniform setting. It is the nature of the connections,
the edges between them, that affects change. It
would be useful to consider, however, how the
particularities of a particular place in a landscape
of real variations as certainly existed in Japan may
have facilitated growth in population and crop
returns or access to specific resources for exchange.
Here the study of topological relations between
specific geographical places does not necessarily
reveal the real topographical possibilities of any
particular place.
Unquestionably, this book is a significant addition
to our understanding of the archaeology of Japan.
I might go further, however, and suggest that the
extraordinary range and detail of archaeological
evidence generated by the development-led
archaeology of Japan during its economic boom
of the 1960s to 1990s, in full use here by Mizoguchi,
has facilitated a study that should be one of the
core archaeological case studies for students of
state formation in general.
University of Liverpool
ANTHONY SINCLAIR
Sacred Sites and Holy Places (Brepols, Turnhout, 2013).
Edited by S. W. Nordeide and S. Brink. 156 × 234
mm. xii+282 pp. 63 b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 2
5035 4100 6. Price €80.00.
This edited volume offers a wide-ranging discussion
of sacred places and landscapes; spanning the
last centuries B.C. to the eighteenth century, the
editors juxtapose case studies from Nordic regions
with examples from Greece and Europe. As the
Introduction by Nordeide outlines, the aim of the
volume is to interrogate holiness in the landscape:
exploring how humans ‘make’ and ‘remake’ the
sacred. The nine papers that follow profile how
various religions have ‘co-influenced’ people and
landscapes. Authors draw on place-name evidence,
historical sources and archaeology in the hunt for
comparative and contrasting processes of creating
the sacred.
In the first four contributions, complementary
perspectives are offered on the pre-Christian
landscapes of Scandinavia. Stefan Brink in ‘Myth
and ritual in Pre-Christian Scandinavian landscape’
describes a natural and numinous pre-Christian
landscape. ‘Landscapes as sacroscapes’, by Veikko
Anttonen, precedes Brink’s paper but expands
this idea. Anttonen uses toponyms in Finland to
explore the spatial distinctions and dimensions
of a mytho-geographic perspective. Specific resource zones and how they were accessed or
encountered are argued to shape concepts of
the sacred in prehistoric and medieval Finland.
The wilderness, transitions and edges are argued
to become significant when cross-cut and the
importance of the dead as means of creating
social order for communities is also highlighted.
Charlotte Fabech and Ulf Näsman follow with
an expansive review of the Scandinavian preChristian landscape. Here the numinous landscape
is dissected and reconstructed, revealing how
central place complexes were integrated with more
expansive sacred landscapes — one is reminded of
106
the Irish evidence for late prehistoric royal sites,
situated within extensive ‘mythic’ landscapes with
multi-period activity (e.g. Navan, County Armagh).
Concurring with both Anttonen and Brink, these
authors argue that Christianity did not bring these
‘spiritually charged’ terrains to an abrupt end, but
that slow processes of hybridisation resulted in
incremental changes which allowed ‘old’ places to be
re-worked and ‘new’ foci added. Anttonen’s paper
adds a useful reminder that sometimes sacred spaces
were appropriated within a Christianised landscape
as non-evangelised and even harmful locales. This
concept of ‘transitative’ landscapes also features in
Asgeir Svestad’s exploration of the changing nature
of pre-Christian and Christian Sámi graves.
The volume turns to the Classical world with
two papers on Greece. Gullög Nordquist reviews
the numinous world of pre-Christian Greece, a
landscape imbued with power and layered with
meaning and myth. Useful analogies can be found
here in the discussion of large sanctuaries which
contained spaces reserved for ‘different functions
and levels of holiness’ and the use of sacred roads
or processional routes for regular attendance as
sanctuaries and special places. The Christianisation
of this world is taken up by Bente Kiilerich in a
discussion of the Acropolis. Here the traditional
viewpoints of Christian iconoclastic destruction
are critically appraised and we are asked to consider
instead the gradual embedding of new values into
the ancient landscape via the Christian takeover
of antique forms. Moving to the twelfth century,
Kurt Villads Jensen discusses the impacts of the
Christian Crusades on the landscape, introducing
ideas of how religious conflict can reshape the
sacred. Notable here is the emphasis on how
changes in soundscape can alter the sacred nature
of places and landscapes. Christianising impacts
are reviewed by Torstein Jørgensen in relation to
Norwegian early medieval provincial laws and finally
Zoë Opać explores late medieval urban theatre in
Prague revealing a new sacred geography key to
human religious experience and elite theatre.
Mapping sacred landscapes is not an easy undertaking, but these papers offer some rich insights
into how we might go about deconstructing and
understanding complex and ambivalent relationships
between people, nature and the sacred. The addition
of papers on Greek as well as Crusader landscapes
LANDSCAPE HISTORY
and late medieval cityscapes is refreshing, as well
as the long time-depth, but the Introduction could
have linked these with a more robust and cohesive
narrative. Throughout, authors emphasise the slow
and complex dialogues of change created by the
conversion. Rather than seeing ‘sacroscapes’ as
static, these papers encourage us to view them as
constantly changing, affected by human interaction
and engagement: as experiential terrains that
embodied multiple sets of sacred values. They
offer insight in to how we might investigate the
development of sacred landscapes over time,
identifying how special places emerge through
human interactions and activities, and how multiple
layers of meaning, memory and myth accrue. Such
emotional palimpsests could be affected by political
and religious change but not necessarily eliminated;
in these papers at least, the creation of sacred
landscapes often involved complex appropriation
and reshaping of ideas about place to serve new
intellectual agendas.
University of Durham
SARAH SEMPLE
The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Europe (Studies in European Urban History 30,
Brepols, Turnhout, 2013). Edited by Marc Boone
and Martha C. Howell. 178 – 254 mm. vi + 215
pp. 23 b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 2 5035 4784 8.
Price € 77.00.
The series on Studies in European Urban History
(A.D. 1100–1800), of which this volume is a part,
emerged from a project on ‘City and Society in
the Low Countries (A.D. c. 1200–c. 1850)’. This
context explains the empirical focus of most
of the papers in this collection, edited by Marc
Boone and Martha Howell, though as the subtitle
indicates, the geographical compass includes Italy,
not just northern France and the Low Countries.
The comparative potential of the volume, allowing
readers to look across examples from the ‘foggy
north’ to the ‘sunny south’, is one of its strengths,
and might have been worth further reflection in
the editors’ introduction. They do comment (p. 3)
on the ‘striking similarities between Italy and the
North with regard to the meanings space acquired,
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REVIEWS
in the way it was constructed, and in the power it
bequeathed’, but it is left largely to the reader to
formulate these connections for themselves through
the various individual case-studies presented by
the papers in the volume, seven of which are in
English and six of which are in French. Many of
the papers range across different permutations of
‘power’ and ‘space’, although some of the individual
contributions are confined to individual towns and
cities, including Naples, Venice, Lille, Brussels,
Antwerp, Paris and Amsterdam, rather than taking
a more regional approach.
Boone and Howell attempt in the Introduction
to set out some conceptual parameters for the
volume, and questions of ‘space’. They admit that
they were ‘inspired by the new interest in social
space engendered by Lefebvre’s work’, especially
his thinking on the ‘production of space’ (p. 2), but
they also identify the influence of others, notably
Pirenne. Their aim, they say, is to focus ‘exclusively
on the politics of space, seeking to reveal how
space produced, constrained, and defined power’ in
urban settings (p. 3). Indeed this volume is one of a
number of recent similar collections addressing the
theme of ‘space’, like Meredith Cohen and Fanny
Madeline’s edited collection on Space in the Medieval
West (Ashgate, 2014) and Julian Weiss and Sarah
Salih’s Locating the Middle Ages. The spaces and places
of medieval culture (King’s College London, 2012).
What is it about space? Why this desire to look at
the medieval world spatially? In part these volumes,
including The Power of Space, reflect a broader ‘spatial
turn’ in the humanities, influenced by critical theory,
but there is a curious absence in much of what is
being written by historians in dealing with space, and
that is the contributions made by both geographers
and archaeologists, for both are disciplines that can
lay particular claim to thinking critically about space.
The Power of Space, looking through the various and
sometimes voluminous footnotes to the individual
contributions, is no different in this regard, with
little engagement with the likes of Chris Tilley, Tim
Ingold, John Wiley, Denis Cosgrove, and others,
who have helped us to rethink one of the recurring
but almost silenced themes of the papers included
in The Power of Space — the landscape itself. It is as if
the power of space — as a topic — has become all
consuming, like space itself, in histories of places.
So space currently dominates intellectual discourse,
for some historians at least, and by neglecting
‘landscape’, and the critical engagements on it that
have been so influential in the Anglophone world in
recent decades, there is a danger that ‘space’ remains
narrowly conceptualised by historians, who instead
defer to fairly abstract discussions influenced by
those following the ideas of Lefebvre. But there is
more to space than Lefebvre.
It may be that something gets lost in translation
when it comes to ‘space’. Geographers such as Yi
Fu Tuan and Tim Unwin, to name but two, have
spent many years debating the subtleties of ‘space’,
as distinct from ‘place’. Again, it seems that ‘space’
dominates the discussions in history, yet often,
as with this particular volume, it is place that is
more the true focus of the papers, rather than the
more abstract ‘space’. Why is place so overlooked?
Is it because it is more problematic as an idea
across languages, between French and English, for
example, compared with ‘space’? Thinking more
about place — of where things happen and why
— rather than across space, seems to be more the
substance of the papers here. For example in the
very interesting and rich paper by Peter Arnade on
Antwerp and the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, it is the
very place of Antwerp in the wider world, as much
as its spatial connections and networks, that can help
understand the special relationship between the city
and the atlas and those who produced it.
So, reading this volume of papers raises some
important questions about the power of space,
but not so much in the ways the authors perhaps
intended, but rather in highlighting the current
preoccupation with ‘space’ and the power it seems
to hold over historians of the medieval world.
Queen’s University, Belfast
KEITH D. LILLEY
East Anglia and its North Sea World in the Middle Ages
(Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, 2013). Edited by
David Bates and Robert Liddiard. 244 × 172 mm.
363 pp. 99 b/w maps, figures, illustrations. ISBN
978 1 8438 3846 3. Price £60.00.
Invited to review East Anglia and its North Sea World,
this reviewer must admit to initial scepticism as to
whether ‘landscape’ would feature prominently,
108
if at all. As a starting point it was a view hardly
dissipated by the second chapter — penned by Tom
Williamson, one of our leading landscape historians
— where the term was encountered only sparsely,
and then largely in the context of Dutch landscape
painting. Marine-oriented studies are of course not
about landscapes, but about cultural contacts and
influence, trade and commerce, and exploitation
patterns. Assessed from this perspective, the volume
which had its genesis in a three-day conference held
at Norwich in 2010 succeeds admirably in presenting
a wide-ranging set of synthetical academic papers,
eighteen in number. They are diverse in their
subject matter, geography and timespan, and,
with perhaps only one or two exceptions (for this
reader) informative and absorbing. The volume is
attractively produced, the illustrations have in almost
all instances reproduced well, the text has been well
edited and proof-read, and the price by current
standards is on the high side but not exorbitant.
In such a short review it is impossible to do
justice to all the papers, so here the reviewer can
only pick out a few that particularly appealed to
him. Christopher Scull contrasts seventh- and
eighth-century settlements at Ipswich, focusing
on the cemeteries of the former, and positing
that in the seventh century there would have been
stronger outward-looking links across the North Sea
than at a later date. His paper reveals too, perhaps
inadvertently, the value of focusing archaeological
effort intensively on selected settlements. Brian
Ayres in his consideration of material culture is keen
to make the point that archaeology can contribute
significantly to medieval studies well beyond simply
generating examples to illustrate the historical
record. Focusing on ships, coastal towns, sea
defences, he even tackles social identity in a paper
that is a pleasure to read. Stephen Heywood revisits
the post-Conquest round-towered churches of East
Anglia and other countries bordering the North
and Baltic Seas and argues persuasively that stone
church-building was largely a Norman introduction.
Richard Plant is more specific in his consideration
of several important Romanesque churches — Bury
St Edmunds, Ely and Peterborough — claiming that
they were inspired by architectural traditions within
the Holy Roman Empire.
Six contributions address one of the major
themes of the marine environment, trade. Two
LANDSCAPE HISTORY
papers — by Gareth Williams and Rory Naismith
— examine coinage in East Anglia at different times
in the pre-Conquest era. Aleksander Pluskowski
looks at the social context of fur use in East Anglia
from the late Saxon era, focusing particularly on the
warrens that proliferated from the twelfth century
with the emphasis initially on meat production and
only later on the provision of fur; this provides a
contrast with pre-Christian Scandinavia. Economic
relations between Flanders and East Anglia in the
Anglo-Norman era described by Eljas Oksanen go
some way towards suggesting a strong trade network
around the North Sea. But there exists a broader
economic zone stretching into Lincolnshire, and
the emphasis is on riverine transport links; from
this Flanders and East Anglia were twinned by their
landscapes and the waterways that penetrated them.
The fluctuating fortunes of three major ports of
the Middle Ages — Lynn, Great Yarmouth and
Ipswich — are considered by Wendy Childs, and
she also alludes to less definable influences from
the Continent on English industry.
Gradually emerging from the papers is an
impression that there is no real agreement (or
acceptance) as to precisely what constitutes the
North Sea World, the common glue that should
hold this volume together. Several authors including
Williamson and Robert Liddiard attempt to define
it, but some of the contributors make attempts to
disguise the fact that their examples are drawn from
a much wider region — in David King’s commentary
on medieval art in Norfolk, for instance, from
virtually the whole of Western Europe. Other
contributions do not seem to fit well into the
concept of the North Sea World. Interesting though
that element of the second crusade known as the
1147 expedition to Lisbon may be in itself, the link
to East Anglia postulated by Charles West seems
rather tenuous. And Anna Agnarsdóttir’s summary
of fishing and trade around Iceland in the fifteenth
century, when the East Anglian ports were only part
of a geographically wider pattern of exploitation by
English seamen and merchants, is less the North
Sea, more the broader Atlantic. Illuminating though
these contributions are, the case for a North Sea
World in which East Anglia played a prominent role
is not really assisted by such a diffusive approach.
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust
BOB SILVESTER
REVIEWS
The Silk Roads of the Northern Tibetan Plateau during
the Early Middle Ages (from the Han to Tang Dynasty)
as Reconstructed from Archaeological and Written Sources
(British Archaeological Reports International Series
2521, Oxford, 2013). By Tao Tong. 297 × 210 mm.
xi + 195 pp. 223 b/w illustrations, 7 tables, 6 maps.
ISBN 978 1 4073 1139 5. Price £34.00.
This work is primarily based on the analysis of
the excavation of Tibetan (Tuyuhun-Tubo) graves
at Dulan and Delingha. Located on the Tibetan
plateau, in the modern-day province of Qinghai in
north-western China, the burials date from the fifth
to the eighth centuries C.E., and contained a wide
range of material, such as textiles, gold and silver
objects, and coffin paintings, etc.
There is a short introduction to the natural
environment of the Northern Tibetan Plateau
(Chapter 2), although this is very brief (three
pages), under-referenced, and could have been
expanded to provide a better context for the later
discussions. In particular, a little more information
on the topography and hydrology of the region
would have helped to frame the later discussions
of settlement and routes.
It is followed by a very useful review of the
historical evidence for routes and activities in the
region from Chinese sources (Chapter 3). This will
be very useful to western scholars less familiar with
sources and includes discussions of issues such as
military actions, mountain routes, the travels of
monks, intermarriage, regional polities, and trade
goods.
The following chapters (4–6) review the archaeological evidence in chronological order: the Han
and Jin periods (third century B.C. to third century
A.D.), the early Tuyuhun period (fourth to midseventh century A.D.) and the Tubo period (or
the later Tuyuhun period: mid-seventh to eighth
century A.D.). These chapters are very successful in
pulling together a range of information, primarily
focused on the cemeteries and the exceptional range
of material culture in the burials. This includes
some internationally significant material, such as
the painted wooden coffins, terracotta figurines,
metalwork, wooden slips with Tibetan inscriptions,
and silk textiles (some with Chinese inscriptions).
The range and quality of the material is very
impressive. However, it is unfortunate that the
109
illustrations are only in black and white (particularly
problematic for the silks and the painted coffins) and
generally the reproduction of the images is rather
poor: they are often too small and sometimes of
very poor quality (e.g. fig. 4.4.1). Nevertheless, this is
a very useful collection of material, much of which
has previously only been available in Chinese sources,
and then often only in interim reports. The chapters
also contain some very interesting and original
contributions, in particular the discussion of regional
interactions through the material culture evidence,
and a very good review of the coffin painting as
reflecting the cultural panorama of the region.
Less successful in these chapters is the handling
of the settlement evidence. The discussion of the
evidence of the city-sites is very brief and with
little or no supporting illustrative material. The Han
and Jin city-sites, for example, are covered in one
and a half pages, with no illustrations, and with
rather erratic descriptions. The discussion does not
clearly present the scale of current knowledge or an
understanding of layout, chronology, and so on. In
part this reflects the paucity of archaeological work
on many of these sites, or the interim nature of the
fieldwork publications on them, but nevertheless
this could have been more effectively presented.
The mapping throughout the volume is problematic. The scale of the region is considerable:
the Tibetan Plateau as a whole covers nearly three
million square kilometres, and the study area of the
northern region requires overview maps covering
an area c. 400 × 400 km; on an A4 page this
produces very cramped maps (e.g. fig. 4.2.1). This
makes it difficult to explore the development of
this important landscape. Settlement distribution,
mapped against the topographic, hydrographic,
climatic or ecological zones, is very difficult on the
presented data. This is a shame, as the volume makes
an important contribution to our understanding of
the region and could have pushed forward rather
more our understanding of the development of
landscapes of settlement and land use.
Overall, however, this is an important volume.
The analysis of historical and archaeological evidence does provide a platform for exploring the
Han, Jin, Tuyuhun and Tibetan development of
the northern Tibetan Plateau. The material provides
important insights into the complicated cultural
dimensions and interactions along the Silk Roads
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LANDSCAPE HISTORY
in this region, all of which contributed greatly to
the shaping of medieval Tibetan culture.
University College, London
TIM WILLIAMS
From the Deer to the Fox. The hunting transition and the
landscape, 1600–1850 (University of Hertfordshire
Press, Hatfield, 2013). By Mandy de Belin. 171 ×
248 mm. 176 pp. 26 b/w illustrations. 2 tables. ISBN
978 1 9092 9104 1. Price £14.99.
This meticulously researched and much-needed study
explores the shift from deer- to fox-hunting from the
early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century and
its effects on the landscape of Northamptonshire.
The principal aim is to interrogate the traditional
primacy of landscape transformation as the main
explanation for this change (i.e. increased enclosure,
widespread loss of woodland and consequent
decline in deer populations). De Belin hypothesises
that the development of the hunting horse, that
‘supreme equine athlete’ (p. 142), was in fact the
main cause, coupled with the fact that the resulting
new type of hunting was more socially inclusive. The
argument is, therefore, that the shift occurred not
due to environmental necessity but to fashion and
cultural change, and de Belin executes it with skill.
Using cartographic analysis she demonstrates a lack
of evidence in Northamptonshire for significant
decimation of woodland before 1850, by which time
fox-hunting was already established as the preferred
country sport. Deer numbers are also shown to
have recovered within fifty or sixty years of the
well-known mid-seventeenth-century depredations,
a notable (and deliberate) decline in their population
only coming, again, in the later nineteenth century.
Thus the traditional account is turned on its head;
although the hunting transition was embedded in
the landscape, this was ‘in a different way to that
generally described’ (p. 142). From the Deer to the
Fox is therefore a significant work in landscape
historiography generally and for historians of
hunting landscapes in particular, not least because
it questions the received wisdoms derived from
nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars and their
predecessors, which persist especially in the latter
relatively recent sub-field.
As well as employing seventeenth- to nineteenthcentury maps, the author’s methodology includes
analysis of literary and administrative written
sources, and she shows dexterity with both. In
addition, the book contains concise and knowledgeable explications of medieval and early
modern hunting methods, as well as woodland
management — e.g. coppicing — that will serve
as a useful introduction to readers new to those
subjects. The chapters, each of which ends with a
useful concluding section, include ‘the landscape
of deer hunting’ and ‘the landscape of foxhunting’,
which both offer new insights, while the chapter on
‘horses and hunting’ provides a novel take on the
subject. Here de Belin demonstrates that ‘if early
hunting was about the hound, then later hunting,
and particularly foxhunting, was about the horse’
(p. 105) — a premise that has seemingly escaped
most of us who write on medieval hunting —
and that this shift had a profound effect on the
landscapes in which the activity took place. She
also highlights the pivotal cultural role played by
horse-racing from the late seventeenth century, a
sport which through selective breeding produced
the English thoroughbred, an experiment that
prompted similar ‘improvements’ in other species,
for example faster foxhounds, which ultimately led
to yet swifter horses. Thus, From the Deer to the Fox
also enhances the recent corpus of works on the
significant role of animals in cultural history and
their effects on landscape modification.
Also worthy of note is the focus on periods often
neglected in hunting histories (perhaps because of
the medieval/deer hunting and later early modern/
foxhunting divide); for example the nation-wide
restraints on deer-hunting in the reign of Charles
II (1660–85).
From the Deer to the Fox results from de Belin’s
doctoral study, completed at the Centre for English
Local History (University of Leicester), and in a
sense its regional focus places it in a traditional
mould. However, her findings are profound
and wide-ranging. As she points out (p. 4), the
significant changes in hunting practices in the early
modern period deserve attention because the era’s
landscape history has traditionally been considered
almost exclusively in economic terms, focusing on
enclosure and agricultural improvement. The book
therefore brings the study of early modern (hunting)
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landscapes into step with what has recently been
achieved regarding the hunting spaces of the Middle
Ages, which, as the subject of a plethora of recent
studies at both regional and national levels, have
been more successfully theorised than their later
counterparts.
To conclude, there is much to praise and little to
complain about here — apart from the rather blurry
lower image on the front cover — and hopefully
this work will inspire similar regional studies. Such
endeavours would enhance our knowledge not just
of the fate of forests and parks in the post-medieval
period, but also of early modern socio-cultural
changes in their own right, and indeed how those
changes affected — and were affected by — the
landscape.
University of Chichester
AMANDA RICHARDSON
The Woods of Ireland. A history, 700–1800 (Four
Courts Press, Dublin, 2014). By Nigel Everett. 240
× 160 mm. 344 pp. 12 b/w figures, 27 colour plates,
1 table. ISBN 978 1 8468 2505 7. Price €45.00.
This is a scholarly, well-researched work that
examines the history of Irish woodland against the
backdrop of political upheaval and bias. It is not for
the faint-hearted and, indeed, occasional summaries
throughout would have been welcome, although the
subject matter is clarified by well-chosen chapter
headings and summarised in the concluding chapter.
A useful exercise is that each chapter sets its story
against the relevant events regarding woodland
extraction or preservation taking place in England.
The book traces the fortunes of Irish woodland
against the vicissitudes of political history but
contemporary accounts are, to say the least, biased
in favour of either the native Irish or the English
landowner, the Catholic or the Protestant. Given
such political and cultural bias — even hatred —,
facts are hard to come by and the author attempts
to assess these in difficult circumstances. For much
of history, Irish woodlands were regarded by the
English as primitive fastnesses offering shelter to
wild Irish rebels and also conducive to ‘roguery,
depression, damp and poverty’ (as expressed by
John Evelyn in his Sylva, published in 1729). Few
accounts are without bias, distorting the amount
of woodland that survived timber extraction,
iron working, and so on. Thus Elizabeth I has
traditionally been blamed for an arboreal ‘holocaust’,
military forces for clearing swathes of woodland
and rapacious English landowners for continued
exploitation, themselves ‘ruling by oppression
rather than law’ (p. 93). Everett examines, as far as
he is able and in considerable detail, the evidence
for such claims and, in later centuries, the effect
of successive rulings to increase plantations and
conserve woodlands put forward by estate owners
and, subsequently, by governments.
The influence is rarely black or white: inevitably,
conflicts continued to arise throughout Irish history.
In the seventeenth century a ‘central question, clearly,
was the extent to which Ireland should be regarded
primarily as a discrete, steadily developing, kingdom
or a convenient source of raw materials, and readily
made fortunes, for British interests’ (p. 11), but in
the rebellions of the 1640s rival commanders on
both sides emphasised the importance of protecting
Irish woodlands from ‘destruction and desolation’
(p. 133). The promotion of woodland planting
increased in the later seventeenth century, partly
to ensure the economic viability of the timber
trade, but was also to be influenced by cultural
forces, especially as views of what constituted
‘picturesque’ or ‘sublime’ landscapes took hold in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Paintings and engravings from these later centuries
express appreciative views of wooded landscapes
and well-wooded estates. For once, both sides
were in agreement over the desired objectives if
not in the initial causes of decline and were not
without continued bias: ‘Irish “patriots” typically
chose to regard their country’s mounting deficit in
timber, not so much as an inevitable consequence
of globalization, than a lamentable expression of
inadequate nationhood’ (p. 198) while extensive
planting was also readily envisaged ‘as an expression
of modern, largely Protestant, civility’ (p. 201) —
hostility continued to underlie any discussion of
Irish woodlands. Arthur Young, the leading English
agriculturalist, made an extensive tour of Ireland
between 1776 and 1779 and his descriptions provide
an insight into the state of Ireland’s woodlands,
praising some estate owners for their ‘silvicultural
performance’ (p. 227). (Such a view was not shared
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LANDSCAPE HISTORY
by all — ‘Capabilty’ Brown’s influence on some
estate owners in England and Wales was denounced
by the architect William Chambers in 1773 as
sacrificing old plantations to ‘make way for … a
few American weeds’: p. 230).
Woodland and national culture remained
inextricably intertwined. The author concludes
that ‘According to well-honed nationalist traditions
emerging in earnest in the eighteenth century,
the uprooting of Irish culture rising from the
English conquest was fully reflected in the fate
of the country’s woodlands’ giving rise to the
hope that independence might promote ‘a rapid
resurgence of the nation’s woods, together with
its literature, music, most cherished customs, and,
indeed, essential national character’ (p. 279). But
as private landowners diminished in power, with
many of their traditional activities passing to central
government, woodland resources continued to
steadily diminish despite nationalists advocating
planting and preservation: independent Ireland
largely ignored their views until the second half of
the twentieth century.
This is a thorough and penetrating study, if not
an ‘easy’ read, and is beautifully illustrated with some
stunning photographs and plates.
University of Birmingham
DELLA HOOKE
The Architecture of Pleasure. British Amusement Parks,
1900–1939 (Ashgate, Guildford, 2013). By Josephine
Kane. 244 × 172 mm. 284 pp. 110 b/w and 4 colour
illustrations. ISBN 978 1 4094 1074 4. Price £58.50.
In September 2013, Thanet District Council became
sole owner of the remaining buildings and site
of Dreamland, Margate, one of the two main
subjects of study in Josephine Kane’s thoroughly
documented and intellectually stimulating study
of amusement parks. Dreamland has significant
listed structures, including the animal cages in
a romantic garden setting from the time of the
circus owner ‘Lord’ George Sanger in the 1880s,
and the fire-damaged remains of Britain’s oldest
surviving Scenic Railway of 1920. Enough of
the listed timber structure survived to prohibit an
intended redevelopment as a retail park, while the
listed cinema and entertainment complex by the
architects Leathart and Granger of 1934 added to
the conservation argument. Backed by the Heritage
Lottery Fund and other funding, Dreamland is now
being restored to working order, incorporating a
living museum of historic rides, complementing
the Turner Contemporary Gallery at one end of
the town with popular culture at the other.
This is a story as bizarre as many of those told in
Kane’s study of the rise and fall of the Amusement
Park, beginning as a somewhat anarchic Edwardian
adoption of American rides and attractions, linked
to the temporary installations of exhibitions such
as the Franco-British at White City in 1908, with
its Flip-Flap and big wheel. The 1930s brought
a significant social shift in style, seen by many
commentators as a return to greater order and
control. Kane explores the different understandings
of both leisure and pleasure over this period,
skewering Marxist theories that it was all a capitalist
stitch-up with the proposition that Edwardians of
all classes made their own fun and commercial
interests followed rather than led.
One of the most interesting threads in the
book is the way that Amusement Parks brought
to the masses the experiences of modernity in
illusory form: travelling underwater, driving a
car and flying. The backgrounds may have been
painted or projected to achieve the illusion, but
the physical jolts for which people were willing to
pay their pennies were real. Simpler devices such
as the Joy Wheel at Blackpool enticed punters of
both sexes to lose their dignity as they struggled
against centrifugal force. Riding on ‘The Witching
Waves’ at White City or descending a helter-skelter
gave women a licensed opportunity for their long
skirts to billow seductively. Dodgems came later,
allowing women a turn at the wheel that might
not otherwise have come their way. At the same
time, the proprietors of the more successful and
long-lasting Amusement Parks understood that
delirium must be controlled and rationed, working
in close collaboration with town councils to ensure
an overall sense of decorum.
This book is published in the series ‘Studies in
Architecture’, and within the necessary and gripping
story of changing experiences bought and sold in
Amusement Parks over the period, there is a thread
about the design of buildings and the layout of
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REVIEWS
sites. Many of the buildings were no more than
billboard fronts to the rides, attracting attention and
providing ‘loading bays’ for waiting customers. In
Edwardian times, these might simulate landscape
features, such as the ‘River Caves of the World’ that
reached Blackpool in 1905 having been pioneered at
Coney Island and then at Earl’s Court. This, and a
similar outburst of rocaille around the ‘Fun Grotto’
at the Southend Kursaal, relate to the artificiality of
eighteenth-century and later landscape features. The
groves and flowers flanking the railway embankment
at Dreamland, a postcard of which inspired Kane’s
doctoral study and the book, signal an older heritage
from Vauxhall via Tivoli and Rosherville that
justifies the use of the word ‘park’, but these given
less detailed consideration.
Larger buildings, combining facilities for eating,
drinking and dancing, provided landmarks at the
entrances to the parks. The style of these aligned with
the eclectic buildings of outdoor exhibition sites,
until in 1933 the Thompson family of Blackpool
Pleasure Beach took the surprising step of employing
Joseph Emberton, a native English Modernist with
experience at Wembley and Olympia. On the face
of it, Modernism was not a style ideally suited to
revelry, but it showed how this premier amusement
park wanted to keep up with fashion. The Pleasure
Beach is the last major survivor of the genre, and
for many years succeeded in keeping listing officials
away, although the Casino is now protected. This
informative and entertaining book could not
have been better timed for giving context to the
miraculous resurrection of Dreamland.
University of Greenwich
ALAN POWERS
Archaeologies of Conflict (Bloomsbury, London, 2013).
By John Carman. 216 × 138 mm. 152 pp. 14 b/w
illustrations. ISBN 978 1 8496 6888 0. Price £45.00.
One of the highest-profile developments in landscape archaeology over the past two decades has
been the growth of Conflict Archaeology. This
sub-discipline began life as Battlefield Archaeology,
explicitly studying the sites of organised armed
conflict, but has since expanded its scope to consider
the wider, material effects and implications of
conflict. In this latest contribution to the Bloomsbury
Debates in Archaeology series, John Carman
presents an overview of this branch of archaeology
and the debates within it, showing how the study
of conflict archaeology has evolved, describing
the landscape, site-specific and anthropological
studies that have influenced archaeological studies
of conflict. He describes the strand of archaeology
that developed from extensive landscape study of
terrain and the recovery and study of artefacts
from battlefields, including the survey of the
Little Big Horn Battlefield, scene of Custer’s Last
Stand. Carmen discusses the processual nature of
much of this work which follows the tradition of
military history, with linear narratives, functionalist
interpretation and a concomitant down-playing or
ignoring of non-functional aspects of the battlefield,
including the sociology of the military and cultural
and ritual factors that might influence behaviours.
He also points out that much of this particular
strand of work has been a nationalistic enterprise.
Nevertheless, examples of international cooperation are cited, which should prompt more
examination than this slim volume allows. However,
battlefields are not the only focus of study and
this has given rise to a series of studies that have
included wider examinations of organised violence
and its effects and associated activities, including
archaeologies of internment, occupation and of
the Holocaust. These areas of study tend to be
more wide-ranging in approach and concerned
with more than the material consideration of the
site of conflict itself. Carmen acknowledges that
this has led to fragmentation within the field but
contends that there is strength in this diversity.
He also explores the diversity of approach and
focus apparent in the study of modern conflict,
which has been largely driven by archaeologists
trained in prehistory, who have introduced different
theoretical concerns from the battlefield specialists,
some of whom come from landscape archaeology.
Carman contends that those engaged in the
modern field may feel more at liberty to discuss
ritual, environment and other external factors than
some of those working in the historic period up
to 1914. Nevertheless, the useful but neglected
work done by Bristol University’s geographers on
militarised landscapes is not considered although it
is primarily archaeological in focus and also brings
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new discourse to bear. Carman writes as a critical
friend to both parties. His argument is that conflict
archaeology is a young subject and that unnecessary
fragmentation can only serve to weaken attempts to
develop research, whether internationally or across
the internal divisions.
This book does offer a concise introduction
to the discipline as it currently stands. However,
there are some omissions that are the result of
this being a slim volume, as books in this series
tends to be. It is unfortunate that there was not
more space for discussion of the ethics of conflict
archaeology. Such concerns are most marked in the
modern era, where contentious issues, including the
recovery of civilian victims of the Spanish Civil
War, draw on narratives from conflict archaeology
but feed contemporary political discourse. Another
absence is discussion of the exhumation of the
1916 mass-grave at Fromelles, which was set against
the backdrop of relations between Australia and its
former colonial ruler, Great Britain. In addition,
there is no discussion of the role of media in
forming narratives of battlefield and conflict
archaeology and, in particular, creating the popular
image of this area of study: television shows
including ‘Battlefield Detectives’, ‘Two Men in a
Trench’, ‘Finding the Fallen’, and several episodes
of ‘Time Team’ have all had conflict themes,
often dealing with human remains, as well as other
evidence, and drawing as much from forensics (and
narrative arcs from Crime Scene Investigation) as
from traditional archaeology.
Carman’s final assertion is that ‘we have much
to learn from each other’ (p. 101) and this is the
critical message from the book. Despite theoretical
disagreements and apparently opposing positions
between Battlefield and Conflict archaeologists and
the techniques they employ, the practitioners of the
archaeology of conflict are employing the standard
tools of archaeological research to consider the
people in the eye of the storm and their material
traces.
WYG, Bristol
MARTIN BROWN
Landscapes and Societies in Medieval Europe East of the
Elbe (Brepols, Turnhout, 2013). Edited by Sunhild
Kleingärtner, Timothy, P. Newfield, S. Rossignol
and D. Wehner. 150 × 230 mm. xiv = 406 pp. ISBN
978 0 8884 4823 1. Price € 80.00
Landscapes and Societies in Medieval Europe East of
the Elbe is a collection of fifteen papers covering
a range of topics and disciplines focusing on the
relationship between colonisation, social change
and landscape transformation in Central-Eastern
Europe; the fruits of an international conference
held in Toronto in 2010, within the Gentes trans
Albiam series. It is not possible to provide a review
of each paper within the limited constraints of this
response, but the editors are to be congratulated on
a solid and accessible piece of scholarship. At a time
when the value of conference proceedings is being
challenged by academic performance evaluations,
this volume clearly demonstrates the continuing
relevance and importance of collections with strong
topical integrity. At first glance the collection may
appear eclectic, but there is a consistent thread
running throughout which is highlighted in the
introduction and concluding remarks.
The volume is principally concerned with
the impact of settlement on the landscape; a
complex interplay between natural topography and
human artifice, between the physical and imagined
environment. The regional coverage is ambitious,
with four geographic subdivisions stretching east
as far as Novgorod and south as far as Hungary,
although as the editors state the coverage is not
comprehensive. The main cultural process shaping
these societies was Christianisation and specifically
Latinisation, a rapid integration into the world west of
the Elbe resulting from a complex dialectic between
the indigenous populations and incoming colonists,
crusaders and merchants. The lens for scrutinising
these transformations is the landscape, and the
editors highlight how interdisciplinary synthesis of a
broad range of data is the only means of achieving a
holistic understanding of the relationships between
historical landscapes and cultural change. The
concept of landscape is explored in some depth in
the introduction, mirroring the range of approaches
in the contributions.
The selection of essays presents the reader
with a useful suite of approaches to the medieval
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landscape. Each of the papers forms a self-contained
case study, from a different geographic region, and
focuses on a specific type of data or is contained by a
single disciplinary paradigm. In some cases multiple
sources are drawn upon. There are also stylistic
differences between the contributions, reflecting
the range of disciplines and approaches. By the
end we are not left with a holistic understanding
of the relationship between landscape, settlement
and social change east of the Elbe, but rather a
series of important vignettes (as Rossignol describes
them in the concluding remarks). Taken together
they illustrate the variability of sources relating to
an understanding of past environments; indeed,
it is not possible to encompass these within a
single study without the involvement of multiple
specialists working towards the same research
objectives. The value of each discipline is reflected
upon in turn, from the high-resolution physical
minutiae of archaeological research and the longue
durée perspective on vegetation change offered by
palynology, through to the experiential windows on
past landscapes preserved in written sources. The
link between medieval landscapes and disease is an
important component, and increasingly popular in
interdisciplinary studies as demonstrated recently
by Ole Bendictow’s compelling What Disease Was
Plague? (Brill 2010).
In this respect the volume is multi- rather
than interdisciplinary. However, this striving for a
connected, integrated understanding should not be
overemphasised. Such an effort would be futile if it
was simply descriptive — a gazetteer of all that is
known of the physical and conceptual landscapes
of medieval Central-Eastern Europe. Instead, the
collection presents a series of focused research
questions tackling the same issues from diverse
perspectives. It draws attention to pronounced
similarities and differences in the outcomes
of Latinisation on the shape of landscapes in
neighbouring regions. What is particularly striking
is how environmental history and environmental
archaeology have been accommodated within the
same collection, as the two are typically segregated
in their outputs.
The accessibility of this volume is one of its
strongest aspects. A scan of the footnotes of
the fifteen papers reaffirms the extensive corpus
of scholarship in German, Polish, Latvian and
Russian on the topic of medieval landscapes
and environments. Traditionally fragmented, they
are brought together and made accessible to
an international audience in this volume. The
medieval Baltic Sea region is becoming increasingly
popular within international and inter-regional
studies, thanks in no small part to the monumental
Culture Clash and Compromise project led by
Nils Blomkvist (1996–2005), and this volume
represents another important step moving us away
from the Western-centricity and methodological
fragmentation of past scholarship, towards a more
holistic understanding of the development of
European societies.
University of Reading
ALEKS PLUSKOWSKI
Why National Parks? (Wildtrack Publishing, 2013).
By Ian O. Brodie. 150 × 230 mm. 144 pp. 20 b/w
illustrations. ISBN 978 1 9040 9852 2. Price £14.50.
This book, from specialist landscape publishers
Wildtrack, explores the values and attitudes which
characterised the drive towards the creation of
designated landscapes (National Parks and Areas
of Outstanding Natural Beauty) in England and
Wales, and which the author fears are in danger from
indifference, or possibly inappropriate exploitation,
in the current climate. Ian Brodie, more widely
known for his interpretative ramblers’ guidebooks,
draws heavily on experience in his native landscape,
the Lake District, to illustrate his argument, noting
that this area has featured prominently in shaping
the values he promotes.
This is not a history book, and the author is
more concerned with setting out the underlying
philosophy of those whose efforts culminated
in the National Parks legislation in 1949, rather
than tracing the process itself — though he does
include a timeline of the most significant dates in
what has clearly been a long drawn-out story. The
book is rather a call to arms for those concerned
to perpetuate and enjoy some of our best-loved
and most highly valued landscapes against the
perceived threat of an increasingly indifferent
public, inadequate resources, and largely ineffective
political management.
116
Brodie deploys the discussion around the
Thirlmere (Cumbria) controversy of the 1870s
(he has written separately on this subject), and
subsequent writing, to illustrate the values that
guided enthusiasts for designation. He is concerned
that these values are in danger of being eroded and
bemoans the loss, as he sees it, of wider public
support for these principles, and the risk this poses
for the future of significant landscapes. It is curious,
though, that he does not take encouragement from
the recent designation of the South Downs, nor
from the relatively recent creation of National Parks
in Scotland, which are only mentioned in passing;
these would seem, on the face of it, to suggest
that the idea of designation still has traction, and
it would have been interesting to have the author’s
take on these developments.
Brodie is also careful to assert that designated
landscapes should not be, and never have been,
spaces to be ‘preserved in aspic’. In rejecting this
position, he recognises the validity of appropriate
evolution, and of balancing and, as far as possible,
reconciling the different demands on these spaces.
But his primary agenda is that of the rambler with
an appreciation of the beauty of wild places, and
is encapsulated in the statement that ‘our social,
creative and economic health depends a priori on
the quality of, and access to the landscape in which
we live’. Natural beauty, its conservation, and access
to it, take strong precedence over other interests,
and these form the foundation of much of the
book’s argument.
Thirlmere is one example of the contested nature
of these spaces; the diversity of opinion between
Romanticist views of landscape, conservationists,
LANDSCAPE HISTORY
and those seeking quiet recreation is explored
at length. But other arguments — those for
more gregarious forms of recreation, economic
development of designated landscapes, and the
interests and aspirations of those who inhabit, or
make their living from, these landscapes — are
dealt with more summarily, and are thus dismissed
less convincingly.
The author quotes extensively, mainly from the
work of pioneers of designated landscapes and
contemporary commentators; and he invokes several
heavyweights, including Wordsworth, Trevelyan,
Rousseau, Joad and Shoard, alongside more eclectic
sources such as Camus, Sartre and de Saint-Exupery.
These quotations are sometimes lengthy, and a more
rigorous edit might have noticed that some are
repeated — in one instance, two pages after it first
appears. This reflects the essential difficulty with this
book: its premise is supportable, but an absence of
clear structure allows the author to introduce and
reintroduce concepts throughout the text which
make the argument feel somewhat repetitive.
The book is illustrated with twenty photographs,
mostly of designated landscapes, but these are
monochrome and are too small to do justice to
the grandeur of their subject matter; the cover
photo shows what might have been possible with a
bigger production budget. There is a comprehensive
bibliography, but references are to publications
rather than to specific pages. Better editing would
have removed duplication, corrected some mistakes
in the spelling of personal names, and justified the
text to make it easier to read.
University of Sheffield
PHIL BACK