European societies in the Bronze Age.

PEARSON, MIKE PARKER

A.F. HARDING. European societies in the Bronze Age. xviii+552 pages, 134 figures, 10 tables. 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 0-521-36477-9 hardback 52.50 [pounds sterling] & US$79.95, 0-521-36729-8 paperback 19.95 [pounds sterling] & US$34.95.

The archaeology of the Bronze Age has few champions at the moment in Britain -- in contrast to the Neolithic and the Iron Age -- but this is a monumental work of synthesis produced by one of those few. It is a splendid successor to Coles & Harding's Bronze Age Europe (1979), eschewing that volume's emphasis on chronology and regional sequences for a thematic presentation of Europe between c. 2500 BC and c. 750 BC. Those themes are: houses and villages; burial; the domestic economy; transport and contact; metals; other crafts (potting, wood-working, salt production, textiles, glass and faience production); warfare; religion and ritual; hoards and hoarding; people; social organization; and, to end with, scale and interaction in the Bronze Age world.

This is an extremely useful work of reference -- I was delighted to be able to chase up specific questions about the contextual associations of bronze working in settlements, or the evidence for bread, or -- at a broader level -- the use of wooden coffins. Detailed footnotes and an impressive bibliography provide the reader with links to sources and also demonstrate just how extensively the literature has grown across Europe in 20 years. This dense text is made more digestible through commentaries which discuss the changes in archaeological theory and social interpretation and attempt to set the themes within broader perspectives. These are perhaps less successful. I was not entirely convinced that the author's stated aim of demolishing the Hawkesian ladder of inference or the ethnocentric categories of modern Western perception (such as maintaining dichotomies between symbolic and functional, or ideological and economic) was always carried through in interpretation. There are a few interesting speculations -- whether, for example, tree-trunk coffins embodied concepts of regeneration and fertility in the context of death, and whether the circular design of British roundhouses referenced the circular barrow features of the British Early and Middle Bronze Age, themselves referencing the ceremonial circular henges and timber circles of the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. The author proposes this `psychological' reason for why houses in Britain were round as an alternative to a `functional' or practical explanation (that rectangular houses are more complicated to build). Yet we might query not only the truth of the latter proposition but also its implication for the relative intelligences of people in Britain as opposed to the Continent. Furthermore, this dichotomizing of practical and psychological reasoning is an unsatisfactory formulation of human agency. Harding compounds the problem with one of his few empirical errors when he states that Bronze Age roundhouse entrances were probably determined by the direction of the prevailing wind; until the Late Bronze Age most faced southwards rather than east as he implies. Another throw-away statement, that the disposal of the dead is a basic and universal rule of hygiene, also betrays an unexpected lack of understanding about the diversity of social practices past and present.

The most ubiquitous form of Bronze Age material culture -- pottery -- is given rather cursory treatment. Some might welcome this, but the reader comes away with the erroneous impression that pottery was made and used locally and that there was no long-distance or maritime transport of ceramics. The sections on metalwork and weapons are, by contrast, very full and informative. One small gripe of mine is that the rapier is presented as a temporary, unsuitable weapon whose effectiveness could not last that it did so for at least 200 years (and considerably longer in some areas) is dismissed as the time of a prehistoric blink of the eye. Perhaps this is symptomatic of an underlying structural problem with the book in that chronology and temporality, together with regionality, have been played down at the expense of material/social themes. It thus appears as if this book was written during the course of a paradigm shift in archaeological interpretation, balancing the empiricism of culture history with the systemic themes of the New Archaeology and having to stay fashionable by leavening them with the occasional nod to post-processual critiques.

Despite these criticisms, this book is a remarkable achievement. It is an exceptional work of reference and synthesis which makes accessible a continent's archaeology over almost 2000 years. Anthony Harding is to be congratulated for taking on this Herculean task and for completing it successfully. The book's level of theorizing might not satisfy certain archaeological colleagues but few would be capable of producing such a thorough empirical work. Its density and size are, however, unlikely to endear it to students. Harding is right to pursue the 'big picture' of pan-European prehistory even though he recognizes, near the end, that understandings at the local level will come to dominate Bronze Age studies. How we adequately integrate these multiple scales of spatiality -- continental, regional and local -- and temporality is surely the big question for future research.

MIKE PARKER PEARSON Department of Archaeology & Prehistory, University of Sheffield