British Archaeology, no 23, April 1997: Reviews

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ESSEX
ed Owen Bedwin
Essex County Council, £21.00
ISBN 185281-1226 pb

This is a collection of conference papers with a specific aim. This was to help professional archaeologists `to explain and justify the significance of particular archaeological deposits' to planning officers, landowners and developers. So it originated as a sort of archaeological `how to make friends and influence people'. It was not intended as an up-to-date account of the archaeology of Essex for the general reader.

The book contains 21 papers by nationally-known and local contributors. Of these, 13 have a period flavour from the Palaeolithic to the post-medieval and the value of these extends well beyond the limited aim - some of the specialist period papers will be of interest to readers outside the county. In the other papers the authors describe the activities of particular organisations or discuss particular subjects, such as timber-framed buildings.

None of the papers includes a summary, so the reader must not expect them to be user-friendly. One paper starts, in the first sentence of the opening paragraph, to remind the reader that it would be instructive to re-read a paper of which he or she is unlikely to have heard. One author was still quoting references in the conclusions. Readers do not always get the consideration they deserve.

As a check I tested for the latest ideas on minster parishes and on the development of hundreds and Iron Age tribal territories. Unfortunately there is no discussion of any of these topics. So whether the minster parishes of Essex had an Iron Age territorial origin and have come down to us as hundreds remains for a future conference.

A well-produced book, expensive, illustrations mostly good, particular papers for particular people, no glossary of technical terms (one author started with Oxygen Isotope Stage 12), limited aims no doubt met, approaches the frontiers in places - but a hard read.

Peter Huggins directs excavations in Essex for the Waltham Abbey Archaeological Society

ARCHAEOLOGY IN LAW
John Pugh-Smith and John Samuels
Sweet and Maxwell, £55.00
ISBN 0-421-50340-8

One should hardly expect bedtime reading from Sweet and Maxwell, the legal publishers. This tome, by a barrister and an archaeological consultant, is a heavyweight reference book to be consulted rather than read. It offers a brief historical introduction to archaeology for non-practitioners (presumably the lawyers who will be representing archaeological interests at public inquiries), and an overview of the organisation of British archaeology. Then we move into the meat of the volume. The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 is summarised. The analysis promised in the introduction never materialises.

The next chapter will be helpful to jobbing archaeologists since it provides a compendium of other legislation affecting archaeology. The requirements made of the privatised public utilities, for instance, are noted under the Electricity Act 1989 and the Water Industry Act 1991. Other areas looked at include Treasure Trove, antiquities exports, listed buildings (briefly, for the reader is referred to a sister volume) and ecclesiastical exemption. This latter is dangerously sketchily covered - whilst the need for `faculty' (or church planning permission) to undertake invasive archaeological investigations is noted, nothing is revealed of the mechanism for doing so. To whom should one apply for faculty? A curious omission from this chapter is the Field Monuments Act 1972.

The chapter on development controls and the impact of PPG16 is far more analytical and provides a useful compendium of inspectors' decisions in public inquiries. But the coverage is all too brief and the bibliography does not offer much help. I would love to know the principles of selection that includes Colt Hoare's 1810 History of Ancient Wiltshire but omits Cullingworth and Nadin (1995) Town and Country Planning in Britain.

A final chapter on tax implications does not raise much confidence by failing to mention the curious VAT arrangements for listed buildings. Overall, this is a disappointing volume. Omissions spotted make one nervous about what else is absent, and it is riddled with inaccuracies of expression.

Jane Grenville is a specialist in archaeological heritage management at the University of York

ROMAN DOMESTIC BUILDINGS
ed Ian Barton
Exeter, £10.95
ISBN 0-85989-415-0 pb

`Small book, boring cover, very dull title.' This is the result of my initial NAPCG test (which stands for Non-Archaeologist Partner Cursory Glance). True or not, a look inside produced a very different impression.

I read this volume as manager of a Roman villa, but not as one familiar with the classical sources, or indeed many of the sites. This was no bar to enjoying and understanding Barton & Co's book. It is pitched at a very approachable level, and tries to be factually informative without an excessive overburden of theory. All the chapters cover a wide geographical range, equating British examples with those from elsewhere in the Empire.

Most people are aware of the marvellous buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Few are familiar with the apartment blocks at Ostia, or the regimented rows of houses from the veterans' colony at Thamagudi (North Africa). The rich variety of buildings across the Roman Empire is cleverly explored by the authors, the similarities and the differences being equally fascinating. The sheer scale of some of the imperial buildings in Italy, such as Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, or Nero's Golden House in Rome, put most Romano-British buildings in their place - firmly in the outer provinces! But the common links across the empire are also shown, and our own relatively poor examples can be seen as part of the wider lexicon of Roman domestic architecture.

One fascinating element to emerge is the Romans' love of their gardens. How timeless seem some of the attempts to include garden space in densely-populated urban areas. The book explores the powerful link between countryside and city in Roman times. The classic Roman gentleman was a landowner, and much of the urban architecture tried to reflect rural patterns and styles (in the posh bits, anyway).

Phil Bethell is the Manager of Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire

THE CULTURAL LIFE OF IMAGES
ed Brian Leigh Molyneaux
Routledge, £45.00
ISBN 0-415-10675-3 hb

Everyone knows that you can't believe everything you read - that all writing evolves out of the values and perceptions of its author. But what of pictures? It may seem obvious that pictures are made in the same, subjective way. Yet we tend to adopt a naive view, assuming that pictures in books and magazines tell a simple truth. We regard them as illustrations of points made in text, rather than as images that have their own story to tell.

This book addresses the rhetorical and persuasive power of images in archaeology. It suffers the inevitable overall incoherence of a collection of 12 papers from different authors based loosely around a theme. That said, many of the papers are striking and perceptive. Michael Shanks, of the University of Wales, Lampeter, tackles photography, discussing its several genres in archaeology - picturesque, travelogue, and so on - and their presuppositions. Despite photography's apparent clarity, its messages sometimes stand in opposition to those of archaeology. Some romantic photographs, for instance, dwell on ruination and its melancholy. Archaeology, by contrast, is interested in formation processes - a sanitised way of looking at ruin, in Shanks's view.

Clive Gamble and Stephanie Moser, of the University of Southampton, look at how images have conditioned our perception of the past - in particular of the Palaeolithic. They argue that, so ingrained are our assumptions, images of the period have changed little over the past century. They conclude that decades of research have led to `almost no interpretive gain' in our imaginative perception of the period.

At a tangent to the rest of the book, Richard Bradley, of Reading University, writes that objectivity in archaeology is unattainable because, for the most part, we only see what we have been trained to see. Intellectual progress depends upon the innovative perceptions of individuals who break the mould of received thinking and who `see' in a different way. He points out that many leaders of archaeological fashions have been trained in the visual arts. This brings to mind Edward de Bono's contention that in schools and universities we train critical skills at the expense of perceptual skills, which are ultimately more useful - an idea that archaeology departments might like to reflect on further.

Simon Denison is Editor of British Archaeology