Scan barcode
archytas's review against another edition
4.0
As a relatively comprehensive, accessible and engrossing summary of Bellwood's view of human prehistory across the globe - based on a long and impressive career - this book is very successful. As a convincing case for all his view, and a refutations of others, it is much less so, at least for a layperson.
I picked this book up because firstly, I wanted to read a counter-view to David Anthony's proto-Indo-European thesis (a theory which I pretty much fell in love with, and hence distrust from sheer too-interesting-to-be-trueness); and secondly because I am looking for good detailed info on Lapita's cultures, and this had a relevant chapter. (All my understanding of prehistory comes from casual reading, so this is most definitively a non-expert's view.)
The first thing that struck me about the book was the huge scope. Bellwood essentially discusses, migration by migration, the entire prehistory of how groups of people got where they were when writing began. A mammoth undertaking, Bellwood also manages to pull off the feat of making this break-neck tour interesting and thought provoking - spending enough time on various questions of debate to spark interest, cover some of the implications of different theories, before pronouncing his opinion and moving on. The issue is, really, that he doesn't spend enough time to actually make a convincing case on any given topic. It's not that his work looks shoddy (at least to an outsider), it's just that you really have to take his word for why he was convinced by x or y.
As a contribution in the field, I suspect this is less of a problem, as he references thoroughly, and a student or post-doc could chase the references down to get the detail on the debate. For someone like me, with neither the resources nor the time to do so, it meant making peace with the book for what it was. For example, the whole of Anthony's insanely detailed book was refuted in half a chapter here - not nearly enough space allocated to actually explain the many specific points of difference.
This may, however, be the book's biggest strength. Both Anthony's book and this one served to remind me that a few hours of casual reading is often not enough to engage seriously with extremely complex and often contradictory research involving linguistics, paleoanthropology and genetic research. And it is a pleasure to read the process of scholarship - in which scholars are rarely wholly right or wholly wrong. a reminder of the importance of detailed, painstaking research to grand-theory-making is not entirely a bad thing.
I've already started chasing more information on some of the issues raised, and that's probably the biggest sign that this book was well worth reading.
I picked this book up because firstly, I wanted to read a counter-view to David Anthony's proto-Indo-European thesis (a theory which I pretty much fell in love with, and hence distrust from sheer too-interesting-to-be-trueness); and secondly because I am looking for good detailed info on Lapita's cultures, and this had a relevant chapter. (All my understanding of prehistory comes from casual reading, so this is most definitively a non-expert's view.)
The first thing that struck me about the book was the huge scope. Bellwood essentially discusses, migration by migration, the entire prehistory of how groups of people got where they were when writing began. A mammoth undertaking, Bellwood also manages to pull off the feat of making this break-neck tour interesting and thought provoking - spending enough time on various questions of debate to spark interest, cover some of the implications of different theories, before pronouncing his opinion and moving on. The issue is, really, that he doesn't spend enough time to actually make a convincing case on any given topic. It's not that his work looks shoddy (at least to an outsider), it's just that you really have to take his word for why he was convinced by x or y.
As a contribution in the field, I suspect this is less of a problem, as he references thoroughly, and a student or post-doc could chase the references down to get the detail on the debate. For someone like me, with neither the resources nor the time to do so, it meant making peace with the book for what it was. For example, the whole of Anthony's insanely detailed book was refuted in half a chapter here - not nearly enough space allocated to actually explain the many specific points of difference.
This may, however, be the book's biggest strength. Both Anthony's book and this one served to remind me that a few hours of casual reading is often not enough to engage seriously with extremely complex and often contradictory research involving linguistics, paleoanthropology and genetic research. And it is a pleasure to read the process of scholarship - in which scholars are rarely wholly right or wholly wrong. a reminder of the importance of detailed, painstaking research to grand-theory-making is not entirely a bad thing.
I've already started chasing more information on some of the issues raised, and that's probably the biggest sign that this book was well worth reading.
More...