Reviews for Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation

The average rating for Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-05 00:00:00 Dave Bodle What is it that you think of when you think of slavery in ancient Rome?  There are admittedly several angles that you could think of, but in judging this book it is worthwhile to note that the author of this volume is focused on the subject of slave revolts.  The most famous of the slave revolts in antiquity was, of course, the Spartacus war during the late Roman Republic, and that is one of the four slave revolts during that time period that forms part of the core material to this book.  There are, of course, many other questions about slavery in ancient Rome that one might wish to ask but that material is not covered here, unfortunately.  Nevertheless, if you are looking for a work that gives some information about the reasons for slave revolts and how they were conducted during the period between 136 and 60BC, this book has a lot to offer, and offers indeed a bit of a mystery to the reader in the form of the question as to why such revolts ceased if slavery itself continued beyond this time.  How is it that the late Republic was a period where slave revolts were so common relative to the rest of Roman history? This book is between 150 and 200 pages long and is divided into three sections.  The book begins with a preface that discusses the importance of knowing about slavery in the Roman world as well an introduction that discusses the debate over the reasons why slave revolts are limited to such a small period during Roman history and how it was that slave revolts were avoided earlier and later.  The core of the book consists of a discussion of the primary sources in ancient history relating to four slave revolts, namely the Sicilian Slave revolt of 136-132BC, the war against Aristonicus and his forces in the effort to stop the establishment of Roman rule over Anatolia, the Sicilian slave revolt of 104-100BC, and the war against Spartacus.  This is the core of the book, and it consists at least some information that is not directly related to the wars but instead sets a context for the conflicts and the political and social state of the areas.  The book then closes with a very lengthy postscript that discusses debates and issues in the study of slaves and slavery in such a fashion that it deals with politics and other uninteresting matters. Admittedly, this book contains more material than just the material on the ancient sources regarding slave revolts.  It seems unlikely that many readers will be more interested in the turgid discussion of the contemporary political arguments over the history of slavery and slave revolts in the ancient world than in what the ancients had to say about the subject themselves.  Therefore it is unsurprising that the core of this book consists of competent translations from Greek and Latin relating to slave revolts that provide the historical context that anyone would have to use when discussing the subject today as a classicist or ancient historian.  One of the advantages to the reader of becoming well acquainted with this subject material is having a grasp of what is known from the writings of the ancient world as a way of keeping one's fancy in check and also being able to note when a historian is seeking to substitute their own a priori assumptions about slavery based on their own ideology for what is actually present in the historical record.  Knowing the historical record allows one to hold others accountable for how they act with regards to it.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-02-09 00:00:00 Patrick Lee This book was written right at the end of Lasch's life and it reads like it: he pulls no punches in telling the chattering classes what he thinks about them and the cultural trends they are presiding over. It is surprising this was published two decades ago since the criticisms are not only still applicable it did not seem to have made any difference for Lasch to have pointed them out so long ago. Elites of all types effectively live in their own world; the original American ideal of an educated public at all levels actively involved in debate and able to argue their interests has been replaced by a highly-credentialed cognitive elite lording it over uneducated plebeians. The latter are viewed with patronizing contempt, and indeed they periodically seem to confirm their low status by expressing themselves politically in a way that reflects their lack of education. The gap has gotten bigger politically, although in the years since Lasch wrote this the cultural playing field has been at least partly levelled by the internet. One thing social media has shown us is that people truly do love to debate and are hungry for knowledge at all levels of society. His analysis of hte attempt to replace religion with a mixture of art (broadly defined) and psychoanalysis is also apt. Almost all social problems are now talked about as though the solutions are primarily therapeutic, the recent interest in self-help books for white people about racism seeming to be a prime example. The therapeutic state really becomes stronger with every iteration. I don't know if Lasch identified as a conservative but this certainly came across as a conservative critique of contemporary culture. Lasch stood strongly against relativism in knowledge and lamented what he saw as the dissolution of the intellectual and moral bases of society; accusing contemporary forms of liberalism of living off the moral capital of the systems it replaced. As a whole the book was an entertaining and at times eloquent polemic but the crux of it should be more or less familiar to anyone following the subject broadly.