--- In EuropeanArchaeology@yahoogroups.com, "mhall940" <markhall@...>
wrote:

Geography Is Destiny

Europe Between the Oceans
by Barry Cunliffe
Yale

Worlds collide Hellenistic images on the dome of a Thracian tomb in
Bulgaria
Image credit: Carmen Redondo/Corbis

Great archaeologists are often at war with themselves. They aim to
explain seismic transformations—social and cultural, economic,
demographic, even genetic. But they do so by sifting (literally and
figuratively) physical evidence that's scant and (literally and
figuratively) fragmentary. These methods mean that nearly all their
publications are narrow and exceedingly dry, even by academic
standards. And even on those rare occasions when they venture beyond
the journal article or monograph, their writing seldom tempts even the
most archaeologically besotted general reader. For instance, although
the great archaeologist of Mesopotamia Robert McCormick Adams has
revolutionized scholars' understanding of the origins of urban
civilization, his oversize tomes, with their detailed maps of
watercourses and settlement patterns and meticulous charts of pottery
types, resemble field reports, not works of history. But because
archaeology addresses the most basic questions and explores the most
profound changes in human history by means of a grossly incomplete
record—and perhaps because it was long the province of aristocrats and
buccaneers—it has invited the sort of bold interpretations in which
speculation can too easily become untethered from evidence. When
archaeology is done right, it's frequently dull; when it's
fascinating, it's frequently wrong.


So Europe Between the Oceans, at once compelling and judicious, is an
extraordinary book. In a work of analytical depth and imaginative
sweep, Sir Barry Cunliffe, the emeritus professor of European
archaeology at Oxford, has synthesized the voluminous recent record of
excavations from Iceland to Turkey, the burgeoning scholarship on DNA
and ancient populations, and research on topics ranging from Stone Age
shipbuilding to trade in Muslim Spain and from salinity levels in the
ancient Black Sea to state formation in Early Iron Age Denmark. This
all serves to elucidate the "complex interaction of human groups with
their environment, and with each other" in Europe from 9000 B.C. to
1000 A.D.—10,000 years of cultural, social, and material development,
starting at the close of the last ice age and ending with the
emergence of the European nation-states.

rest at

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/editors-choice

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