This article was downloaded by: [Fiona Counsell]On: 08 July 2014, At: 07:19Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Landscape HistoryPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlsh20

ReviewsJanette Deacona, David Barrowcloughb, Xinyi Liub, Mark Sapwellc, DušanBorićd, Martin Worthingtonb, Harold Mytume, James Royf, Domonic

Perringg, Neil Christieh, N. Jamesb, Andrew Merrillsh, John Simpsoni, Jan-Henrik Fallgrenj, David A. Hintonk, Paul Eversonl, Simon Draperm, RorySherlockn, Bob Silvestero, Sophie Hueglinp, Daniel R. Curtisq, RichardMorrisr, Christopher Taylors, Susan Oosthuizenb, Angus Winchestert,Charles Turneru, Timothy Mowlv, Paul Wardew, Barbara Simmsx, KateSpenceb, Ian Baxtery & Della Hookez

a Stellenbosch, South Africab University of Cambridgec Abingdond University of Cardiffe University of Liverpoolf University of Nottinghamg University College, Londonh University of Leicesteri British Museumj University of Aberdeenk University of Southamptonl Nantwich, Cheshirem VCH Oxfordshiren Galway Archaeological Field Schoolo Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust, Welshpoolp Archaeological Department Canton Basel-Stadtq Utrecht Universityr University of Hulls Pampisford, Cambridgeshiret Lancaster Universityu Great Gransden, Cambsv University of Buckingham

w University of East Angliax London SE1y University College Suffolkz University of BirminghamPublished online: 07 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Janette Deacon, David Barrowclough, Xinyi Liu, Mark Sapwell, Dušan Borić, MartinWorthington, Harold Mytum, James Roy, Domonic Perring, Neil Christie, N. James, Andrew Merrills, JohnSimpson, Jan-Henrik Fallgren, David A. Hinton, Paul Everson, Simon Draper, Rory Sherlock, Bob Silvester,Sophie Hueglin, Daniel R. Curtis, Richard Morris, Christopher Taylor, Susan Oosthuizen, Angus Winchester,Charles Turner, Timothy Mowl, Paul Warde, Barbara Simms, Kate Spence, Ian Baxter & Della Hooke (2014)Reviews, Landscape History, 35:1, 81-114, DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2014.916917

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2014.916917

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DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2014.916917

Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Edited by Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane. 246 × 171 mm. 1080 pp. 250 illustrations. ISBN 978 0 1995 6988 5. Price £120.00.

Reminiscent of a movie with a cast of thousands, this blockbuster book reflects on the results of archaeological investigations of 2.6 million years of human occupation in Africa in seventy chapters and just over a thousand pages. The chapters were written by seventy-six authors (including editors Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane) who have consulted more than three thousand books and articles published mainly in the last fifty years. In the limited space allocated for this review, it would be impossible to comment on all the contributions, but several issues surfaced and are worth mentioning. A common thread in Part II, entitled ‘Doing African Archaeology: theory, method, practice’, is the acknowledgement that more focused research and innovative methods are required to make the best use of the analogies used for interpreting the past. While Chirikure (p. 141), bemoans the lack of an adequate comparative database for metalworking, Wynne-Jones (p. 184) maintains that Africanist archaeology is an innovator in the field of material culture studies. This innovator role has the potential to develop even further if, as advocated by Arazi and Thiaw (pp. 222–3) and, indeed, by many other authors in this field over the past decade, local communities are actively encouraged and empowered to participate in heritage conservation and management. There is a satisfying balance between summaries of theory and current understanding of human

REVIEWSThe Society does not accept responsibility for

opinions expressed by its contributors

history, particularly in the even-handed approach in the chapters on human evolution and hypotheses for identifying modern human behaviour that challenge the model of a late and sapiens-specific expression of modernity (Barham, p. 348). Similarly in Part IV, that examines the diversity of African foragers, it was encouraging to see that the terminology for the Stone Age sequence in southern Africa that was proposed in 1929 by Goodwin and Van Riet Lowe, is not only intact but even applied by some authors in North Africa in preference to the Palaeolithic. This has occurred as a result of increasing interest in the similarities in stone artefact manufacture north and south of the Sahara, rather than the differences. Particularly useful are the summaries of research on domesticated animals and plants in Part V that include a map of the genetic make-up of African cattle, a list of the major indigenous African plant domesticates and a map of sites in Africa with dates for early domesticated plants. One of the Big Questions is whether ceramics were introduced before domestication in regions such as Egypt and southernmost Africa and, in Part VI, whether the spread of domesticated animals occurred with or without folk migration. Part VI is entitled, ‘Power, Prestige, and Con-sumption: African towns and states and their neighbours’ and the chapters deal with diverse examples ranging from Pharaonic Egypt and the Roman presence in North Africa, to Zimbabwe and late farming settlements in the south. Most authors explicitly reject the colonial ideology which assumed that early African states came about as the result of external intervention, mainly European and Near Eastern. It is in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, however, where there is the clearest

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demonstration, ‘that African political systems can and did evolve without external stimulus’ (Reid, p. 885). In the last part, individual authors acknowledge the effects of the slave trade in East and West Africa and across the Atlantic, contrasts in the colonisation of different countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and the influence of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa. They agree that researchers are moving towards studying the smaller-scale evidence, the nature of the expanding colonial frontier, and how indigenous societies were transformed and impacted upon by colonialism, both on the coast and in the hinterland. Although compilations such as this one inevit-ably become out-dated as the subject moves on, they remain the most accessible resource to gauge current thinking and provide benchmarks for the nature and dating of major events and processes. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane can be congratulated on successfully identifying contributors with both general and site-specific knowledge and taking the time to cross-reference the chapters and provide a comprehensive index. It will become one of the most useful books on my shelves.

Stellenbosch, South Africa Janette deacon

NW Europe in Transition: the early Neolithic in Britain and south Sweden (British Archaeological Reports, International Series 2475, Oxford, 2013). Edited by Mats Larsson and Jolene Debert. 292 × 210 mm. 88 pp. ISBN 978 1 4073 1087 9. Price £23.00.

The twelve regional case studies, ranging in time from the Mesolithic to Neolithic, and in space from England and Scotland through the Shetland Isles to Denmark and Sweden form the backbone of this important volume. The inclusion of the Shetland Isles is most welcome, adding an extra dimension and helping to shed light on the colonisation of a little understood island archipelago. The omission of Ireland is its biggest weakness, leaving one feeling that the volume is somewhat incomplete. None-theless, this is an important publication, reflecting the early work of an emerging generation of scholars, and should be essential reading for those interested in the transition from the Mesolithic to Neolithic.

Studies of the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic have shown that it can only be fully understood when changes in diet, artefact types and burial rites are studied together in the context of their landscape setting; and with an awareness of the subtle changes in routine and habits that accumulated to transform the everyday existence of peoples. These transformations were essentially local, making it imperative that studies are con-ducted at a regional scale, and it is here that this volume makes its most significant contribution. A highlight is Kenneth Alexandersson’s discussion of ‘Flint as a medium of social change’ (Chapter 10), which eloquently combines palaeogeography, lithic studies and settlement patterns to develop a convincing narrative for social change in the Late Mesolithic along the Kalmar coast. Lasse Sørensen similarly draws on archaeobotanical, faunal, and artefactual data, in combination with close dating by radiocarbon assay to document the adoption of farming during the Early Neolithic in Scandinavia (Chapter 2). In collections of papers such as these individual readers will find some topics more appealing than others depending on their own interests and research foci. Overall, the papers that are most successful are those whose authors have new data of their own to present and interpret, whereas those that claimed originality in theoretical argument often fall wide of the mark, notably those by Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay (Chapter 9) and Jolene Debert (Chapter 12). Ellen McInnes’ overview (Chapter 1) aims to orientate the reader to major theoretical debates framing the transitional period between Mesolithic and Neolithic. Her bibliographic review is, however, overly focused on British scholarship (particularly Gordon Childe, and to a lesser extent Grahame Clark), almost entirely omitting important Scandinavian scholars, many of whom are referred to by the authors of the subsequent chapters, and this is a substantial failing. Although regionality is key to understanding the context of the Mesolithic to Neolithic transition, as well as other periods, the volume would have benefited from a concluding chapter that attempted to give coherence to the diverse case studies, an opportunity for highlighting just how far we have come in understanding the transition in recent years and of course for identifying the gaps that remain.

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Overall, this thought-provoking volume is essential reading for scholars working in this field.

University of Cambridge david Barrowclough

Ancient Central China. Centres and peripheries along the Yangzi river (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013). By Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen. 229 × 153 mm. 428 pp. 63 b/w illustrations. 16 maps. ISBN 978 0 5217 2766 2. Price £20.99.

Ancient Central China is a fount of knowledge, supported by an eighty-four-page bibliography. The book provides an up-to-date synthesis of archaeological discoveries in the Three Gorges Dam reservoir zone of the upper and middle Yangzi River. It is one of the outcomes of the Three Gorges archaeological mitigation project, arguably one of the largest archaeological projects in China. The mitigation project began in 1997 after preliminary surveys in 1993 and 1994–1995. Research began in 1997, and most large-scale work was conducted prior to the completion of the dam structure on June 2003. Archaeologists from at least thirty institutions of archaeology, geology, paleontology, and anthropology from around the country were involved. More than 500,000 m2 at over 200 sites were excavated over the course of the project. The volume covers the period from the Late Neolithic (late third millennium B.c.) to the end of the Bronze Age (late first millennium B.c.) and considers regional and inter-regional cultural relationships in the light of anthropological models of landscape. Throughout the book, Rowan Flad and Pochan Chen show that centres and peripheries were not coincident, and that current politically peripheral regions such as the Three Gorges were crucial hubs in prehistoric economic networks. The book provides detailed discussions of not only recent archaeological discoveries in the region, but also the historiographical context of these research projects. It is illuminating to read this book in parallel with another recent book on the archaeology of China, The Archaeology of China: from the late Paleolithic to the early Bronze Age, by Li Liu and Xingcan Chen

(Cambridge University Press, 2012). Here, Li Liu and Xingcan Chen investigate the trajectory of the rise of civilisation in China, and ask whether there is such a thing as ‘Chinese-ness’. They argue that China’s geography is a determinant factor in the development of Chinese culture, returning to K. C. Chang’s notion that Chinese civilisation rose through ideological control, as opposed to economic power. Rowan Flad and Pochan Chen have, by contrast, given weight to economic activities by ‘studying the lives of salt producers and traders in the Three Gorges’ in a broader context, taking further ideas developed by Rowan Flad in her Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: an archaeological investigation of specialization in China’s Three Gorges (Cambridge University Press, 2012): essentially a systemic archaeological investigation of a late Neolithic and Bronze Age salt production site at Zhongba on the tributary of the Yangzi river. Much emphasis is placed on diversity, concentration, scale and context of production through a 10 metre by 10 metre trench excavated between 1999 and 2002. By using the term ‘Central China’ for provinces conventionally considered as the ‘Southwest’, the authors bring to the fore the crucial role of the Three Gorges, a peripheral region that has been overlooked in most historical and archaeological studies, and illuminating earlier work on both this and other parts of China. The authors end by asking whether peripheries are really peripheries. They argue that a peripheral region like the Three Gorges was an active agent of change in a broad picture of inter-regional social landscapes; that this only becomes evident when one recognises the central role played by this area in economic activities in the broader region. Their position is that archaeological realisation is only meaningful in the context of a study focused on the Three Gorges in its own right, not just as a region peripheral to an urbanised Chu state. Ancient Central China thus identifies broader trends and patterns of inter-regional interaction in new ways.

University of Cambridge Xinyi liu

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The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Edited by Anthony Harding and Harry Fokkens. 246 × 171 mm. 1,016 pp. 232 illustrations, maps, tables. ISBN 978 0 1995 7286 1. Price £120.00.

In their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age, the editors express concern over whether there existed enough new material to sanction a new book on the subject. A review of the chapters within this handbook demonstrates that this worry is uncalled for. With the collection of chapters drawing on developments in scientific technique, new theoretical outlooks, and the increasing connectivity between regions of Europe (e.g. Atlantic Europe and Eastern Europe), it becomes clear how much this field of study has progressed in the years since Cole and Harding’s 1979 The Bronze Age in Europe, or Harding’s 2000 European Bronze Age Societies. A new handbook on this topic is therefore very welcome. A striking initial observation of the handbook is the editors’ decision to separate the chapters into two main parts. The first half of the book concerns general themes within the Bronze Age (e.g. settlements, hoards, exchange/trade, transportation), which place the challenge of con cisely overviewing complex subjects in the hands of leading authors in the field. The second half of the book contains chapters which examine specific regions within Europe (e.g. Balkans, Peninsula Italy, south Russia). This half of the book offers a platform for local archaeologists to illustrate the peculiarities of their datasets, and a means for the book to tangibly demonstrate the diversity of approaches archaeologists take towards Bronze Age Europe. This separation within the handbook forms an attempt to negotiate the conflict between champions of large- and small-scaled research that is often visible in Bronze Age archaeology. There is some question as to why the integration of the two scales was not taken further, and the two-part separation replaced with a more active attempt to explore the interaction between general and local. However, this endeavour would have likely damaged the clear structure of the handbook, and the mere presence of both scales in one volume at least provides a means for readers to infer for themselves the interaction between macro and micro interpretations.

While the handbook contains a variety of approaches, a distinctive theme which frequently raises its head is a move away from descriptions of the individual chief and economically driven hierarchies by exploring the capabilities of the materiality approach. This approach, which explores the relationship between people and material things in interpreting experience and social action, has a very powerful effect on past theories in Bronze Age archaeology that emphasise the sole agency of the individual chief. In Chapter 11, ‘Prestige goods, power, & person hood in the European Bronze Age’, Brück and Fontjin argue that bronze objects were not necessarily involved in the accumulation and control of wealth by individualised chiefs. Instead, by tracing the biographies of production and exchange of bronze objects, the authors suggest that these objects linked their users to other people, places and events, dispersing agency across a range of actors. Goldhahn takes a similar stance in Chapter 14, ‘Rethinking Bronze Age cosmology’, as he describes how cosmologies in northern Europe should not be considered as a ‘free-floating phenomenon’, but rather the result of active performances, embodied in people’s everyday lives. As these practices and networks of materials and people changed, so did peoples’ understanding of the world, meaning that cosmology was always in the making. In Chapter 12, ‘Identity, gender, and dress in the European Bronze Age’, Stig Sørensen also explores the active role of materials, by discussing the role of clothing in realising gender. Drawing on theories of individuality, Stig Sørensen puts intrinsic sexual identity into question, and argues that gender is performed through e.g. dress. Again, value is not taken for granted, but rather traced through the interaction between people and objects. These collection of chapters demonstrate a growing colony of Bronze Age archaeologists who are successfully implementing the materiality approach in a field previously dominated by discussions of economy and power. The shift in focus towards networks that both emerge from and enable material objects works to challenge the indivisible potency of the economically powerful chief, and potentially empowers a more diverse range of archaeological material to be used to interpret social action in Bronze Age Europe.

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In doing so, this handbook not only offers an updated overview of newly developing ideas and approaches to Bronze Age Europe, but also offers new opportunities which the reader may take and build upon in his or her own ways.

Abingdon Mark sapwell

‘As Time Goes By’? Monumentality, landscapes and the temporal perspective (Habelt, Kiel, 2012). Edited by Martin Furholt, Martin Hintz and Doris Mischka. 210 × 300 mm. 263 pp. 195 b/w figures and tables. 4 colour figures. ISBN 978 3 7749 3764 2. Price £65.00.

An explicit interest in landscape studies has re-mained a constant field of enquiry throughout the development of the discipline. However, different theoretical perspectives of archaeological research approached landscapes in different ways: starting with Major G. W. G. Allen’s aerial reconnaissance of the Upper Thames Valley, still within the culture-historical paradigm, through the GIS predictive modelling of ‘New Archaeology’ to more recent post-processual discussions of the importance of monuments in the phenomenology of landscapes. This edited volume focuses on this last strand of research, looking at the significance of monuments in the prehistoric and Classical past. This volume represents the proceedings of one workshop session on ‘Socio-Environmental Dynamics Over the Last 12,000 Years’ in a con-ference on ‘Human development in landscapes’ at Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel, Germany, in March 2011. It follows a number of similar volumes produced by this dynamic research group which is — significantly — backed by adequate funding. This kind of (one is tempted to say generous) financial support for large-scale and long-term archaeological projects is reflected in the technical quality of this and similar recent German archaeological publications. The eighteen contributions in As Time Goes by? are structured by several different criteria: thematically (with contributions at the beginning of the volume focusing on the relationship between memory and time), regionally (Eurasian and

African global perspectives; northern European Plain) and chronologically (Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments; case studies from Romanised Europe). Two contributions (Cunliffe, Škundrić) place discussions of particular monumental sites in the context of heritage industry and present-day uses of monuments. All contributions are firmly grounded in empirical case studies even when discussing theoretical concepts, one of the recognisable and commendable traits of the German school of archaeological production. The majority of the contributions discuss Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments on the Northern European Plain and reflecting the geographic proximity of both the research group and Kiel to this part of Europe. While certainly of wider European interest in relation to the study of monuments, this criterion for the selection of papers, however, makes the volume of regional rather than international relevance. Nevertheless, it is encouraging and refreshing to see the existence of a dialogue with some earlier and later periods and more distant regions on the same topic. Overall, the volume testifies to the fact that in more recent years German archaeology, which was in the past largely characterised by a more traditional theoretical outlook, is increasingly engaging with wider strands of archaeological theory that have been more prominent in the Anglo-Saxon speaking world for several decades. Its contributions explore how landscapes are marked and human perceptions of time are defined through monuments and sites of past and present commemoration. However, the richness and accuracy of empirical detail in some contributions is not always matched by an equivalent level of sophistication in the theo-retical approaches to landscape studies in relation to time, memory, and materiality. Some seminal works and some other more recent publications on these topics are not mentioned or taken into consideration: for example, there is no reference to A. Gell’s work on different conceptions of time in discussions of linear and cyclic perception of time by Hinz; nor are there references to the large body of work in human geography. Although a number of various authors explore a range of theoretical ideas regarding the connections between monuments, landscapes, and time — sometimes through socio-cultural anthropology but

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more often through the work of Richard Bradley, Christopher Tilley, and Magdalena Midgley — these are not developed further into original theoretical positions. Some of the theoretical notions used in the book, such as the one about monuments in the capacity of ‘external symbolic storage’ (Watkins) or acting as ‘arenas of social power’ (Pelisiak), should have been more thoroughly developed or, perhaps, challenged rather than taken as ready-made solutions applicable to particular case studies. Finally, the volume would have benefited from an Afterword, perhaps taking stock at the end to bring together the range of themes apparent in individual contributions. In sum, the volume’s lasting value will be in its presentation of detailed and illuminating case studies of the Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology of the northern European Plains and in its application of state-of-the art methodological tools.

University of Cardiff dušan Borić

The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). By Stephanie Dalley. 216 × 135 mm. 304 pp. 90 b/w illustrations. 8 colour plates. ISBN 978 0 19 966226 5. Price £25.00.

To make it into ancient lists of Wonders of the World, and thence into the general knowledge of us all, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon must have been pretty spectacular. How odd, then, that they are first mentioned by Greeks: no source from Ancient Mesopotamia so much as alludes to them! This is doubly surprising because today we can consult the inscriptions of the very Babylonian king who supposedly built the Hanging Gardens, Nebuchadnezzar (605–562 B.c.): he boasts of many things he did, but about horticulture he says next to nothing. By contrast, several kings of Assyria do mention sumptuous gardens in their inscriptions. Indeed, one of them, Sennacherib (704–681 B.c.), expatiates ad nauseam about those he built in the city of Nineveh, and how it required an enormous aqueduct and special water-raising devices. So, why are Mesopotamian sources so eloquent about

Assyrian gardens, but so reticent about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Such is the mystery at the heart of this book. Stephanie Dalley’s solution has the simplicity and elegance which is characteristic of brilliant ideas: there never were any renowned gardens in Babylon! It was really Sennacherib’s gardens at Nineveh all along, but the unwary Greeks confused the two cities, creating a misapprehension that was to endure for over two millennia. Dalley first put this idea forward in the journal Iraq in 1994, and has since tried and tested it against the various objections which so bold and ground-breaking a thesis inevitably attracted, even starring in a BBC documentary. She now marshals all her arguments afresh, with much that is new. The result is an impressive and wide-ranging work, which discusses matters as diverse as: Assyrian bronze-working technology, differences between Babylonian and Assyrian gardens, the battle of Gaugamela, the symbolic and ideological significance of the date palm, Greek historiography, life at Assyrian courts, and the Garden of Eden! One of the most suggestive pieces of evidence Dalley cites is a bas-relief from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh (now lost, but surviving in a nineteenth-century drawing) which closely matches a Greek description of the Hanging Gardens of ‘Babylon’. Already in 1853 A. H. Layard remarked that the panel depicted ‘a hanging garden, supported upon columns’, but well over a century had to pass until Dalley’s quantum leap to the idea that the World Wonder was actually in Nineveh, and that this is why it figured in Sennacherib’s panel. Dalley’s reconstruction of Sennacherib’s gardens is given on p. 148, in an exquisite drawing by the late Terry Ball. Following the Greek descriptions, she envisages a shape like a theatre, with semi-circular terraces stretching further back as they go up the hillside. (The ‘hanging’ aspect is linguistically complex, and remains elusive.) If you’re wondering ‘Well, does it work? Should we really all be talking about the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh?’, I would say that the state of the evidence only permits a judgment on balance of probability rather than a hard-and-fast proof, and there must be ultimately be subjective elements. That said, and though I was not persuaded by every idea she puts forward (I found a couple far-

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fetched!), my own hunch is that Dalley’s main thesis hits the nail right on the head. For, as she points out, the gardens extolled in Sennacherib’s inscriptions, with all the claims of technical innovation and unrivalled splendour, fit the bill of ‘World Wonder’ suspiciously well. Add this to the silence of Babylonian sources, and several arguments for making this plausible which Dalley constructs with great care, and you have a pretty strong case. A few ‘gaps’ remain to be filled — for example, how long the Ninevite gardens remained visible and/or talked about after the fall of Assyria in 612 B.c. is a tantalising question which requires more evidence; and though Dalley makes a strong case for Sennacherib having used the ‘Archimedes’ screw’ to supply his gardens with water, it is uncertain how the screws were turned. But even if she cannot dispel every doubt, the edifice which Dalley has constructed is so intellectually rich, so excitingly daring, and so brilliantly ingenious, that it must surely be applauded by ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ alike. Her book is as much about the Graeco-Roman world as it is about Ancient Mesopotamia (Egypt gets the occasional look-in too), and anyone interested in the ancient world, not to mention garden-lovers, will rejoice in its painstaking reasoning, beautifully clear style, and splendid illustrations.

University of Cambridge Martin worthington

Architecture, Regional Identity and Power in the Iron Age Landscapes of Mid Wales: the hillforts of north Ceredigion (British Archaeological Reports, British Series 583, Oxford, 2013). By Toby Driver. 295 × 210 mm. xi + 181 pp. Numerous illustrations. ISBN 978 1 4073 1123 4. Price £33.00.

Hillforts are the most massive and obvious elements in the British late prehistoric landscape, but it is surprising how little research has concentrated on understanding their physical setting. Some of the early twentieth-century regional studies considered control of routeways linked to the culture-historical paradigm of invasion. Individual site studies have continued to evaluate the role of the hill on which

a fort sits, its contours and outcrops, but even here the degree of sensitivity to the landscape has often been limited. It is for this reason that Toby Driver’s study is both innovative and important, with far wider significance than only for the mid-Wales region or even for the whole of Wales and the west. The evidence for hillforts in mid-Wales largely comes from surface evidence and in recent years by aerial photography, both finding new sites and adding components such as annexes to already identified locations. Much of this reconnaissance has been undertaken by Driver himself. The volume is well illustrated with many photographs from the RCAHM Wales collections that demonstrate the hillforts in their landscape setting, augmented by interpretive sketches that match the views and by maps at a range of scales, though some are a little small. This book demonstrates two main themes relevant to readers of this journal, with not only new data but innovative ways to seeing and interpreting, and placing the evidence within the current debates regarding the role of hillforts in terms of social, symbolic, and military functions. Having just completed a volume on the excavations of the earthworks at Castell Henllys, only a short distance to the south of the study area (Monumentality in Later Prehistory. Building and rebuilding Castell Henllys. Springer, New York, 2013), these themes resonate strongly with the reviewer and it is pity for both of us that the books have appeared more or less simultaneously, as each would have supported the other. The first theme is that hillforts sit in a landscape context which links and divides sites in terms of accessibility, visibility, and experienced landscapes. Gone are the theoretical polygons imposed on a physical landscape, to be replaced with a study that considers how late prehistoric peoples lived and worked within a physically highly varied world. Driver redirects attention away from the sea routes that have been emphasised in recent models of Atlantic Iron Age worlds to balance this by recognising the routeways across the uplands and passes of central Wales, reaching the Marches and Midlands. These communications, demonstrated by ceramics and possibly salt, would have connected com munities along the way, bringing ideas (includ-ing architectural ones — relevant in the study of

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hillfort earthworks) from east to west. The isolation of mid-Wales is challenged here. The second theme is that of working with but also greatly modifying the landscape in the creation of hillforts. Many sites utilise the topography effectively, but rather passively, in the creation of contour forts and selecting appropriate locations for gates, fitting the traditional trope of archaeological interpretation. Many large and small forts do not fit this model, however, and it is here that Driver makes some exciting discoveries and offers new terminologies and concepts that deserve wider attention. The creation of bastions and terraces, in what he terms façade schemes, are central to his arguments. These are massive constructions, sometimes of one phase on a site, and in others conducted in a series of chronologically distinct campaigns of investment. The landscapes were transformed by the sculpting and moulding of the hill, creating visions of the settlement when viewed from certain directions. Styles of façade are grouped, suggesting connections, and sites may face towards or away from each other in these landscapes. Whilst not all military aspects are denied, it is clear that the social and symbolic aspects of motivation and function are preferred here, though the lack of certainty about the types of social structure (from loosely stratified to highly hierarchical) limits higher-level interpretation. This is an important study, of significance far beyond Wales, and provides landscape and site survey analyses to complement the few sites that have attracted recent large-scale excavation, none of which are in the study area. It shows the potential of field evidence, and in façades offers a new way of understanding these major landscape features.

University of Liverpool harold MytuM

Reading the Landscapes of the Rural Peloponnese (British Archaeological Reports, International Series 2504, Oxford, 2013). By Daniel R. Stewart. 295 × 208 mm. 162 pp. 20 illustrations. ISBN 978 1 4073 1120 3. Price £31.00.

Stewart is concerned with the interpretation of intensive surface survey by archaeologists

in the Peloponnese, where there have been six such surveys. He seeks a way to compare their results, which are not presented uniformly, and concentrates on the period from c. 200 B.c. to c. a.d. 200, i.e. when the Peloponnese came under Roman hegemony. (The surveys report finds from a much wider chronological range.) Initially (and later) Stewart presents at some length a theoretical basis for his arguments. He then explains the technical difficulties of his project, and also discusses the processes that particularly interest him, such as the interaction of different regions and possible changes brought about by contact with Romans. From the data published by the different surveys Stewart selects those scatters of artefacts that are published with sufficient detail on, for example, dating and density of material on the ground, so that he has a body of comparable evidence. Since dating criteria are often loose, he is obliged to use simply three chronological periods (Hellenistic, Hellenistic/Roman, and Roman), but he is then, after detailed analyses of the various surveys, able to make a number of detailed comparisons, for example on the range of sizes of scatter found in different survey areas, and how these ranges change over the periods covered. The comparison shows broad trends in the Peloponnese, with some general decline but local variations: the Pylos area, for instance, has an increase in sites in the early Roman period. Stewart then proceeds to ‘Regional narratives’. His regions are somewhat arbitrary, and some lack intensive survey, though he presents briefly other relevant archaeological work. He argues that on a regional scale, despite a general decline in the number of sites, some regions were able ‘to benefit from the new reality of Roman hegemony’ more than others, though even within a region development could vary. He then considers ‘Inter-regional narratives’ concerning the whole Peloponnese, and even the Mediterranean, while admitting that some developments would have had local causes. A chapter follows on ‘Processes of interaction’, analysed at levels from the very local up to reactions to Roman hegemony, again arguing for complex and varied processes. As the geographical scale of analysis extends, other evidence besides intensive survey is brought in, although Stewart never attempts to present and

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examine all relevant evidence, archaeological, epigraphical, and literary. Results of excavation (for example, of rural cemeteries in Elis where there has been no intensive survey) are largely ignored. In a brief concluding chapter Stewart argues that his methods allow comparison of the results of different intensive surveys, and thus allow analysis of the results over a wider area. In particular, he argues, he has arrived at a more complex and varied picture of development in the Peloponnese than that previously prevailing. That is certainly true, and it is one of the merits of the book that it draws attention to the Peloponnese as a whole as well as to regions within it. An appendix gives detailed data from intensive surveys, and another lists known ancient agricultural writers (a useful catalogue, though not closely related to the text). Finally there is a full bibliography. The qualities of the book will appeal to different readers. Undergraduate archaeologists will learn from the expositions of theory, though professional historians will take little from the page (pp. 73–4) on ‘Defining historical narrative’. Historians and archaeologists working on the Hellenistic-Roman Peloponnese will find much to consider here, though arguably as the framework of analysis expands in space uncertainties increase. It is certainly fruitful to compare results from different areas of the Peloponnese, but arguably not enough intensive survey has yet been done to give a clear picture. Those engaged in intensive survey will find matter for thought on how to present and analyse the results: there may well be future attempts at statistical refinement. Stewart is well aware of the importance of landscape within his subject, and devotes space (pp. 17–32) to discussion of its general significance. Yet the nature of the book’s arguments as they develop leaves limited scope for the direct discussion of the land. There is brief discussion of geology and soil-types at pp. 97–8, but in general attention is directed rather to human settlement and activity.

University of Nottingham JaMes roy

Archaeological Survey and the City (Oxbow, Oxford, 2012). Edited by Paul Johnson and Martin Millett. 171 × 235 mm. 288 pp. 275 illustrations. ISBN 978 1 8421 7509 5. Price £36.00.

This useful collection of papers describes some of the more technically demanding programmes of urban-orientated landscape survey currently being undertaken by Classical archaeologists, with a focus on university-based research in Italy and neighbouring parts of the Mediterranean. Most papers illustrate the application of new methodological approaches to the study of individual sites, using current work to show how survey projects have moved beyond light-touch and low-cost exercises in surface collection and are now grappling with more intensive explorations of complex and urban landscapes. The main purpose of the conference that gave rise to this collection of papers was to share ideas and experiences, and chart new research directions for those working on Classical sites. There is, therefore, a heavy emphasis on describing areas of technical experimentation adopted in recent programmes of work. This does not always make for easy reading, but makes this a particularly useful source of reference for those planning research-orientated programmes of survey. The volume is divided into three sections: approaches and methods, surface collection and integrating geophysics. These subjects are not, however, given equal attention and remote-sensing wins the lion’s share of attention. From a technical point of view the stand-out paper is that which describes the mapping of Roman Carnuntum in Austria (Nebauer et al.). The quality of the imaging obtained, in particular from Ground Penetrating Radar, is simply stunning (see also http://www.malags.com/mala-gpr-user-success-stories/mira-brings-new-light-on-ancient-history). It is dangerously easy to be seduced by image alone, and it is one of the strengths of this volume that many contributors look beyond the immediate rewards of topographic detail and ask questions of how we should use our better understanding of urban form to develop new understandings of the ancient city. These are themes best addressed by Millett in his discussion (Chapter 3) of Roman towns in Italy. This draws on the results of fifteen years of research into a

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dozen or so different urban foundations, and sensibly moves from issues of urban planning and design into discussions of urban settings, organisational rules and meanings. Whilst Millett’s most forceful points concern the importance of topographic modelling in the understanding of urban morphology, there are gently provocative ideas here about the theatricality of urban settings and the role of social memory in the design of urban landscapes. In addition to the extensive treatment given to geophysical survey (other case-studies include Amara West in Northern Sudan, Mariana in Corsica, Picenum, Gabii and Portus in Italy), we are also brought up-to-date on new work involving both aerial reconnaissance and surface collection. Here too the papers lead on methodological issues, resulting in densely written technical descriptions. Some of this research is pioneering (as Verhoven on digital manipulation of spectral reflectance data in aerial imaging), although consequently likely to be overtaken by continuing technological innovation. Whitelaw’s invaluable paper on problems and prospects in surface collection is more certain to retain currency. This provides an accessible but fully referenced overview of how Classical archaeologists have used survey projects in research into the ancient city, drawing on the results of the Knossos survey to explore issues of sample purpose, meaning, recovery and bias. One of the main purposes of this book, as set out in the introduction and evident in many individual papers, is on integrating different strands of evidence and putting these in the service of archaeological interpretation. It is consequently a shame that comparatively little attention is given to the potential of excavation as an investigative tool, in particular for its potential to provide stratified archaeological assemblages from which we can propose nuanced and historically situated chronologies of urban societal change. Ground-truthing is recognised to have value as a test of topographic and chronological interpretation, and some contributors describe excavations under-taken within their survey programmes. Other contributors, however, are critical of the narrow focus, considerable expense and inconclusive nature of so much urban excavation. These are legitimate concerns, but we are also at risk of neglecting one of the richest sources of data for understanding

urban landscapes. Rescue archaeology is still busy producing mountains of ill-sorted data from in and around ancient cities, probably including sites within the study areas described in this volume. The future challenge for university-based researchers is to find a way of tapping into this material, and putting it in the service of some of the research ideas so usefully explored in this volume.

University College, London doMonic perring

The Roman West, AD 200–500. An archaeological study (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013). By Simon Esmonde Cleary. 235 × 180 mm. 547 pp. 95 b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 0 5211 9649 9. Price £75.00.

The late Roman period (and the Roman collapse in the West) has been busy in recent years with debates on what barbarians were and how the Roman state endeavoured to adapt. Esmonde Cleary stresses, however, that the material repercussions of historical, political and military change in the period have not seen enough concerted coverage; his book thus focuses on letting the archaeology do the talking. This new volume has long been anticipated: the author’s The Ending of Roman Britain (Routledge, 1989) fuelled expectations of a critical and detailed exploration of challenging archaeology on a wider stage, and an analysis of questions of continuity and change. Much of that is here, and new readers will learn much of the changes to towns, landscapes, religion, the military and elites and of transformations in sites in a variety of regions. Others, however, may feel less informed or challenged than they hoped. The geographical coverage is disappointing: the ‘West’ shrinks down to Gaul, the Rhineland and Spain. There are some occasional (very brief) forays into Britain (as in discussions of the Saxon Shore), but the province is omitted from chapters on ‘Christianity and the traditional religions’ (Chapter 4) and ‘Rural settlement and economy in the West’ (Chapter 6). As a result Esmonde Cleary misses the chance to draw comparisons between Britannia and ‘continental Roman’ transformations. On the other hand, he delivers successfully for those with a particular interest in late Roman

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Gaul, especially Northern Gaul. Chapter 2 explores impacts of insecurity and military presences — the appearance of defended hilltop communities west of the central Rhine, and military-style burials. Urban defence is examined in Chapter 3 — rather rushing through discussions of changes in public and private space to conclude that, generally, fourth-century cities remained ‘expressions of ‘civilian’ political and cultural formations’ (p. 122). Contrasts come with urban shrinkage to military cores at northern Gallic sites like Jublains and Bavai whose function was revised ‘as training ground for the new soldier-citizens formed to sustain and defend the empire’ (p. 75). Although imperial palaces in towns like Arles and Trier are examined in Chapter 5, its main strength is in elite villas, especially southern sites like Montmaurin, Chiragan and São Cucofate, and in new villa functions and aristocratic displays. Recent studies on villas, farms and landscapes are explored to good effect in Chapter 6 where graphs display changing volumes and scales of rural activity; contrasts north and south of the Seine from the third century onward are striking — the south still dominated by villas, the north far more ‘workaday’. The economic focus of Chapter 7 successfully examines distributions of ceramics and coinage in Gaul; it questions the influence of military stimulus as long-distance bulk good supply from the Mediterranean faded and as new, more regionalised, mechanisms took hold. Finally, Chapters 8 and 9 discuss fifth-century changes in identities as Franks and Visigoths imposed kingdoms on Gaul and Spain. Chapter 9 particularly considers the archaeology of town and country, charting changes in content, form, and outlook — cities, for example, became specialised nodes for administration and religion, while diversified aristocratic power was articulated in fortified sites such as those in south-eastern Gaul. Some of the reflective Discussions at the end of chapters may have been at the expense of the inclusion of sufficient hard data in the main text. Chapter 4 (‘Christianity and the traditional religions’), for instance, felt rather slight; its rapid summaries of monasticism omitted monks in towns and suburbs, while recent work on springs was not considered in that on ‘traditional’ religions. There is much wordiness — e.g. ‘In order to avoid the Scylla of overgeneralisation where the macro-level of the

big picture risks obscuring multiple variations and realities, and the Charybdis of overspecificity where concentration on the micro-level of those same variations and realities risks obscuring how they may interrelate at a macro-level, the big picture, I propose to employ a number of exegetic categories that ...’ (Introduction, p. 6). Various slips suggest lack of a tight final edit: p. 2 cites North American academics — ‘one thinks, for instance, of scholars such as F. X. Gearey or R. Mathiesen’. It should of course be Mathisen, and presumably T. F. X. Noble or else P. Geary. Page 174 has ‘Cantina Wataghin’ instead of Cantino; p. 216 retains an incomplete text reference as (p. XXX). Oddly, the Index cites only two entries for ‘late Roman’ and just three for ‘Late Antiquity’ (omitting, for example, references on pp. 44, 151, 198). Such niggles should not put readers off: there is much of value in here and it opens up a substantial amount of French archaeological scholarship especially to a wider audience. And Esmonde Cleary does not just report and synthesise; he also raises many questions which need further exploration.

University of Leicester neil christie

Maize: origin, domestication and its role in the development of culture (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013). By Duccio Bonavia. 262 × 185 mm. 601 pp. 24 b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 1 1070 2303 1. Price £70.00.

By the time that Columbus found the Americas, maize was grown in most of the most populous regions there. It is thought to have originated in Mexico. In the mid-1900s, P. C. Mangelsdorf proposed that it was derived from a wild ancestor now extinct; but G. W. Beadle argued that it developed from weedy teosinte. The latter position has gained ground and is now enshrined in the sociological argument that maize was favoured first for its sweet stalk and as a source of beer rather than for eating the seeds. Yet, in Maize, the late Prof. Bonavia and his colleague, Alexander Grobman, argue that the general process of domestication, its chronology, and the crop’s diffusion to the Andes remain in doubt. It may be a while, however, before

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their trenchant book is more widely acknowledged. Maize fields and terraces at various altitudes are a distinctive sight in many regions of the Americas. The Aztecs, Maya, Incas and other peoples venerated the crop. The seeds rich in starch and oil, it is an annual grass that can grow quickly. From Central America northward, it is commonly sown with beans and squashes, a suite that flourishes in the field and is highly nutritious. In the Central Andes too, maize is complemented by beans. Maize comprises two parts. In the first, Bonavia assesses the botany, archaeology and early historical evidence; and, in the second (a full third of the book, titled too modestly as an appendix), Grobman reviews recent research on the genetics and molecules of maize, teosinte and related crops. Considering chromosomal, chemical and anatomical variation in both pre-Columbian and modern maize, and the abundance of maize that Bonavia unearthed at the apparently early settlement of Los Gavilanes on the foggy Peruvian coast in the 1960s and ’70s, the authors favour Mangelsdorf. They emphasise that the earliest Andean maize is more diverse than Mexico’s but that, where most Mexican maize reveals interbreeding with teosinte, Peru’s does not. They argue that the Peruvian plant’s dark colour is caused by anthocyanin and that that molecule may first have been selected for cultivation at high altitude, so that the coastal maize was not Peru’s earliest. They consider that maize reached South America so early that it must have been domesticated there independently of Mexico. They work through more than 1,500 references plus experts’ personal communications. Bravely, Bonavia reviews the archaeology throughout the Americas. Both authors criticise the reporting of many of the specimens and their contexts in the Andes. R. S. MacNeish’s work at Pikimachay comes out very poorly; R. M. Bird’s discussions of Áspero are branded as dogmatic; accounts of Caral are pilloried; and leading commentators in the USA are blamed for inconsistent, ignorant or arbitrary interpretation. There is, indeed, a general issue, in the Americas, about how to report excavations. Here, Bonavia’s brief account of Los Gavilanes is itself ambiguous. More broadly, Grobman concedes that the arguments against the teosinte hypothesis remain inconclusive but both authors appeal for open-mindedness.

Maize is up-dated and translated from a first Peruvian edition (2008) that lacked Grobman’s contribution. Few readers will find all of this widely ranging work equally easy but the sub-title is somewhat misleading. Very cautious with any evidence but the grains themselves, Bonavia says little about cultivation or (other than the pits at Los Gavilanes) storage. He draws cogent inferences about how maize was cooked; and, while first sceptical about the idea of sugar and beer, he then concedes that brewing was important in ancient Peru. Otherwise, his assessment of maize’s ‘role in ... culture’ is minimal. He admits that the biological, social and historical implications of agricultural methods remain to be assessed; yet, unlike Beadle, neither author considers that ancient farmers made much difference to maize apart, perhaps, from diffusing it to different environments. Further, whether or not because of the conviction that it was dispersed very early, they hardly consider its ‘companion plants’ other than teosinte. For example, where Bonavia notes that, in eastern North America, maize was used comparatively little until a thousand years ago, he fails to point out that that was when beans were added to the repertoire. Not, by any means, that our authors are the only ones to beg questions about maize’s early agricultural and dietary contexts. Posthumous production of the final text may have been fraught but Bonavia’s part suggests that the Press overlooked editing. Much of his detail could conveniently have been tabulated and there was scope for more drawings and charts. Grobman compensates somewhat but both its own flaws and the teosinte bandwagon will probably delay adequate appreciation of Maize.

University of Cambridge n. JaMes

Empires of Faith. The fall of Rome to the rise of Islam, 500–700 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011). By Peter Sarris. 234 × 156mm. 446 pp. 15 illustrations. 8 b/w maps. ISBN 978 0 1992 6126 0. Price £40.00.

Peter Sarris’s new survey of the early medieval world provides an invaluable introduction to an increasingly well-studied period. Two things

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distinguish Peter Sarris’ book within this crowded field. The first is the breadth of his geographical focus: at the heart of his study is the contested middle ground between the developing Byzantine Empire and the rising powers of Islam set within a spatial context that extends well beyond the Caucasus, into North Africa and the western fringes of the European world. The second is the clarity and persuasiveness of his historical narrative, particularly when unpicking the knotty political, social and religious puzzles of the seventh-century East. While Sarris provides a measured survey of the whole of the ‘European’ world, for many readers his greatest contribution will be to lay out clearly the dramatic political narrative of the Levant for an Anglophone audience and set the ‘History of Medieval Europe’ in an appropriate frame. Discussions of perpetual upheaval within the eastern empire form the backbone of the book. Chapters 4 ‘The view from the East’, 7 ‘Heraclius, Persia and holy war’ and 8 ‘The age of division’ discuss the emergence of new polities in Byzantium and the Fertile Crescent against a nuanced background of economic, demographic and cultural change. Crucial to these discussions is a recognition that local social and cultural conditions were often extremely varied, frustrating attempts to represent these changes in straightforward terms. Nevertheless, the resulting discussion provides a clear and stimulating overview. The remaining chapters complement this narrative, extending the discussion to the transformation of the Empire’s western provinces. The result, which emphasises the Balkans and southern Spain quite as much as the more familiar territories of the North Sea, challenges the insular approaches of many surveys of the early medieval ‘world’. On the surface, Sarris’s would seem to be a history that is more concerned with ‘Empires’ than with ‘Faith’, but this is perhaps overly simplistic. The political and economic emphases of the work do mean that some of the more familiar narratives of early medieval Christian history are passed over relatively quickly: the chapter on ‘Religion and society in the age of Gregory the Great’ is the shortest in the book by some distance, and the only one to address directly the transformative (and transforming) power of the western church within this period. But for the most part, Sarris integrates religious themes into

his wider discussion, rather than parcelling them off on their own. This is often accomplished with a wry humour: I particularly enjoyed the description of the origin of the Christian cults at p. 21: ‘Christianity was an offshoot and mutation of the ancestral cult of the empire’s Jewish subjects, which advocated the exclusive worship of one “true” God, whose son, it was claimed, had been made man in the form of an itinerant Palestinian preacher known as Jesus Christ (Greek ho Christos, “the anointed one”), who had been executed by the Roman imperial authorities under the Emperor Tiberius’. This refusal to separate the metanarrative of Christian growth from its wider setting is at its most effective in the presentation of the complex doctrinal and conciliar disputes of the sixth and seventh centuries. Rather than view these councils in dry theological terms, as is so frequently done, they are presented here with respect to the wider geo-strategic challenges that faced the Byzantine emperors. Here, disputes are less about metaphysics and more about an acute realisation that the authority of a church council could be a valuable tool to shore up support among dissident neighbours, particularly in times of military weakness. Inevitably, one or two minor mistakes have crept in. The division of the Spanish provinces between the Alans, Vandals and Sueves took place in 411 not 412 (p. 45); King Huneric did not execute the Ostrogothic princess Amalafrida in 527 (he had been dead for more than forty years): his son Hilderic did. Rather more seriously, the presentation of the barbarian invasions of the early fifth century as a sort of ‘domino effect’ from Hunnic expansion (p. 44) may explain the Gothic crisis of the 370s, but cannot account for the location, scale and date of later episodes on the frontiers. For these crises, the view of this period as one of Roman civil war in the western empire, rather than cataclysmic ‘barbarian invasion’ remains more convincing (and is closer to the accounts of our primary materials). Nevertheless, these are minor quibbles. Empires of Faith makes a valuable and unique contribution and will be much used, particularly for its excellent discussion of the East.

University of Leicester andrew Merrills

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Persia’s Imperial Power in Late Antiquity. The Great Wall of Gorgan and frontier landscapes of Sasanian Iran (Oxbow, Oxford, 2013). By Eberhard W. Sauer, Hamid Omrani Rekavandi, Tony J. Wilkinson and Jebrael Nokandeh et al. 298 × 216 mm. xvi + 712 pp. Numerous b/w and colour illustrations. ISBN 978 1 8421 7519 4. Price £85.00.

The Sasanian empire was one of the great powers of Late Antiquity. Extending from present-day Syria to the Central Asian steppe, it flourished for four centuries until it was overcome by Arab armies in the seventh century. Archaeological surveys prove that ambitious irrigation schemes were implemented to boost agricultural production and feed an urban boom. Arts and crafts thrived, and written sources attest the strong military threat the Sasanians posed to Rome. However, beyond this, little is known about how the state operated or how the civilian and military interacted. This massive monograph throws important new light on some of these issues and gives the results of a five-year joint Iranian-British project focused on the Gorgan plain and which began in 2005. Located in north-east Iran this is a highly fertile region, known in Classical times as Hyrcania and settled since the seventh millennium B.c. As early as the ninth century, Islamic geographers referred to one of the region’s most distinctive built features which is a long wall running from the Kopet Dagh mountains in the east to the Caspian sea in the west. The date and function of this, and the nearby Tammisha wall running north from the Elburz to the Caspian, have attracted many different views, from the work of Alexander the Great to construction by Parthian rulers in the second century B.c. or later Sasanian defences in the fifth or sixth century. The scope of the present project was phen-omenal. The primary aim was to date the wall but, from the outset, the strategy was to conduct a landscape survey approach to both walls and use satellite-based, surface, geophysical and underwater surveys to map their extent and establish their relationship to the local hydrology and settlement patterns. Underwater investigations proved that both walls continued further and may have originally connected, and the postulated terminus might have been used as a harbour for trade across the Caspian to the southern Caucasus (also part of the Sasanian

empire) and northwards to the mouth of the Volga. Raised internal features found within forts and a 40 ha site believed to have been a campaign base proved to be canals, and explain how they were supplied with running water. Zooarchaeological analyses indicate considerable variation between the forts but prove fishing, hunting in riverine, forested and steppe environments, the herding of sheep, goat, pig and cattle, use of cattle and donkeys as draught animals and the first evidence for water buffaloes in Iran. Thousands of brick kilns were built at regular intervals along both walls; locally sourced fuel provided charcoal for radiocarbon dates which suggest construction in the second or third quarter of the fifth century, thus proving a late Sasanian date for the wall system. This period was one when Iran was threatened in the east by Hephthalites and the wall was clearly designed to plug a large gap in the natural defences of Iran. Moreover, it not only offered a robust hinterland defence but the presence of possible campaign bases imply planned capability for offensive operations. Its construction over little more than a generation, with the firing of hundreds of millions of bricks and the construction of a canal to provide the water to make them (and form an additional barrier in front of the wall), implies a top-level state decision. The date also correlates to a peak in minting and period of trade with northern Europe, suggesting another reason for the heavy investment in this region. Geophysics indicated that the largest fort con-tained barrack blocks capable of holding about 2,000 men; the plan implies the housing of regular troops and a total of 30,000 troops may have been posted on the wall. This implies a regular professional army, provides substance to clay sealings which refer to a ‘Commander of the East’ (as well as the North, South and West) and destroys the traditional image of the Sasanian army as a medieval host of heavily armoured mounted nobles, light cavalry and levied peasants. It helps explains the regular success they had over equivalent Roman troops, either in the open field or in siege warfare and raises questions over how it was provisioned and what military solutions were sought in other border regions where the open landscape did not lend itself to building such walls. The results of the Gorgan wall project described in this book mark an important landmark in the analysis

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not just of this wall but also in the understanding of the planning and capital project capabilities of one of the great powers of Late Antiquity.

British Museum John siMpson

Settlement and Lordship in Viking and Early Medieval Scandinavia (Brepols, Turnhout, 2011). Edited by Björn Poulsen and Sören Michael Sindbaek. 156 × 234 mm. xvii + 337 pp. 20 b/w illustrations. 7 tables. 16 b/w line art. ISBN 978 2 5035 3131 1. Price €95.00.

In many ways this is an important volume that’s been developed from an international conference hosted by the University of Aarhus’s Centre for Viking and Medieval Studies, 13–14 March 2008. The aim of this book is to define the changing nature of lordship in Viking and early medieval Scandinavia. Also, it tries to answer the important question of when land and its organisation in the form of manors became important as a new source of power for the elite in the Scandinavian societies. These subjects and questions have been the subject of lively debate over the past ten to fifteen years by archaeologists, historians and human geographers in Scandinavia. This is the first major attempt to summarise these difficult but essential issues in a Scandinavian context while at the same time bring together differing views from different academic traditions working with different sources. Therefore, this volume is more than welcome. The book contains seventeen different articles by researchers belonging to the disciplines of Archaeology, History, Human Geography and Economic History, and the subjects are studied and presented from a range of different sources: runes, graves, settlement archaeology, charters, diplomas, chronicles, provincial laws and narrative sources. The editorial introduction offers an extensive background to the history of research and the current state of research in Scandinavia. In addition, the editors address important key questions con-cerning Viking Age landowning and the actors who directed the changes that led to the feudal forms of ownership and the new forms of organisation of farmland. Also, they inform how the other

authors in the book stand on these matters. This is highly beneficial and gives the reader a quick and comprehensive introduction to the entire volume. This and the fact that most of the articles refer to each other gives the book a generally well-edited impression. The proposition of, and call for, innovative theoretical models and new terminology by the authors for pre-feudal settlement and landed property in Scandinavian research is very appealing. To date, there has been a fairly confused terminology within this research field, and as the editors point out ‘… literature has tended to term any large farm a manor, irrespective of its assumed organization’. They have therefore reserved the term manor for a domaine bipartite — an economic system comprising a demesne farm with small dependent peasants who gave the landlord some form of rent. Terms like magnate farms or main farms are used in other contexts. This facilitates the reading and understanding of the various arguments in the different articles. The book is divided into four main sections; Part I: Changing Aristocracies, Part II: Settlement and Social Differentiation, Part III: Magnates and Manors and Part IV: Lords, Slaves, and Tenants. Several of the articles include spatial analyses taking a landscape perspective in relation to land ownership and lordship and as a result providing several new insights. I particularly enjoyed Søren M. Sindbæk’s contribution, which in many ways succeeded in pinpointing the differences between Viking age and feudal lordship and the spatial implications in the landscape of different agricultural economies. Also, Morten Søvsø’s article shows in a tangible way how the different conditions between Viking and early medieval aristocrats appeared spatially. The example of the bishop of Ribe’s farm at Lustrup, Jutland, illustrates this especially well. The bishop’s farm consisted of a ground area of c. 1,400 sq. metres, which is double that of any of the largest Viking Age farms found so far in Scandinavia. The most fundamental divergence between the different authors in the book is in their perception of the existence and possible character of manors and the estate system in the Viking period. Two main positions emerge in this volume: 1, those who emphasise a break in the eleventh century with a transition from slave or tributary relations to feudal

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ones, and 2, those who believe that manors existed in the Viking age, that manors were the dominant form of settlement during the period and that the agrarian organisation was more or less similar to the feudal estates. The latter view is in the minority among the contributors and is generally regarded as based on anachronistic assumptions since it tends to ignore important facts such as the existence of hamlets and villages and the presence of small and medium-sized farms throughout the Scandinavian region.

University of Aberdeen Jan-henrik Fallgren

Beyond the Burghal Hidage. Anglo-Saxon civil defence in the Viking Age (Brill, Leiden, 2013). By John Baker and Stuart Brookes. 236 × 162 mm. 498 pp. 77 illustrations. ISBN 978 9 0004 2456 31. Price €168.00.

This book addresses ‘military landscapes’ of the eighth to early eleventh centuries, and seeks to be ‘landscape-focused’ in the hope of revealing ‘something of the “grand strategy” of early medieval Wessex’ (p. xiii). It results from a project led by Professor Andrew Reynolds and seeks to identify a network of here-paths, beacons, and defensible places. Place-names and charter boundary marks are key pieces of evidence, as are the documents known collectively as the Burghal Hidage; other sources recount battles and sieges, but those cannot always be located, nor can the means by which armies and ships reached them always be deduced. One theme of this book is the importance of roads and tracks, the former ‘arterial’ and well enough known for use by raiding Vikings, others creating local networks for local people to reach local shelter-points, and to muster those who had to counter an impending attack. Another is that a developmental sequence in the size and scale of defensive provision can be established, even though excavations do not produce precise construction dates and texts can be read in different ways; consequently conclusions have to be hedged around with ‘points to’, ‘in all probability’, ‘allowed for’, ‘it is argued’, ‘no doubt’, ‘is likely to’, ‘in all likelihood’ (all from the last five sentences of Chapter 2, p. 135).

The starting-point is linear earthworks, used for patrolling behind frontier zones and controlling movement into a kingdom’s heartlands. Baker and Brookes take West and East Wansdyke as unitary — and as extending as far east as Inkpen, which not all accept — and created by the kingdom of Wessex ‘conceivably’ in the late eighth/early ninth century (p. 46; but if it dates to the period of Mercian expansion, why did Wessex provide for Somerset and Wiltshire but not for Hampshire?). Perimeters around major churches and residences augmented these, and then reused hillforts and Roman defences replaced them for larger-scale warfare, with the de novo sites such as Cricklade, Oxford, Wallingford and Wareham providing defence of the ‘peripheries’ in the 890s and 900s. Key to this dating is the fort at Portchester which Baker and Brookes consider could not have featured in royal defensive provisions before the king acquired the estate on which it stands from the Bishop of Winchester in 904. Here, the authors are in disagreement with the work of Jeremy Haslam, who sees the Burghal Hidage as the creation of King Alfred in 878–9, not as a compilation revealing a stage in a series of systematic developments. Much of the rest of this argument comes from different reconstructions of territorial areas based on interpretation of what such phrases as ‘taking control’ might mean, and complex reading back from Domesday Book, rather than from the landscape, but the result is a conflict over the River Thames, which Baker and Brookes regard as a frontier line in Alfred’s reign, dismissing Haslam’s argument that that king controlled most of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire because he probably put his name on Oxford coins as early as c. 880. The Thames Valley is one of three case-study areas detailed by Baker and Brookes. Another is Wiltshire’s Kennet Valley, already well known from the work of Andrew Reynolds, who took up the idea of beacons from the work of the late David Hill. No unequivocal Old English place-name or charter boundary mark uses ‘beacon’, however, and an alternative, ād, is ‘relatively rare’ and anyway may mean ‘lime-kiln’ (pp. 183–5). The warning systems of the fourteenth and later centuries could rely on Baltic imports of pitch, from pine resin, and Della Hooke has shown that pine-trees were not a feature of the Anglo-Saxon landscape in southern

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England. Gorse flares quickly, but needs acidic soils, so would not have been common on the Wessex chalk. Could a highly visible column of flame and smoke from stock-piled timber in a remote place have been produced quickly enough to be a useful warning? Tot- names imply look-out points, but they could have been manned quite efficiently by people using horns, horses and perhaps rudimentary flags. Furthermore, herders guarding their flocks could have been the primary users of the weardes; the names do not necessarily imply a coherent military warning system. The third case-study is Kent, on which Stuart Brookes has co-authored an excellent book that has no discussion of the ‘warehorns’ and the like presented in Beyond the Burghal Hidage, but is short, reasonably priced and has colour pictures. Only in the unsatisfactory size of the maps is there a similarity.

University of Southampton david a. hinton

St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire: a parish church and its community. Volume 1, History, Archaeology and Architecture (Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2011). By Warwick Rodwell with Caroline Atkins. 214 × 303 mm. xiv + 922 pp. 838 illustrations. 71 tables. ISBN 978 1 84217 325 1. Price £75.00.

The tower of St Peter’s church at Barton-upon-Humber has been a matter of scholarly interest, conjecture and dispute nationally since the later eighteenth century. By 1970 St Peter’s, one of two large medieval churches situated within 100 metres of one another serving a small and early Humberside port, was closed. In 1972 it was formally made redundant and taken into state care in 1978 for preservation and display to the public. Between 1979 and 1984 (with run-ons), there followed a remarkable programme of thorough-going and research-driven archaeological investigation of fabric and site, preceding and integrated with a programme of repair and conservation. The upstanding fabric was recorded and analysed, furnishing and fittings were studied, the whole interior of the church was excavated (excluding the later medieval and modern chancel area), the ground abutting the church

externally was excavated, including large sections of the graveyard on three sides. This project, probably the most effective church investigation in the country to date, undertaken essentially without restrictions or constraints, has given rise to a report every bit as thorough-going in its turn. Bound as a lavishly illustrated, two-volume set, it is supported by Appendices accessible on the website of the Archaeological Data Service and complemented by a second report published by Professor Tony Waldron in 2007, whose principal findings are summarised here as Chapter 14. This mighty publication is a triumph of will and skill and erudition. Though Warwick Rodwell is generous in acknowledging his numerous co-workers and collaborators, the effort and determination that have seen it through to publication are plainly, and characteristically, his. The headline for architectural studies is that the famous early church probably dates from the early eleventh century — perhaps even from its second quarter — rather than from the tenth as previously thought. But to focus only on that conceals the density and interest of the architectural narrative. The sequence begins with a pre-church Christian cemetery for which a levelled and surfaced platform was constructed; the footprint for the first church was cleared of burials and the emptied graves plugged with clay, before foundations were dug. That church was of a tower-nave form, with a baptistery annexe to the west where the font’s setting and soak-away is identified. This was a proprietary chapel rather than parish church, its form — as Rodwell notes — declaring lordship by combining a minimum footprint with maximum visual and aural impact whose ritual spaces are analysed in both plan and elevation. Eastward extensions from the twelfth century shifted the nave and chancel to the east and turned the early core into a conventional west tower for a parish church which the report describes in all its complexities, down to the point of its closure and post-redundancy refurbishment. To all facets of this narrative in its unrivalled detail, Rodwell brings his exceptional experience of the practicalities of church building and the minutiae of church details throughout the country. So, though he laments the necessary exclusion of architectural comparanda and academic discussion, this is far from a bare or parochial narrative; a mass of comparisons

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and explanations will make these volumes a source of future reference for all involved in church studies across many of its specialist aspects. What adds extra value to this publication and makes it something of a landmark, is its serious, sub stantial attempt to place St Peter’s in its local and regional context. A mass of archaeological and topographical evidence and observations about Barton and its neighbouring parish of Barrow-on-Humber is energetically drawn together, and deployed to create a narrative development for the town of Barton and its area. David Roffe’s contribution to this is, as usual, authoritative and innovative, drawing from the documentary record a secular context for the church’s construction in the early eleventh century that sits comfortably with the excavated and scientific evidence for its origin. Since Rodwell is temperamentally decisive and seeks (properly) to extract significance and value from the information currently available, the result contains some surprises and many stimulating ideas: a putative pre-historic ritual enclosure re-occupied by a early to mid-Saxon inhumation cemetery; a contemporary nearby secular enclosure, within which St Peter’s is founded; a Viking base camp extending to 45 ha; the form and origins of the medieval market town and port; and much more. Not all of this may stand the test of time or new evidence. Not all of it amounts to a logically coherent sequence. But the effort is more than worthwhile for the added dimension it brings to this account, for the agendas it sets for continuing work in and around Barton, and for the stimulus it provides for how churches might elsewhere more routinely be interrogated as components in wider landscape.

Nantwich, Cheshire paul everson

Urban-Rural Connections in Domesday Book and Late Anglo-Saxon Royal Administration (British Archae-ological Reports, British Series 571, Oxford, 2012). By Jeremy Haslam. 210 × 297 mm. iii + 144 pp. 24 figures. 26 tables. ISBN 978 1 4073 1056 5. Price £28.00.

This is a bold, wide-ranging and, at times, complex book. Its central thesis is that the thirty-one burhs

(forts/proto-towns) named in the Late Saxon document known as the Burghal Hidage were all part of a single system of defence conceived and established by King Alfred in the few years immediately following his victory over the Danes at the battle of Edington in 878. This is in stark opposition to other scholars (notably David Hill, Nicholas Brooks and, most recently, John Baker and Stuart Brookes), who have instead argued that the burhs of Wessex and western Mercia evolved piecemeal over a period of time and that some, notably Cricklade and Buckingham, were later additions to one or more earlier schemes. A secondary hypothesis is that the urban-rural connections visible in the Domesday survey (largely in the form of rural manors possessing urban tenements) were established at the same time as the burghal scheme, based on older (Middle Saxon) connections between rural settlements and royal estate centres. Again, this is something that is by no means universally accepted. Having set out his stall in a somewhat daunting opening chapter entitled ‘Heterogenous tenure in Anglo-Saxon England’, Haslam asserts his thesis in a series of geographical studies, beginning with Wiltshire (Chapters 2 and 3) and proceeding to Hampshire (Chapter 4), Warwickshire and south Staffordshire (Chapter 5), Gloucestershire including the former Winchcombeshire (chapter 6), Worcestershire (Chapter 7) and Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire (Chapters 10–12). In each region Haslam attempts to reconstruct the Burghal Hidage territories for each burh based on the urban-rural connections evidenced in Domesday Book. This is something that a number of authors have attempted, but, significantly, each has reached a different conclusion and I cannot help wondering whether the exercise can ever be little more than speculative guesswork, especially given that the Domesday evidence post-dates the notional burghal system by around 200 years. For my mind, in light of all the uncertainties, Haslam is a little too quick to accuse others of ‘reinterpreting and rejigging the evidence to suit the hypothesis’ (p. 118). Perhaps the most important chapters in the book are those which explore Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. Here, the burhs of Oxford and Wallingford both have urban-rural connections that straddle the Thames, seemingly disregarding the

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river as a political boundary. As Haslam observes, this has important implications for the shiring of the three counties, suggesting that the shires came into being later than the burghal system. Furthermore, Oxford, he argues, was established as a burh in a West Saxon (rather than Mercian) context, whilst Buckingham ‘must have formed a component of the original system of burhs listed in the Burghal Hidage’ (p. 118) — as opposed to the traditional view that it was founded c. 914. Overall, this book is an important contribution to the study of Anglo-Saxon burhs and deserves to be read and digested by all with an interest in the topic; but it is certainly controversial and even dogmatic in its argument (any opposition is dismissed in a robust fashion) and, so, needs to be considered alongside other interpretations of the same or similar evidence. In terms of its editing and production, it is a shame that the book lacks an index, whilst there are some unfortunate copy-editing errors, most notably the frequent confusion of the authors John and Nigel Baker.

VCH Oxfordshire siMon draper

Wexford Castles: landscape, context and settlement (Cork University Press, Cork, 2013). By Billy Colfer. 299 × 237 mm. 272 pp. Illustrations. ISBN 978 1 8591 8493 6. Price €49.00.

The publication of Wexford Castles by the late Billy Colfer brings to a close a remarkable trilogy in which the author sought to explore the history of his native county through a series of profusely illustrated volumes within the Irish Landscape series published by Cork University Press. Colfer’s first engagement with Cork University Press came though his contribution of a case study on the Hook Peninsula, Co. Wexford, to the hugely successful Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (1997) and continued through his subsequent publication of a three large-format books on The Hook Peninsula (2004), Wexford: a town and its landscape (2008) and Wexford Castles (2013). The current volume, with the support of superb cartography, outlines the Anglo-Norman colonisation of County Wexford in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and so places the discussion of the castles of the

county which follows in its wider geographic and historical context. Colfer notes the existence of twenty mottes and nine ringworks in the county, nineteen of which were adjacent to churches, and also records that five of the six thirteenth-century stone castles in the region appear to have been preceded by earlier earthwork fortifications. The gradual decline of the Anglo-Norman colony, due partly to the impact of the Bruce Wars and the Black Death, and the concomitant rise in the power of the Gaelic Irish in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led directly to the abandonment of manors and the neglect of castles in the region. These events also shaped the settlement patterns of the coming centuries, as the old Anglo-Norman families retreated southwards to the baronies of Forth and Bargy where most of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tower houses were built, leaving the northern areas under Gaelic control. Tower-house construction is commonly associated with weak central authority, as persons of means seek to provide for their own security in lawless times and, since Wexford was held as a palatinate by the absent earls of Shrewsbury until 1536, it seems that many of the 137 tower houses recorded by Colfer in Wexford were built within this context. While the suggestion that thirteenth-century castles were arranged in a series of defensive lines across the county may cause some debate amongst scholars, most of Colfer’s arguments are securely founded in his extensive fieldwork, his knowledge of the Wexford landscape and his mastery of the available historical sources. For example, the suggestion that tower-house building in Wexford may have been boosted by an Act of Parliament of 1441 which established a subsidy for their construction in the south of the county is worthy of note and reflects the better-known act of 1430 in the Dublin Pale which gave rise to the term ‘£10 castles’. Like the tower houses of the Dublin Pale, those in Wexford are simple structures and are considerably smaller than comparable buildings in most other counties. Most of the Wexford examples are rectangular in plan, have a single entrance doorway at ground-floor level and feature a stone vault over the main ground-floor chamber, above which comfortable accommodation is provided on three levels. Discussion on Irish tower houses tends to focus on issues of architectural detail and

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regional variation and Colfer is strong on matters of form and typology, but he must also be commended for taking a broader approach by exploring the manorial landscapes, including extensive church lands, within which tower houses were built. Tower houses and churches frequently mark the site of late medieval manorial villages which failed to prosper in subsequent centuries and so they can act as a key settlement indicator for the period in Ireland, since the lesser-status housing which developed around these twin nuclei was often quite ephemeral in form. Many Irish tower houses may also have had free-standing, timber-framed halls beside them, as described in late sixteenth-century sources, but the landscape of Wexford also features an important series of stone-built three-storey fortified hall houses of late sixteenth-century date. These buildings, rarely found elsewhere in Ireland, are commonly served by an attached four-storey service tower and mark the end of castle construction in the county. This handsome volume concludes with an exploration of the decline of the castle in Wexford, a consideration of their legacy and a useful gazetteer of standing tower houses in the county. Over 400 illustrations of the highest quality, including plans, maps, photographs and antiquarian sketches, serve to illuminate Colfer’s elegant, well-referenced narrative and his love for his native place shines throughout this volume, a fitting legacy for a fine scholar.

Galway Archaeological Field School rory sherlock

The Historic Landscape of Devon (Windgather, Oxford, 2012). By Lucy Ryder. 244 × 182 mm. 256 pp. 102 colour and b/w illustrations. 20 tables. 3 charts. ISBN 978 1 9051 1938 7. Price £38.00.

Erecting the framework of this study which originated in an Exeter University Ph.D. thesis are two components, the one methodological, the other a specific source material. The latter is the mid-nineteenth-century Tithe surveys, the data from both the maps and their accompanying schedules being entered into and then manipulated by a geographical information system (GIS). Through case studies drawn from different areas of Devon, two based on

her research and a third contingent on a Heritage Lottery Funded Community Landscapes project, the author set out to determine what could be learnt of the settlements and field systems of the county from a detailed analysis of the Tithe surveys, and to what degree the nineteenth-century landscape elements might be projected back in time to establish the medieval landscapes of the study areas. The scale of the research described here was innovative, with over 13,000 fields in fourteen parishes being digitised and tithe data including owners and tenants, landholdings and field-names entered. Other datasets were added to the GIS as for instance records from Domesday Book, Inquisitions Post Mortem, Lay Subsidies and such physical aspects as geology, topography and drainage. In combination these provide a significant amount of data that allows a GIS to come into its own. The opening chapter provides the background, highlighting the complex nature of the Devon landscape, introducing the concept of the pays, questioning whether these units can be defined at the parish as well as the regional level, and defines the three well-dispersed study areas, part of the Blackdown Hills in the east of the county, the Hartland peninsula in the north-west, and one part of the South Hams in the south. Next is an extended discussion on the sources which, among other things, offers a sometimes less than complimentary critique of earlier GIS-based historic landscape studies. The core of the volume are the chapters that follow, devoted to the individual case study areas, and the final chapter brings order to the mass of data by considering amongst other things topographical variations and their role in the evolving man-made landscapes; open fields as revealed by the Tithe surveys and in some instances their relationship to parish boundaries; what are termed ring-fenced settlement enclosures, of squatter encroachments on the commons; the validity of the county historic landscape characterisation; the value of field-names with a particularly useful analysis of the term ‘acre’; convertible husbandry in the south-west; transhumance in the Devon landscape; further consideration of pays as socially constructed as much as material entities; and the value of folkloric studies. The illustrations are numerous, and many of the parish maps have been generated through the GIS, not always entirely successfully for on occasions it is difficult to correlate their contents

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with the evidence detailed in the text. The deeper one gets into this book, the more two, wholly unrelated, aspects become apparent. Firstly, in general very few publications are wholly free of errors, whether typographical, grammatical or factual. But equally, very few contain so many errors that they become a material distraction to the reader. Sadly, this volume falls into the latter category and one has to lament the fact that the author has been badly let down by her copy editor. It would serve no purpose to provide examples of the range of errors, and it is sufficient to remark that this reviewer without conducting a comprehensive check encountered more than twenty reference citations in the text that did not appear in the bibliography. The second issue is one that in essence was beyond the control of the author. Devon is arguably the most well-worked county in the British Isles where landscape history is concerned, with a number of recent publications, yet the most recent reference in the bibliography is from 2007 and thus has a curiously dated feel to it. Looking on the positive side, this is an excellent study in the utilisation of a particular historic map set. Generally maps are used along with other sources in response to specific queries. Here the Tithe maps and their supporting documentation are analysed in a way that allows the surveys both to signpost the questions and to generate at least some of the answers. Comparable studies of a similar nature from other parts of the country would be very welcome.

Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust, BoB silvester

Welshpool

Town and Country in Early Medieval Bavaria: two studies in urban and comital structure (British Archaeological Reports, International Series 2437, Oxford, 2012). By Carl I. Hammer. 290 × 205 mm. iv + 65 pp. 11 illustrations. ISBN 978 1 4073 1036 7. Price £21.00.

Hammer’s most recent volume on early medieval Bavaria displays an extraordinary knowledge of both written sources and current academic discussion. His originality lies in his broad and strictly empirical approach, his mastery of an interdisciplinary field,

and his comparatively ‘easy-going’ handling of terminology. In this short monograph Hammer combines two earlier conference papers. The first considers the development of urban settlements — boroughs and marketplaces — in medieval Bavaria. The other looks at the ruling comites who, during the Carolingian period, Hammer sees in transition from sheriff to count. In Carolingian times Old Bavaria extended south and east including all of modern Austria, portions of modern Italy and Slovenia, but did not include the districts of Swabia and Franconia west of the Lech and north of the Danube. Max Spindler’s Bayerischer Geschichtsatlas (Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag, 1969) is extensively referred to in this second section, but is illustrated only with an insufficient sketch-map. The author identifies six proto-urban centres or boroughs in early medieval Bavaria before 1000 a.d.: Regensburg, Passau, Salzburg, Augsburg, Eichstätt and Freising. He analyses their degree of urbanism through criteria including: Roman predecessor, transportation access, fortification, royal palace, episcopal seat, major monastery, market, mint, fair, civic organisation and tenements. Hammer sees a network of para-urban places between these proto-urban centres. This well-chosen new term describes local-commercial networks of sub-urban market-places for trade, especially in salt — like Föhring (a predecessor of Munich). They are largely undocumented. The second part of the volume focuses on political personnel. Hammer translates comes as ‘sheriff ’ in the early periods and as ‘count’ only in the later periods of Carolingian rule. In this way, he charts the shift in this office from temporary and personal appointment by the king to an inheritable post for nobles. Over time, as the position of sheriffs strengthened, their absolute numbers decreased from about twenty at the beginning of the ninth century to around twelve by c. a.d. 840. Hammer chooses the supposedly first Bavarian comital dynasty, the Ebersberger, to illustrate comital government and feudal transformation in early medieval Bavaria. Sigihard, the first Bavarian comes, was possibly from the Upper Rhine region where, Hammer suggests, he had previously lost his office by taking part in a conspiracy against King Ludwig. His arrival in the ‘Wild East’ in the 870s thus provided him with the chance to re-establish

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his fortunes. Sigihard’s status as sheriff was clearly based on delegated royal authority. His first fort at Ebersberg probably was a primitive stockade from wood, but in the 930s his grandson Eberhard both rebuilt the fortifications in stone and erected a church. Only after Eberhard’s death in a.d. 970 was the church allowed to become a family mausoleum. Thus for Hammer Eberhard — not Sigihard — was the first true ‘count’ of Ebersberg. Although this interpretation runs counter to the eleventh-century Ebersberg Chronicle of Abbot Williram, Hammer argues that Williram was part of the foundation myth of the place at a time when the Ebersberg dynasty was long extinct and contemporary counts were again behaving very much like ‘sheriffs’. The second part — interesting as it is with many hypotheses on origin, kinship and relationship of the members of the Ebersberg family — is not as well structured as the first and lacks a summary. This exemplary study in feudal constitution and early state formation would have profited from more structured subtitles and illustrative graphs placed within the text, and made the book more readable for those outside the small scholarly circle interested in medieval Bavaria and the next generations.

Archaeological Department sophie hueglin

Canton Basel-Stadt

Property Rights, Land Markets and Economic Growth in the European Countryside (Thirteenth–Twentieth Centuries) (Brepols, Turnhout, 2013). Edited by Gérard Béaur, Philipp R. Schofield, Jean-Michel Chevet and María Teresa Pérez Picazo. 156 × 234 mm. 535 pp. 46 figures. 62 tables. ISBN 978 2 5035 2955 4. Price €71.00.

This recent volume of a new series on ‘Rural History in Europe’ must be regarded as the most important compilation of up-to-date scholarship on pre-industrial property rights. The quality of the book is that it explicitly links property rights and land markets with significant current debates on the origins of geographical divergences in economic development — debates associated most famously with Kenneth Pomeranz, Peer Vries, David Landes, and Gregory Clark, to name but

a few. The volume clearly outlines its goal in the superb introduction: to test the assumption that the Industrial Revolution happened on the back of the protection, security and efficiency of modern clear property rights (p. 20). Property rights have long featured in discussions on the causes of economic divergences, from the New Institutional Economics of Nobel prize-winning scholar Douglass North, to the neo-Marxist approach of Robert Brenner, or the institutionally deterministic works of Jeffrey Williamson, James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu. The beauty of this volume, however, is that it makes a case for suggesting that trained rural historians (rather than a marginalised or niche field) could have an important role to play in approaching ‘big’ questions about the origins of divergent economic development. The future of the ‘Great Divergence’ debate need not lay in the hands of economists or macro-level global historians comparing large units such as ‘Northwest Europe’, ‘the Mediterranean’, or ‘the Yangtze Delta River Area’, but with rural historians more receptive to regional contrasts. Although the volume itself is in truth not a systematic comparison of a hypothesis but a loose collection of individual papers (there is no synthesising chapter to end, for example), an important idea links many of the chapters. Essentially this volume suggests that the emergence of modern clear property rights probably was not the causal factor behind the Industrial Revolution — an argument given logic in that many pre-industrial regions of Europe showed signs of economic growth coterminous with the establishment of ‘imperfect’ or ‘multi-layered’ property rights. The crux of the book is then this: no form of property right was inherently ‘better’ than any other, and the effectiveness of property rights and the land market was determined by social context. Certain arrangements of property and land markets ‘made sense’ or had ‘rationale’ in the broader economic, political, social, and even cultural contexts in which they were embedded. To just focus closer on two aspects of this argument, we see, for example, chapters by Rosa Congost and Lorenç Ferrer-Alòs showing how aristocratic and ecclesiastical concession of land through emphyteusis (a form of lease highly characteristic of Mediterranean societies) was not an indicator of ‘backwardness’ or the persistence of

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ancient conservative feudal relations, but revitalised agriculture in parts of eighteenth-century Catalonia — giving more peasants access to land, providing incentives to improve land, and in turn stimulating new forms of commercialised viticulture. The same could be said of chapters on the commons. Instead of being a ‘backward’ form of agricultural organisation and hindering the emergence of more ‘commercialised’ economies (as asserted by Gregory Clark), some of the chapters in this volume show that pre-industrial societies in Europe could often thrive by exploiting various arrangements of collective/shared property (sometimes in com-bination with other private property forms) as a way of negating risks, creating advantageous economies of scale, and reducing transaction costs — in line with the theoretical frameworks posited by Nobel Prize-winning scholar Elinor Ostrom or the empirically-grounded scholarship of Tine De Moor. Collective property was not mired in antiquated feudal relations but could coexist as components of commercialising rural economies. Weaknesses in this volume are few and far between, but a point must be made that this collection of papers still represents work in pro gress. The story of a progressive triumph of capitalist forces pushed through by the definition and enforcement of private property rights has been significantly nuanced, and instead posited that the effectiveness of property rights systems was more ‘socially embedded’. That of course leads us to the as yet unanswered question of why were some pre-industrial societies unable to arrange property rights most ‘suited’ to their particular economic and social context? Perhaps a future volume need not explore the relationship between property rights and economic growth per se, but between property rights and inequality. Some property rights systems may have led to agricultural or economic growth through more surplus extracted, but in whose hands did this surplus end up? Were average rural ‘common folk’ better off after the advancement of more modern forms of private property rights, or did they fare better at the height of manorialised serfdom, for example? As we can see, this issue can be approached diachronically as well as through geographical divergences.

Utrecht University daniel r. curtis

The Archaeology of Churches (Amberley, Stroud, 2012). By Warwick Rodwell. 248 × 172 mm. 384 pp. 103 b/w illustrations. 242 colour illustrations. ISBN 978 1 84868 943 5. Price £25.00.

Rather like Leaves of Grass, the poetry collection that Walt Whitman repeatedly rewrote, The Archaeology of Churches is but the latest version of what is becoming a lifelong work. Its immediate ancestor, published in 2005, was an elaboration of Church Archaeology (1989) which in turn was a revision of The Archaeology of the English Church (1981). The latest rendering is more than a simple update: there are new chapters on how churches were designed, built and fitted, and on written records. The churches are primarily of medieval origin and now in Anglican hands. However, to ask questions of a church at any stage in its existence it is necessary to understand the processes by which evidence has survived, been lost or transformed. One of the book’s characteristics is the attention it gives to this: for Rodwell, a church is a continuum from its beginning to the present, and all aspects of its story are accordingly deserving of study and record. The book opens with chapters on historiography, and on the place of archaeology in relation to the Church today. Next comes a section on written records — what they disclose, where to find them. Three important chapters follow. The first examines and classifies the constituent parts of churches, from basic parts such as aisles and towers through different kinds of chamber forms of building and feature that are unconventional. Second, a chapter on the character and interpretation of evidence for how churches were built — from alignment and layout through foundations, scaffolding, formwork, the raising of arches and arcades, incidental features connected with construction, to structural carpentry, reinforcement and surface finishes. Rodwell draws from a wealth of experience gained at cathedrals, parish churches, chapels, religious houses that he has investigated and published, and all who study buildings will benefit from the extent to which he shares it. The same applies to the following chapter dealing with evidence for fixtures and fittings — a theme that embraces subjects as diverse as Anglo-Saxon sculpture, wall-painting, bell ringing, clocks, furniture. This brings us to Chapter 7, ‘Surveys of

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churches’, and we are still not halfway through. The survey chapter reminds us of various motivations for different kinds of regional and thematic survey that were undertaken in the later twentieth century: ruined churches in Norfolk, medieval churches in Wales, chapels in Shetland, redundant churches in Nottinghamshire, church contents — the list of lists goes on. We are also told about ecclesiastical processes that govern investigation and conservation (or in some cases, not). There are peppery protests about conservation bureaucracy, over-zealous application of health and safety requirements (a ‘new curse’), or the loss of original fabric that can result from absolutist demands for access. In the eighth chapter, ‘Recording the fabric: aims and methods’, the book becomes a field manual — how to grid a wall, planning scales, scaffolds and ladders, rectified photography, geophysics. By now we get the picture, if we had not got it before: this is not simply a book about what churches can tell us, what different kinds of investigation can reveal, or how we might undertake them; rather it is an out-pouring of lifelong experience in which practical advice, frameworks for interpretation, preoccupations and didactic comment are mingled. The frameworks come into their own in the follow-ing chapters, on reading buildings through the investigation of fabric, excavation, analysis, and in an important review of the intricate variety of evidence provided by graves and human remains. Readers of this journal will be drawn to the chapter on churchyards, for it is principally here that the book considers how churches articulate with their surroundings. Rodwell has valuable things to say about features and ecology in the immediate environs of churches (things like gates, paths, trees and boundaries), and also about themes such as the placing of churchyards in relation to Roman structures, springs and wells. He writes about buildings in the vicinity of churches, some common, like ale-houses and almshouses, others rare, like the hut at Warblington (Hants) that was stationed to deter the theft of corpses for anatomical research and teaching. One of the book’s many strengths is the gener-osity and colour with which it is illustrated — there are 346 photographs, plans, elevations, schematic figures and reproductions of antiquarian images.

If the publisher has reproduced some of them at too small a scale to make intended points with full effect, that is modest criticism of a book that for all its idiosyncrasies is witness to over four decades of beneficial endeavour and original research.

University of Hull richard Morris

The Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle (English Heritage, Swindon, 2013). Edited by Anna Keay and John Watkins. 276 × 219 mm. 224 pp. 163 colour and b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 1 8480 2034 4. Price £40.00.

This lavish book comprising seventeen essays by distinguished scholars explains the background to the re-creation by English Heritage of the documented Elizabethan garden at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire. All aspects of the original garden are discussed. The book begins with the background of its creator, the Earl of Leicester. Then its place in garden history and its setting within the castle are examined. Next is a survey of the evidence on which the re-creation was based, and an analysis of the research into the layout chosen and the form of architectural features selected. It concludes with a useful Appendix listing the plants known to have been in sixteenth-century gardens. All very splendid and made more so by fine maps, plans and photographs. However, there are problems. A major difficulty is the result of the dual aims in the making of the garden. For English Heritage seems to have been keen to produce both as accurate a replica of the original garden as possible, as well as a layout that would attract and please visitors. The latter was particularly desirable on a site that although nationally important is not the most appealing or easily understood monument in the care of English Heritage. The major obstacles in attempting historical correctness were the limitations imposed by the sources. For despite extensive research there are only two real pieces of information on the Kenilworth garden. Almost all the rest is conjecture. The first of these sources is a somewhat vague description

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of the original garden in a letter by a minor official who was present at Queen Elizabeth’s visit there in 1575. This letter is more concerned with the aura of the garden than with the plants or layout which are hardly mentioned. And although there are some details of the architectural features, these are not enough to replicate them with certainty. Thus, although the letter is useful for the setting of the garden, and its impact on the viewer, it has restricted value for re-creating it. The second source is the archaeological excava-tion of the site. Because of the almost complete destruction of any sixteenth-century features by later activity, little of importance was uncovered except for the foundations of the central fountain. The result of this limited information was that the layout, paths and planting, as well as the appearance of documented architectural features, had to be based on contemporary analogies that may or may not be correct. Thus, while the new garden, like the original, is probably typical of a high-status later sixteenth-century one, it is certainly not the recreation claimed in the book. The other aim of English Heritage, to make the new garden a financial success, also produced problems of authenticity, a situation well known to owners of historic gardens. In the past great gardens were designed to be at their very best for visits by their owners or by important guests, perhaps once or twice a year. But the commercial requirements of twenty-first century visitor numbers and expectations are such that gardens are required to be continuously at their best for at least eight months of the year. Thus strictly accurate planting schemes are impossible. What actually result are rarely more than unseasonal pastiches. Worse, even if it is possible to obtain the correct species, these are often produced by modern breeding in forms more attractive than those used in the original gardens, which in any case would not be popular today. So, while the Kenilworth garden may be close to a typical sixteenth-century arrangement, whether it is really a re-creation of the original garden there is again unknown, but doubtful. English Heritage has given us an excellent book that will be of considerable value to anyone engaged with the making of historic gardens and is thus highly recommended. But perhaps more importantly, it has made a fascinating garden which,

whether strictly accurate or not, gives enormous pleasure to visitors to Kenilworth and brings history alive for them. Thus English Heritage is right and your reviewer merely a pedant.

Pampisford, Cambridgeshire christopher taylor

An Atlas of Northamptonshire. The medieval and early-modern landscape (Oxbow, Oxford, 2012). By Tracey Partida, David Hall and Glenn Foard. 208 × 280 mm. x + 270 pp. 94 b/w and colour figures. 13 tables. 172 colour maps. ISBN 978 1 8421 7511 8. Price £35.00.

David Hall, Glenn Foard and Tracey Partida have delivered an Atlas of the medieval and early modern Northamptonshire landscape for which the word ‘sumptuous’ may have been waiting since it was first coined. Scholarly chapters — illustrated by a wealth of high-resolution colour illustrations of details from early maps — are enhanced by a large format, good-quality paper, and an affordable price. When not one, but two Atlases are included describing medieval and early modern settlement and land use in the county in turn, ‘dull would he be of soul who could pass by’. The book is divided into seven sections: five chapters (whose authors are attributed) and the two Atlases. The Introduction explains how GIS was used to map ‘open fields, woodland, settlement, communications and administrative organisation’ against the surface geology (p. 5). Such mapping was undertaken twice: the first Atlas describes Northamptonshire’s landscape as it was in c. 1300; while the second Atlas shows the landscape as it was (mostly) between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The mapping in the Atlases aims at an impressive accuracy of around 5 metres within a scale of 1:25,000; case studies were mapped at 1:10,560. The enormity of the task is revealed in an unassuming note that it took six years to redraw the parish maps to enable digital analysis (p. 9). Chapters 2–5 offer a meticulous description and evaluation of sources and methods used by the authors against their chosen themes, and an analysis and interpretation of their results. David Hall evaluates ‘Forests and woodland’ (Chapter

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2) and ‘Open fields’ (Chapter 3); Tracey Partida interprets early modern landscapes in ‘Enclosure’ (Chapter 4); while Glenn Foard analyses ‘Rural settlement’ (Chapter 5). Throughout the volume, the authors grapple explicitly — and largely succeed in dealing — with the problems raised by inevitably imperfect sources, the difficulties in extrapolating earlier periods from later data, and the fluidity of land usage. There is a satisfying depth and breadth to the analysis, supported by county-wide distribution maps (often against the surface geology and drainage) including surviving ridge and furrow in 1947 and 1990 (figs 32 and 33), settlement size (fig. 61), ancient enclosure (figs 36 and 45), and a wide range of non-arable place- and field-name elements (figs 15, 16, 17, 68). Case studies of settlement morphology and land-use are supported by high quality figures too. The tables often undertake complex comparisons between, for instance, the relationship between Anglo-Saxon settlement and surface geology (table 10), or the ratios of greens to open field pasture (table 12). The book is thus scholarly, informed and satisfyingly thorough in its scope, analysis and exposition. It will maintain the attention both of those new to the field and established researchers. The eighty-six pages of each Atlas are beautifully drawn. They show schematic open-field selions, meadow, pasture, woodland, heath and fen, the extent of settlement, the locations of churches and chapels, as well as Anglo-Saxon archaeology. It is extraordinary to be able to compare a map of (say) land use in Peakirk in c. 1300 (map 4M) with the same township between 1727 and 1901 (map 4EM), revealing the extent of late medieval and early modern reclamation against the east Northamptonshire fen-edge; or the fission of an almost entirely arable medieval landscape across Titchmarsh, Thrapston and Clopton into an early modern one where Clopton carried only grass, Thrapston remained arable, and Titchmarsh was divided between the two (maps 27–28M, and 27–28EM); or the post-medieval retreat of both woodland and open-field arable in Deanshanger, Puxley, Passenham and Wicken (maps 79–80M and 79–80EM). There are, inevitably, minor flaws, but it would be invidious to point them out. They are not sufficiently significant to affect the quality of

the argument and are welcome evidence that the authors are not (yet) divine. There is not enough space here to outline their arguments and models for the origins and evolution of the landscape between the ninth century and the early nineteenth. They are, as might be expected, sometimes controversial, sometimes well accepted. What the volume delivers in spades, through a quality of scholarship to everyone aspires, is an outstanding contribution in evidence, argument and conclusions to the central debates which have occupied landscape historians over the past two generations: the relative influences in different periods of lords and communities, on the one hand, and physical geography on the other, on the origins, evolution and later development of the English Midland landscape.

University of Cambridge susan oosthuizen

Alston Moor, Cumbria: buildings in a North Pennines landscape (English Heritage, Swindon, 2013). By Lucy Jessop and Matthew Whitfield with Andrew Davison. 208 × 208 mm. viii + 140 pp. 115 colour and b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 1 8480 2117 4. Price £14.99.

Alston Moor, high up in the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, is famed both for its claim to be England’s highest market town and for the richness of its industrial archaeological remains, the tangible legacies of its role at the heart of the Pennine lead-mining dales. Yet, as this book amply demonstrates, the mining heritage is only one element of a rich and distinctive landscape history. This attractive book is a product of English Heritage’s recent intensive survey of Alston Moor’s ‘miner-farmer’ landscapes and forms an addition to the ‘Informed Conservation’ series, which seeks to discuss buildings in their archaeological and landscape context. The authors present a comprehensive picture of the built heritage of the parish of Alston Moor, from the medieval period through the transformation wrought by lead mining in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the long decline after the collapse of the lead industry in the 1880s, to recent regeneration. The diversity

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of buildings in the area is striking: tower houses and bastles, farmsteads and cottages, country villas, industrial buildings, shooting lodges and nonconformist chapels. All are discussed and set in the context of the successive phases of Alston Moor’s history. A key theme running through the story is Alston’s distinctive legacy of vernacular buildings, in particular the bastle-like farmsteads, with living accommodation on the first floor, often accessed originally by ladder from the gable end, over a byre beneath. Akin to the bastles of Northumberland, they presumably owed their origin to the turbulence of the era of Border raids. The authors suggest, however, that many of these structures in Alston Moor date from the more settled years of the seventeenth century, after the granting of 1,000-year leases in the 1610s. The distinctive vernacular tradition continued into the eighteenth century, with many farmsteads developing a linear form, comprised of an extended line of bastle-like houses. The tradition of living upstairs was also found in the compact town of Alston, which grew up clustered around the church and market place. The mining era brought new forms of building, not only the mine shops, providing accommodation for lead miners close to remote mines, but also the planned mining village of Nenthead, built by the London Lead Company in the 1820s; a row of well-built houses (graded from semi-detached for those higher-status to short terraces for the lead smelters) with spacious garden plots. It was a model village, an early example of industrial paternalism, complete with school and public library, and forms a striking contrast to the higgledy-piggledy organic growth of Alston. The nineteenth century also saw the proliferation of places of worship, particularly the numerous Methodist chapels, from the vast bulk of the Wesleyan church dominating the town of Alston to the modest chapels of the Primitive Methodists in small mining settlements. The economic stagnation which followed the collapse of lead mining had the effect of preserving many buildings and much of the character of the landscape across the twentieth century. Raising awareness of the richness of this survival is one of the book’s main aims, which is achieved admirably. It would have been tempting to close the book with the end of the mining era but the authors are

to be congratulated for including a final chapter, charting landscape change since 1950, teasing out the distinctiveness of Alston Moor’s built heritage and the conservation challenges for the future. A rich and varied landscape history is thus distilled here into a short, accessible story. One might quibble with some details (‘byre’ — cowshed — is not related to Old Norse -by; the Quaker community in Alston was never ‘large’ and had little to do with the London Lead Company, for example; and the suggestion that Alston’s circular churchyard originated as a prehistoric circular settlement is surely little more than wild speculation) but the overall achievement is considerable. It whets the appetite for more: the serious reader will want to pursue the detail of individual buildings, to explore further the rich potential of marrying documentary and cartographic evidence (the wealth of which is hinted at in the illustrations) with field survey. Perhaps what is needed to accompany this book is an old-style inventory of the type produced by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments! This is a beautiful book, richly illustrated to English Heritage’s usual high standard. As Simon Thurley says in his foreword, ‘Alston Moor is a very special place’. It can appear cold, wet and bleak but the superb photographs let the reader glimpse the magical quality of its landscape. To those who know the area, the book is a powerful evocation of the spirit of the place: sun glistening on soft-brown, gritstone buildings after rain, and the calls of the curlews rising into spacious moorland skies.

Lancaster University angus winchester

Ancient Woodland: history, industry and crafts (Shire Publications, Princes Risborough, 2013). By Ian D. Rotherham. 248 × 211 mm. 64 pp. b/w, colour illustrations. ISBN 978 0 7478 1165 7. Price £6.99.

This latest addition to the diverse and always interesting Shire Library covers a field made familiar to many local historians through the publications of Oliver Rackham. It follows the typical Shire tradition of providing a popular but well-informed and well-illustrated introduction to its subject at a very reasonable price. However, as the subtitle

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indicates its scope and emphasis are rather different from those of Rackham. On the historical side the landscapes are principally, though not exclusively, the deer parks and upland woodlands of northern England rather than the more familiar woodlands and parkland of southern England. Such a small book cannot be comprehensive. Although the author begins by encouraging his readers to get out into woodlands and investigate them for themselves, the characteristic features of ancient woodland — wood banks, ditch patterns, pollards, coppice stools and floral indicators, as well as archaeological field evidence, are mentioned but only treated briefly, in contrast to Rackham’s approach. However, the meat of this book is its discussion of the different crafts and industries that were based on woodland products and have left their mark in the structure and archaeology of surviving ancient woodland today — charcoal and ‘white coal’ production, oak-bark leather tanning, potash manufacture, as well as wood turner, furniture makers (bodgers) and basket making. Many of these were more important in the industrial north rather than the south of England, and there is a great deal of useful background activity brought into the open here.

Great Gransden, Cambs. charles turner

Magnificent Entertainments: temporary architecture for Georgian festivals (Yale University Press, Boston, 2013). By Melanie Doderer-Winkler. 292 × 241 mm. 320 pp. 133 colour and 100 b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 0 3001 8642 0. Price £40.00.

This is a perfect model of how a doctoral thesis can be transformed into a readable and engaging book, while still retaining its scholarly credentials: a wonderful survey of extraordinary yet ephemeral structures, raised to commemorate great public occasions and to delight the bon ton of eighteenth-century England. It should be required reading for any architectural, art or garden historian interested in the material culture of that most sybaritic of ages. Melanie Doderer-Winkler and her doctoral examiner, Professor Brian Allen of the Mellon

Centre, appear to have cherry-picked those struc-tures with the best archival record, images of which, from the British Museum, the Sir John Soane Museum and the Royal Collection, are scattered liberally through its pages. In some sense this makes for a predictable structure, where set piece essays line up under umbrella chapters — temporary structures for fireworks and private entertainments; buildings at Vauxhall Gardens, which can only just count as temporary but, nevertheless, were the catalysts for later experiments; illuminations; temporary decorations on tables and floors and the paraphernalia of Regency fêtes. But Doderer-Winkler’s enthusiasm and sure grasp of her rich material drives the narrative. Reading her first section on firework displays, visions of the explosions at Sydney Harbour Bridge at the dawning of the last Millennium and Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony to last year’s London Olympics came to mind. Throughout the ages man has celebrated great occasions with pyrotechnics, one of the most lavish in the Georgian period being the 1749 public celebrations on Green Park to commemorate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. For this, the Franco-Italian stage designer Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni contrived a huge classical temple with screen walls ending in pavilions, the whole edifice extending 125 metres. Charles Frederick, comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich, was in charge of the event, which took six months to organise. As well as the firework display, the temple was decorated with painted transparencies, allegorical panels, lit from behind by lamps, which were magically transformed from sculptural monochrome into ravishingly coloured scenes. Winkler-Doderer’s new research on the transparency, synonymous with such entertainments, is perhaps the most original contribution in the book. Sadly, after these gargantuan efforts, the appointed night was damp, many devices could not be lit as planned, and the north pavilion caught fire causing the explosives inside to detonate. The most extravagant temporary building to be raised in the period was the ballroom designed by Robert Adam in 1774 for the fête champêtre at The Oaks in Surrey. This took the form of a horseshoe-shaped garden pavilion entered via an octagon, both decorated with Adam’s delicate neo-

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Classical ornament, the ballroom supported on an internal colonnade of Corinthian columns. After the requisite minuets and cotillions, ‘the revellers were startled by an explosion of rockets’ and the space behind the columns was revealed to contain ‘sumptuously laid supper tables’. Two large canvases by Antonio Zucchi were expressly commissioned to record the entertainment, and not one to miss a marketing opportunity, Adam had a plan of the pavilion engraved. Winkler-Doderer’s second chapter on Vauxhall has been eclipsed by David Coke’s definitive 2011 study of the capital’s pleasure gardens, so it will be prudent to move on to her last three chapters. Sadly, space does not allow for a full account of the amazing entertainments and their structures, but a few can be singled out. In the latter half of the century there was fashion for illumination nights when house façades would be lit up as a sign of allegiance to the king. Adam’s 1789 illumination for the Earl of Hopetoun was to celebrate George iii’s recovery from his first attack of porphyria. Not surprisingly, the victory at Waterloo was celebrated with illuminations of ‘A Grand Collection of National Historical, Allegorical, and fine Emblematic Portraits’ of Wellington and Blucher among others. There follows a section on the transformation of houses and public places, Martha Stewart-style, into spaces ‘to amuse and astound revellers’, decked out with artificial and real flowers and even full-scale trees to create Arcadian forests. Table centrepieces have been well covered by culinary historians but the ephemeral practice of creating pictures — marmo tintos — on a festive table made out of sand, coloured sugar and marble dust was new to this reviewer and yet another extraordinary example of fleeting opulence. The survey climaxes in the Grand National Jubilee of 1814, with a revolving Temple of Concord on Green Park and more fireworks. Pun definitely intended, this is a real cracker of a book.

University of Buckingham tiMothy Mowl

The Plough that Broke the Steppes. Agriculture and environment on Russia’s grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). By David Moon. 234 × 156 mm. xii + 332 pp. 3 b/w illustrations. 4 maps. ISBN 978 0 1995 5643 4. Price £67.00.

In this book David Moon, distinguished historian of the Russian peasantry, turns his attention to the movement of Russian (and transnational) colonisation into the Steppe region that stretches from the north-west coast of the Black Sea in a widening sweep to the east and north-east to the northern Caucasus and beyond the Volga. To outsiders, especially those from the more wooded regions to the north, it was a disorientating land, lacking familiar forest and water, but home of the famously fertile black soil; a land that came to be considered both quintessentially Russian, yet difficult to manage for arable farmers and subject to the cold and dessicating winds from the ‘Asiatic’ east. This is a story of attempts to integrate the steppes into Russian economy and society, but above all as an object of knowledge in Russian science; of attempts to make the grassland productive using, at first, techniques imported from afar, and later through means developed in part locally as knowledge about the environment improved. The chronological weight lies between the late eighteenth century and World War I, when the population of the region surged from three to twenty-five millions. The book is divided into three sections. Firstly, we learn how outsiders encountered and tried to comprehend the steppes, moving from travellers’ reports to exploratory and investigative expeditions, and the systematic collection of data. Secondly, Moon addresses the perception that the steppe environment was changing, and explanations thereof, using interrelated shifts in vegetation cover (balance of forest, grasses and crops), precipitation and wind exposure; and soil erosion. These perceptions were debated primarily among ‘outsiders’ working in the field sciences, but also incorporated observations of local estate holders, officials, and members of agronomic associations. Thirdly, Moon discusses ‘remedies’, such as afforestation, irrigation (both always of rather limited extent), and new agronomic techniques. At first these aimed to combat the imagined changes the Steppes were undergoing (initially blamed on climate change), but became

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more preoccupied with soil quality and especially moisture retention, as hydrology, rather than the atmosphere, came to be seen as critical for farming success. This was in part because ‘climate change’ was increasingly understood as cyclical, rather than unidirectional and negative. Aside from being a meticulous reconstruction of the development of scientific knowledge of the Steppes, this is a rich history of the transnational nature of environmental thinking that shaped perceptions, measurements, and theorising about this land. Knowledge networks stretched from Germany or beyond, to Russian training institutes far to the north, through expeditions and research stations in situ, and travelled with migrants and savants, eventually to discover a shared or inherited experience of farming (in the case of Mennonites) or perception of equivalence (in the case of some scientists) on the Great Plains of the United States. Importantly, and vividly, Moon demonstrates throughout that ideas about the Steppe environment were always contested, sometimes rather flamboyantly, and debates cannot be subject to any easy periodisation. Even if one can perceive shifts in favour of arguments and individuals over time, such as the decline of ideas linking aridification to deforestation through the medium of regional climate, such notions would be revived in a new form decades later as the colossal shelter belts of the Great Stalin Plan. The book’s sections are ordered according to qualities or processes of the land (sands, ravines) and particular means of arresting or producing desired change in that land (shelterbelts, irrigation). As a consequence, the chronological thread is uneven (if tending towards the present), and the full panoply of views of particular influential individuals, and the immediate context of debates over issues, are not always visible (or require excellent recall of earlier parts of the book!); one gains a keen sense of the networks and rivalries that invested the creation of environmental knowledge, without these being thematised explicitly. The gain of this approach is that one develops a deeper sense of what was happening to specific parts of the land, or how techniques were applied. Nevertheless, Moon is studious in never stepping outside the voices and data of the time; we learn how knowledge of them was a construction born of increasingly intimate acquaintance with this land, but at times one does

yearn for the historian’s overbearing summary — when, where, to what extent was the plough really breaking the Steppes? Where the historian does emerge more clearly is in his own journeys to the Steppes, and conveying his own sense of how an outsider experiences the place helps give a powerful presence to the land in this text, without it becoming a substitute for suitably detached appraisal of his sources. Yet while this is a book about how wider ways of knowing invested one (vast) place, it is also a major contribution to our understanding of the international development of the environmental sciences, and how environmental knowledge was produced.

University of East Anglia paul warde

Regent’s Park. From Tudor hunting ground to the present (Amberley, Stroud, 2013). By Paul Rabbitts. 236 × 166 mm. 220 pp. 20 b/w and 20 colour illustrations. ISBN 978 1 4456 1024 5. Price £20.00.

London is one of the world’s greenest cities, its parks and green spaces ranging from the Royal Parks to local recreation grounds, providing tranquil areas, recreational activities, links to the natural world, and protection of natural environment and habitats. The showpieces of this green network are the eight Royal Parks, which cover 1,976 ha, all former royal hunting grounds which are now open to the public. Unlike the other Royal Parks, Regent’s Park was created in the early nineteenth century, part of a grand scheme of landscape design and town planning for the Prince Regent by the ‘picturesque’ architect John Nash. The site in north-west London, Marylebone Park, part of the ancient forest of Middlesex, had also been an imparked hunting chase for Henry viii, a transformation lucidly described in Paul Rabbitts’s comprehensive coverage of the park’s history. The pre-nineteenth-century history of Regent’s Park features in contemporary accounts, such as those by James Elmes (1830) and Evelyn Cecil (1907), but Rabbitts integrates these with his own findings to produce three engaging initial chapters. The subsequent three chapters on the creation of Regent’s Park form the core of the book. Nash’s contribution to the design and implementation of

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the park is well known, but Rabbitts emphasises that Nash ‘did not achieve his great vision alone’, and credits the work of surveyor John Fordyce, landscape architect Williams Andrew Nesfield and his son Markham, and the architect Decimus Burton. In March 1811 Nash presented his first set of designs to the Crown estate, proposing a new royal residence inscribed in a circle with a lake and a canal, linked to St James’s Palace by a processional road (later Regent Street). The income from fifty-six villas to be constructed in the park and a series of grand Regency terraces around it would finance the whole project. This was the first of several designs — the idea of a palace was dropped, only eight villas were built, and the canal was moved to the northern boundary of the park — and, as reported in the Times Telescope Almanack 1825, for several years the site presented, ‘a most extraordinary scene of digging, excavating, burning, and building’. On viewing the park in the late 1820s, however, Elmes exclaimed, ‘all the elegancies of the town, and all the beauties of the country are co-mingled with happy art and blissful union’, his publication on new developments in London including many engravings of the park by Thomas Shepherd. At first, only residents of the villas and terraces were allowed in the park, but in 1835 the east side was opened to the public and eventually the whole park and Primrose Hill. This was part of a general move to provide publicly accessible green spaces in the city and in Chapter 7 Rabbitts places Regent’s Park in the context of the public parks movement in nineteenth-century Britain. Rabbitts is an enthusiastic proponent of London parks, and of the Royal Parks in particular, and his book uses published findings to provide context for his own evaluation of Regent’s Park. As such, his description of the commission process, park layout, architecture of the villas, and other features, such as the ingenious Diorama, Royal Botanic Garden and Zoological Gardens, draws heavily on contemporary literature, in addition to modern sources, such as Professor Mordaunt Crook’s Soane lecture of 2000. Fortunately, the latter’s published version is fully referenced, a serious omission from Rabbitts’s accounts. An irritation for the reader is also the lack of reference in the text to the forty-two images included in a central section — and how sad that some of Shepherd’s delightful engravings

depicting typical Regency plantings could not be included. A minor niggle for the editorial team is the inconsistent spelling of Humphry (sometimes incorrectly Humphrey) Repton. The author’s professional involvement with urban parks provides him with the expertise not only to review recent developments in the management of Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill, but also to consider government policy and funding for parks generally. Charting the ‘decline and revival’ and ‘catalogue of neglect’ of parks during the later twentieth century, he acknowledges the part played by amenity societies, such as the Garden History Society and the Victorian Society (particularly in the restoration of Nesfield’s plantings), the Urban Parks Forum, Royal Parks Review Group, English Heritage, and the Royal Parks Agency. Cecil regarded the ‘unrivalled’ parks and gardens of London as, ‘bright spots in the landscape … Each has its own associations, its own history’. Rabbitt’s book provides insight into the unique history of Regent’s Park, and is a valuable resource for researchers, planners and visitors as well as those responsible for its care and management.

London SE1 BarBara siMMs

Egypt in England (English Heritage, Swindon, 2012). By Chris Elliott. 240 × 195 mm. 320 pp. 225 colour and b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 1 8480 2088 7. Price £25.00.

The Egyptian style has always been rather a foot note in studies of English design and with good reason: while Egyptian motifs have been liberally sprinkled over the facades of buildings and burial monuments at various points over the last 200 years or so, rarely have these structures been considered great works of art and architecture. The author wisely does not seek to rehabilitate Egyptianising design but instead attempts to show when and why the style was used and how images and ideas were transmitted. The material is not particularly abundant, allowing space for detailed discussion of the circumstances surrounding the creation and execution of some of the designs and there are some wonderful vignettes: I particularly enjoyed the discussions of Egyptianising

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architecture and the politics of freemasonry; the diplomatic shenanigans surrounding the production of the Apsley House Sèvres ‘Service Egyptien’ for the Empress Josephine and its eventual use as a diplomatic gift from Louis Xviii to the Duke of Wellington; and the full story of Cleopatra’s needle. It is a pity that the content and focus of this book are not more immediately clear from the title as it perhaps does not immediately advertise itself to the right readership. While there is much here to interest the Egyptophile, the volume’s most significant audience is likely to be readers interested in English architectural history. The author’s intention is to provide a guide to the use of Egyptian style in English architecture and interior design; actual Egyptian material is only touched on when it has been reused as an architectural feature (for example Cleopatra’s needle or the Bankes Obelisk), so there is only incidental coverage of museums and the collection of Egyptian objects. The book is divided into two sections. In the first part a series of short essays (on Egyptian architecture in England, Cemeteries, Cinemas, Egyptiana, Egyptology, Freemasonry and Hiero-glyphs) contextualise the material, while the second part is divided by region and presents the surviving buildings, monuments and other objects in detail. As might be expected, the bulk of the material discussed is in London, although some of the most interesting structures, such as Marshall’s Mill in Leeds (of which more below) are not. For the landscape historian the volume will provide useful contextualisation for Egyptian and Egyptianising monuments in the landscape. Cemeteries form the focus of one of the intro-ductory essays and make up a significant proportion of extant monuments. Although far less prominent than classical and gothic motifs, the long association between the ancient Egyptians and death made it an appropriate alternative to those styles in cemetery contexts. The new cemeteries of the 1830s and ’40s provided scope for the construction of architectural features and impressive monuments in London cemeteries such as Highgate and Kensall Green as well as provincial cemeteries such as that at Anfield. Egyptianising monuments in gardens and landscapes such as the Blickling Park pyramid, Bankes Obelisk and Biddulph Grange gardens are also covered.

For me the real revelation of the book was the factory and commercial architecture and I would have liked to see an introductory chapter dedicated to it. Here we find instances of innovative design and building techniques combining with an Egyptian style. Much of the material is inter-war — the wonderful Carreras factory and the muted influence of Egyptian elements on Thomas Wallis’ London Hoover Factory and GEC Witton Factory in Birmingham are good examples — while John Outram’s Temple of the Storms provides a more recent example. The strong Art Deco heritage of the Wallis buildings can be linked with contemporary cinema design in which the exotic nature of the Egyptian style appropriately advertised the allure of the moving picture (cinemas are well treated in an introductory chapter). Marshall’s Mill in Leeds was built in the late 1830s and is the absolute highlight here. Not only was it innovative in its design, construction methods, environmental interests (it even had a turf roof with grazing sheep!) and concern for the welfare of the workforce, but it also appears to be the only Egyptianising structure surviving in England which shows any real concern for historical accuracy: the architect worked with contemporary artists and experts on Egypt, modelling the design of the office building on the temple of Horus at Edfu. In short, this is an interesting and reliable volume which will should prove a useful reference book for architectural or landscape historians but which also offers much of interest to other readers.

University of Cambridge kate spence

Men From The Ministry: how Britain saved its heritage (Yale University Press, Boston, 2013). By Simon Thurley. 216 × 138 mm. 224 pp. 50 b/w illustrations. ISBN 978 0 3001 9572 9. Price £18.99.

At first glance, the publication of the Men from the Ministry is a relatively innocuous event in heritage publishing. It is a historical account of the people behind the state conservation movement in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. It has been published to coincide with the anniversary of the 1913 Ancient Monuments Consolidation

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and Improvement Act which repealed what had gone before (including the perhaps more widely recognised Act dating from 1882), re-establishing the framework for ancient monuments protection through scheduling and other instruments. As explicitly dealing with the people involved in the functions of the Act, namely civil servants within a dedicated section of Government, rather than the functions themselves, it could be considered a somewhat arcane social history. This is far from the case however, as Thurley intimates at the introduction and builds through to a crescendo of argument with a couple of ‘killer comparisons’ in the concluding chapter. The account demonstrates clearly the politics of conservation from a unique social angle, and is an important text for what it is rather than what it contains. The heritage described here is political in the choice and values professionals have over time ascribed to sites gathered together in the ‘national collection’; heritage is Political (capital P) arising from the State’s involvement in directing conservation measures through law, policy and operation played out through a succession of professional civil servant teams now recognised in the form of English Heritage. The third political element refers to the role of the book itself, chiefly authored by the head of that quango which is suffering from unprecedented cuts and the greatest reorganisation since the original legislation. Through chronological chapters which divide the century into periods of change and consolidation for both the ‘ministry’ and the ‘national collection’ undertaken by government officers such as George Lansbury, Lionel Earle and Charles Peers (amongst others), the book has been designed to inform the reader about ‘unsung heroes’, the plight of the collection of sites in state care, and the state’s role in changing public service expectations and economies. Nineteenth-century enthusiasm for visiting historic sites led to the creation of the Office of Works (itself dating back to the fourteenth century). There is coverage of the 1882 Act, and the gradual consolidation of responsibility for sites and monuments into a single Ministry; the speeding up of protection measures and the gathering of sites into the collection. The inter-war period sees a rash of such notables as Ancient Monuments Inspectors professionalising approaches to managing the nation’s heritage, and major feats of restoration at

large-scale sites. Stonehenge, unsurprisingly, gets specific coverage, as does Hadrian’s Wall, these chapters incorporate widening views of heritage as approaches to landscape-scale monuments and historic houses develop. Industrial sites, churches and wider planning concerns test further the scope and expertise of the heritage professionals, to the point where inherent weaknesses become evident in the heritage body’s attempts at operating across the sheer breadth of government concern with the built and natural environment. Thurley posits that the Department of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings was at its lowest ebb in 1981, preceding periods as a ‘heroic period of conservation’ leading to the greater recognition of landscapes, townscapes and settings of historic buildings and monuments. Despite English Heritage’s best efforts and notable successes to instil enthusiasm and change in the approach to management of the collection, these are different sites: not collected and curated, but literally saved with huge maintenance burdens on-going in perpetuity. Distancing the collection from direct political ministerial control has also distanced policy and political appreciation of the work of the body and the sites it looks after. At the same time the economics of culture have been dominated by easel paintings; recent multimillion-pound purchases question the sustainability of that market (and public investment in it for museums and galleries) in comparison with the sums required for a ‘truly national’ collection of physical historic surroundings and environment that includes guardianship monuments and listed and scheduled sites. Thus, writing on the verge of a proposed movement of managing the collection into the third sector, despite suggesting it is no bad thing, Thurley’s double-edged conclusion implicitly warns that an overtly economic policy approach undermines the involvement of government in and its relationship with the values of the social fabric of heritage and culture. As an architect of this shift in approach, there is little doubt that Thurley will have cemented his position in the next chapter of the social history of public heritage.

University College Suffolk ian BaXter

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OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

Bennachie and the Garioch: society and ecology in the history of north-east Scotland (the Bailies of Benachi, 2013). Edited by Colin Shepherd. 124 pp. 22 b/w, 48 colour illustrations and 2 tables. ISBN 978 0 9576384 0 2. Price n.s.

This superb and beautifully illustrated little book is the second in the Bennachie Landscape series which describes work undertaken by the Community of the north-east in 2012, resulting from collaboration between the Bailies of Bennachie, members of the wider community (including children from local schools) and the University of Aberdeen on a project deservedly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Oral history has

been collected, further work has been undertaken in archives dating back to the fifteenth century, and archaeological investigation using test-pitting techniques and fieldwork has explored former rural settlement sites. The ecological background of the region has also been studied, both though historical sources and more recent surveys. The project is particularly valuable because it shows how local communities can profitably explore their own region, through this study becoming more aware of its ecological and social history, and also collect so much information that casts light upon the development of this particular historical landscape in north-east Scotland.

University of Birmingham della hooke

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