Antiquity最新文献

We appreciate the respondents’ comments on our debate article ‘Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions’ (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices—such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes—often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that cultural practices are intergenerational. As Frieman (2024: 1421) notes, ideas and practices persist because they are “valued, recreated, manipulated, instrumentalised and enacted generation after generation”; and as Ingold (2024: 1417) puts it, traditional tasks “are not subject to the free will of the individual but fall upon practitioners as part of their responsibilities” to their communities. Drawing on the practice of Bronze Age metallurgy, Pollard (2024) asks the million-dollar questions: how does innovation occur, and what causes it? As both Prentiss (2024) and Pollard note, for example, the pace of technological change is often punctuated, an observation common across the natural and social sciences, but one that defies easy explanation (e.g. Duran-Nebreda et al. 2024; O'Brien et al. 2024).

Throughout the twentieth century, considerable research has been dedicated to understanding the rise, development and end of ancient cities. In recent years, there has been a remarkable upsurge of new methodological and theoretical approaches applied in urbanism studies, which enables us to improve, validate or question our knowledge about ancient urban life. The three books reviewed here concern the development, transformation and experience of ancient Roman cities; leading experts in urban history and archaeology discussing the potential of new technologies and conceptual frameworks for analysing Roman urban space.

Many years ago, I taught a course at the University of Aberdeen on the ‘4As’ of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (Ingold 2013). As we had been discussing flint-knapping, I invited the master-knapper, John Lord, to give a demonstration. We watched in awe as he skilfully detached flakes from a flint nodule of irregular shape to reveal the classical, bifacial form of an Acheulean handaxe. Then it was our turn to use wooden or antler hammers to detach flakes from fragments of flint. After an hour or two, none of us had made any headway. What looked simple in practised hands would have required years to learn, not a single afternoon! Nevertheless, the workshop taught us an important lesson. As Bentley and O'Brien (2024) remind us, mastering the skills to make an Acheulean biface requires hundreds of hours of practice. The question is, why does it need so long? What is going on during these many hours?

The authors of this book are archaeologists who want to create a field they describe as ‘critical paleoeconomics’. Their quest is promising in several ways. For example, they are not averse to grand narratives and believe modern economic theory can offer insights into various features of ancient economies, including markets, trade, money and debt.

Today, Neolithic circular enclosures are generally regarded as evidence of the first monumental architecture in Europe. They are undoubtedly a topical subject in Neolithic research and also attract great interest from a broader audience. This has not always been the case. Just over 40 years ago, the few examples known then, mainly from Bavaria and Bohemia, were regarded as exotic and of no particular importance for the cultural-historical assessment of early farming societies in Europe. Thanks to aerial archaeology, the number of known sites increased rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s in Bavaria and Lower Austria. This has also been the case, since the 1990s, in East Germany and other countries of the former Eastern Bloc when political change made systematic prospecting flights possible. In addition, the development of geophysical prospection methods provided new insights into the structure and landscapes into which the enclosures were embedded. Finally, the increasing number of rescue excavations and large-scale scientific excavations have contributed to a better understanding of such sites as a characteristic component of Middle Neolithic societies in Central Europe.

This edited volume by Mark Hauser and Julia Jong Haines aims to bring together local narratives within the context of the Indian Ocean in modern times, from c. AD 1500, and establish how these narratives can inform historical archaeology. As the editors highlight in the introductory chapter, historical archaeology has been greatly informed and inspired by the Atlantic world and its colonial histories. Here, they seek instead to foreground the Indian Ocean as a setting for historical archaeology in its own right. The authors use the long and deep history of interconnectedness and trade in this ocean as a basis for understanding more recent history, not just in light of colonial impact but through bottom-up approaches that focus on the local in the global. The case studies in this book and its overall theme are also part of the ongoing process to decentralise Europe in archaeological discourse. The book consists of 11 chapters, including an introductory chapter by Haines and Hauser and two commentaries. The majority of the case studies are from island East Africa or South India, which naturally limits the scope somewhat.