Book reviews

The Solitary Self: Jean‐Jacques Rousseau in Exil and Adversity. By Maurice Cranston (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997) xii + 247 pp. $29.95 cloth.

The Self‐Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta‐Painting. By Victor I. Stoichita (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xv + 345 pp. $85.00, £55.00 cloth.

The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Edited by Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ix + 403 pp. $18.95, £13.95 paper, $59.95, £40.00 cloth.

David Hume: Political Essays. Edited by Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) lxvi + 346 pp. $49.95, £30.00 cloth, $15.95, £10.95 paper.

Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason. By Thomas R. Flynn (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997) 340 + xvi pages. $18.95 paper.

Shaping World History: Breakthroughs in Ecology, Technology, Science, and Politics. By Mary Kilbourne Matossian (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997) 264 pp. $62.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.     

Archaeological excavations at Bosutswe,Botswana: cultural chronology,paleo-ecology and economy

Excavations at the site of Bosutswe on the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana have uncovered over 4 m of deposit ranging in age from CE 700 to 1700. Our research has produced quantitative and qualitative measures of the material and ecological dimensions that structured the everyday actions and behaviors through which social identities were constituted, maintained, and transformed during the period when the polities of Toutswe, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Khami rose to power. By examining the material dimensions that underlay shifting relations of production, exchange, and social stratification we are able to contextualize the social judgments that ascribed value to material goods and food ways, while specifying the ways these were used to create and naturalize social relationships and power differentials. Stable isotope analyses, combined with evidence of vitrified dung, further enable us to suggest changes in herd management strategies used by the inhabitants of the site to compensate for ecological changes brought about by long-term occupation, while at the same time enabling them to economically tie subordinates to them as social divisions became more rigidly defined after CE 1300. The cultural and economic changes that took place at Bosutswe thus directly impact our understanding of the social transformations that immediately preceded contemporary configurations of ethnicity in Botswana.