Customer Reviews

Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a remarkable overview of an important period in human history in what we now call Europe (basically the period from the end of the last ice age to the medieval period, and covering the beginnings of farming and the rise of cities and settlements: the Neolithic and post-Neolithic period). This is also a summary of archeologist Cunliffe's other works, now contained between two covers. The author discusses everything from trade, migration and the domestication of animals to art and literature -- with Homer's great oral tales in particular getting very good treatment -- and of course languages and warfare. It is well written (on paper is of an exceptional quality) and filled with wonderful crisp and clear photographs, as well as charts and diagrams. The only possible downside is the sheer weight of the book, making it resemble a coffee book, though it isn't that. So, all in all, a great work about an important subject -- the big picture of how the West came to be the West we know -- by a learned and lucid expert in the field(s), pitched at the intelligent ordinary reader, to boot.

This book is a great treasure - if I was headed for a desert island it would be one of the ten books I would take with me. (And that is after a good forty years of reading history and literature) Cunliffe gives a wide and deep summary of Europe's growth and evolution from the paleolithic to the Roman empire. Unlike so many historians with narrow views, he weaves together findings from archaeology, climatology, geographpy, medical genetics, social history and ecology. His prose is a miracle of clarity, conciseness and sparkled here and there with a little wit and mischief. He highlights the big controversies, lets you know where he stands on them, but is never dogmatic or overbearing. He writes from a long career in this field, yet everything in the book is right up to date. The maps, charts and photos are all a graphic designer's dream - perfectly rendered and always completely integrated with the text. In fact, the book is a publisher's masterpiece. I could go on and on - but just go out and get this!!

Along with Mithen's After The Ice, this is the most enjoyable book on European prehistory that I have read. Filled with colorful maps and photos that follow along with the text descriptions, written elegantly and with enough detail to not seem too "dumbed-down" for the layman. If every professor or researcher published their books in such an appealing and vibrant fashion, it would cut into the ratings of the Science and History channels.

This book is a quick summary of European prehistory, ancient and early medieval history. I bought it chiefly for the prehistoric section (two thirds of the book). It is very readable and well illustrated, but so basic that it reminded me of a secondary school textbook (although a nice one). I didn't learn much. I was annoyed by the fact that Barry Cunliffe speculates a lot and gives his personal opinion everywhere, but not enough archaeological data that would allow the reader to draw his own conclusions. Archaeological periods are usually mentioned without starting and ending dates, which I find unacceptable.

The first three chapters (86 pages) are not about history or archaeology, but consist of a boring description of European geography and geology. There is very little about the central European and Italian Bronze Age; only to sentences about the Unetice culture and not a single mention of the Tumulus culture (1600-1200 BCE), nor of the Terramare culture (1700-1150 BCE), two essential periods to understand the development of Celtic and Italic cultures. There is very little on north-eastern Europe as well.

For a book specifically about European (pre)history, I found that there was an undue emphasis on the Near East (Anatolia, Levant, Egypt) and much too little about Europe beyond Greece, Italy and the Balkans.

Cunliffe keep insisting that no major migration took place between the Pontic steppes and the rest of Europe, despite overwhelming genetic evidence to the contrary. He claims that Indo-European languages came with Neolithic farmers from Anatolia (p.137). This goes against all linguistic studies that date the split of Indo-European languages to 4000-3000 BCE from their Pontic steppe homeland, much later than the spread of agriculture to Europe (7000-5000 BCE). Archaeological evidence confirms that bronze technology, horse-riding, single graves and the rise of patrilinear hierarchical societies all originated in the Eurasian steppes, and moved progressively westward until reaching the Atlantic coast of Europe. Cunliffe reports all this in the book, but repeats obstinately that all this change happened without substantial migration.

On pages 99-101 and 111, the author argues that the Neolithic Greek and Balkanic populations descended directly from the Mesolithic population, and not from Near-Eastern immigrants. How could Indo-European languages spread with agriculture (as he believes) without a migration of population ? In fact, Cunliffe's claim has been completely disproved by DNA studies as well. The Balkans and Greece are much closer genetically to Anatolia and the Levant than to the rest of Europe. This much was clear beyond reasonable doubt when the book was written in 2007.

Barry Cunliffe even argues that the Etruscans did not have any Near Eastern origins. On p. 250, talking about the rise of the Etruscan civilization, he pompously and wrongfully declares that "it is now generally accepted that development was continuous with no influxes of new people". Not only is it not generally accepted, but once again DNA tests have confirmed a Near-Eastern origin both for modern and ancient Tuscans, but also for cattle lineages found in Tuscany today.

The author's dogged refusal to admit a spread of Proto-Celtic people, culture and language from central to western Europe has for consequence that his view of Bronze Age Europe is flawed from the start. On pp. 254-258, he is amazed at the similarity of weapons and feasting gears in Iberia, France, Britain and Ireland in the period 1200 to 800 BCE, and attempts to explain it simply by the existence of maritime networks. It does not ocur to him that this Proto-Celtic culture might have sprung from a common source. Maritime networks don't explain the presence of the same objects inland, far from the coasts. He also does the unforgivable mistake of illustrating the late Western European Bronze Age with a map of P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages based on the earliest Roman accounts of Celtic languages dating from over 1000 years later ! It is unlikely that the P vs Q split had already occurred around 1000 BCE. How can a serious historian make such a basic anachronism ?

Without trying to nitpick, I noted that some dates were quite inconsistent in different parts of the book. For instance, on p.95 Cunliffe writes that farming reached Crete from Anatolia in 7000 BC, but on p.174 it is 6000 BCE. One thousand years is a long time for such an imprecision.

The next criticism focuses on the author's unrepenting Anglo-centrism. On p.181 he claims that "the earliest appearance of regular bronze-using economy is to be found in Britain and Ireland in the period 2200-2000 BC, after which it spread eastwards and southwards through Europe". The reality is quite different. The Bronze Age started in the Near East, Caucasus and Pontic steppe from 3500 BC, then spread to the Carpathians, Balkans and Greece around 3000-2500 BC, then Central Europe around 2300 BC, and only reached the Atlantic fringe around 2200-2000 BC. I don't know who is is fooling writing that it spread the other way round.

Along the same vein I was shocked to read this passage on p.28 : "At a simple level it would be possible to see the Mediterranean world - a centre of innovation from the third millennium BC - as a core for which the rest of Europe served as periphery. There is a degree of validity in this generalization. Extending the argument, one could say that things only began to change in the seventh and eighth centuries AD when the focus of innovation started to shift to the Atlantic fringes of Europe, where it remained until the end of the nineteenth century." What is he saying is that the Atlantic coast of Europe (the British Isles and western France and Iberia) led scientific/technological innovation in Europe from the early Middle Ages. This is just absurd. During the medieval period it was first the Byzantine Empire then Italy then progressively France and Germany that led innovation. Britain really started influencing the rest of Europe from the late 17th and early 18th century onwards, but along with France, Germany and Austro-Hungary. In France, new ideas came from Paris or eastern France, rarely western France. Iberia hardly led Europe through its scientific innovations, mostly because of the oppressing religious climate under the Inquisition.

Cunliffe speculates (e.g. p.139) that the Western European seafaring tradition and the social prestige attached to exploring unknown territories and colonizing them have their roots in the spread of farming during the Neolithic. In other words, he is suggesting that the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British colonialism can be explained by what people did 6000 to 8000 years ago ! I am not going to list all the aberrations contained in this book, but you will understand why I only grant it two stars. I won't give it only one star because the writing style is pleasant and the illustrations are nice.

What can be said about a "history" of ancient Europe that doesn't even mention Socrates, let alone the Druids? That it is not a conventional history! As Cunliffe readily explains, his book is concerned with the long-term trends in European history, not the short-term ephemera of particular people and events. This is debatable in principle ("For want of a nail... the kingdom was lost," as Shakespeare put it), and even more restrictive in practice, for "Europe Between The Oceans" confines itself exclusively to the movement of populations and goods, i.e. territories and trade, across and around the varied geography of Europe. This is understandable in a physical archaeologist of the now-outdated (1960's!) French "Annales" school, for whom the object record is paramount, but it is so far from the whole story as to turn the book itself into a prime example of the limitations of this sort of methodology. There are, after all, long-term trends (the infamous "longues durees" so beloved of French theory) to be discerned in science and technology, political and legal systems, social organization, art and literature, philosophy and religion. Yet Cunliffe argues that geography and trade routes are the determining factors in human (or at least, European) history. Not Proven! Consider, for example, the author's concluding remarks, in which he opines that Europeans were restless explorers because they had a "pioneering spirit" (p. 475). This is like saying (to quote Voltaire's satire) that people sleep because of a "dormative principle."

Turning from theory to a reader's practical concerns, I think that many readers will not be able to get through the book's endless recitals of who traded what to whom. It is very heavy going. For example (p. 341):

"During the early and mid-fifth century BC the elites of Levantine Iberia were provided... with high-quality Attic wares probably from Emporion. But around the middle of the fifth century large volumes of cheaper Attic pottery begin to flood the Levantine markets, among them the ubiquitous Castulo cups... The bulk of this material seems to have come not via the trading ports of the Golfe du Lion but direct from Magna Graecia..."

This sort of information is by now, thank goodness, usually incorporated into more focused histories, where it is easily digested and illuminates larger issues about culture and society. Five hundred pages of trade goods and population movements are, I think, too thinly spread over 10,000 years of early European history; if you don't already have a good idea about what the Hallstatt culture is and why it is important, the scattered mentions in the present volume will hardly enlighten you. There is a disproportionate emphasis on minor societies and secondary trade routes in the book, that takes away valuable page space from larger issues.

Finally, and to sum up, Cunliffe's book provides such a practically restricted and theoretically impoverished stream of information that it cannot, despite the author's distinguished standing in his field, be recommended for most readers.

This massive study shares Cunliffe's life of researching prehistoric and early historic geographical and archeological patterns of migration in Europe. It's a hefty book in size and scope, bringing us what can be summed up about the previous ten millennia to the better-recorded one we have just concluded. (I did not see in my copy the graphic problems some earlier reviewers here have noted.) The maps and illustrations add to the understandings packed within an accessible, yet scholarly, text.

A wealth of details tend to favor what we can glean from the warriors and invaders. The quieter folks leave, buried in the soil or carved on the stones, less testimony. The sense of restlessness permeates this volume. Over the "longue durée" of the French Annales historical school, which Cunliffe follows to excavate the deep rarely moving water, the more vibrant surface, and the frothier waves of battle and assault, he seeks to understand the patterns that move Westerners always westward.

A patient reader will find intriguing examples. Primitive people could have gotten the same nutrition from a single red deer as fifty thousand oysters, yet their middens are filled with the tasty shellfish. Europe's coasts in mileage around them roughly equal the earth's circumference. The shift from inhumation-- burying bodies in the ground-- to cremation after 1300 BC may signal a break with earth-mother beliefs for those oriented towards sky-gods.

The ties between material culture then and what we speak today may be tenuous, but Cunliffe explains a key marker. Indo-European languages appear to have spread with Neolithic production of food, from south-west Asia, and then across the Balkans to Hungary and then through Middle Europe's forests in one branch; the other branch stretched from the Mediterranean to Iberia. This language was part of the "Neolithic package" that attracted Mesolithic peoples to adapt cultivation rather than hunting as their way of sustenance.

He also offers an explanation for the disintegration of the old Atlantic trading network that helped spread language and farming. The end of the Bronze Age, with the advent of iron, may have disrupted the entire subcontinent. Regionalism replaced trans-maritime networks. Agricultural surpluses in the east replaced bronze as commodities. Phoenicians dominated the seas. Along with the Greeks and Romans, seafarers left tantalizing suggestions of Atlantean travels into Africa, up into Britain, and perhaps beyond. First the exclusion from this network of Atlantic Iberia in the 8th c. BCE and then northern Europe with the isolation of Ireland in the 6th c. BCE may have accelerated the break we see later within Celtic languages, with Iberian splitting off more, proto-Irish evolving apart from British and Gallic Celtic. (258) Like many points, Cunliffe raises insights in passing on such a long intellectual journey, but he does point out byways worth pursuing.

Later, the Mediterranean inherited imperatives of honor and acquisition by trade and conquest. Cunliffe goes beyond the usual accounting for classical civilization by the need for feeding "gaggles of philosophers and droves of vase painters." (319) "But deep within the human psyche is the desire to gain honour and recognition through leadership: in the situations of stress and conflict that prevailed, military and territorial adventures provided a ready vehicle. In other words, desire to control resources met a deep-seated psychological need by offering leadership opportunities to young men intent on seeking honour." (319) Young men wanted to fight, to advance their careers when they returned, and to gain high office. The more fights the empires raised, the more they invaded and conquered, until the Romans found themselves at the barbarian frontiers, recruiting the barbarians to police the imperial borders against the barbarians infiltrating the Empire. Many lessons can be learned, and Cunliffe retells the familiar story of Roman weakness well.

Cunliffe does present heaps of evidence, hundreds of tribes, and thousands of facts. Yet, he arranges the clashes and contacts logically, and the visual support aids comprehension of Sarmatians vs. Scordisci, or Pomerania vs. Pannonia. The complicated movements across ancient empires do get confusing even with charts, and the amount of learning crammed into these attractively designed pages is better digested slowly. Endnotes point the reader towards specialized studies, and the text proper remains remarkably free of jargon. One small flaw: the index, substantial though it is, lacks alphabetical listings for the more minor peoples and references in the text.

Concluding, Cunliffe eloquently summarizes his vision. Reviewing the endless push of populations across the continental spine (he starts the book by turning the map to view the sub-continent's peninsular ridge top first), he wonders. "What drove these outpourings is a fascinating problem." Beyond demographic pressures prompting mobility, "is it too much to suggest that underlying it all was a folk memory, passed across the generations, that 'our people always ride into the west'? I once met an elderly traveller on a road in Sussex, who told me he was making for Kent and hoped to be there in May. When asked why, he said, 'We always go there at this time.'" (476)

The good news: this is a fabulous overview of the history of Europe as it reflects the geography of Europe. The end of the Ice Age, the incursion of tribes, the rise and fall of Rome and other cultures, the development and decline of manufactured goods -- all of these are brilliantly re-interpreted through the sheer facts of who lived where, what they had to do to get from Point A to Point B, and what seems a logical conclusion about why major events occurred. It's a physically heavy, handsome book, with lots of gorgeous maps, and a lucid writing style that pushes onward and onward through time, building up evidence, circling around to previous conceptions, and giving one a very well-rounded sense of what made Europe Europe.

The bad news (and it's minor): there are lots and lots of typo's, especially on the maps. Keys that don't make sense, spelling variants all over the place, occasionally misdrawn images, that sort of thing. Feels like it was perhaps rushed to print, on the graphical side: lots of great graphics, but they didn't pore through them as well as thye should have.

But that's a quibble: this book is a must for anyone interested in European life and history.

Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000
Europe between the Oceans is a marvelous book on at least three levels. First, it is itself an impressive artifact, a prime example of what a great loss it would be if publishers abandoned the printed page to go exclusively to electronic media. This is the sort of book you will want to own and have on your shelves not only for future reference, but also for purely aesthetic reasons. The hundreds of illustrations -- mostly maps and photos of archeological artifacts and sites -- are often beautiful and are always relevant to the text. They complement and clarify what Cunliffe has to say, as opposed to interfering with the narrative.

Second, this volume is a grand synthesis of what archeologists, historians, and other specialists know about the distant past. It is a fine example of "big history," the sort that addresses the "longue dureé," not just brief episodes. The total sweep is 10,000 years and even the individual chapters span sufficiently broad periods for Cunliffe to see patterns and trends that would be obscured in finer focus. Europe between the Oceans is also big history in the sense that it is interdisciplinary. Cunliffe is an archeologist and that is the specialized knowledge most on display here, but he also branches into geology, oceanography, genetics, and other sciences applicable to doing history in the absence of written documents. And for the later periods when the texts are there he has absorbed much of the relevant scholarship.

Third, Cunliffe offers many illuminating insights and interpretations. I caution that I am a non-specialist reader, so I am not sure of the originality of much of what he has to say, but it impressed me. I will present just a few examples in the summary that follows.

Much like Jared Diamond, Cunliffe attends to geographic and environmental factors that may have conferred advantage. He claims that the diets of the coastal peoples of what he call the "European Peninsula" enabled a rapid increase in population and led to a more sedentary lifestyle. Even in much of the interior the European landscape and environment were supportive of human thriving: a wide variety of ecological niches supported development of distinctive economies. Cunliffe notes the favorable location of Middle Europe (the North Alpine area), for instance. It commands the northern approaches to the passes through the Alps and incorporates the headwaters of the major rivers. East-west trade routes passed through this zone and were especially active in the late Bronze age (c. 1300-800 BC), for example.

One of Cunliffe's major themes is that the favorable environmental and resource conditions that supported population growth in turn "led to the development of complex societies hierarchically structured and controlled by elites." These societies competed for land, resources, and luxury goods. This competition, Cunliffe continues, "energized society, creating a dynamic that drove forward production, innovation, and exploration." The author draws on Braudel to make the large point that imbalances in the distribution of resources are productive of change.

Seas and rivers facilitated exploration and exchange. A major strength of this book lies in how Cunliffe has applied the archeological findings, the distribution of found artifacts, to document trade routes and patterns. For much of the period that he examines he believes that ideas and values flowed primarily through exchange networks. But population pressures also contributed to mass migrations from time to time as well.

Cunliffe observes that the period 800-500 BC was pivotal; he entitles this chapter "The Three Hundred Years that Changed the World". Greeks, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, and Romans emerged as big players on the world stage. Whereas previously the trading system was built largely on tribute and gift-giving among elites, by the end of this period it had shifted toward exchange of commodities without further obligations.

Cunliffe seeks to restore a balance, to give areas outside the Mediterranean cultures their proper due. He points out that the disparity in the historical information available between the Mediterranean zone and the rest of Europe has contributed to a tendency to treat them separately. Instead, he claims, the two areas "... can only be understood in relation to each other."

I especially appreciated Cunliffe's willingness from time to time to speculate beyond the evidence (he clearly calls out when he is doing this). Similarly, he acknowledges at least some of the problems presented by reliance on archeological findings. For instance, he points out that just tracking crude numbers of discovered objects can mislead because the great majority of surviving objects come from hoards -- deposits deliberately buried in the earth -- or from bodies of water where they may have been deposited as votive offerings to the gods. Thus, for example, the increase in recovered bronze items dating to the 1300-800 BC period may reflect shifts in the practices of worshiping deities, rather than an increase in bronze in circulation. We simply cannot say for sure.

It will take you awhile to get through Europe between the Oceans if you attend to it carefully, but if you are like me you will find pleasures on virtually every page.

This is a fascinating book and I agree with the other reviewers. However, I found the maps enormously frustrating. Place names in the text are not often shown on the maps, and my copy has many of the maps incomplete, that is, the color coded indications were blank. I found many typos in the maps also; whomever worked on these maps clearly had English as a second language...and no one edited them with care.

Europe of the stone age, of neolithic cultures, was a complex land of trade, new technologies, cultural change and advance. This well written and exciting book shows the way Europe developed, and through that lens the way human kind developed a civilization over the past 12,000 years.

This book is wonderful. Based on recent archaeology, a panoramic view is presented of the way men and women used the land, developed networks, changed and shaped culture and the land.

Readable? Mesmerizing. From the effects of climate change to the way trade patterns civilization, this book shows the interaction of exogenous variables with local cultures, the way we came to be what we are, not only in Europe but in the West, and where influence extends.

After reading this book, you will never look at Europe again with the same eyes, and you will not think about civilization, now or as it came to be, without a better grounding in the ways we live together. A stunner.