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Issue 71July 2003ContentsnewsNew Neolithic settlements found on Orkney Medieval double watermill found at Stafford Iron Age hilltop ‘town’ found at Margate Prehistoric landscape of settlement, ritual and magic Coins reveal how Hannibal bankrupted the Romans featuresUnderground warfare Great sites Islands in the Neolithic Tale of the limpet lettersRoman burials, medieval fields, and Saxons in Scotland issuesGeorge Lambrick on the looting of antiquities in Iraq Peter EllisOn archaeology and today's mentality of hurry, hurry, hurry booksA History of Childhood by Colin Heywood Conserving landscapes reviewed by Christopher Catling Farming in the First Millennium AD by Peter Fowler CBA updatefavourite findsPaul Pettitt on an antiquarian book found in a junkshop
ISSN 1357-4442 Editor Simon Denison |
booksChildren's pastReviewed by Geoff Egan A History of Childhood This book, by an economic and social historian, seeks to deal with key issues in the history of childhood from the medieval period to the First World War, in Europe and North America. It is arranged in three parts - childhood as a social construct, growing up in the past, and wider interactions of children, for example in health and education. There is a great deal of very diverse information, drawn from an impressive array of individual, anecdotal as well as contemporary and later statistical sources on both sides of the Atlantic. Trends in the employment of wet nurses are considered, and the potential benefits for child workers are thoughtfully balanced with the dark side. Health and education are major themes, vividly illustrated by well chosen contemporary quotes or comments from individuals. The difficult subject of child mortality and attitudes to it are discussed, using evidence that is inevitably incomplete. This mass of historical information is readably presented, with insightful summaries at the end of each section. But while some selection in a work on this scale is necessary, the omission of any reference to the early tradition of girls' education in early-modern Scotland seems strange. Studies of aspects of childhood have recently become very popular in archaeological circles. But except for one brief mention, largely derived from Nicholas Orme's well illustrated 2001 book Medieval Children, the fruits of these new perspectives have apparently not come directly to Colin Heywood's notice. The Dutch children's playthings which Simon Schama discusses in his 1987 book An Embarrassment of Riches have, it appears, yet to be assimilated by the wider academic community beyond the archaeologists who have written widely about them - and about their English and other early counterparts - over the intervening years (see ba, June 1998). As excavated evidence has shown that children's playthings were individually made from about 1150, with mass production from about 1300, an archaeological readership should now expect a bit more than a passing reference to this key evidence for attitudes to children. This is an impressive and compelling history book on a popular topic, but it is necessary to look elsewhere for the material culture that might be the focus of interest of a significant number of readers of this magazine. Geoff Egan is a finds specialist at the Museum of London
Conserving landscapesReviewed by Christopher Catling The Cultural Landcape Europe's Cultural Landscape Through these two collections of conference papers we are able to witness the evolution of new modes of thought relating to public policy on the conservation of large-scale environments. Neither book makes for easy reading. That could be said of many archaeological monographs, but this time the difficulty grows out of the struggle to define a new area of archaeological discourse and strategy. The language is unfamiliar, the concepts are challenging, and in many cases the contributions are inconclusive, but that simply reflects the difficult nature and scale of the problems involved. Both books are a response to the European Landscape Convention published in March 2001. The Convention has no legal force, but provides an enabling framework for the recognition, designation, conservation and management of cultural landscapes, defined as 'the result of interaction between people and the natural environment over space and time'. Put like that, it is easy to argue that the whole of the earth is a cultural landscape, for human activity has had an impact, often destructive, on the entire globe. For a clearer idea of what the concept means, it is useful to look at specific examples, and both books are packed with case studies from around the world - including the industrial landscapes of Blaenavon in Wales, the rice terraces of the Cordilleras in the northern Philippines, and the Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park in central Australia, to name but a few. In simplistic terms, cultural landscapes are 'a good thing' because they are holistic. They reject the old practice of scheduling monuments or buildings in isolation, and they recognize the continuum that exists between sites and their context. They also recognize a broad variety of contexts, including physical topography, other human landscape artefacts and religious or cultural beliefs about the landscape. In order to engage with all of these, it is now necessary to integrate information from a wide variety of disciplines: ecology, geography, history, anthropology, architecture, land-use and planning, agriculture and geomorphology among them. So far, so good. The real difficulty lies in the fact that landscape designation also involves engagement with people and politics, and that is the point at which many of the contributors to these volumes begin to flounder and lose confidence, struggling to articulate solutions to some rather intimidating problems. Peter Fowler describes these problems graphically in his discussion of Le Cause Méjean, in the Languedoc, an area that is economically impoverished and yet outstandingly rich in archaeology and wildlife. Tourism here has led to road improvements that enable buses to reach previously inaccessible areas, leading sheep farmers to abandon their previous lifestyle. Instead of milking sheep and making cheese, they now run cafés, shops, hotels and restaurants and use their new-found wealth to build modern houses out of alien imported materials. The abandonment of sheep farming has led to the loss of genetically rare breeds of sheep, and to degradation in the character of the landscape as grass that was previously cropped is allowed to grow rank and wild. As the landscape becomes less appealing to tourists, alien 'attractions' are introduced (notably Przewalski horses), whilst roads are littered with a proliferation of signs 'marking recently invented tourist routes and the territorial imperialism of recently invented official organizations'. Nearly all the contributors argue that the answer to this kind of problem is to impose restrictions on what people are permitted to do within protected landscapes. The flaw in this thinking is that governments simply will not cooperate - significantly, the UK has not ratified the Convention. Governments and their advisors tend to believe that conservation values represent a barrier to change and progress, and are at odds with the desires of their electorate to enjoy a prosperous modern lifestyle. So what is the solution? Common Ground (in the icomos volume) offers an Arcadian vision of a world in which people celebrate apple orchards, write poems and give names to bridges. More practical are the agro-environmental schemes (described in the European Archaeological Council/English Heritage volume) whereby farmers are paid to adopt or maintain archaic working methods in the interests of ecological diversity and sustainable conservation. Some might object that such schemes are artificial and turn swathes of the countryside into museums, with the indigenous population looking after landscape features rather as curators look after historic artifacts or works of art. Undeniably such schemes offer only a partial solution, and one that can only work if local people want them and don't see them as demeaning. But they do represent the best option we have at the moment of mitigating the destructive effects of tourism, intensive agriculture, wetland drainage, mineral extraction and inappropriate development. That being the case, the task facing those concerned with the historic and natural environment is not just the relatively easy one of charting the kinds of landscape that deserve protection, but the much more difficult one of persuading politicians to stop being timid and lethargic, and to substantially increase the number of such schemes. The majority of the electorate wants this to happen, and they will thank governments who are radical enough to overhaul their planning and subsidy systems to reward environmentally sound practices and penalise destructive activity. Once people do reach a certain level of prosperity, it is to cultural landscapes they turn for aesthetic and intellectual sustenance - whether as Sunday ramblers or as informed observers reading the pattern of history in buildings, woodland and field boundaries. Allowing free-for-all in the use of land might make some people more materially prosperous but will ultimately lead to the spiritual impoverishment of us all. The Cultural Landscape is available from ICOMOS-UK, tel: 0208 994 6477, email: icomos-uk@icomos.org; Europe's Cultural Landscape is available from the EAC Secretariat, tel 00 49 3867 7800, email archaeomuseum.m-v@t-online.de Christopher Catling is the Director of Heritage Link
Roman LincolnReviewed by Peter Carrington Roman Lincoln Lincoln has a relatively low profile amongst England's historical towns. Consequently, it is easy to under-rate the richness of its archaeology and the amount of the work that has been done there. Mick Jones's book dispels these misconceptions and is a must for anybody who wants to maintain an overview of the latest research on Roman Britain. After reviewing the prehistory of the area, the book traces the history of the city from its foundation as a legionary fortress, through its establishment as a Roman colony at the end of the century, to its role as a capital of one of the four British provinces in the 4th century and as a bishopric in the 5th and 6th centuries. We know from elsewhere in the empire that being a colony did not guarantee a distinctly Roman cultural life or prosperity. Lincoln clearly had a measure of both, with elaborate civic buildings, elegant adornments such as a fountain, and luxurious private houses. On the other hand, Jones points out, its material culture came increasingly to resemble that of other towns. It would have been stimulating, however, if some key questions had been posed more clearly. For example, if most of the upper city was taken up by civic buildings, where were the houses of the early colonists? Was it in what became the 'lower city', or even on farms outside the city? What happened to the native rural population? Was it displaced or did it survive, with the colonists coming in as a class of landlords? Does the archaeology of the surrounding countryside shed light on these issues? And how does the evidence for craft activity affect the picture we have of Roman administrative towns as 'consumer cities'? Based on an Archaeological Research Assessment for the city, this is a densely written volume. While it will undoubtedly be quarried by students, others may be put off. The location maps are few, poorly placed and short on relevant street names, so the book is hard reading for the outsider who does not know the city. Jones comments that 'the archaeologist's role nowadays is to preserve rather than investigate, to assess the significance of what survives, and to interpret it for the local community, visitors and educational groups'. This is true across the country, and profoundly worrying. His first chapter shows the contribution made to the exploration of the Lincoln's past - as elsewhere - by members of the local community. Are those communities now to be reduced to passive consumers of research carried out by English Heritage, universities and Time Team? Peter Carrington is a Senior Archaeologist with Chester City Council
Early medieval farmingReviewed by Tom Williamson Farming in the First Millennium AD Peter Fowler Peter Fowler is one of our foremost field archaeologists and writers on early agriculture, and this excellent book clearly displays the breadth of his knowledge and interests. In many ways it is a sequel to his earlier Farming of Prehistoric Britain and, in a similar way, provides a comprehensive, readable and scholarly survey which will be essential reading for undergraduates, and all with a serious interest in the early history of British agriculture. It is thoughtfully structured. Successive chapters deal with the nature of the evidence, the character of settlements and fields, agricultural technology, crops and livestock before going on to consider diet and the more general character of early agrarian society. Fowler's ability to place British developments within a wider European context, and above all his genuine emphasis on British as opposed to merely English experience, make for a refreshing perspective. The most original aspect of the book, however, is also its main weakness. Fowler makes an explicit attempt to eschew conventional chronological divisions such as 'Roman' or 'Saxon', and to emphasise instead the broad continuities in settlement and farming life across this vast period. Although in a stimulating final chapter he proposes his own chronological framework for economic and agrarian change this approach produces, in some places, a feeling of undifferentiated, descriptive stasis, and leads to conclusions so basic that they are uninformative. The chapter on settlement, for example, ends with the unsurprising conclusion that an 'extraordinary range of settlement types ... existed during the first millennium BC'. At times it almost seems that nothing much happened for a thousand years or more. One can always find particular points to argue about in such a stimulating book. Should we really continue to accept, as Fowler seems to, the oft-repeated suggestion that the 4th century population of Britain was in the order of 4-5 million, not dissimilar to that of the later 13th century? Field surveys invariably reveal a lot of Romano-British sites, but in few areas do they appear as numerous or extensive as those of the high medieval period. More importantly, Fowler's argument that the mouldboard plough only came into widespread use as late as the 11th century ignores the excellent recent discussion of this topic by David Hill. It seems hard to square with what we know about the widespread cultivation of heavy clay soils in the Middle Saxon period, but it would, if correct, upset a number of widely shared assumptions in landscape archaeology, especially regarding the genesis of open fields. So there are some provocative ideas in this book, and statements and arguments which not everyone will necessarily accept with enthusiasm. But it is unquestionably a great achievement and an invigorating and lively read. It will remain an essential source of ideas and information for decades to come. Tom Williamson teaches landscape archaeology at the University of East Anglia
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