Book reviews

TRANSFORMATION SCENE: THE CHANGING CULTURE OF A NEW GUINEA VILLAGE, by Ian Hobgin. The International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1951. xiv + 326 pp. with 2 maps and 22 plates. Price 30s.

AN INTRODUCTION TO WORLD POLITICS. By Professor W. Friedmann. 2nd ed. London, 1952 (Macmillan & Co. Ltd.), pp. xiv + 384. (Maps and tables).

THE SOCIAL SERVICES OF MODERN ENGLAND. By M. Penelope Hall. Routledge, 1952. Pp. viii 332. Price 25s.     

Post-glacial environmental change and hunting-gathering societies of the southern Prairie Peninsula

Evidence from several disciplines supports the proposition that following the Wisconsinan and an initial but brief moist phase of the Holocene, there was a gradual drying trend in the mid-continent Prairie Peninsula that peaked about 7000 years ago, a pattern that was not reversed until about 4000 years ago. Except for minor perturbations, conditions during the past four millennia have essentially been similar to those of the present. Studies in palynology and geomorphology have shown that the climatic regimes of the early/mid Post-glacial had a marked influence on both the biota and landscape erosional patterns, especially along the margins of the Prairie Peninsula. Measurable changes in the landscape and attendant biota show a time-transgressive pattern of drought related phenomena recorded palaeo-ecologically from west to east.Few studies of archaeological sites in the Prairie Peninsula have examined the evidence in and around the sites themselves for data reflecting local environmental dynamics. In fact, earlier models proposed for explaining the evolution of food-procuring systems in eastern North America virtually ignored potential changes in the natural environment. This paper examines data from two archaeological sites along the prairie-forest border in Missouri that contain long cultural sequences. Evidence is presented that pronounced changes in the natural environment occurred and that these biophysical variables are indeed critical for understanding the evolution of food-procuring societies in the American Midwest.     

BARNSLEY PARK VILLA; ITS INTERPRETATION AND IMPLICATIONS

The Roman villa at Barnsley Park was interpreted by its excavator as a farm run by a family and a body of workers, its distinctive archaeological features being the division into three yards and the existence of a number of circular structures described as pens. An alternative hypothesis envisages a kin-group, the 'pens' being the houses associated with three farmyards. The three families are presumed to have held and worked the surrounding land in some kind of joint proprietorship. This system became Romanised as a hall-type villa designed for the occupation of some modified form of the kin-group.     

The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’

Traditional understandings of the development of the medieval English longbow and its role in the fourteenth-century ‘infantry revolution’ have recently been challenged by historians. This article responds to the revisionists, arguing based on archaeological, iconographic and textual evidence that the proper longbow was a weapon of extraordinary power, and was qualitatively different from – and more effective than – the shorter self-bows that were the norm in England (and western Europe generally) before the fourteenth century. It is further argued that acknowledging the importance of the weapon as a necessary element of any credible explanation of English military successes in the era of the Hundred Years War does not constitute ‘technological determinism’.