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American Anthropologist Vol. 104, No. 1 March 2002 first is on p, 112 in the Darvill paper where, in reference to the entrances to Durrington Walls, the text should read "southeast" rather than "southwest"; a little further on, reference is made to flint mines to the northwest of Durrington Walls, but Figure 8.1 shows them as being to the northeast. The second occurs on p. 468 in the paper by McGlade, where one reads, "over the past 2,000 years spanning the first neolithic colonisations, through the later Iberian and Romanisation periods," which is not only obviously an error but also makes it difficult to interpret the statement in the following paragraph that the primary goal of the project was to gain an understanding of the dynamics affecting the region "spanning a period covering the last 2,500 years." Together, the two volumes provide a broad overview of the kinds of work being carried out in landscape archaeology in the early to mid-1990s. Both include contributions that are interesting, thought provoking, and useful. Both range widely around the world and throughtime.Being the longer of the two, the Ucko and Layton volume naturally provides a wider range of perspectives, but anyone interested in the interaction between cultures and the landscape will find something of value in each. Both are, in my opinion, valuable contributions to the literature and well worth reading.
REFERENCES CITED Fox, Sir Cyril 1932 The Personality of Britain. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales. Renfrew, Colin 1973 Monuments, Mobilization and Social Organization in Neolithic Wessex. In The Explanation of Culture Change, Colin Refrew, ed., pp. 539-558. London: Duckworth. Trigger, Bruce G. 1968 The Determinants of Settlement Patterns. In Settlement Archaeology, K. C. Chang, ed., pp. S3-78. Palo Alto, CA: National Press (Mayfield). Willey, Gordon 1953 Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Vini Valley, Peru B A E Bulletin 155. Washington, DC U.S. Government Printing Office.

and places providing wide vistas are all commonly seen as places linking different levels and states of existence and as forms of power. James E. Brady and Wendy Ashmore (AK, pp. 124-145) describe how mountains, caves, and water orient and order the Maya world, strongly influencing architecture and other aspects of their culture. As in papers discussed earlier, the earth is seen as sacred and animateas "Earth Lord." Caves, pits, and waterholes are conceptual counterparts, linking living people with the earth and with the ancestors. Structures are conceived of metaphorically as "hills" and temples atop the pyramidal mountains interpreted as symbolic caves. Maarten van de Guchte (AK, pp. 149-168) reports that in the Inca world ideologically important landscape featuresthe ritual/sacred places known as huacaare marked only by rocks or textiles and can be identified only through ethnohistorical descriptions. Together with a system of lines called ceques, these provided a key to the ritual landscape, incorporating information about the ritual calendar and social relationships. The final paper to be described, by Lisa Kealhofer (AK, pp. 58-82), shifts to a very different time and place. It deals with social rather than sacred landscapes, describing how spacespecifically garden spacewas used by the settlers of colonial Virginia to "establish, negotiate, and maintain community and individual social identity" (p. 76) and how this reflects aspects of economics, politics, and social organization in colonial Virginia. As can be expected in collections such as these, the papers vary considerably in quality. A small minority of papers in each volume suffer from good ideas poorly conveyed by bad writing. In addition, a few papers are marred by discussions of postmodernist concerns that seem designed more to show off the authors' intellectual prowess, knowledge of recent philosophical fads, and political biases than to contribute to our understanding of landscapes. 1 encountered remarkably few obvious errors; the only ones noted both being in the Ucko and Layton collection. The

Two Approaches to an Archaeology of the Social

IAN HODDER

Stanford University Social Theory in Archaeology. Michael Brian Schiffer, ed. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. 235 pp. Social Transformations In Archaeology: Global and Local Perspectives. Kristian Kristiansen and Michael Row. lands. London: Routledge, 1998. 438 pp. In approaching the edited volume by Schiffer, 5<Hit// Theory in Archaeology, 1 was intrigued. Alter all, I had recently read tin- following by Schiller in another book that purports to develop a new behavioral theory of material culture

Readers may be nonplussed at the absence in the new theory of much vocabulary . , . such as meaning, sign, symbol, intention, motivation, purpose, goal, attitude, value, belief, norm, function, mind, and culture. Despite herculean efforts In the sodal sciences to define these often ethnocentric or metaphysical notions, theyremainbehaviorally problematic and so are superfluous in the present pro|ect How could someone who rejected everything that many anthropologists, sociologists, and historians regard as central components of the social come to build a social theory? Was the title just hubris, or had a new thcocy emerged that would sweep away all that we know and substitute something radically different? Toward the end of

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the book, Susan Kus notes that she had been asked to contribute a chapter to a working conference whose original title was "Social Theory in Archaeology: Setting the Agenda" (p- 156) (see also Schiffer, p. 2). The book, which derives from the conference, has lost this agenda-setting subtitle, but given the views of the editor, what could "social theory" possibly mean? My sense of wonder only increased when I saw the list of contributions to the volume. These covered an enormous breadth from evolutionary biology to the empathetic reconstruction of past sensuous experience. Had Schiffer somehow miraculously welded this diversity of authors into one new theory? Certainly, the initial pages of the volume eloquently express Schiffer's fear of a disintegrating discipline, He fears that archaeology might become like sociocultural anthropology with no "common ground, no core set of concepts and principles . . . I hoped that we could, at all costs, avoid that unpleasant outcome" (pp. vii-viii). Although he has elsewhere noted the proliferation of archaeological theories, here his aim is "to counteract the fissioning of social theory and the factioning of archaeology" (p. 2). He sees the book as an exercise in bridge building. In a number of places, Schiffer admits from the start a relative lack of success in this realm. For example, he admits to failure in building bridges to evolutionary archaeology (p. 6), and elsewhere "the bridges that have been built are at best tiny and fragile structures" (p. 12), but can any movement toward conformity of perspective be detectedespecially when some of his authors, such as Thomas and Kus, explicitly reject the need for unity? So in evaluating the book in its own terms, what is the social theory implied by the title, and is some unity of perspective achieved? As far as the first question is concerned, we are furnished with a definition of social theory on page 1. According to Schiffer, social theory consists of bodies of general knowledge about sociocultural phenomena; it answers how and why questions about human behavior and societies. I suspect that each of the contributors to the volume would provide very different definitions, but in any case, given the rejection by Schiffer (see above) of most of what many of us include as sociocultural phenomena, how can social theory be built? Certainly, many chapters reject Schiffer's strictures and discuss topics such as power, meaning, and agency, but in much of the book it is difficult to identify any discussion of the full range of the social, society, the social role of the material, the relationship between societies and individuals, society and power, and so on. Because so rouch of the social is ruled out of court, it becomes difficult to see how the contributors can satisfactorily answer the how and why questions that Schiffer sees as central to social theory. A good example is provided by the Feinman chapter. Feinman describes an interesting categorization of societies into network and corporate. But he accepts 'hat the important why questions remain (p, 49). Unless allowed to explore the dally manipulation and re-

production of social micropractices, knowledge, and power, it is difficult to see how a fuller account can be achieved. As another example, Nelson criticizes behavioral approaches to the choices involved in artifact deposition, saying "the social context of the choices could be more fully explored" (p. 61). She recognizes the need to introduce agency-based approaches to abandonment studies, but her account does not benefit from the full range of available social theory. Kelly provides a perspective derived from behavioral ecology. His argument that archaeologists should think through how stone manufacturing technologies are related to return rates (amount of calories produced per minute) and distance to raw material is helpful. Some strategic use of an optimizing argument may be necessitated in such an analysis. Such analyses provide a baseline against which to consider other social, prestige, power, and gender aspects of tool production. Kelly provides a useful exploratory exercise that any good archaeologist should think through. Quite rightly, Kelly sees behavioral ecology here as simply a "useful tool" (p. 78). The more information that can be introduced about the "performance characteristics" (p. 69, and Schiffer 1999) of artifacts, the better. But the use of such tools does not constitute a social theory or paradigm. Kelly does not want to argue that "humans always optimize." Thus, grand theoretical claims are avoided, and it becomes clear that if a realistic account of human behavioral choices is to be provided, there is a need to move beyond optimization to consider perception, prestige, power, negotiation, and so on. If we extend Kelly's account to include a wider range of factors, we could claim to be building social theory in the form that it is usually identified. Kuhn and Sarther, too, in their chapter, which takes an evolutionary ecology view, acknowledge the need to introduce some of the complexity of human relations found by anthropologists in actual social settings. A similar indication of the need to embrace a fuller social theory is seen in the Darwinian evolutionary archaeology of O'Brien and Lyman in chapter 9. They try to build bridges by discussing the role of history in their theoretical perspective. Their own account of history focuses on the selective environment that led to the appearance of cultural traits and then on pursuing the historical lineages of the traits that ensue. A full account of the selective environments and performance characteristics that lead to some cultural variants being selected would need to consider social power, agency, meaning, and so onthat is, all the rich world (environment) in which cultural traits are embedded, selected, and transmitted. Once all that has been done, one is back with the full world of social theory, and with history as social, cultural, constructed, and created, as well as being materially based. In order to provide an adequate account of an evolutionary process, a full social theory would need to be incorporated. At that point evolutionary archaeology would look very dilierent. As another example, there is little recognition in tins book that social theory should also deal with the social

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American Anthropologist Vol. 104, No. 1 March 2002 inspired view of social change but made no reference to the structural Marxist tradition of Friedman and Rowlands and Kristiansen (see below). Nelson discusses the abandonment of places and mentions meaning, contextualization, and negotiation but does not make any use of the enormous literature on the social theory of memory (e.g, Rowlands 1993), the invention of tradition, locales, or the abandonment and revisiting of sites (Barrett 1994; Bradley 1993). I was depressed to find that Zedeflo could discuss the ritual deposition of artifacts (p. 107) without any reference to the large amount of social theoretical work on this topic (Barrett 1994; Hill 1992; Richards and Thomas 1984). All these latter topics are discussed by Kristiansen and Rowlands in their volume of largely republished papers Social Transformations in Archaeology. Like Schiffer, they seem worried by the hybridity of contemporary archaeological theorizing, a stance that probably derives from their longterm commitment to structural-Marxism (p, 15). Certainly they do provide discussions of many of those aspects of the social dismissed by Schiffersuch as symbols, beliefs, and culture. And, unlike the Schiffer compendium, there is some unity of theoretical position. Again, there is a danger that a single-minded pursuit of a limited perspective leads to a rejection of what so many people accept today as fundamental to any consideration of the social, bi addition, the unified perspective offered, while undoubtedly important in its timethe 1970s and 1980scould be considered rather dated at the start of the 21st century. Why should the reader be interested in a set if papers that go back to the 1970s and that use a structural-Marxist approach that the authors themselves recognize fell out of favor in the social sciences from the mid-1980s (p. 11)? How will such papers help us to understand the social today? The introductory chapter by Rowlands and Kristiansen is an attempt to answer these questions. They restate their position at the start, to "remain committed to an archaeology which investigates the existence of social realities that to some degree lie beyond, or are repressed by, the scope of conscious experience" (p. 4). Their main influences are Althusser, Braudel, and Wallerstein. They spend much time in the introduction salvaging something of long-term objective structures in the face of theriseol practice theories, the linguistic turn, and the recent widespread acceptance of the dominance of the discursive and the phenomenological in European prehistoric archaeology. They ask us not to reject social evolutionary views, and they make a plea for retaining an emphasis on political, historical, and objective structures. It is useful to have a reprinting of so many classic texts Iroin the structural Marxism of European prehistoric archaeology in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these texts set the agenda for many prehistoric archaeologists for decades. For example, chapter 3 by Rowlands reflects that exciting period in the 1980s when the prestige goods model, larftIv derived from Friedman, was taking hold In archaeology-

role of archaeology. Through much of the book, social theory exists in a social vacuum, as apolitical and decontextualized. A welcome contrast is provided in the chapter by Zedeno. He examines the politics of the construction of the past (see also Kus's and Thomas's chapters), and provides a fascinating account of how Native American notions of place in the landscape conflicted with, and lost out to, government definitions of bounded space. He shows how anthropologists colluded in this process. But even here, the attempt founders because of the refusal to develop a social theorythat is, to consider the full range of social life rejected by Schiffer. Zedeno argues that places in the landscape are socially and meaningfully constituted as "sacred geographies" or "symbolic landscapes." However, rather than therefore embracing a full analysis of such complexities, he takes a behavioral twist and suddenly says that we should "first define landscape materially" (p. 105). We should start off by defining a place's formal and performance characteristics. On the one hand, he accepts that a place becomes a landmark through a social process but then argues that it can be defined separately from that process! This confusion stems from a limited view of social theory, which derives from the behaviorism, materialism, and positivism that Schiffer espouses. The unfortunate result is that Zedeflo argues that the cause of Native American groups can somehow be furthered by describing their sacred sites in terms of objective performance characteristicsa very Western and contemporary view. Because so many of the chapters take a very limited view of social theory, it seems very remarkable that the term is used to title the book. Few in other disciplines, or in anthropology, would recognize this book as about social theory at all, at least as it is widely understood. And, certainly, it is difficult to identify any unified alternative. The chapters in the volume are highly diverse; there is no adherence to any general propositions. Is there even the limited amount of bridge building that Schiffer claims? I found the chapters by, on the one hand, Kus, Thomas, and Spencer-Wood, so divergent from those of O'Brien and Lyman or Feinman that 1 came away with a greater sense of the fragmentation of archaeology than ever before. For example, far from building bridges, the different approaches to power diverge radically. For Arnold, power is linked to the control over labor. But, for Kus, there are many forms of power, and Thomas specifically rejects the limited definition of power as control over labor and resources, and, instead, prefers a perspective derived from Foucault. 1 came to deeply regret that more bridges were not built and that the different traditions seem so unaware of eacii other's work. It seemed unproductive tiiat Fcinman's distinction between ostentatious and "laceless" power (p. 14) did not refer to the parallel distinction between naturalizing and masking forms of power (Miller and i'iliey I''H4), or that his distinction between network and corporate societies did not rcler to Foucault's break between centered and distributed power (Miller and Tilley il>84). It seemed inilielpliil that Arnold claimed to have a Marxist

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Shifts in ranking and social complexity were now seen in relation to the control of exchange and the intensification of production, in contrast to the earlier Chil-dean conception of a European "individualism" emerging in the Bronze Age. This more systematic and evolutionary approach has had a huge impact. Still, why should we be interested in such an approach today, given all the criticisms that have been leveled against it, and given all the attempts in archaeology to move toward practice, agency, discourse, and the phenomenological? One of the main disappointments I had in this book is that so little new was written for it. By this 1 mean that, apart from the introduction, which is general and limited in scope, there is no real discussion of criticisms and new developments. For example, the classic (1978) paper by Frankenstein and Rowlands, here reproduced as chapter 13, has led to widespread discussion and critique (e.g., by Gosden 1985), and it would have been good to see some response. So the well-rehearsed critiques of evolutionary, objectivist perspectives seem as relevant as they ever were. In chapter 4, Kristiansen identifies "chiefly lineages" in megalithic burial in southern Scandinavia, and change is seen as the result of contradictions between the forces and relations of production. He talks of "theocratic chiefdoms of the Bronze Age" (p. 91), which can be compared with Polynesian and Melanesian chiefdoms. Today there would, 1 think, be less emphasis on off-the-shelf evolutionary categories and more attempts would be made to understand specific forms of articulation of ritual, space, time, power, and so on. In chapter 5, Kristiansen argues that the prime factors leading to greater social differentiation were prestige goods and the control of bronze. This was all exciting when first published (in the 1970s and 1980s), but when viewed after the debate that has taken place since, it seems remarkable that no attempt is made to discuss the microtechnologies of powerembodiment, landscapes, and material practices. No attempt is made to "make sense of" the evidence either in terms of reading or experiencing. It would have been helpful to have some expansion of the account to consider these alternative or more recent approaches. In these accounts from the 1970s and 1980s, relations of dominance and hierarchy depend directly on the manipulation of relations of circulation and exchange (p. 176). There is an assumption that wealth can be measured in terms of the consumption of ornaments and weapons in graves and hoards, whereas deposition came to be discussed in terms of discourses of cultural practice (Barrett 1994; Richards and Thomas 1984; Thomas 1996) in much of prehistoric European archaeology. Kristiansen's classic (1978) study of the wear on ornaments and swords (reproduced here as chapter 7) sees the wear in terms of economies of supply and demand rather than In terms of changing social practices. The second part of the book includes chapters dealing w th center-periphery relations and with a tradition of scholarship that Includes Frank, Wallersteiu, Ekhohu, and

Wolf. Kristiansen and Rowlands have again had enormous influence in introducing this approach in European prehistory. Here they do respond to some extent to the critique that 2nd-millennium B.C. Bronze Age and Iron Age systems are different from the capitalist systems for which World Systems models were developed. They move toward an account of large-scale spatial interactions, but if anything is to be ieft of center-periphery models, surely there should be some demonstration of unequal dependence between center and periphery, or of devolutionary processes in the periphery. The World Systems approach has had enormous value in exploiting the large scale of archaeological data, and in breaking out of parochial accounts. Kristiansen and Rowlands have shown that long distance exchange with the Mediterranean may have been linked to social processes within prehistoric Europe. There may have been some (perhaps limited) social and economic dependency. I remain unconvinced that this justifies the use of World Systems models. Unequal dependence and devolutionary processes have not, in my view, been demonstrated. As a number of authors have pointed out, there is a need for a greater contextualization of the models within a fuller account of the social and cultural (Gosden 1985; Treherne 1995). It was not until the end of these two books on "the social" that 1 found adequate accounts of what 1 was looking forsomething that escaped from the narrow strictures of Schiffer's behavioralism and Friedman's structural Marxism, something that engaged in contemporary debates. The two chapters by Rowlands at the end of the book, on ritual killing in Benin, and on embodiment in Cameroon, mark significant moves toward a more contemporary engagement. Both appear to have been written recently, especially for the book. Chapter 15 describes how the threat of colonial incursion affected West African kingiy power and its mythopraxis. Colonialism is situated within a local world of sacrifice and divine belief, in contrast to the emphasis on exchange and production in the earlier chapters. Chapter 16 is a fascinating account of the embodiment of power in Cameroon. Rowlands is concerned here to dissolve for West Africa oppositions of person and thing and to destabilize ideas about instrumental power. Such oppositions and ideas were central to prestige goods models, and it is useful to see them dismissed here. Beliefs and rituals are not seen as utilitarian, as in the prestige goods models, but are seen as constitutive of the social world. Power is not general but is about a particular conception of bodies, body substances, and flows. The account of power is here much more subtle, focusing on the details of body practices and beliefs. The two books under review deal in very different ways with the social in archaeology, and both make important contributions. The former reflects some of the diversity of contemporary archaeological theorizing about tile social. The latter provides a useful historical overview of tile contributions of a very influential pair of writers and of structural Marxism in archaeology. But both are

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Hill,J.D. 1992 Ritual and Rubbish in the Iron Age of Wessex. Oxford: Tempus Reparatum. Miller, Danny, and Chris Tiliey 1984 Ideology, Power and Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press. Richards, Colin, and Julian Thomas 1984 Ritual Activity and Structured Deposition in Later Neolithic Wessex. In Neolithic Studies: A Review of Some Current Research. R. Bradley and J. Gardiner, eds. Pp. 189-218. British Archaeological Reports British Series, 133. Rowlands, Michael 1993 The Roie of Memory in the Transmission of Culture. World Archaeology 25:141-151. Schiffer, Michael B. 1999 The Material life of Human Beings. London: Routledge. Thomas, Julian 1996 Time, Culture and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Treheme, Paul 1995 The Warrior's Beauty: The Masculine Body and Self-Identity in Bronze Age Europe. Journal of European Archaeology 3(l):105-144.

stymied by a tendency to restrict the definition of the social. Schiffer's exclusions were listed at the start of this review, and the objectivism and evolutionism of structuralMarxism as it has been used in archaeology provide their own blinkers. But we see, toward the end of the Kristiansen and Rowlands book and in some of the chapters in the Schiffer volume, a fuller account of the social that enters into contemporary debates. We see how debate in archaeology has moved on to a consideration of the ways in which embedded and embodied material practices constituted and transformed the social.
REFERENCES CITED Barrett, John 1994 Fragments from Antiquity. Oxford: Blackwell. Bradley, Richard 1993 Altering the Earth. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Monograph 8. Gosden, Chris 1985 Gifts and Kin in Early Iron Age Europe. Man 20:475-493.

Modern Reflex
BILL MAURER University of California, Irvine Facing Modernity: Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Morality. Barry Smart. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999.206 pp. Questions of Modernity. Timothy Mitchell, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 229 pp. If, for 19th- and ear!y-20th-century European intellectuals, modernity was experienced as a disruption of the moral and epistemological bases of social and political life, for contemporary knowledge it is the sedimented but unstable ground of social scientific practice. Europeans characterized the "modern" in ways that are familiar to us today because those characterizations formed the foundations of the social scientific endeavor. Concepts like "alienation," "anomie," and "ideology," as well as supposedly first-order descriptive terms like family, individual, and community, have structured that version of human inquiry caiied "social." Sociology's objects would be the causes and the products of the disruption of life that conjured the social and the individual from the community that Europeans imagined their own pre-modern to have been, its object would be modernity itself. Anthropology's ob|ects, constituting its disciplinary apparatus and achieving for it a place at the table of modern inquiry, would be tlir peoples who Europeans imagined had not undergone that same disruption. Anthropology's objects, the core of its self-constitution as modern, would be the nouuiodern. After World War 11, tile disciplines converged in visions of development and modernization: sociology would tackle the "social problems" of modern life and anthropology would identify the "barriers" preventing nonmoderns from acquiring the moral and material goods of civilization. The new world society that the social sciences would document and help to create would represent the inevitable and one-way motion toward the end of ideology and the end of analysis, as, eventually, the analytical apparatus would resonate precisely with the clockwork harmony of the real world. It did not happen. And it is this predictive failure of social science and the unfolding of other possibilities that
animates the books under review. Composed of seven chapters that review theorists from Foucault and Lyotard to C. Wright Mills and Ulrich Beck, Smart's volume is about the fate of sociology after the exhaustion of its modem paradigms. Smart centers on a new appreciation of theoretical reflexivity and ambivalence. The literature Smart draws on and the debates he engages are from sociology, primarily (and refreshingly) outside its neopositivist U.S. formulation. Despite the disciplinary focus, this book will be accessible to a range of anthropologists seeking to be brought up to speed on recent social theory and a reflection on modernity that emphasizes the ethics of social thought. Timothy Mitchell's volume contains a short preface and introduction situating it in a conversation between Middle East and South Asia area scholars who are redefining area studies as a theoretical project and developing accounts of modernities outside the West, "rediscover|ingj the parochialism of the West" rather than "* parochializ|ing| Western history and social science" IP viii). The volume contains a chapter by Mitchell five chapters on South Asia, and two on the Middle East.