Reviews
seems that every approach that attempts to general-
ize/define the various aspects leads to a narrowing
of the concept: a simplification of diversity into a
manageable form’ (p. 2). Well…yes: that’s what science
— or analysis in general — does. While the approaches
advocated here do lead us to rich descriptions of indi-
vidual cases, the big picture is lost, and comparisons
become very particularistic. One might argue that
the big picture has received far too much attention,
but I do not think that eliminating it entirely is the
appropriate answer. The fundamental conclusion of
these analyses is that all societies, of all time periods,
are ‘complex’, and that to claim otherwise is demean-
ing to ancient and/or indigenous people: ‘…to regard
complexity as a property common to all society and
human interaction is only possible within a scholar-
ship that has embraced inclusivity and multivocality’
(p. 7). The authors seem to be using a common-sense
understanding of ‘complex’ to mean ‘complicated’.
But, if everything is complex, then ‘complexity’ itself
is not very fruitful to study. Demonstrating that all
societies are complex leaves open questions about
how societies are different, and which differences have
been significant in the development of the ancient and
modern world.
The editors and contributors have provided a
legitimate, if somewhat repetitive, critique of simplistic
taxonomies (e.g. chiefdom/state or ranked/stratified)
and unilineal models. They have foregrounded the
valuable point that lateral social relationships — e.g.
kinship, gender, production, feasting etc. — play as
important roles in daily life as vertical relationships,
and archaeologists should put effort into understand-
ing the materialization of these lateral relationships. In
addition, they have effectively emphasized that large
and differentiated social groups may share egalitar-
ian communal ideologies and practices as well as
hierarchical ones. However, in attempting to ‘socialize
complexity’, they have thrown out the baby of broad
comparative patterning with the bathwater of Western
models of progress. The volume demonstrates creative
analysis of rich sets of archaeological data. I hope that
the authors in the future will escape from their current
polemics and also contribute to the big picture of the
development of human societies.
Janet E. Levy
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
USA
Email: jelevy@uncc.edu
139
The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia, by Philip L. Kohl,
2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
ISBN-13 978-0-521-84780-3 hardback £48 & US$89;
xxiii+296 pp., 112 figs.
David L. Peterson
This book is very appropriately titled. Philip Kohl’s
account of the making of the Bronze Age in Eurasia is
largely based on the material practices through which
ancient Eurasian societies, in a sense (and with a tip
of the hat to V.G. Childe), made themselves. While
acknowledging that the work of archaeologists ‘is
necessarily constrained by the social context in which
archaeologists must function’, among the author’s
objectives is to address the gap which developed during
the Cold War era between Anglo-American researchers
whose investigations centre on the Near East and west-
ern Europe, and those within the Commonwealth of
Independent States (and previously, the Soviet Union)
whose research is situated within Eurasia. In part, this
gap can also be attributed to the evidence with which
researchers of the Bronze Age period in the Near East
and Eurasia respectively work; the former having a
view of the past that is heavily informed by the histori-
cal evidence available from thousands of texts, while
the latter almost exclusively rely on material culture.
Figuring largely in Kohl’s account is the material
evidence for developments that significantly colour
scholarly views of the later prehistory of the areas of
Eurasia that are the province of the book: the Eurasian
steppes, the Caucasus and the desert zone of central
Asia. These include early metal networks, modelled
according to E.N. Chernykh’s concept of metallurgical
provinces (Chernykh 1992 and elsewhere), wheeled
vehicles, the domestication of the horse and camel, and
the development of nomadism.
One thing that scholars and students of other
regions may need to work past in approaching this
book, or virtually any archaeological text on the
regions it covers, is the ambiguity associated with the
term ‘Eurasia’. By and large, ‘Eurasia’ has come to refer
to the area formerly encompassed by the Soviet Union,
as well as closely adjoining portions of Southeast
Europe, Mongolia, and western China. This definition
will not satisfy those who may wish to include all of
Europe and Asia combined, but the majority of dis-
senters are likely be those whose primary interests lie
far beyond the boundaries just mentioned. In support
of these admittedly fuzzy boundaries is the commonly
accepted terminology for the Eurasian steppes, which
CAJ 19:1, 139–41 © 2009 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
doi:10.1017/S0959774309000213 Printed in the United Kingdom.
 Reviews
lie in a broad belt from Hungary to Manchuria, and the
historical ties between prehistoric steppe communi-
ties and those in neighbouring areas of central Asia,
the Caucasus and western Siberia. As a geographic
signifier, ‘Eurasia’ moves beyond politically loaded
designations that carry no significance for the ancient
people in question, such as ‘the former Soviet Union’
(cf. Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR: Chernykh 1992).
It is also preferable to another imaginable alternative,
‘Central Asia’, which is used increasingly in geopoliti-
cal (as opposed to archaeological) circles to refer not
only to the Independent Republics of what used to
be Soviet Central Asia, but the Caucasus as well. This
would be unsatisfactory or worse to the archaeologists
who work in these regions. Better to accept ‘Eurasia’
and move on, keeping in mind that any problems it
may pose have much to do with the urge to reconcile
the geography of past societies with the boundaries
of modern nation states and federations. These are
not only in flux, but as the author reminds here and
elsewhere (Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Kohl et al. 2007),
they were never meant to coincide except for the most
deeply problematic reasons.
This is an important and much needed addition
to the small but growing literature on the Eurasian
past that is readily accessible to English language
readers, including the volume by Koryakova &
Epimakhov (2007) also recently published in the
same series by Cambridge University Press. In its
detailed and synthetic treatment of a geographically
and temporally broad portion of Eurasian prehistory,
its lengthy bibliography, and numerous references
to Russian and other non-English sources, it should
quickly become a staple on the shelves of scholars of
ancient Old World civilizations, and graduate and
undergraduate reading lists alike. Kohl’s examination
of many and varied alternatives to urbanization from
the fourth to the late second millennium bc also make
this book a logical complement to standard texts on
early Near Eastern history. (I should note, however,
that in my experience it is a challenging selection
for introductory courses on Old World archaeology
and ancient history.) These alternatives include the
gigantic, non-urban settlements of up to 400 hectares
that appeared during the Copper Age in Southeast
Europe; the Carpatho-Balkan metallurgical province
of the fifth to fourth millennium bc, which joined
communities in Southeast Europe with others that
occupied river valleys within the steppes as far east as
the Middle Volga; the agropastoral and pastoral socie-
ties associated with the Early and Middle Bronze Age
Circumpontic metallurgical province, especially those
that made and used Kuro-Araxes ceramics, which are
identified in Early Bronze Age levels across the Near
140
East from the Caucasus to the Levant; the intriguing
settlements of the Middle Bronze Age Sintashta-
Arkaim culture; and the emergence and dissolution of
the oasis fortress civilization of the Bactria-Margiana
Archaeological Complex (BMAC). The amply detailed
accounts of these phenomena, ample bibliography,
and short, personal, biographies of leading researchers
in several regions also make it an excellent gateway
resource to the ever-growing research on the Copper
and Bronze Age in these areas, especially for those
who read Russian, or are willing to learn how.
Kohl’s overall aim for the book is the construction
of ‘a narrative account of the increasing integration of
Eurasian steppe societies into the “civilized” literate
world of West Asia’ from the fourth to second mil-
lennia bc. He is therefore ultimately concerned more
with the broader historical processes in which Eura-
sian societies participated than with the individual
developments just mentioned. In this he consciously
and critically partakes of aspects of both processual
and post-processual archaeologies in the examination
of ‘broad contours of large-scale historical develop-
ments’ that accompanied this trend. Although the
categories ‘processualist’ and ‘post-processualist’
are of less and less relevance to Anglo-American
archaeology, this is interesting given his past (Kohl
1993; 1998) and present debates with processualists
and post-processualists alike. Whether or not (as he
sees it) these perspectives are linked to ‘provincialism’
and disinterest in ‘actual archaeological evidence’, it
is hard to disagree with him as he cautions American
and British archaeologists to pay greater attention ‘to
what archaeologists working within other traditions
— and not publishing in English — are actually doing’.
However, I take some issue with the author’s use of
devolution to characterize alternative developments
in Eurasia, such as the gigantic settlements of the
Copper Age in western Ukraine, in comparison to the
evolution of urban society in the Near East (especially
on pp. 10–15). I do not argue with Kohl’s intent with
this, which is to counter some researchers’ unrealistic
claims that Cucuteni-Tripolye and Sintashta-Arkaim
settlements constituted urban states. However, to my
mind the use of the term ‘devolution’ suggests that
we should hold developments in Eurasia up to a Near
Eastern standard, which risks duplicating aspects of
the neo-evolutionism that the author himself criticizes.
It is admittedly difficult to find the right words to
describe the qualitative differences between ancient
Eurasian societies and early Sumerian city-states.
He is not altogether comfortable with ‘devolution’
either, which, as he puts it, might perhaps be better
described as the ‘cyclical transformation of social
complexity…rather than its continued growth’ (p.
 Reviews
257). As Koryakova (1996) has argued, this may in fact
be what occurred in the steppes in the second and first
millennia bc. Moreover, the connotations of cyclical
development are far different from devolution, and
in my opinion, less problematic.
While closely examining trajectories in the devel-
opment of metallurgy, wheeled vehicles and horseback
riding in Eurasia through the end of the Bronze Age,
in keeping with the interest in interregional relations
that has occupied the author throughout his career to
date, he ends by contextualizing them within patterns
and processes in the later prehistory of West Asia. As
he points out, none of these developments, whether in
Eurasia or West Asia as a whole, occurred in isolation.
Although Philip Kohl is quick to acknowledge the
contribution of a legion of international researchers to
his unique synthesis, in his overriding concern with
the relationships that were involved in The Making of
Bronze Age Eurasia, this book is a solid work of anthro-
pological archaeology, something which is as yet still
uncommon for research in this part of the world. His
focus on the participation of ancient Eurasian societies
in these shared developments also makes it important
reading for scholars and students of the prehistory and
early history of other parts of West Asia.
David L. Peterson
Department of Anthropology
Idaho State University
921 South 8th Avenue
Pocatello, ID 83209-8005
USA
Email: Peterson@isu.edu
References
Chernykh, E.N., 1992. Ancient Metallurgy in the USSR. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kohl, P.L., 1993. Limits to a post-processual archaeology (or,
The dangers of a new scholasticism), in Archaeologi-
cal Theory: Who Sets the Agenda? eds. N. Yoffee & A.
Sherratt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
13–19.
Kohl, P.L., 1998. Beyond caricature and polemics and
towards a healthy archaeology. Archaeological Dia-
logues 5.1, 30–34.
Kohl, P.L. & C. Fawcett, 1995. Nationalism, Politics, and
the Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kohl, P.L., M. Kozelsky & N. Ben-Yehuda, 2007. Selective
Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Com-
memoration, and Consecration of National Pasts. Chicago
(IL): University of Chicago Press.
Koryakova, L.N., 1996. Social trends in temperate Eurasia
during the second and first millennia bc. Journal of
European Archaeology 4, 243–80.
141
Koryakova, L. & A.V. Epimakhov, 2007. The Urals and Western
Siberia in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Native American Landscapes of St Catherines Island,
Georgia, by David Hurst Thomas, 2008. New York
(NY): American Museum of Natural History
(Anthropological Papers 88.); ISSN 0065-9452
paperback (3 parts) £66 & US$100; 1184 pp., 205
figs., 209 tables
Kenneth E. Sassaman
St Catherines Island is one of several composite
barrier islands fronting the Atlantic seaboard of the
Georgia Bight (USA). With a slowdown in postglacial
sea rise some 5000 years ago, the island approached
its modern configuration of beach ridges and salt
marshes surrounding an interior, Pleistocene core.
The emergent mosaic of tidal creeks and marsh flats
supported productive shellfish beds, notably oyster,
as well as intertidal fishes. Complimented by the mast
and deer of its core habitat, St Catherines’ salt marshes
formed the economic basis of intensive human occupa-
tion for over 4000 years. Knowledge of this occupation
has been shaped, often wrongly, by written accounts
of the Guale Indians who were missionized by Jesuits
in the sixteenth century. David Hurst Thomas and
colleagues have spent the past three decades building
an archaeological case that not only reveals the limita-
tions of these ethnohistoric accounts, but provides one
of the best empirical records of pre-Columbian native
ecology ever assembled.
Native American Landscapes is the 1184-page,
three-volume treatise of one of North America’s
premiere archaeological projects. Benefiting from the
un­developed conditions of a 5670 ha sea island (includ-
ing marsh) and the sustained generosity of its private
stewards, the project began in the mid-1970s with an
assessment of the mortuary sand mounds scattered
across the island (Thomas et al. 1978; Thomas & Larsen
1979). The project quickly expanded to include an
island-wide survey, as well as full-scale excavation of
Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. The latter effort has
been thoroughly reported elsewhere (Thomas 1987,
among many), and now, with this behemoth of a report,
the results of island-wide investigations are published,
some 28 years since most of the fieldwork was completed.
The long gestation of this report is hardly regret-
ful. The prolonged time has witnessed more nuanced
CAJ 19:1, 141–3 © 2009 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
doi:10.1017/S0959774309000225 Printed in the United Kingdom.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.