Issue no 41, February 1999

RELIGION IN LATE ROMAN BRITAIN
Dorothy Watts
Routledge, £45.00
ISBN 0-415-11855-7 hb

Legend has it that the last words of the Roman Emperor Julian `the Apostate' were: `You have conquered, Galilean!' However, according to Dorothy Watts, Julian's doomed attempt to re-establish paganism in the Roman Empire had one unexpected success - in provincial Britannia. Here, a revival of native pagan cults is discernable in the archaeological record, from about the time of Julian's rule (361-63). Watts maintains that Julian gave the green light to a population which had rendered only limited allegiance to established Christianity since 312.

According to this story the increasingly distracted state of the western provinces after Julian's brief reign hampered subsequent attempts to enforce orthodoxy. This culminated in the break with Rome and the consequent removal of the church in Britain from imperial patronage. Watts, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland in Australia, maintains that the Church persisted into the 5th century as a beleagured remnant of its former state.

The historical thesis is intriguing. However, as Watts admits, the revived pagan cults of late 4th century Britain were not concerned, in the main, with Julian's Olympian deities but with the native Romano-Celtic variety of `nature spirits'. The failure of popular Christianity is ascribed to the fact that St Martin of Tours confined his efforts to Gaul.

Unfortunately, most of the archaeological evidence Watts relies on is what those in the trade call `dodgy data' derived mainly from old excavations. Matching dated historical events with archaeological evidence is a dangerous procedure, usually involving a variety of circular arguments. The author's ideas on religion also seem to rely on obsolete Victorian notions of animism - an aquaintance with contemporary thought on the anthropology and sociology of religion would have been an advantage. We still await a master work on this multi-faceted and enigmatic subject.

Colin Forcey is a post-graduate student at the University of Leicester

CULTURAL IDENTITY IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Ray Laurence and Joanne Berry
Routledge, £40.00
ISBN 0-415-13594-X hb

This is a diverse collection of papers unified by one overriding theme - cultural identity. Geographically, it moves from Britain to North Africa; chronologically, it progresses fromthe foundation of Cyrene (in modern Libya) in 631BC to post-Roman Wales. The contributors, both archaeologists and ancient historians, use evidence as diverse as Herodotus, field survey and analogies with medieval Ireland. As a result, much hangs on Ray Laurence's introduction which draws out the common themes - how people create their identities; the relationships between identity, material culture and territory; how imperial societies destroy, reshape and create new identities for their subjects; and the importance of breaking down generalisations such as Roman/Barbarian or coloniser/ colonised, recognising that these groups were internally divided by factors such as class, wealth, power and gender.

The book has its origin in the 1995 Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference which aimed to bridge the gap between different approaches to the past, in particular, archaeology and history. The book achieves mixed success - several papers, although strong contributions, fail to tackle this issue, and overall the book may have benefited from more collaboration between contributors. However, as a statement of intent, it moves in the right direction. David Petts's paper on Roman Wessex uses the type of landscape theories common in prehistoric studies to explore power and identity through peoples' everyday experience of the landscape and monuments from earlier periods. Peter van Dommelen's paper assesses how the people of Sardinia constructed their identities as Rome and Carthage fought over their island. Laurence's own contribution considers how ancient geographers manipulated the ethnic groups of Italy to create new identities and territories - not least Italia itself.

These papers remain individual contributions, rather than chapters of a larger coherent approach. But this diversity reflects the variety of identities within the Empire and the ways in which they were created and challenged.

Rob Witcher is a post-graduate student at the University of Leicester

EUROPE BEFORE HISTORY
Kristian Kristiansen
CUP, £50.00
ISBN 0-521-55227-3 hb

This major synthesis examines the European archaeological record for much of the 1st millennium BC. Evidence from more temperate parts of the continent is juxtaposed with developments in the Mediterranean to provide a wide-scale view. The author is catholic in his theoretical stances, although the `world systems' perspective is dominant in which developments in peripheral areas are envisaged as dependant on what occurs in core areas.

One of the author's main aims is to explain why state-level organisations emerged relatively tardily in non-Mediterranean Europe. The development of traditional cultural and chronological schemes is summarised, from the work of the great Scandinavian typologists, through that of Childe, to the relatively slight impact of newer means of obtaining absolute chronology. Kristiansen, Professor of Archaeology at Gothenburg University in Sweden, next outlines the theoretical agenda that underpins his efforts to furnish the `first approximation to a historical understanding' of the period and area. This combines good overviews of favoured theoretical models, with some frank criticism of their applicability.

The core of the study takes us in chronological order from the developed Urnfield culture through to the late Iron Age. Conclusions - some undoubtedly contentious - are highlighted in each chapter, and elaborated at the end of the book.

This is an excellent handbook to a prevailing archaeological perspective on the last millennium BC, which also shows how one major researcher is attempting to take forward the agenda. This is archaeology painted impressionistically on a broad canvas. In detail, there is scope aplenty for challenges, and Professor Kristiansen has not been well-served by the publisher: too many typographical errors and too many illustrations that are cramped to the point of illegibility or otherwise unsatisfactory for a work at this price.

Ian Ralston is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh

NEOLITHIC LANDSCAPES
Peter Topping (ed)
Oxbow, £20.00
ISBN 1-900188-41-4 pb

This book consists of 13 papers from a Neolithic Studies Group seminar on `Domestic Settlement and Landscape'. It is prefaced with a quotation from Marcel Proust - `The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes' - and this is the point of the project, as old evidence is reinterpreted and new data examined from a range of innovatory perspectives.

The book eschews landscape interpretations based upon the environmental determinism of a previous generation and it shows a desire to engage with phenomenological and other experiential approaches to understanding past human activity in the world.

These new approaches involve an attempt to understand the world from the point of view of the Neolithic people who inhabited it, rather than from a modern stance. It is a difficult and some would say impossible task but it is worth the effort. It means researchers have to pay more attention to a subtle use of ethnographic analogy to try and understand the many ways in which people might interact with the landscape, and the ways in which the landscape impacted upon people. A good introduction to this approach was Chris Tilley's 1994 book A Phenomenology of Landscape.

A recurrent theme emerges in Tim Darvill's introductory chapter, namely that archaeologists should see landscapes as constantly changing contexts for social action. It is argued that `the landscape' was constantly reinterpreted by Neolithic groups who inscribed their varying political, ritual, social and domestic activities on it over time. Thus we have debates about Neolithic mobility on a European scale (Alasdair Whittle), the development of a sense of place and belonging in the Irish Neolithic (Gabriel Cooney), `domestic' as opposed to `ritual' landscapes in Italy (Keri Brown), and all of these ideas applied to the development of the Tell sites of Eastern Hungary (John Chapman). Along the way there are contributions on the Neolithic landscapes of the Channel Islands, Sussex, Kent, Essex, Oxfordshire, and the Cheviots of Northumberland, as well as Neolithic forest clearance and stone procurement strategies.

Dr Rob Young is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leicester