By Region Books

I am a student of history and local history is especially interesting to me so I love the Arch Merrill books. His writing style is informative and at the same time very easy to read. Every time I travel to Letchworth Park I am reminded of this book and Merrill's vivid description of the beauty and the story of Mary Jemison. Merrill's books should not be out of print because they are the most valuable resource we have in keeping the history of Western New York alive! I aspire to write local history in the tradition of Arch Merrill and I respect him as a role model.

I recently re-read this Arch Merrill classic. His use of language has a flair that is rarely experienced in modern novels. He paints a picture of the Western New York locales that I, as a native, find to be accurate yet remindful of a time when these hills, valleys, and the gorge of the Genesee River must have been so pristine and even more beautiful than today. Merrill tells of the raw truth of savage times without the gore that modern stories find necessary to include. He leaves much to the imagination while describing a multitude of detail. I love the book and the authors quaint style.

This is a great study into the difficult field of the transition in Europe from the Roman Empire into the world of what we call the Middle Ages. It tries to combine such field as archaeology, ethnology, language, religion and history, with major contributors such as D.N.Dumville, D.H.Green, J.Hines, J.D.Richards and Ian Wood. Though the invividual contributions are good enough a reason for acquiring this book, it is the discussions at the end of each paper that make it exemplary. These dicussions between the authors are stimulating and challenging, giving far more insight to the reader into the matter discussed . I'll be looking forward to the second volume.

In 1938 an excavation was made at Sutton Hoo by the Ipswich Museum after years of rumors of untold gold having been buried in the area. The site was found to be that of a ship burial, possibly for an East Anglian king known as Redwald. A veritable treasure hoard was found of decayed weaponry, armor, and a variety of everyday use items - as was the norm when burying a person of stature in the early Middle Ages. Most of these items are now in the British Museum, the two most famous being a large, ...more In 1938 an excavation was made at Sutton Hoo by the Ipswich Museum after years of rumors of untold gold having been buried in the area. The site was found to be that of a ship burial, possibly for an East Anglian king known as Redwald. A veritable treasure hoard was found of decayed weaponry, armor, and a variety of everyday use items - as was the norm when burying a person of stature in the early Middle Ages. Most of these items are now in the British Museum, the two most famous being a large, solid gold Celtic knot work belt buckle and a reconstructed warrior's helmet.

In this collection of articles from Boydell & Brewer edited by Martin Carver, new insights are presented about the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the artifacts discovered there. But The Age of Sutton Hoo is much more than a dry and simple book on the burial site. It presents fascinating articles on the specific period in which the burial took place, and explains what England was like at that time, as well as Pictland (then Scotland), and Europe. Articles into the development of Old English, the Anglo-Saxon language, reveal insights into how language varied between England and Europe. Numerous articles document the undeniable similarities between Sutton Hoo and the tale of Beowulf, which, coupled together, help to create a more complete and detailed story of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of medieval Europe.

A history degree is not required to understand the articles of The Age of Sutton Hoo, which are presented in a clear and concise manner, keeping the reader interested from page to page. The book is a must for any fan of Sutton Hoo, as well as anyone interested in this crucial period of history, when the continent of Europe was recreating and redefining itself.

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My six year old loved this book and thought it was funny as well. A good read for him to do by himself.

Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Wuptaki are three of the best known of the Indian ruins that dot the landscape in the high desert country of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. To this day it is difficult to comprehend how these Indians thrived in a region of short hot summers, little rain, and poor soil -- and not only fed themselves but left behind spectacular monumental buildings. Adding to the mystery is their sudden abandonment of their major sites in the 1100s and 1200s.

The author surveys the knowledge and theories about the ancient peoples who became the modern day Pueblo Indians. He follows the development of the Anasazi and Mogollon traditions from their beginnings thousands of years ago until the 1700s, after the arrival of the Spaniards. The book is illustrated with more than 100 photos, maps, and charts and 25 sidebars that take up interesting topics such as cannibalism, construction methods, domestic animals, ballcourts, burials, and leadership. The emphasis is on thoroughness as the author briefly describes the findings and gives a hearing to the theories of hundreds of archaeologists and other scholars. The bibliography runs to more than 30 pages.

There is much of environmental determinism here for in the climate of the Southwest small changes in the weather made all the difference in the lives of the inhabitants. Scholars have meticulously reconstructed temperature and precipitation records for the last 2,000 years and the author attempts to correlate the rise and fall of Indian cultures with precipitation and temperature averages.

"Ancient Puebloan Southwest" is probably a bit too dense for the casual reader, but offers those interested in archaeology and the Southwest a thorough and up-to-date account of the Anasazi the Mogollon and the proto-historic Zuni, Hopi, and Rio Grande Pueblos.

Smallchief

The collapse of the Clovis paradigm has meant, among a great deal of other things,a re-evaluation of lowland tropical American archaeology. This is an invaluable and comprehensive guide to the field, which provides judicious analysis of recent research as well as very useful intellectual histories of debates. The very extensive bibliography is especially useful. My own interests are in the environmental history of the Amazon, and I found the chapters by Erickson, Bray, Pearsall and Piperno especially helpful. My only criticism is one of omission: I think a contextualising chapter putting the developments in lowland South American archaeology in a wider continental and hemispheric context would have been useful, especially since one of the most interesting implications of recent developments elsewhere is not the uniqueness of the lowlands, but the parallels between the South American lowlands and similar environments elsewhere in the Americas, such as the mound complexes and drained fields of the Mississippi valley. Nevertheless, a fitting and appropriate memorial to Donald Lathrap. David Cleary Harvard University

The history of America's earliest settlement has been reinterpreted over the last twenty years. Archaeology of Colonial Pensacola summarizes the para-historical research and development that has developed over the last two decades and how it has influenced the history of Pensacola. Editor Judith A. Bense discusses in her preface that though Pensacola was first settled in 1559, the excavation of colonial Pensacola is very new, in fact the first excavations occurred by accident only in 1983. This 1983 site in downtown Pensacola turned in to research and surveying nearly every square inch of the greater Pensacola area and produced one of the best public representations of archaeological history in the nation. Archaeology of Colonial Pensacola follows the work of the University of Western Florida's fledgling archaeology institute and then "presents their discoveries and interpretations of documents" (p. xiii). These discoveries of the archaeology of Pensacola give the modern historian crucial insight into the undocumented culture and everyday lives of the colonial settlers and the environment in which they existed.

Dr. Judith Bense received her PhD in Terrestrial Archaeology at Washington State University, while doing her undergraduate and Master's work in Florida (Archaeology Institute of University of Western Florida official website, http://uwf.edu/archaeology/ facstaff/). She is currently professor of archaeology and anthropology at the University of Western Florida (UWF). In 1980, Bense started an anthropology-archaeology department at UWF for certain reasons: "the area's untouched resources" (p. xv) and the fact that she would be "the area's first archaeologist in residence" (p. xv). She built a neophyte archaeology program in to one of the best archaeological institutes in the nation, in a matter of a few short years. Bense's true accomplishment was that the city of Pensacola "pioneered the melding of public interest (and support) with archaeological and historical research. The Pensacola model, which has received national awards and acclamation, has inspired similar projects through the United States" (p. xv).

While Bense writes some of this book, the majority is written by her own former students; those who majored in archaeology. As all of the archaeological sites in Pensacola were excavated by students at UWF, these students are just as much experts on this subject as Bense, herself. As a full fledged archaeologist, Bense's own writing in this volume is incredibly accessible, as is the writing of her students. Though the descriptions of their discoveries are extensive, never is it dry. The accessibility fused with the abundance of raw research data found in the appendixes, makes it for an archaeologist well worth the [...]; however for the casual history reader out of the price range. As it is, the volume is absolutely indispensable when studying the history of colonial Pensacola, due to the fact that is one of only a handful written on the subject.

In contrast to Bense's balance of documents and archaeology, the only other full-length book on colonial Pensacola entitled, Santa Maria de Galve, A Story of Survival, by Virginia Parks, deals almost exclusively with documents. In A Story of Survival, Parks, however, does use some data presented in Bense's volume. It is not an exaggeration to state that Judith Bense owns the expertise on the archaeology of Pensacola.

There is no debate that the documented history of Pensacola must be studied across the disciplines to include, for certain, archeology. It is definite that Judith Bense and the UWF archaeology program have answered many questions plaguing Pensacola's history and the data has been wrapped up in Archaeology of Colonial Pensacola in a very accessible, cross-discipline book.

Teresa Pangle
December 2006

Normalmente la atención de los lectores se concentra en la historia de Egipto en época faraónica. En las monografías más usuales se limitan a unas pocas páginas que ofrecen un resumen. Sin embargo, la prehistoria de Egipto es tan interesante, si no más, que los periodos que siguieron. Esta obra tiene la gran virtud de estar escrita por un especialista, que ha sintetizado con gran acierto, todo lo que sabemos sobre esta época. También ha incluido los últimos descubrimientos arqueológicos. Es ante todo un libro de divulgación, muy recomendable para todos aquellos que quieran iniciarse en el tema. Se deben mencionar también las magnificas ilustraciones, aunque se echa de menos que algunas de ellas no sean en color, asi como mapas más precisos.

Ok, so before I picked this book up I didn't even know what Jomon-pottery was, and while I read this book I had to make frequent reference to wikipedia. However, I really did learn a lot about the archaeology of Korea while I read it.

I guess due to the nature of the evidence, pottery was covered in special depth, and other kinds of artifacts were related to the pottery. I especially appreciated the cautious speculations about religion in stone-age and bronze-age Korea; that's why I read the book. Now, when I visit a museum here in Korea, even if I can't understand the labels, I know what I'm looking at pretty well: that's another big bonus for me.

It's a few years old now. I think that genetic work probably sheds some light on the migrations into the peninsula, and there must've been a lot of archaeological research since this book has been written. Soon, I hope, North Korea will open up a bit and more research will go on there; the sites there are probably very interesting. I hope a more updated version comes out sometime soon.

The bibliography was also very helpful to me.

I have no idea what a well-informed scholar would make of this book, however; and when I read reviews by people who don't know about things that I know about, I can tell...

UPDATE: I've now discovered Gina L. Barnes' "The Rise of Civilization in East Asia: The Archaeology of China, Korea and Japan." I highly recommend it. It's easier to read, somehow inherently more interesting, and the regional coverage adds a lot of useful context. It spans a greater time period with less detail, but its fascinating insights really do make up for the loss of detail. Unless for some reason you are definitely interested in Nelson's book, I recommend Barnes.

A comprehensive book, Thou might be a little daunting to beginners due to the complexities of the terminology used in the African context.