British Archaeology, no 25, June 1997: Reviews

CHANNEL DEFENCES
Andrew Saunders
Batsford, £15.99
ISBN 0-7134-7595-1 pb

This latest book by Andrew Saunders, the former Chief Inspector at English Heritage, has a rather broader scope than might be imagined from its title, transporting the reader in a broad sweep from the Isles of Scilly and the Channel Islands to Harwich, and from the 16th century to the Cold War.

The south coast of Britain has been endangered by invasion threats many times, and has been perceived as being in danger many times more. Saunders details these threats, whether real or perceived, and the measures taken to protect against each of them. His text is divided into five chapters. The first four - Times of danger, The role of the navy, Defence of the naval bases, and Invasion coasts - follow their respective themes chronologically from Tudor times up to the 19th century and the last - Twentieth century total war - covers the two World Wars and the inter-War period. An epilogue deals with the Cold War. There are also a glossary, a gazetteer of defences accessible to the public, suggestions for further reading and a good index. To cram all this into 128 pages of text means that coverage of individual castles, forts and batteries is, necessarily, rather superficial but by careful choice of photographs, drawings, old prints and maps, everything of note is covered quite adequately.

Military archaeology has until recently been rather looked down upon. Castles, of course, have always been popular, having a certain romantic aura, but Saunders is to be congratulated on bringing all defences, from castles through forts, Martello towers and coast defence and anti-aircraft batteries to the humble though ubiquitous pillbox, to wider public notice.

There is nothing particularly new here. All of the information is readily available if one is prepared to wade through enough books for it. The value of this book is that everything is gathered into one volume.

David Burridge is Secretary of the Kent Defence Research Group, and Area Co-ordinator (South East) for the Defence of Britain Project

VILLAGE, HAMLET AND FIELD
Carenza Lewis, Patrick Mitchell-Fox and Christopher Dyer
Manchester UP, £45.00
ISBN 0-7190-4577-0 hb

On 11 August 1495 Thomas Pigott, a lawyer, enclosed his newly acquired Buckinghamshire manor of Doddershall `with fences and ditches'. One hundred and twenty people `tearfully', as a contemporary source has it, departed, leaving behind 24 houses to fall into ruin. Pigott was one of the enclosing graziers first brought to prominence a generation ago by Maurice Beresford in his Lost Villages, which established the `deserted medieval village' as an archaeological monument to rival the round barrow and the hillfort.

Studies over the last 40 years, however, have shown that the formation, development and eventual desertion of many villages was a far more complex process than was foreseen when Beresford wrote, and this book reports on the most ambitious attempt yet to unravel the story. In particular, it seeks - through the mapping of villages, hamlets and farms against such things as local landscape types and medieval wealth levels - some explanation of why settlements took the form they did, and why some fared better than others. Why, particularly, did nucleation - village formation - occur in some places yet not in others with apparently similar characteristics?

Based on the four east midland counties of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, the study shows that no easy answers are to be found, and not for want of a rigorous attempt. Ultimately, however, some worthwhile general observations and possible explana tions are advanced. The key period is seen as 850-1050, when increasing pressure on arable resources led some communities to completely reorganise the community's fields, with the tenants at least supporting an initiative by the local lord even if not instigating reform themselves. At Segenhoe in Bedfordshire, for example, in the 13th century the village lands were completely remeasured and then reassigned `reasonably' by a team comprising the two lords of the manor and six old men representing the tenants. Such a transformation probably necessitated the bringing together, into an orderly and compact village, houses formerly scattered in hamlets and farmsteads, and on land in some cases subsumed in the new common fields.

This book is jargon free and clearly written. It is an important study.

Dr Paul Stamper works for English Heritage's Gardens & Landscape Team

HUMAN EVOLUTION, LANGUAGE AND MIND
William Noble and Iain Davidson
CUP, £45.00
ISBN 0-521-44502-7 hb

The mind, far from being a personal possession, is better characterised as `socially distributed'. Full of this sort of argument, this book is definitely not one for the faint-hearted. Indeed, it is less the `psychological and archaeological enquiry' of the subtitle, and more a psychological enquiry with an extended archaeological postscript. This is a pity because, although enjoyable, the book would have benefited from a more convincing treatment of the archaeological record. According to Noble and Davidson, respectively a psychologist and an archaeologist at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, the defining characteristic of being human is to know that you mean something; and that meaning is neither an inherent characteristic of the world nor a characteristic that we attribute to the world, but one that arises through human communication. This, though hard to grasp, is a radical proposition which implies that at some point in prehistory hominids `discovered' language (rather than `evolved' it) and in so doing made themselves human.

Noble and Davidson argue that art is linguistic because it is intentional communication using symbols. Even `lifelike' art is symbolic because what passes as lifelike is itself the subject of convention - recall that single viewpoint perspective is a compara tively recent invention. On this reading such finds as the paintings from Chauvet Cave and the plaquettes from Apollo Cave, Namibia, indicate that hominids had become human by at least 40,000 years ago.

The problems begin with earlier isolated artefacts such as the `engraved' mammoth tooth from Tata, Hungary. In the absence of similar finds there is no way of knowing whether such items are symbolic because the element of convention cannot be demonstrated. There are, of course, many repeated stone tool forms dating long before 40,000 years ago, but according to the authors such repetition was not intentional until the Upper Palaeolithic - an argument pursued with excessive zeal given the near perfect symmetry of many handaxes.

Dr Mark Lake is a Research Assistant in Archaeology at Reading University

ARCHAEOLOGY: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION
Paul Bahn
OUP, £4.99
ISBN 0-19-285325-2 pb

This short book is intended for teenagers thinking of studying archaeology at university, but it would be wasted if confined to its primary audience. Here we have a series of acute and entertaining short essays on the subject's great themes - for example, how people lived, how people thought, and why things changed in the past.

It is often said that well-written books are rare in archaeology, but this is a model of good writing for a general audience. Paul Bahn writes popular books for a living, and his chapters rattle along, packed with information but never getting bogged down in too much detail. To give a flavour of his style, here is an extract from a paragraph on ancient food residues, where he mentions the evidence for wine and beer in Iran at c 3500BC - `clearly the occupants of Godin Tepe knew how to have a good time' - and he goes on:

Chemists have also discovered traces of opium in a 3,500-year-old vase from Cyprus, which sug gests to some scholars that a drug trade existed in the eastern Mediterranean at this time. In Britain, on the other hand, ancient pots tend to contain less stimulating substances, such as cabbage . . .

Archaeology probably produces more than its fair share of pretentious and tedious writing, and Bahn fingers the guilty - particularly the obsessives of theoretical and gender archaeology - with amusing directness. `Some pedants in post-processual archaeology, ' he writes,

have pointed out that there is no such thing as the present, since as soon as you have become conscious of a moment it is already past. This kind of facile observation, however, merely invites a loud raspberry.

One of the book's more appealing characteristics is its balanced view of the value of archaeology as a whole: `It helps to keep the subject in perspective, and remind oneself that we are basically just nosing around in dead people's left-overs and trying to guess how they lived their lives. '

The book is full of jokes, some of them real groaners (the Chinese lady buried in the 2nd century BC with a number of prepared meals in labelled containers had `a sort of Chinese undertakeaway') but its serious message - that archaeology can be a rich and fascinating subject - it gets across with more panache than any other book I know.

Simon Denison is Editor of British Archaeology