Development Economics on Trial

 

I was chatting with my friend Niklas Hultin yesterday when he recommended a book about a conflict between anthropology and economics. On his recommendation, I went to the library here at UCF and read the book right away. It's quite accessible, and is both engaging and well documented with supporting evidence. It's a sobering read for an archaeologist interested in agriculture, because Polly Hill (check out this interview) points out how difficult it is to characterize and describe agriculture in the tropics. Some of her strongest points include how ambiguous official statistics can be, how much inequality there can be (and usually is) among farmers, and how farmers do all kinds of things in addition to cultivating, including loaning and borrowing money, trading, and crafts like blacksmithing. Hill's examples are drawn primarily from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It seems even more bleak when I consider that these are economists, agronomists and anthropologists who have the chance to talk to farmers, not archaeologists trying to interpret material evidence. On the other hand, in pre-Columbian eastern Bolivia at least we have access to some direct evidence of what fields look like, how big they are, and where they are located. That's not always the case in the tropics, as Hill convincingly emphasizes.

Reading about monuments

I am reading Early New World Monumentality, a book edited by Richard L. Burger and Robert M. Rosenswig, which has good coverage from around the Americas, although there are perhaps more from South America. I have found each of the chapters I have read to be very useful. The idea I want to examine in my own work is that monumentality is best considered as an independent phenomenon, a point that is brought up explicitly in the editor’s introduction, by at least one of the papers (the chapter by Sassaman and Randall on shell mounds in Central Florida) and implicitly in the range of interpretations that the various authors put forward.

If monumentality can be recognized in the archaeological record as constructions that are “over engineered” or made larger or more elaborate than they need to be, then it would seem that monumentality comes in many different varieties, and in association with many different attributes. That is to say, monumentality varies independently from other kinds of social, political and cultural factors. Reflecting on the pioneering work of Renfrew with monuments in Neolithic England, Rosenswig and Burger show how easily circular reasoning can seep into archaeological interpretation. Sassaman and Randall’s chapter documents their work with very early monumental architecture on the St. John’s in Florida, and advances an interesting interpretation relating these monuments to societies with dual social organization, based on ceramics and spatial analyses.

Online excerpt from Mann's 1491

image from backissues.com

If you are not sure about whether or not to buy a copy of 1491, the book by Charles Mann that presents a new and updated view of pre-Columbian America, why not see this excerpt at one of his webpages. I am not sure how long it will be available, because the larger doesn't seem to cover his more recent work. Mann is a gifted writer and does the important job of making archaeology more accessible to all readers. The illustration above is from the March 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, where the introduction was first published.

New book about almost everything

The Creation of Inequality is the new book from Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, archaeologists at the University of Michigan, and well-known in the field both for their research and for their engaging writing style. The book has been reviewed here, here and here, and it will surely get more attention, because of the authors and the publisher, but also because the book engages questions about the origins of contemporary society in the archaeological past, but also taking archaeological interpretations of the past and using them to re-imagine society today. It's the kind of archaeological book that should get attention outside of the narrow field of archaeology.

Denevan's Book

If you are interested in the archaeology, ethnohistory, or geography of the Bolivian Amazon, then there really is no replacement for William Denevan's The Aboriginal Cultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia. It's not easy to find a copy for sale, but many university libraries have a copy of the book. It is a clear, well-written summary of everything that was known about the topic in 1966, and it is still indispensable. Although George Plafker and Kenneth Lee were also part of the same historical moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was Denevan who brought the earthworks of the Llanos de Mojos to a wider English speaking audience.