Ancient History: Key Themes and Approaches by Neville Morley

I’ve mentioned Neville Morley’s Theories, Models and Concepts in Ancient History before, but hadn’t said anything about Ancient History: Key Themes and Approaches. This is because I thought they were similar books. I’ve got a couple with differing UK and American titles. In fact it’s another good book – though Morley didn’t write much of it at all. This is because it’s a source book.

What Morley’s produced is a treasure trove of opinions on various topics connected to ancient history. The first section tackles various topics. The subjects you’d expect are listed like, Christianity, Myth and Tyranny and one or who you might not, like Magic and Divination and Euergetism. Part Two tackles specific writers, both historians and people from other fields. So you get highlights from Foucault and Marx as well as Finley and Gibbon. The snippets are well chosen and give plenty of starting points for discussion.

As an example here are two from Archaeology.

It is self-evident that the potential contribution of archaeology to history is, in a rough way, inversely proportional to the quantity and quality of the available written sources.

M.I. Finley. ‘Archaeology and History’ in The Use and Abuse of History. Chatto and Windus. London. 1975. p93.

Is it? Is it really? It’s a very European view of archaeology, as a tool for creating History. It does presuppose that the written sources define the past. If that is the case what happens if other disciplines disagree? Can they only be wrong?

The expression of archaeological results may call for nicely written historical narrative but this is a case of choosing one particular vehicle to convey results obtained by quite alien methods. The danger of historical narrative as a vehicle for archaeological results is that it pleases by virtue of its smooth coverage and apparent finality, whilst the data on which it based are never comprehensive, never capable of supporting but one interpretation and rest upon complex probabilities. Archaeological data are not historical data and consequently archaeology is not history.

David Clarke. Analytical Archaeology. Methuen. London. 1968. p12.

This to me seems to be the exact opposite of the Finley quote. Is the role of history to provide a narrative? Are historical sources incapable of providing anthropological or sociological data? These questions tackle some of the basic issues in history or archaeology, like “Why do it?”

To a grad student this might all seem a bit lightweight, but to someone who hasn’t had formal training, or else is starting a degree with Ancient History this sort of bite-sized introduction is a useful starting point. Obviously Gender isn’t going to be comprehensively covered in a few paragraphs, but nor is it going to overwhelm, but as a companion to Theories, Models and Concepts in Ancient History it could prove very useful.

Also posted with minor changes to Revise and Dissent and Blogographos.