Issue no 40, December 1998

FURTHER LIGHT ON THE PARISI
Peter Halkon (ed)
East Riding Arch Soc, £4.00
ISBN 0-902122-82-7 pb

The Wolds and wetlands of East Yorkshire have long been recognised as a rich repository of prehistoric remains, and the cemetery sites of the so-called Arras Culture (and particularly the celebrated chariot burials) have aroused international interest. Rather less well-known is the cultural heritage of the Parisi. Yet as this was the tribe attested by Classical authors as occupying this region at the time of the Roman Conquest, they should either be the same people as the Arras Culture or their successors. However, the Romano-British settlements within East Yorkshire have attracted little interest outside the region itself.

This book is a collection of papers from a one-day conference held last year, and is a successor to an earlier volume, New Light on the Parisi. The five papers cover work which took place mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, but is a welcome addition to the regional literature. The aims set by many excavators in those years tended to be more research-based than those of today's evaluations, which are usually driven by the requirements of the planning process.

As with any other symposium, the quality of the papers is variable. The two which will attract most interest are by John Dent and Rod Mackey - directors of two of the largest excavations in the area during these two decades (Wetwang and Welton, respectively), although neither has yet been published. Dent's paper is an overall synthesis of the Yorkshire Wolds in late prehistory, and the emergence of an Iron Age society. Mackey's contribution is the most detailed account yet published of his six-year excavation at the 17-acre Iron Age settlement and Romano-British villa complex at Welton Wold. The other contributions concern the Foulness Valley during these periods (Peter Halkon), the regional pottery during the 1st millennium BC (Val Rigby), and recent research on Roman coins in the area (Bryan Sitch).

Dave Evans is the Director of the Humber Archaeology Partnership

DIGITAL PLACES
Michael R Curry
Routledge, £17.99
ISBN 0-415-13015-8 pb

Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, have reached that age at which, for a human, a degree of self reflection might be in order. Generally agreed to have begun life in the 1960s, the study and application of GIS is now well established in many spatial disciplines, with GIS-like functions even creeping into commonly used desktop software programs such as the humble spreadsheet. Curry's book is one of several reflective works to be published in recent years, distancing itself from the more traditional technical treatises and product-related manuals that abound in GIS as in any other computerrelated field.

More upbeat than the likes of John Pickles's Ground Truth, Digital Places attempts to address the social, cultural and ethical issues underpinning the application of GIS to real-world problems. In so doing, Curry - an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles - delves into works of philosophy, psychology and linguistics to support arguments on the fundamentally limiting nature of GIS display and analysis, resulting in a curious mix of citations from Foucault and Levi-Strauss as well as from more `main-stream' GIS literature such as works by Peter Burrough and David Mark.

From quiet beginnings a decade ago, use of GIS has spread throughout archaeology to the extent that many archaeologists have now heard of - and received data from - a GIS, even if the majority have not yet actually used one for themselves. Stripped of philosophical angst and wordiness, the issues raised here are as relevant to archaeology as to other disciplines. Equally, though, they are relevant in many areas of human endeavour - long discussions of ethics and privacy, for example, are not specific to GIS. Curry argues that GIS are incapable of fully modelling the `real world', but shows how their use is governed by the rules, principles and concerns of society as a whole.

Dr Paul Miller is Collections Manager at the Archaeology Data Service, University of York

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONUMENTS
Richard Bradley
Routledge, £14.99
ISBN 0-415-15204-6 pb

This book asks why monumental architecture emerged at the start of the Neolithic on the Atlantic fringe of Europe, and how it was transformed over the succeeding three millennia. Richard Bradley lays stress on the durability of monuments, claiming that their enduring physicality encouraged a commitment to place, and fostered a sense of time which extended back into communal history and anticipated a shared future.

It was for this reason that monument-building developed not amongst the pioneer agriculturalists of central Europe, but in the North and West, where - according to Bradley - hunter-gatherers took on Neolithic ways by acculturation. Far from long barrows and megalithic tombs being the product of an agricultural surplus, their construction by people who still largely relied upon wild resources created the conditions under which sedentism and the delayed returns of food-production became conceivable.

The principal change at the start of the Neolithic in North-West Europe was thus in ways of thinking - it was necessary for people to conceive of themselves as separate from nature before they could manipulate it. This argument resembles one made previously by Ian Hodder, although Bradley takes the innovative step of analysing Mesolithic funerary and depositional activities to reveal a society embedded in nature, preoccupied with fertility and regeneration, and not separating itself from the animal kingdom. The adoption of agriculture required an ideological shift toward the domination of plants, animals and landscapes.

However, it remains an open question how far the very idea of `nature' is a product of the modern era. The Neolithic doubtless brought about a changed relationship between people and other living things, but arguably this involved a closer involvement with animals, which might be seen as integral to the community, and a more intimate connectedness with place, expressed through monuments. These kinds of closer intervention need not imply domination.

In the first half of the book, Bradley demonstrates how material forms which originated in the Neolithic of central Europe were adapted in the Atlantic zone. He reiterates the link between Bandkeramik longhouses and mortuary long mounds previously made by Hodder, Andrew Sherratt and others, but adds that loess-land settlements would have contained the collapsed remains of buildings no longer occupied - literally the `houses of the dead'. These abandoned mounds of wall-daub and timber would have provided the models for long barrows.

Just as long mounds made reference to the household, so causewayed enclosures represented the whole settlement. Bradley goes on to reassess the notion that corporate burial in tombs and barrows indicates a conception of ancestry, which in turn suggests long-term control over particular resources by a social group. As he points out, the earliest long mounds in France and northern Europe contain single graves rather than the disarticulated remains of many persons. Bradley's suggestion is that in these areas funerary monuments preceded agriculture, and that the shift to communal mortuary practice heralded economic change. This may be a little too neat, as the synchronicity of cultivation and multiple burial remains to be demonstrated throughout North-West Europe.

The second part of the book concentrates on the changes which overtook monumentality through the Neolithic and into the Bronze Age. Bradley points out that almost all the monumental structures of the later Neolithic were variations on a circular plan, which he takes to be under-pinned by a cosmological archetype. The circle represented a world perceived from the point of view of a person located at its heart, but the way in which this basic form was presented changed over time. The passage tombs of Ireland and Orkney allowed access to a select few into a secluded inner space, but later were surrounded by platforms which made the performances of the élite visible to outsiders. Henge monuments increased the performance space, but set up a division between the enclosed space and the outer world, which was rendered invisible to those inside. Stone circles were a permeable form of enclosure which allowed the interior to be viewed from without, and the landscape to be appreciated from within. The end of the sequence, in the early Bronze Age, came with the closing-off of these open enclosures, converting them into round- and ring-cairns, and appropriating them for the burial of the highly-ranked dead.

In a final chapter, Bradley puts forward the stimulating idea that the seemingly abrupt change to a landscape of fields, settlements and hillforts in the Middle to Late Bronze Age was achieved by translating this same principle of order into the domestic sphere. Houses and enclosures were organised according to symbolic structures established in the Neolithic. This book contains more ideas than can be discussed in any review and is one of Bradley's best.

Dr Julian Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southampton