Book Reviews - In Brief

Published on Friday 30 May 2008 17:46

Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives **** by Rosemary A Joyce (Thames & Hudson, £14.95)

ARCHAEOLOGISTS can only work with the material traces of the past, which leaves a great deal to the imagination. But all the scientific rigour in the world won't avail us if the evidence is going to be read according to wildly anachronistic modern assumptions.

Nowhere, suggests Rosemary A Joyce in a lively and thought-provoking essay, is the scope for miscomprehension greater than in the areas of sex and gender – so central to our lives, yet so sketchily represented archaeologically.

How far can we avoid Flinstone-ising our forebears, imposing on them structures of social organisation, sexual desire, emotion and morality, which owe more to our own age than theirs?

A Voyage Long and Strange ****

by Tony Horwitz

(John Murray, 25)

HORWITZ grew up, as every American does, knowing when Columbus sailed the ocean blue; likewise he knew when the Pilgrim Fathers landed. But it was only much later that it struck him how much had separated these arrivals in time and place. How was it that the first native the Pilgrim Fathers met greeted them in English? This early period has not gone unrecorded, but by and large it's been viewed in a separate Spanish or English frame. This absorbing, often entertaining, study sets out to show how these early experiences add up to a "forgotten first chapter" of American history.