New book chronicle

Antiquity, Sept, 2008 by Madeleine Hummler

Memory, from the 'dark abyss of time' to present day conflict zones, via biographies of some of the British players in twentieth-century archaeology, permeates this chronicle. Two points emerge: first, that good writing matters. Second, that the past is eternally composed.

The past composite

LAURENT OLIVIER. Le sombre abime du temps: memoire etarcheologie. 304 pages. 2008. Paris; Seuil; 978-2-02-096637-5 paperback 21 [euro].

ANDREW JONES. Memory and material culture. xiv 258 pages, 38 illustrations. 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-83708-8 hardback 40 [pounds sterling] & $80; 978-0-521-54551-8 paperback 14.99 [pounds sterling] & $25.99.

NORMAN YOFFEE (ed.). Negotiating the past in the past: identity, memory, and landscape in archaeological research. viii 268 pages, 55 illustrations, 2 tables. 2007. Tucson (AZ): University of Arizona Press; 978-0-8165-2670-3 paperback $39.95.

PHILIP L. KOHL, MARA KOZELSKY & NACHMAN BENYEHUDA (ed.). Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts. iv 426 pages, 30 illustrations, 1 table. 2008. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press; 978-0-226-45059-9 paperback $26 & 13.50 [pounds sterling].

NICHOLAS STANLEY-PRICE (ed.). Cultural heritage in postwar recovery: papers from the ICCROM forum held on October 4-6, 2005 (ICCROM Conservation Studies 6). viii 120 pages, 80 b&w & colour illustrations. 2007. Rome: ICCROM; 92-9077-201-8.

BEVERLEY BUTLER. Return to Alexandria: an ethnography of cultural heritage, revivalism, and museum memory. 300 pages, 40 illustrations. 2007. Walnut Creek (CA): Left Coast Press; 978-1-59874-190-2 hardback 40 [pounds sterling]; 978-1-59874-191-9 paperback 18.99 [pounds sterling].

PETER SHERLOCK. Monuments and memory in Early Modern England. xiv 282 pages, 38 illustrations. 2008. Aldershot: Ashgate; 978-0-7546-6093-4 hardback 55 [pounds sterling].

KITTY HAUSER. Bloody old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the archaeology of modern life. xviii 286 pages, 60 illustrations. London: Granta; 978-1-86207-873-4 hardback 14.99 [pounds sterling].

MIRIAM C. DAVIS. Davie Kathleen Kenyon: digging up the Holy Land. 280 pages, 40 illustrations. 2008. Walnut Creek (CA): Left Coast Press; 978-1-59874-325-8 hardback 34.99 [pounds sterling]; 978-1-59874-326-5 paperback 13.99 [pounds sterling].

ADAM STOUT. Creating prehistory: druids, ley humers and archaeologists in pre-war Brimin. x 318 pages, 33 illustrations. 2008. Malden (MA) & Oxford: Blackwell; 978-1-4051-5504-5 hardback; 978-1-4051-5505-2 paperback 22.99 [pounds sterling].

Books with 'Memory' in their titles are proliferating and, on receipt, are likely to provoke a Violet Elizabeth Bott reaction from this reviews editor (for non-English or younger readers this is the lisping girl in the Just William schoolboy book series who will 'scweam and scweam and scweam until I'm thick'). Why? Because the 'memory' tag appears attached to just about anything. Nevertheless, there are many enlightening studies in the bundle under review here, and, as we shall see, a great deal of common ground.

Let us start with the best-written first. LAURENT OLIVIER'S is a fine book, the sort that gets discussed on high-brow radio--and it has, on France Culture. Le sombre abime du temps (from a phrase by the eighteenth-century naturalist Buffon) is, I suspect, intended to reach a readership other than archaeologists, though it should be on the latter's bookshelves too. It is a worthy addition to the Couleur des idees series published by Seuil: a captivating essay seeking to explain what archaeology is, what it does and what it does not do. Olivier insists that the past cannot be recreated, as it is constantly transformed by its afterlife into the present. This position may not be new, at least to archaeologists, but it is worth paying attention to. Olivier is searching for a new way to read the past; somewhere between the stances adopted by Kristiansen (the stuff of the past) and Holtorf (the past in the present) in a recent Antiquity debate (vol. 82, June 2008: 488-92; both protagonists are in fact far more sophisticated than their polarised views let on). Olivier's argument is that archaeologists, his 'rag-and-bone men of the past' are 'those who bring back the vanished past, who make it reappear in the present and who, in so doing, change history by making the past happen' (en faisant advenir le passe) (my translation, p. 97). The first part of this sentence puts forward the conventional view that archaeology brings the past back, but it is the second part that matters: faire advertir le passe, which implicitly contains the notion of transformation. This is precisely what Olivier conceives the role of archaeology to be: an understanding, with its own grammar, of the trajectory of the past into the present. Consequently there is no 'Once upon the time there was ... (il etait une fois ...)', only 'Once upon a time there has been ... (il a ete une fois ...)'--hence the past composite of this chronicle's title.