Europe Between the Oceans: themes and variations: 9000 BC-AD 1000

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 h

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 fo

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 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.