Reviews

739

Published by Maney (c) European Association of Archaeologists

inferred that the primary benefit of object networks is stability of identity, along with the potential to explore new dimensions within that identity. The downside or cost is that object networks need work and investment in order to avoid becoming devalued and irrelevant (the destabilising effects of the world of things in the book). Objects need to be taken care of and repaired, while the concept of their value needs constantly to be reasserted and transmitted through space and time. These activities, which aim to preserve identity through time, require significant investment in terms of ritual, cost, and effort. The book by Knappet helps us to understand the importance of interaction and the role that objects and groups of objects play in this process, as well as the advantages offered by approaches based on the concept of networks. Many of these approaches are applied here, and originate from the so-called complexity sciences. Other advantages are related to recent approaches that perceive material culture as beyond mere scenery or simply the result of human interaction. What the author achieves in his book is to show how network ideas have associated methods that can be applied to data to bring out new patterns and interpretations, offering new ways to study

material culture and its role in human interaction across multiple scales. REFERENCES
Bogua, M., Pastor-Satorras, R., Daz-Guilera, A. & Arenas, A. 2004. Models of Social Networks Based on Social Distance Attachment. Physical Review E, 70: 056122. doi:10.1103/ PhysRevE.70.056122. Lozano, S. 2009. Dynamics of Social Complex Networks: Some Insights into Recent Research. In: T. Gross & H. Sayama, eds. Adaptive Networks: Understanding Complex Systems. Berlin: Springer, pp. 13343. Mills, B.J., Clark, J.J.,Peeples, M.A., Haas Jr, W.R., Roberts Jr, J.M., Hill, J.B., Huntley, D.L., Borck, L., Breiger, R.L., Clauset, A. & Shackley, M.S., 2013. Transformation of Social Networks in the Late Pre-Hispanic US Southwest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15): 578590. Newman, M.E.J. 2010. Networks: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wasserman, S. & Faust, K. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

JOAN BERNABEU AUBN University of Valencia, Spain

DOI 10.1179/146195713X13721618715911

Michael B. Schiffer. Studying Technological Change: A Behavioral Approach (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011, 224pp., 38 figs., 7 tables, pbk, ISBN 978-1-60781-136-7) Academia, like many other fields of cultural production, has its fashions, whether we like it or not. Archaeology is no exception; in the aftermath of Post-Processualism it has been all too easy to dismiss (probably prematurely) those such as Lewis Binford whose work in New Archaeology was once considered radical. Mike Schiffer is one of those people, like certain rock musicians, whose work seems to defy the vagaries of fashion remaining as topical today as when he published Behavioural Archaeology in 1976.

740

European Journal of Archaeology 16 (4) 2013

In this book, Schiffer sets out a systematic review of his approach to technological change and innovation. With the exception of Brian Winston's Misunderstanding Media (1986), there have been few, if any, attempts to go beyond the mythology of the genius inventor and the assumption that invention's mother is necessity (a trope which seems to originate with Plato). Few look beyond the notion that the benefits of novelty are obvious, and explore the social, cultural and political processes that lead to the broad adoption or rejection of particular technological solutions. Here, one of Schiffer's key contributions lies in what he calls building a crap detector. Particularly in historical and contemporary contexts, technologies are invariably surrounded by mythology: folk theories and popular media accounts that give us simplistic explanations of the obvious superiority of internal combustion over the electric car or the invention of the steam engine. Even in academic research, there is a tendency to print the legend, as in the classic case of Langdon Winner's uncritical acceptance of the fables surrounding New York planner Robert Moses (Winner, 1980; Joerges, 1999). Before beginning to explain technological change it is essential to deconstruct the assumptions that have accreted around it. It might be argued that this implies a privileged world view; that in some positivist sense, Schiffer is claiming that his avowedly scientific approach allows us to know better than others. Those who take what he calls a humanist approach doubt the possibility of crafting generalisations that apply to diverse societies (p. 5), and here I assume he is thinking of postprocessual, interpretive archaeologies. Yet the whole point of archaeology is that it offers a challenge to our assumptions about the past, or indeed the present; that the theoretical analysis of material culture, in and of itself, can undermine familiarity.

Here Schiffer's emphasis on cutting the crap applies in equal measure; progressive or what we might call totalising explanations are exactly the kinds of mythologies he is seeking to explode, but this is not to say that principled generalisations are impossible, provided we accept, and attempt to circumscribe, their limitations. The book offers numerous examples of this precept, of which I offer a few as salient examples. Schiffer distinguishes between material properties and performance characteristics. He points out that whilst any material can have a wide range of material properties, only certain of those will be characteristics that are appropriated, and that different aspects may be relevant at different times in the life history of an artefact. The advantage of clay is its maleability when soft, and hardness-impermeability when fired, yet some of its material properties may be irrelevant to its utility, or may only later come to be regarded as important in social function, as insaythe particular colour of a type of clay. Equally, performance characteristics may emerge unexpectedly, as Schiffer discusses in the case of the Leyden Jar as a primitive storage medium for electricity. In order to generalise about innovation, we need to understand how and why certain properties of materials are appropriated or co-opted, rather than accepting them as self-evident. At another level, it is all too easy to interpret innovation in terms of simple, for the want of a better word capitalist, economics. Indeed, tall buildingsskyscrapers have been symbols of the power of capital since the early twentieth century and continue to be so in the twenty-first. Yet their construction is often more to do with the social aggrandisement of their creators than it is any conceivable profit motive. And over time the purposes of construction have shifted; until the nineteenth century the largest buildings were of religious or civic origin, in the late nineteenth/early

Published by Maney (c) European Association of Archaeologists

Reviews

741

twentieth these were dwarfed by the structures erected by industrialists, which in turn have been superseded by the symbols of financial power. In effect, as Schiffer says, the changing urban skyline is a graph of changing social conditions and status. Equally, the role of material culture in the construction of social status can change both because the structure of society changes and because the role of artefacts within this stratification evolves with it. In a feudal society the place of material culture in lite differentiation is relatively simple, but with the iteration of emergent social groups these roles become more complex. From the emergence of a middle class at the end of the Middle Ages onward, the ambiguities created by societal complexity have been a driver for technical innovation. Not least because technological change, in itself, leads to a trickle down effect where what were once markers of lite status become accessible to the mass of the population. Thus the social markers of the rich represent not just peer competition but also the increasing difficulty of marking lite status in material terms. There are also instances where technological innovation itself stimulates invention; aluminum being a case in point. Only discovered in the early nineteenth century, the cost of production meant that aluminum remained a virtually precious metal comparable to gold or platinum. Despite, as Schiffer points out, predictions dating from the midnineteenth century as to what the performance characteristics of the metal could imply, it was only the later development of electrometallurgy that facilitated its widespread use, such that from the mid twentieth century onwards it has become one of the defining materials of the age. Finally, as Schiffer discusses in later chapters of the book, questions of design choices and manufacturing process are crucial in understanding change and

innovation in technology. As noted above with respect to performance characteristics, the potentials and constraints offered by manufacturing procedures have always shaped how and why products are made as they are. Indeed, for example, despite the introduction of electrometallurgy to the smelting, plating, etc. of metals in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, the basic principles of casting and machining metals have always applied to manufacturing processes. Conversely, one might argue, questions of design choices, which are often intimately linked to the economies of industrial production, have come to predominate in the how and why of technical innovations. Thus the design of any artefact may have had to accommodate constraints involving how it is manufactured, marketed and serviced/maintained, as well as any consideration of its end users. Although Schiffer does refer to a variety of pre- and proto-historic examples throughout the book, my feeling is that its arguments are largely applicable to historic and contemporary contexts. Whilst one might want to argue, for example, that in some sense all artefacts have been designed, it has only been since the early twentieth century that design has come to predominate. With the professionalization of industrial design and its intimate articulation with advertising since the 1920s, it comes to be the primary consideration in studying technological choices, perhaps to the exclusion of many others. Similarly, it is only in the well documented historic past where the paradoxes and contradictions between what things are, and what people say they are, become particularly apparent. My only other reservation is that I kept thinking of places in which Schiffer could have connected his discussion to other discourses and debates. Although he mentions Winner, he does not discuss the aforementioned Winner/Joerges debate, which to me epitomises the pitfalls that

Published by Maney (c) European Association of Archaeologists

742

European Journal of Archaeology 16 (4) 2013

Published by Maney (c) European Association of Archaeologists

surround the politics of artefacts. Issues around material properties versus performance characteristics have also been discussed by Ingold (2007: 13), following the work of David Pye (1978), in terms of subjective qualities, opening up the debate as to what we mean by materials and materiality. Schiffer rightly emphasises artefact life histories, but does not cite Kopytoff (1986) or the many biographical studies that have followed him. Finally, Schiffer's arguments around the mythologisation of technological change have obvious connections to the work of Roland Barthes (1993[1957]) and, I would suggest, those of the Frankfurt School such as Marcuse and Adorno (e.g. 2001[1970]), who saw the material world as a dialectical challenge to conventional opinion. Maybe in the second edition?! REFERENCES
Adorno, T. 2001[1970]. Negative Dialectics. (trans. Dennis, Redmond). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Barthes, R. 1993[1957]. Mythologies. London: Vintage. Ingold, T. 2007. Materials against Materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1): 116. Joerges, B. 1999. Do Politics Have Artefacts? Social Studies of Science, 29(3): 41131. Kopytoff, I. 1986. The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In: A. Appadurai, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 6494. Pye, D. 1978. The Nature and Aesthetics of Design. London: The Herbert Press. Winner, L. 1980. Do Artifacts have Politics? Daedelus, 109(1): 12136. Winston, B. 1986. Misunderstanding Media. London: Routledge.

PAUL GRAVES-BROWN Honorary Senior Research Associate, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, UK

DOI 10.1179/146195713X13721618715957

Andrew Meirion Jones, Davina Freedman, Blaze O'Connor, Hugo Landin-Whymark, Richard Tipping and Aaron Watson. An Animate Landscape: Rock Art and the Prehistory of Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2011, 356pp., 153 figs., 56 tables, pbk, ISBN 978-1-905119-41-7) As a Trustee of the Kilmartin House Museum, I am happily open to accusations of bias, but Kilmartin Glen (valley) on the west coast of mainland Scotland is in my view one of Britain's most important early prehistoric landscapes. The area abounds with rock art (the densest collection in Britain and Ireland), two cursuses, a henge, cist cemeteries including Beaker burials, timber and stone circles, standing stones and stone alignments, Neolithic chambered tombs, and a Bronze Age linear cemetery. Grave goods, rock art, and other materials demonstrate contacts with Ireland, North East England, and the Lower Rhine. During the Bronze Age this focus of sacred activities appears to have been an important crossroads in the trade of bronze and copper between Ireland and Scotland; it may even have been a source of native copper itself (see Chapter 12). To boot, it still remains a