Issue no 1, February 1995

THE VIKING AGE IN CAITHNESS, ORKNEY AND THE NORTH ATLANTIC
eds C Batey, J Jesch and C Morris
Edinburgh, £25.00
ISBN 0-7486-0430-8 hb

In Scotland, the Viking Age is when prehistory came to a full stop; which is a pity for prehistorians, to judge by this fine collection of papers. There are important ideas here, some long-awaited perhaps none more so than those of Raymond Lamb, Orkney's archaeologist, expounding the Carolingian model for Orkney's transition from pagan colony to high medieval European Christian society. Like all the best hypotheses, it is perfectly obvious once someone else explains it.

There are reports here on Bradford University's excavations at Pool, Durham and Bradford's campaigns around Birsay Bay, Bergen's excavations at Westness and Historic Scotland's unfinished examination of Tuquoy. All are classic examples of the sites of this period, where archaeology and history reach yearningly towards each other.

As in every volume of proceedings, there are esoteric papers, for instance on placenames and runic interpretation, on mythology and artistic technique. But even these are to the point, and frequently witty - both rare things in archaeology. The cosmopolitan Viking world is vividly illuminated.

Here we see Orkney's 12th century Earl Rognvald Kali transformed from a bastion of traditional oral verse into an affected poseur, `a pain in the neck to his more sober contemporaries'. Even better, here are three rightly obscure 19th century `translators' of the Maeshowe runes, who deployed Latin, Anglo-Saxon and guesswork to stunning effect, one even providing four optional and inconsistent translations.

Few readers will enjoy none of the volume's 35 papers. As a celebration of the rich academic life that continues to focus on the Viking Earls of Orkney, those legendary descendants of the sea, name and the wind, it is an enthralling read. One can either dip into it, or (encouraged by the lack of an index) voyage from end to end.

Dr Noel Fojut is an Inspector at Historic Scotland

ROMAN POMPEII
Ray Laurence
Routledge, £35.00
ISBN 0-415-09502-6 hb

Pompeii is perhaps the most famous of all Roman sites, but until now there have been no decent introductory books on the subject. There are some marvellous specialist studies, often in foreign languages; but general books have tended to recycle a long-outdated consensus about the site's history, major monuments and urban topography. Now, with Laurence's book, that may at last have changed.

This is a passionately, occasionally polemically argued book that demands a serious reappraisal of many cherished notions about Pompeii. It is part archaeological, part ancient historical, but also integrates ideas from the social sciences and modern town planning.

The key arguments concern the nature of Roman town planning and use of space. Laurence, a Research Fellow at Reading University, demonstrates that the degree of formal planning by city authorities has been over-emphasised in earlier studies, and that social and economic relations in a town were of much greater significance in defining its infrastructures.

Some of the illustrations are highly original - for instance, the plan of the forum with the exact findspots marked of all the inscriptions found there, with translations printed around the margins. This provides a wealth of detail about the domination of the public space by elite dedications, and also about public office holding, donations and social conventions.

Particularly interesting are the maps, which Laurence uses to explore the spatial distributions of (amongst other things) street shrines and public fountains - commonly marking boundaries between neighbourhoods - bakeries, workshops connected with the wool trade, metalworkshops, brothels, bars, patterns of doorways along roads (commercial roads have frequent doors, rich residential roads far fewer than average), and frequency of graffiti on walls.

Occasionally Laurence's ancient historical training may have led him to squeeze the archaeological pegs into the holes he felt they should fit in; but this is a refreshing and enjoyable book, which sets a new standard in its analysis and interpretation.

Dr David Mattingly is a Lecturer at the University of Leicester

INDUSTRY IN THE LANDSCAPE 1700-1900
Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson
Routledge, £40.00
ISBN 0-415-11206-0 hb

Only quite recently has industrial archaeology emerged as a distinct species of the genus Archaeology, and it is still in the process of exploring its evolutionary niche.

Its early tasks were the collection of data: finding and listing sites, describing technicalities and establishing typologies. These were all necessary and desirable, even if the trees did obscure the wood; and they have made possible broader perspec- tives, as exemplified by this book, which are growing in competence and authority.

The impact of industry on the landscape, heaven knows, was far-reaching enough. Ironworks scarred square miles of South Wales with blast furnaces and slag heaps. Genteel market towns in Lancashire were transformed almost overnight into conurbations thick with cotton mills and heaving with compressed humanity. Countrysides largely unchanged for a millennium were dissected by the earthworks of canals and railways.

It is a huge subject, and a hugely important one, historically, archaeologically and environmentally. It is a subject where gen- eralisation is impossible, for conditions in one area differed wildly from those in another. Geology, climate, water supplies, landownership, availability of transport all played their differing parts, and the pattern varied from one period to another. The 18th and 19th centuries embraced the major changes; the 20th and post-industrialism is another ball-game, wisely omitted here.

The revolution was obvious enough at the time, and its repercussions were remarked on by many a writer and painted by many an artist. The effects, when commercially or scenically romantic, were generally approved; when human or environmental, they were widely ignored, except of course by those who suffered but they had no voice.

Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson, who are counted among the high priests of industrial archaeology, offer an outline account of the rise (and often the fall) of all significant British industries, their location, settlement, transport and impact on the landscape.

This is a hefty brief for 200 pages, and the effort to fulfil it results in a sometimes breathless style, verging in places on the catalogue. Text and illustrations, too, have a tendency to focus in from the broader landscape to the individual monument. And a subject which cries out for maps and aerial photographs is given only three of the first and none of the second.

This is not a book for the specialist, who will probably cling to Barrie Trinder's pioneering (and more profound) The Making of the Industrial Landscape (1982). But as a welcome and serious introduction it is both successful and enlightening.

Dr Michael Lewis lectures in industrial archaeology at the University of Hull