150 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [77,1975]

used in some of the structures, or thermo- luminescent dating of slag, could establish some sort of a chronology.

The reader’s imagination is caught by the amazing proliferation of stone structures on these islands, and by the culturally striking fact that on Majorca and Minorca, only fortyeight kilometres apart, identical boat- shaped stone bulidings were used for entirely different purposes-as dwellings and sepulchres respectively. The Balearic islands rival Malta in their unique developments in massive stone architecture.

Ibiza and Formentera were little occupied before the Punic invasion of 654 B.C. Professor Pericot discusses finds of Greek bronzes and Punic figurine jars before closing the volume with quotations from Greek and Roman sources about the Balearics and their famous sling-throwing in- habitants.

The volume is well illustrated with good line drawings and maps.

Reference Cited Whitehouse, R.

1972 The Rock-Cut Tombs of the Cen t r a1 Mediterranean. Antiquity 46:275-281.

The First Great Civilizations: Life in Meso- potamia, the Indus Valley, and Egypt. JACQUETTA HAWKES. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. xxvi + 465 pp., figures, plates, chronology table, index. $12.50 (cloth).

Reviewed by GEORGE F. DALES University of California, Berkeley

This is the eighth volume in the History of Human Society series edited by J. H. Plumb of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Plumb’s Introduction sets the tone for the series which is aimed at the general reader with an interest in social history and the growth of man’s control over the physical universe. In selecting the authors for the in- dividual volumes, Plumb states they were chosen “for their wisdom” and must be per- sons “quick in understanding, slow in judge- ment.” Hawkes fulfills these qualifications admirably, especially considering the vast

scope of the historical and cultural material she is presenting. A review can easily argue about specific details but generally Hawkes has presented an unusually sensitive picture of everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and to a lesser extent the Indus Val- ley. The overall quality of the volume is marred only by the disappointing quality of the illustrations, especially the line drawings.

The book opens with an interesting reveiw of the various theories concerning the rise and nature of ancient civilizations. While recognizing that all the early civilizations had certain basic similarities, especially in the technological realm, Hawkes stresses the importance of appreciating the essential “form” of each civilization that makes such a truly independent human experience.

Part I1 describes the geographical settings and settlement patterns for each of the three civilizations. A serious misrepresentation is given here of the distribution of sites in the Indus Valley, one that distorts the entire im- pression of the degree to which the civiliza- tion was urbanized. The author repeats the old notion of dual capitals-Moenjo-daro and Harappa-which does not stand up now that we know of the existence of several other sites of equal or larger size. Part I1 concludes with a review of the evidence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley for the Neolithic and the rise of the great civiliza- tions.

Parts I11 and IV deal specifically with Mesopotamia, with Part I11 presenting a political history of the region from Early Dynastic Sumerian times to the fall of the Assyrian empire in the seventh century B.C. Part IV is the heart of the presentation giving the author’s interpretation of the daily life and times of ancient Mesopotamia neatly arranged into essays on the Material World, Social and Political World, and Mental World. The same scheme of presenta- tion for ancient Egypt is given in Parts VI and VII. It is these parts that make the author’s contribution truly original and valuable to students as well as the general reader. They effectively convey the goal that archaeologists are ultimately digging up people and their life-ways rather than merely objects for the museums.

It is sad that the same could not be done for the Indus civilization. A mere eighteen pages suffices to describe the essentials of

ARCHAEOLOGY 151

our knowledge of this vast enigmatic civiliza- tion. Hawkes is fully aware of the dearth of information, but it is unfortunate that she did not go much beyond the now twenty- year-old views of other British archaeologists that dominate the literature on the subject. Much new research has been done by Paki- stani, Indian, and Western archaeologists that cast doubt on many of the older inter- pretations.

The book concludes with chronological tables and a very short, select bibliography.

Ancient Ceylon: Journal of the Archeologi- cal Survey Department of Ceylon, Vols. 1 and 2. Commissioner of Archeology, Colom- bo 7, Sri Lanka. Annual Subscription Rs.32.00.

Reviewed by BENNET BRONSON Field Museum of Natural History

The volumes under review are the initial issues of a new journal on the archaeology of Sri Lanka or Ceylon. The title is formed on the model of several other South Asian journal titles: Ancient India, Ancient Paki- stan, and Ancient Nepal. Ancient Ceylon resembles the first two of these in other ways as well. It is published by a government antiquities service. More importantly, it is oriented more toward the new, post- Wheelerian archaeology than toward the traditional kinds of antiquarian research. Much of what seems commonplace to the European prehistorian or the anthropologi- cally-trained American-precision in excava- tion, attention to small finds, quantitative analytic proceduresstill looks strange to many specialists in southern and eastern Asia, where dirt archaeology has long been the unprestigious adjunct of art history and epigraphy. Under the influence of Sir Morti- mer Wheeler, Ancient India became the first journal east of Iran to encourage discussion of archaeological topics other than statues, inscriptions, and architecture. The spread of this attitude has been slowed by the scarcity of similar forums in other countries, due to financial obstacles and the conservatism of the old guard. The Archeological Survey De- partment of Sri Lanka is to be congratulated on its initiative.

The quality of the product also merits congratulation. The layout is handsome and the printing and paper, considering the shortage of supplies endemic in Sri Lanka, excellent. Further, the editorial content is solidly professional with little concession to dilettantish antiquarianism. The best pa- pe r smos t of them, interestingly, by young Sri Lankans rather than foreign contri- butors-are quite publishable by the stan- dards of the internationally distributed specialist journals.

In the light of the long post-colonial isola- tion of Sri Lankan archaeology, a most un- expected feature is the innovativeness of several of the contributions. In the first volume (pp. 141-144), R. Silva and A. D. N. Fernando present an unpretentious paper called, “The Use of Photogrammetry in the Deciphering of Inscriptions,’’ in which they report an attempt to verify the (disputed) existence of a very faint inscription through using stereo photography and a Wild plotting machine. The notion of treating an inscribed stone as a minature landscape is both prac- tical and, as far as I am aware, entirely original.

A similar innovativeness marks the most significant contribution in either volume, S. Deraniyagala’s monograph-length report on his excavations at Gedige in Anuradhapura (“The Citadel of Anuradhapura 1969: Exca- vations in the Gedige Area,” pp. 49-169). The paper is a landmark. It is the first ade- quate site report to come from Sri Lanka and the first to deal at length with such non-artistic small finds as tools and pot- sherds, thoroughly illustrated and described according to a well thought-out classifica- tory scheme. Gedige itself is a site of critical importance. The material from its lower strata represents the society that gave rise to Anuradhapura, one of the major tropical civilizations of antiquity, noted equally for the splendor of its architecture and the scale of its hydraulic engineering projects. More- over, the Gedige material is shown to have close links with Wheeler’s famous site of Arkiamedu in southern India, and through it with the Classical Mediterranean. Gedige thus becomes the second (or third, if one counts Brahmagiri) major site of the Roulet- ted Ware Horizon to be excavated and published. Although a number of related sites have been investigated-Kaveripattinm,