Reviews in Archaeology

Reading Archaeology. Photo (cc) Queen Roly.

There’s an interesting post gone up at Publishing Archaeology: Why Aren’t There More Good Book Reviews in Archaeology? – the discipline, not the magazine. Mike Smith raises one of those points which is obvious when someone else mentions it. Why is there no archaeological equivalent of BMCR?

One key point is the difference between good reviews and positive reviews. When I review something here it tends to be positive. One reason for this is that I write in my spare time and I don’t often feel like putting in effort for what may promote a bad book. A good review in contrast is one which informs you about the book and gives an accurate account of whether or not it’s worth bothering with. Whether or not there are good reviews here is for you to decide and I’m not fishing for compliments.

My first reaction when reading this post were that there were plenty of good reviews, most of them in BMCR, but as Mike points out (and I keep forgetting) there is a Divide between archaeology and classics. Nonetheless BMCR is fantastic. If you haven’t read it then it’s a free online journal which is only reviews of recent books. Better still you can also sign up to have the reviews delivered to your mailbox, where I tend to end up deleting a lot of them, because they’re often not something I’d be interested in. However, it’s not unusual to find something which I wouldn’t have otherwise read about.

So why is there no archaeological equivalent? The technical issues are trivial. From my position as a post-grad, we’re not really trained in book reviews. Mike Smith’s guide is a help here. Also, writing a good review as opposed to a positive review might be a bad idea when you don’t have a job. For instance a comment that north and south are opposite directions can cause people to take umbrage [PDF]. Some people even set up an entirely new section of an organisation’s website to deliver that umbrage. That wouldn’t explain the difference between archaeology and classics though, because presumably there are still academic politics to negotiate in classics.

Another reason may be the fragmentation of archaeology. Classics has big meetings for all classics in both the UK and USA. The Classical Association is the big event in the UK, the APA meeting in the USA. Archaeologists in contrast tend to meet in period-themed or method/theory-themed meetings. The closest to a general meeting for archaeology in the UK is the TAG series, which is about Theoretical Archaeology with a very broad definition of theory. There are some common grounds between archaeologists, Antiquity is the most obvious one that springs to mind, but they’re rare.

This matters because specialities tend to be concentrated in regions. You’re more likely to find an cluster of archaeological researchers on Medieval Britain in the UK than in the USA. Similarly Australian archaeology tends to be practiced by Australian archaeologists. The boundaries aren’t exclusive. There are Mayanists in the UK as well as the USA, but nothing like the same proportion. This means that in archaeology, much more than in classics, that specialisms are also social groups. Classicists in contrast have the same sources regardless of where they are in the world. A classicist is more likely to be able to review someone’s work and have little to do with them socially and professionally than an archaeologist. If I like someone then I will find it difficult to give a book a negative review, even if it richly deserves one. If this isn’t a freakish personal foible then it would explain how the less tightly knit classical community can produce more good reviews.

A final UK based point is that we’re all assessment mad here at the moment. We get assessed on producing papers and books, not reviewing them. Rather like undergrads if it ain’t assessed then we don’t think it’s important.

This wouldn’t in anyway detract from the central point Mike Smith makes, which is that from the perspective of producing good Archaeology good book reviews are important. It’s well worth reading the whole thing and the comments.