Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000 |  | Author: Barry Cunliffe
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
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Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 27101
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.1
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 7.8 x 1.4
ISBN: 0300119232
Dewey Decimal Number: 940
EAN: 9780300119237
ASIN: 0300119232
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
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Product Description
Europe is, in world terms, a relatively minor peninsula attached to the Eurasian land mass. Yet it became one of the most innovative regions on the planet, generating restless adventurers who traversed the globe to trade, to explore, and often to settle. By the fifteenth century Europe was a driving world force, but the origins of its success have until now remained obscured in prehistory. Â In this magnificent book, distinguished archaeologist Barry Cunliffe views Europe not in terms of states and shifting political land boundaries but as a geographical niche particularly favored in facing many seas. These seas, and Europeâs great transpeninsular rivers, ensured a rich diversity of natural resources while also encouraging the dynamic interaction of peoples across networks of communication and exchange. The development of these early Europeans is rooted in complex interplays, shifting balances, and geographic and demographic fluidity. Â Weaving together titanic concepts while remaining sensitive to specifics, Cunliffe has produced an interdisciplinary tour de force. His is a bold book of exceptional scholarship, erudite and engaging, and it heralds an entirely new understanding of Old Europe. (20080808)
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
 Great book, synthesizing many years and fields November 29, 2008
K. Kehler (B.C., Canada)
66 out of 67 found this review helpful
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.
Fascinating, smooth reading December 10, 2008
History buff
27 out of 28 found this review helpful
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.
A great treasure January 17, 2009
Robert J. Melton (Carmel, California)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful
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!!
Oceans of pleasure March 15, 2009
Jay C. Smith (Portland, OR USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
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.
Why Westerners keep wandering towards the sunset April 20, 2009
John L Murphy (Los Angeles)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
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)
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
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