British Archaeology, no 17, September 1996: Reviews

THE RETURN OF CULTURAL TREASURES
Jeanette Greenfield
CUP, UKP19.95
ISBN 0-521-47746-8 pb

The current refusal of Croatia to normalise relations with Serbia-Montenegro until Belgrade returns the museum collections taken in 1991 from war-devastated Vukovar is a contemporary example of a centuries-old problem. Historic objects have frequently been seen as fundamental symbols of national cultural identity, while their loss or transfer abroad can be among the most controversial long-term consequences of colonisation, war, or international collecting and museum-building.

Jeanette Greenfield is a lawyer particularly interested in the legal and ethical aspects of the international trade and collecting. The first edition of this highly readable study was an important landmark in the debates about the trade, and the determination of many museums and private collectors to hang on at all costs to what they hold, presenting in detail the evidence and opinions of both sides.

British cases examined in great and often fascinating detail include the Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon in 1801 and bought by Parliament for the British Museum in 1816, the royal memorial heads and other bronzes seized in the Benin (Nigeria) punitive mission of 1897, and the Kohi-noor diamond (claimed by both Pakistan and India) now in the Crown Jewels. Further chapters review approaches in other countries, and there is discussion of relevant international treaties from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia onwards.

Perhaps most challenging of all is Greenfield's documentation of cases in which important objects and collections have been returned to their countries of origin in recent decades, such as the large collection of early manuscripts of Icelandic sagas returned from Copenhagen. She includes a number of British cases, such as royal regalia and related collections returned to Uganda by the Cambridge University Museum, and to Burma by the V&A. This updated edition also notes the return of a large collection of Aboriginal skeletal remains to Australia from Edinburgh University. Though each return is unique and should not necessarily be regarded as a precedent for more widespread transfers, they do weaken the much cited 'domino theory', namely that agreeing to just one transfer would result in the rapid emptying of the internationally-orientated museums of the western world.

Patrick Boylan is Professor of Arts Policy and Management at City University, London

by Philip Barker

NORWICH CATHEDRAL
eds Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie, Christopher Harper-Bill and Hassell Smith
Hambledon, UKP25.00
ISBN 1-85285-134-1 hb

Books on cathedrals range from simply written pamphlets, through the Pitkin guides, with their minimal texts and unnaturally-lit photographs, to those at the far end of the spectrum such as this on Norwich, a massive 784 pages embracing every aspect of the cathedral over the nine centuries of its existence. It is a collaborative work of 35 distinguished authors, combining documentary history, archaeology, and the histories of art and architecture.

But for whom is it written? The blurb says that it has been 'designed for the general reader', but it is so densely packed with highly detailed scholarly information and so literally heavy that it will surely be used chiefly in the study and the library. Yet so much of it cries out to be taken into the cathedral itself, so that the book can illuminate the building and the building the book. To this end, if parts II and IV, which discuss respectively the evolution of the fabric, and the sculpture, painting, monuments and so on, were to be offprinted and bound separately, they would form handbooks to the understanding of the cathedral unlikely to be superseded in the foreseeable future. Another good reason for reading the book in the cathedral is that the illustrations do not, perhaps could not, convey the beauty and numinous quality of this great building.

However, it is a remarkable achievement to have brought together and published such a symposium. Future work can only add glosses to it.

Philip Barker, among other achievements, has excavated and written about Worcester Cathedral

MEDIEVAL SOUTHWARK
Martha Carlin
Hambledon, UKP35.00
ISBN 1-85285-116-3 hb

For most people, ancient Southwark is remembered simply as the suburb which provided Londoners with playhouses, prisons and prostitutes. But it was much more than that, as this book on the City's infamous south bank settlement shows.

Martha Carlin looks principally at the documentary evidence, paying particular attention to the period from c 1200 to 1550. The settlement was not legally a London suburb, since it lay defiantly outside the jurisdiction of the City (at least until 1550); but it was not a town in its own right, having no borough charter, although it held regular markets and returned two members to Parliament from 1295. It was in fact a polyfocal settlement comprising five independent-minded but contiguous manorial estates owned by the Crown, the Bishop of Winchester, the Templars, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bermondsey Abbey. Such a place defies all the rules set by those intent on the neat classification of urban settlements.

Whatever its legal status, it certainly boasted a diverse economy, with occupations suggested by the 1381 poll tax returns that included goldsmith, innkeepers, hucksters, tailors, boatmen, brewers and prostitutes. It had its poor and unemployed, as well as the Great Hall of Winchester Palace, the hospital of St Thomas, and the magnificent Augustinian Priory of St Mary, now Southwark Cathedral.

All in all this is a most useful and informative study. The main drawback, however, is the surprisingly reticent use of archaeological evidence. There is no mention, for example, of the new dates for the timber precursors of the stone-built London Bridge (the history of the bridge is central to that of Southwark); no illustrations based on the detailed work at Winchester Palace, or of the moated house 'La Rosere' built for Edward II, or of the one owned by John Fastolf (Shakespeare's anti-hero).

Dr Gustav Milne is a specialist in medieval London at London's Institute of Archaeology

THE AVEBURY CYCLE
Michael Dames
Thames & Hudson, UKP10.95
ISBN 0-500-27886-5 pb

To read that the avenue at Avebury represents a snake coming from hibernation at the Sanctuary to copulation at the henge makes a change from the generality of archaeological discourse. Michael Dames's book puts forward a General Theory of Avebury that ties the archaeological evidence in with data on pre-literate thought and religion, and on astronomical observations and folklore.

The theory is that the Avebury monuments were a contemporary group whose purpose was to celebrate the Great Goddess of the Neolithic in her different manifestations at different times of the year - winter death at West Kennet long barrow, spring changes at the Sanctuary, midsummer wedding at Avebury, and autumn fecundity at Silbury Hill. The construct is to be seen as part of a Neolithic sense of the unity of the body and the landscape, with the representations of the goddess brought out of already existing forms in the landscape rather than imposed on it, and where the human, farming and celestial cycles merge.

Anyone should be able to relate to and have theories about our countryside and its monuments without feeling they have to engage in a battle with academia. This is not a bad theory, but unfortunately it is accompanied by sideswipes at unimaginative archaeologists and an unconvincing apparatus of scholarly proof. For example, the common units of measurement reckoned to prove the unity of the monuments are, embarrassingly, arbitrary bits of river bed paced by the author. There are many eyebrow-raising moments such as the meaningful conjunction seen between nine lines of decoration scored on a Neolithic pot, and the nine layers sealing its broken fragments. All this rather clouds the theory and diminishes the impact of what could have been a similar book to DH Lawrence's Etruscan Places.

Peter Ellis is a Field Officer with the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit