Book Reviews 451

and fresh ancillary material, does Van Helden’s translation offer any marked advantage over the earlier edition?

Drake’s version in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo omits roughly five pages of observations of Jupiter satellites, no great loss. On the title page Drake says ‘with the aid of a spyglass lately invented by him’ while Van Helden’s reading is ‘with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him’; both are allowed, but Van Helden’s is arguably better. In the dedication to Cosmo II de’ Medici, Galileo makes his first published allusion to the Copernican system. Drake’s rendition reads ‘Variously moving about most noble Jupiter as children of his own, they complete their orbits with marvelous velocity-at the same time executing with one harmonious accord mighty revolutions every dozen years about the center of the universe; that is, the sun’. Van Helden has ‘. . make theirjourneys and orbits with a marvelous speed around the star of Jupiter, the most noble of them all, with mutually different motions, like children of the same family, while meanwhile all together, in mutual harmony, complete their great revolutions every twelve years about the center of the world, that is, about the Sun itself.

Van Helden’s translation is slightly stricter, and he had the advantage of seeing two previous versions, but otherwise the choice between the editions lies primarily with the notes and ancillary pages and not the translation itself. Every interested scholar will need both; for classroom adoptions as supplementary material, the choice will depend on the associated material, which in Drake’s edition includes the Letters on Sunspots and the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina as well as excerpts from The Assayer.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Owen Gingerich

A History of Archaeological Thought, Bruce Trigger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xv+500 pp., &?14.95/$17.95 P.B.

Bruce Trigger’s book provides an excellent summary and commentary on the history of archaeological thought from its beginnings in antiquarianism through to the middle 1980s. It is written not just to provide a narrative but to address a philosophical problem: what is the relationship between archaeology and society?

One of the most important themes in the last decade of archaeological research has been the rejection, by many, of the positivism that dominated the New Archaeology and with it the belief that one can achieve an objective view of the past. Some have taken this so far as to create an extreme relativism believing that archaeology does no more than reflect the social and political values of the time in which it is written. Consequently, they suggest, one has no responsibility to try and discover what the past was like, but just to write archaeology that is concordant with one’s chosen politics. Other archaeologists still maintain the view that the application of scientific philosophy and method can create a view of the past that is essentially objective and that through time we are gradually getting better and better aproximations of what the past was actually like. Of course the majority of archaeologists he between these extremes; they recognise that achieving an absolute objectivity is impossible but that one should nevertheless quest towards it. Trigger uses the vantage point of a historical perspective to explore the respective merits of these contrasting views of the relationship between archaeological thought and the society in which it is generated.

The result is a masterful work in terms of its scope and detail, the lucidity of his prose and the depth of his analysis. The core of the book is eight chapters which follow a rough

452 Book Reviews

chronological path from antiquarianism though the beginnings of scientific archaeology in the 19th century, culture-historical perspectives, functionalism, the new archaeology and ending at the most recent ‘post-processual’ trends. There is much detail in these chapters and I was repeatedly surprised at how far back many ideas which are normally associated with late 20th century work go; for instance the oasis theory for agricultural origins derives from Raphael Pummelly’s work in 1908; the idea that there is a relationship between population size and subsistence intensification dates back to the 17th century. These central chapters are sandwiched between an introductory chapter in which he sets out the ‘relevance of archaeological history’ and a final chapter entitled ‘Archaeology and its social context’ in which he assesses the current state of archaeological thought.

Inevitably much of the work focusses on archaeology in the western hemisphere and the last chapters are dominated by work in Britain and America. In earlier chapters he does cover many other areas; China, Japan, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Russia. However one can anticipate that the next book on the history of archaeology, or even a later edition of this volume, will need to be even broader in scope with much more attention paid to the development and role of archaeology in the third world.

The chapter on Soviet archaeology is a particular fascinating and important. As G/usnast allows more and more western archaeologists information about, and access to, Russian material, we need to understand more about the history of Russian archaeology to be able to use that material effectively. Trigger charts the close relationship between the changing nature of soviet archaeology and the political upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In that he admits (in his very useful bibliographical essay at the end of the book) to being limited by language difficulties to not using Russian texts as effectively as he would wish, it appears that we can expect from some quarter an even more thorough and revealing history of Soviet archaeology.

As the chapter on Soviet archaelogy illustrates, Trigger repeatedly demonstrates how archaeological thought is indeed very intimately connected with the social and political values of its times. An equally blatant example is the development of racist views in the earlier 20th century and Trigger charts remarkable similarities in the appalling attitudes to the aboriginal peoples and the archaeological remains of America, Africa, New Zealand and Australia by the new colonists. Similarly, but making rather less shocking reading, is how the development of an evolutionary view of the past in the 16th and 17th centuries, which laid the ground work for the acceptance of Darwin’s ‘origins’ and the antiquity of archaeological remains, was deeply embedded in the intellectual developments and philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The most unsatisfactory part of the book is when Trigger is writing about the last thirty years of archaeological thought. He continues to document how archaeological thought reflects the values of its day but his connections are rather strained or simplistic. For instance his claim that the-ready acceptance of catastrophe theory when presented to the archaeological world by Renfrew reflected ‘widespread fears that Western societies might be sliding towards a catastrophe in the conventional as well as the mathematical sense’ (p. 322) is almost glib. Similarly I find it difficult to accept some of his generalisations. For instance he provides no justification for his statement that ‘. neither evolutionary archaeologists nor most of the opponents of enviornmental pollution, unchecked population growth, and the wastage of natural resources treat these problems as ones that can be resolved by means of concerted economic and political reforms carried out on the national and international levels. Instead they mystify these problems by locating their causes in a general evolutionary framework and seek when possible to ameliorate them in discrete, piecemeal ways’ (p. 323). It is perhaps the case that Trigger, and many of the readers of his book, are too embedded in the recent history of archaeology to stand back from it and write the sort of history that Trigger achieves for the majority of his book.

Book Reviews 453

It is difficult to grasp Trigger’s own feelings about the current state of archaeology and the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity from the final chapter. At times he seems pessimistic about what archaeology can achieve; Hawke’s ladder of inference is said to be essentially correct and middle-range theory limited in its capacity to infer many aspects of behaviour from the archaeological record. At others he is more optimistic and perhaps reaches the only possible conclusion for such work: ‘Archaeology.. . is neither separate from society nor a mere reflection of it, but has a role to play in a rational dialogue about the nature of humanity, which a better understanding of the relationship between archaeological practice and its social context will facilitate’ (p. 410). 1 recommend all archaeologists to read this book. It will remain for many years the most authoritative account of the history of archaeological thought.

Steven J. Mithen The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge

Romantic Motives-Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W Stocking Jr,

History of Anthropology, vol. 6 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 286 pp., $25.

Anthropology has roots in two opposing currents of thought: the Enlightenment of the 18th century and the Romantic reaction of the 19th. The former saw progress in a positive light: with mankind breaking away from unthinking obedience to tradition, human reason was now free to acquire ever-greater knowledge of and control over the natural world. Romanticism saw progress differently: Emancipation from tradition was leading to a loss of community, the eventual result being a sham culture in which relationships would be transitory, superficial, and rootless

Romantic Motives features essays by Curtis M. Hinsley, George W. Stocking Jr, and Thomas De Zengotita on the ebb and flow of romanticism in anthropology. In the late 19th century, the enlightenment view prevailed in the form of evolutionist models that ranked societies on a scale of primitive to advanced. This belief in progress, and Western values as the culmination of progress, gave way to disillusionment as ‘civilized’ nations slaughtered each other’s youth in the First World War. A romantic view of primitive peoples soon took hold. In this context, Franz Boas and his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict strove to replace evolutionist schemas with the notion of cultural relativism. Such thinking was to lose ground after the Second World War which, unlike the previous war, ushered in a renewed faith in progress and Western values. Yet romantic themes continued to inform postwar anthropology, particularly in the works of Claude Levi-Strauss.

Other essays focus on specific areas of debate, one being the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which, like cultural relativism and romanticism in general, emphasises the group to the detriment of the individual. According to this hypothesis, language does not simply express our thoughts; it also determines them. As pointed out by De Zengotita, however, this leads to a paradox: How then did language come about? If our repertoire of concepts is limited by the language we speak, then the very first words to be invented could not have expressed any concept already in existence. Sapir turned to the works of a 19th century romantic, Johann Herder, to find an answer: The first words, often onomatopoeic, arose not through abstract reasoning but through imitation of sounds and sensations in the