At a time when academic scholarship is leaning towards hyper-specialism, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep one's overall idea of the discipline up-to-date and reliable. As a result, we tend to concentrate effort on our particular field of expertise, and somehow expect others to outline and assess the bigger pictures of the past to accommodate our limited findings. Only a few researchers are capable of proposing and challenging such big pictures. This may help to explain the success and resilience of established interpretations, and the difficulties of proposing competing readings. Within this state of affairs, the volume by Tobias L. Kienlin stands out as a timely and much-needed contribution. This German scholar's early career focused on the first metallurgical societies of central Europe (Kienlin, Reference Kienlin2008). This gave rise to a wide array of interests, which ultimately led him to embrace a critically-informed perspective on prehistoric societies in the Old World. Thus, his latest work contributes to raising awareness of the pitfalls and weaknesses of consensual mainstream standpoints, and their uncontested macro-narratives (Kienlin & Zimmermann, Reference Kienlin and Zimmermann2012; Kienlin, Reference Kienlin and Kienlin2015). He argues for more nuanced understandings of the trajectories of later prehistoric Europe, beyond any dogmatic divides between research communities, such as the processual versus post-processual approaches. This implies questioning a great deal of taken-for-granted concepts and customary ways of setting archaeological agendas, while taking proper advantage of all lines of enquiry available.
In this vein, Bronze Age Tell Communities in Context is part of an ambitious agenda that combines intellectual deconstruction of current ‘big pictures’ with hands-on fieldwork to obtain fresh information. This is certainly not the first time that such a research programme integrating archaeological theory and practice has been carried out in order to enlighten important aspects of European prehistory. Yet, Kienlin's contribution stems from a reaction to recent top-down models that subsume rich archaeological variability into reified and essentialist categories (e.g. ‘elites’, ‘ancestral places’, ‘proto-urban centres’, ‘warriors/heroes’, ‘travellers’, ‘core and peripheral areas’, etc.), which carry with them entrenched evolutionary and teleological connotations. Thus, his research features an important critical emphasis. The published book—also available as an open access e-PDF file—is the first of a two-volume series. It is a critical appraisal of some major current narratives regarding the manifold trajectories subsumed under the banner of the ‘European Bronze Age’. Its ultimate goal is to provide alternative and cogent readings best fitting the multi-faceted evidence. The forthcoming second book will illustrate the points made by the author by drawing on the results from ongoing fieldwork projects in Hungary and Romania.
The work reviewed here is designed as a collection of eight essays divided into two parts (I and II) and closed by a very concise epilogue (III). Parts II and III, titled ‘Approaches to Neolithic and Bronze Age Tell Settlement in the Carpathian Basin’ and ‘Europe and the Mediterranean: Dependency or Delusion?’ respectively, discuss, from a diachronic and comparative perspective, two well-known settings that have featured prominently in successive master-narratives of later prehistoric Europe since the early works by Childe: the Carpathian Basin and the Aegean world. To this end, Kienlin's approach circumvents top-down social modelling and its assumptions. Such overarching schemes are based on supposedly timeless rationales (e.g. a widespread entrepreneur ethos, the uniform esteem accrued by metals and ‘prestige’ items) that (since their misuse) are becoming unhelpful and stagnant. These standpoints also subsume ill-defined realities under allegedly cross-culturally valid mechanisms (e.g. the notion of ‘political economy’ applied to Bronze Age Europe). Rather, Kienlin's perspective seeks to characterize prehistoric communities and their contingent cultural practices by paying minute attention to the idiosyncratic material outcomes of social life. Thus, his flexible social analysis advocates the heuristic value of unique diagnostic details. It seems akin to non-deterministic and bottom-up ways of illuminating historically specific solutions to social organization. In particular, among the available bodies of evidence in later prehistoric Europe, Kienlin's interests have recently shifted from technology to settlement and architecture, as underexploited and reliable proxies for characterizing prehistoric everyday activities. Hence, Part I justifies the book's title.
A short theoretical introduction (Ch. I.1, ‘Introduction: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Archaeological Perception’) shows how current perceptions of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age and their stressed differences mainly derive from academic prior knowledge—background prejudices and expectations—and not from factual observations. We archaeologists are all too often imprisoned by our customary disciplinary compartments. The divide exposed by Kienlin is therefore epistemological rather than empirical. That is, our understanding of the Neolithic is channelled mainly in cultural and symbolic terms borrowed from post-processualism and its jargon (e.g. agency, identity, ancestry). By contrast, discourses on the second millennium bc are constrained by political and economic notions targeted at underlying structures and abstract regularities, ultimately reflecting functionalist/processual concerns. To prove this claim and challenge such attitudes, the author deals with the multi-layer tell-like settlement mounds dated to the Late Neolithic (Ch. I.2) and the Early and Middle Bronze Age (Ch. I.3) in the Pannonian Basin. He concludes that Bronze Age tells in south-east Europe cannot be adequately accounted for in conventional terms, namely, as fortified centres whose urban elites controlled exotic items and redistributed agrarian production, mirroring convergent developments in the eastern Mediterranean. On the contrary, horizontal single-layer sites and superimposed vertical mounds were part of the same settlement landscapes and their functional relationships remained indefinite; variability in terms of size, layout, or architectural biographies among these tells is too dynamic and wide to identify any territorial hierarchy with alleged ‘capitals’; and differences in scale and quality of the material evidence with previous Neolithic tell-like sites are too ambiguous to set apart both periods as neatly independent realities.
Part II is devoted to past and present relationships between marginal ‘Barbarian’ Europe and the ‘advanced’ Mediterranean civilizations. This section contains an effective criticism of Kristiansen and Larsson's influential work The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations (Reference Kristiansen and Larsson2005), which posed a highly contentious argument for second-millennium bc Europe: a continent supposedly interwoven by political relations of dependency, where assorted and distant societies were connected by the exchange of valuables led by their travelling elites, who also shared ritual and symbolic institutions. A decade after the publication of The Rise, the volume by Tobias L. Kienlin represents in my view the soundest book-length critique of such grand narratives. Surprisingly, The Rise and its ‘neo-diffusionist’ macrohistorical account has only received sporadic, yet fierce, criticisms (e.g. Harding, Reference Harding2013). Kienlin's appraisal adequately exposes the rhetorical strategies and even interpretive exaggerations within The Rise. In particular, the author shows how, within such generalising models, regional variability is neglected; how supposedly universal principles are applied irrespective of particular local developments; and how, in recent intellectual approaches (e.g. postcolonial theory) to interregional interaction and reinterpretation of foreign elements, both physical items and immaterial know-how are ignored. In order to do so, the volume dissects some of the key arguments in The Rise.
Consequently, Chapter II.2, ‘Homer, Heroes, and the Bronze Age’, is devoted to alternative readings of Homeric epic stories, and revises their implications for understanding Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Aegean archaeologies. More specifically, The Rise attempted to bridge the gap between the Homeric Dark Age and the preceding palatial Mycenaean context. Both are qualitatively different historical settings in many aspects, yet are somehow conflated and made interchangeable in some passages of Kristiansen and Larsson's book. Chapter II.3, ‘Bronze Age “Centre” and “Periphery”’, addresses some of the inconsistencies of World Systems Theory and core and periphery schemes when uncritically transferred to European prehistory. Thus, some pivotal notions within such theorizations (e.g. systemic interdependence or unbalanced exchange) are simply assumed rather than adequately demonstrated. Another case in point regards the prehistoric counterparts of some contributing factors envisaged for the sixteenth century in Wallerstein's model (e.g. a clear-cut and unique core area, or the occurrence of ‘technological gaps’ between the thriving core and peripheral-underdeveloped zones), which are missing when tackling pre-modern Europe. Finally, Chapter II.4, ‘The “Emergence of Civilization”, or just: Contingency and Culture Change in Bronze Age Greece’, focuses on important milestones of architecture as a medium through which to frame social action and habitus, sensu Bourdieu (i.e. embodied dispositions orchestrating preferences and perceptions ultimately shaping social action), throughout Bronze Age Greece. Thus, the House of Tiles at Lerna, an example of Early Helladic ‘corridor houses’, shows a mutable and ambiguous setting framing various levels of social interactions, from formal to unconsidered. This is in sharp contrast to Late Helladic Mycenaean orderly palaces (e.g. the palaces at Mycenae, Tyrins, Pylos) within a highly centralised tributary and administrative polity. Palatial cyclopean citadels with their courts, workshops, and stores, propylon (i.e. main entrance), and the megaron or representation hall for the wanax (i.e. king) left no room for ambiguity or alternative readings to compliance with tightly prescribed norms stating how to behave. In Dark Age Lefkandi (Euboea), the exceptional Toumba apsidal building and its famous rich burials—with archaic items likely to have been used as mnemonic devices—allows an understanding of how local Early Iron Age communities dealt with such a remarkable past after the collapse of palatial rule. When compared to trajectories in the rest of Europe, the archaeology of Greece can hardly be integrated in any centre and periphery modelling.
In short, the running thread of these chapters revolves around recursive topics, tackled from different angles, and leading to concurrent ideas. There is no linear teleological evolution in prehistoric Europe. Abstract and universal categories are unhelpful and impose artificial dichotomies upon a far richer, misunderstood prehistoric reality. The mainstream top-down perspective on the European Bronze Age limits how one can approach the subject and creates scholarly artefacts. In order to avoid homogeneous and misleading archaeological accounts we should pay adequate attention to finer-grained contextual analyses, assessing diverse lines of evidence.
To conclude, this is a ground-breaking research contribution. Its timely publication and the bravery of its assertions will allow it to become a seminal piece of scholarly work. Its significance goes beyond the particular prehistoric realities tackled on its pages, which are explored as test cases for discussion of important, yet disregarded, interpretive challenges pervading current accounts of the European past. For this reason, Kienlin's contribution will likely attract the interest of a wide audience. Hopefully, the avenue opened by this volume will promote prospective contributions that will provide far more nuanced accounts of prehistoric Europe.
