Howard Williams . Archaeologies of remembrance: death and memory in past societies

Antiquity, June, 2003 by N. James

xiv 310 pages, 54 figures, 5 tables. 2003. New York (NY): Kluwer Academic / Plenum; 0-30647451-4 hardback.

K.S. BROWN & YANNIS HAMILAKIS (ed.). The usable past: Greek metahistories, xiv 239 pages, 33 figures, 2 tables. 2003. Lanham (MD): Lexington; 0-7391-0384-9 paperback $20.95.

Dr WILLIAMS introduces twelve thoughtful case studies. They include: two of monuments of the earlier Neolithic of Britain; one on memory and identity in Early Bronze Age Scotland; one on 'bog bodies' in northwestern Europe; V. Hope on tombstones of Legio II Augusta; one on Roman objects in early Anglo-Saxon graves; two on early Medieval epigraphy in Wales; a paper on Anglo-Scandinavian gravestones from York; one on graves at three monasteries in England and Wales; and a contribution on the history of collecting from mortuary assemblages in France (B. Effros). Nine introduced by K. BROWN & Y. HAMILAKIS take on the complicated matter of how history is moulded in the present for the especially complicated case of Greece. Readers of ANTIQUITY will be drawn, first, to the paper on Albanian (Arvanitic) speakers in Boeotia (J. Bintliff) and the one on 'vernacular and national architecture' (E. Bastea), which concludes that 'we cannot recall' without 'a coherent narrative' (p. 166).