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Non-Cambridge persons fortunate enough to have heard Professor Graeme Barker’s largely autobiographical Beatrice de Cardi lecture in London in 2014 will not be surprised at the geographical range and time depth of the material assembled here in his honour at Cambridge. It duly reflects not only his interests and achievements – and personality – but also his approaches and methodology, particularly in relationship to landscape.
Part I consists of but one essay, ‘Introduction: frameworks and landscapes’, by Barker’s immediate Disney predecessor, Colin Renfrew; and similarly, Part V, ‘Afterword’, contains a single, short essay by the new Disney Chair, Professor Cyprian Broodbank. In between, Parts II–IV contain twenty-two papers grouped under ‘Before the Holocene’ (eight papers), ‘Transitions towards Farming’ (seven) and ‘Into the Light of Written History’ (seven). A helpful device spreads these papers out in time in orderly and graphic fashion: by using the inside front cover and the (usually blank) first facing page, a time-column is created, first covering the Upper Pleistocene with seven papers slotted in beside it at their appropriate dates, and then, by expanding the top block of time – the beginnings of the Holocene – to a larger scale on the facing page, fifteen papers are arranged chronologically from bottom to top. The same device is used inside the back cover. At both ends of the book, therefore, a reader can see at a glance that ‘Pleistocene Island Archaeology in the Mediterranean: insights from a tied-biome approach to glacial refugia’, the earliest paper at the bottom of the column, relates to about 120,000 years ago; that ‘Farming comes to Arcadia: notes on the Neolithic settlement of central Europe’ is concerned with developments some 7,500 years ago; and that ‘The Power of Pits: archaeology, outreach and research in living landscapes’ is centred chronologically on some 500 years ago.
A later paper, ‘Investigating Large Landscapes: constraints and developing techniques’, is about the present and is so much at the top of the Holocene column that it alone enjoys the slot opposite ‘Anthropocene’(‘Pits’ could arguably be there too?). So the time-range covered is from the early twenty-first century ad back some 120,000 years. The book is geographically ambitious, too: Europe, obviously, but, ever-reflecting the honorand’s research, south-east Asia, northern Africa and the Mediterranean are all touched on as well. The whole is illumined by a high standard of graphics and tabulation.
The contributors, all fifty-five of them, are also geographically wide-ranging. Many are ascribed (‘Contributors’, pp vii–ix) to the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, without revealing their status (Professor? Student?), and contributing universities other than Cambridge include the American University of Rome, Australian National, Belfast, Exeter, Harvard, Las Palmas, Leicester, Liverpool, John Moores, London, Otago, Oxford, Perugia, Plymouth, Princeton, Sogang, Sydney, Ulster and Washington in St Louis: no motley crew this, rather a distinguished assembly perhaps containing a future Disney. It stands as tribute in terms of both loyalty to and respect for the recipient. Not every contribution is felicitous of prose, however, and, inevitably, some of the academic jargon makes for ‘unfriendly’ reading for someone not particularly committed to the subject of the paper. Such a reader may also wonder whether a tighter editorial line might not have also have possibly reduced, for example, the some 240 references adorning one seventeen-page essay (pp 83–108), and even cavil perhaps at minor blemishes in presentation such as the over-casual cliché; for example, ‘The tide now does seem to be turning’ (p 87), in discussing early journeys to islands.
The approaches of the contributors vary too. Some papers are mainly methodological, like the ‘Glacial Refugia’ and ‘Large Landscapes’ papers already quoted; some deal with specifics in time and / or space, like the Earl of Cranbrook’s insight into ‘the Dog in Borneo’ and David Mattingly’s ‘Castles in the Desert: living in Libyan landscapes’; and some are overviews, like Peter Bogucki’s Arcadian farming paper quoted above and Charles Higham’s ‘Agriculture, Feasting and Social Change in Early South-east Asia’. The depth and quality of the learning on display is impressive; notably, in this reviewer’s eyes, Robin Dennell’s acute reassessment of Palaeolithic Asia (including his careful de-construction of relevant Indian and Burmese fieldwork in the 1930s) and Richard Hodges’s ‘Landscape and Society: the making of San Vincenzo’s Mediterranean valley’.
Merely by quoting those titles above, some flavour of the book’s contents begins to emerge. By theming the whole volume around ‘landscape’ (p xvi), the editors avoid some of the characteristic drawbacks of a Festschrift. The strengths of this one are brought out by Renfrew as he basically summarises the contents, paper by paper, in Chapter 1. He concludes by correctly observing (p 6) that the ‘leitmotiv of this volume … is what may be termed the landscape approach to archaeology. Here, long-term land use by humans is the key to understanding the basis both of their economies and their societies … The interdisciplinary study of landscape change therefore underlies much of the work presented here’. While not incorrect, his last sentence opens up an interesting, if fine, distinction: ‘… working in the landscape, as a deliberate research design and methodology … can bring a range of fresh insights to our understanding of prehistory and of history’. This reads to this reviewer as meaning that the Cantabrian ‘landscape approach to archaeology’, unlike the more widely used concept of ‘landscape archaeology’, uses landscape to serve the greater end of human prehistory and history rather than decoding a place or the landscape itself primarily for its own sake (a good exam question in that sentence: ‘Discuss’).
The geographical range employed in the interests of high-quality research and the better understanding of the human condition represented by this academically heavyweight volume is admirable, but it raises a very uncomfortable question: in an increasingly fractious and much more dangerous world than obtained when most of the fieldwork underpinning this Festschrift was in hand, will it be possible in future to pursue such objectives successfully using the sort of long-lasting, widely based, landscape-oriented studies which Living in the Landscape so impressively celebrates?
