Have we gotten out of the crisis in Latin American book reviews?

I have always been a big fan of book reviews. When I get a new journal, I may scan the article titles first, but I almost always read the book reviews before the articles. Book reviews are an important part of quality control in scholarly disciplines where books are prominent (as in archaeology). In the past I have blogged about the book review crisis in Latin American archaeology: See my posts in:

2008,  2009,  2011

For a decade, very few books were being reviewed in the main journal, Latin American Antiquity. The major Mesoamerican journal, Ancient Mesoamerica, doesn't published book reviews at all! But now, book reviews are trending up in quantity. I thought there were more reviews in LAA over the past year, so I counted them up. Here are the data, starting in 1997.

These figures paint a bleak picture of the decline of quality control in Latin American archaeology starting around 2004. But after six years of almost no reviews (average of one--count, 'em--1 per issue!), things are trending up in 2016.

Book reviews are important for many reasons. First, they get out the news about new publications. Second, a good book review is a gem of a short essay on the topic of the book. Because I try to keep up with urban research at some level in many different disciplines, I use book reviews to help guide my reading. And third, book reviews give an indication of the quality of the book. Bad books are called out, and good books are praised. I recently had to give a quick judgment on the quality and influence of a book in a field far from my own (NOT Latin American archaeology!). I was able to find four book reviews easily, and they gave me the information I needed.

Let's hope this trend at Latin American Antiquity continues! Perhaps Ancient Mesoamerican might be persuaded to begin reviewing books. When I have suggested this at the board meetings, the response has been, "Fine, if you want to organize it, go ahead," hardly an enthusiastic promise of support.

If you are asked to review a book, please do it. If you would like to see more book reviews, contact the relevant journal editors and let them know. Our field has need of all the quality control we can get, and book reviews should be a major part of our collective strategy of disciplinary improvement.

World's worst book review?

A scholarly book review should do three things: (1) Describe the contents of the book. What is the book about, and what does it cover?  (2) Describe the scholarly context of the book. Where does the book fit within the literature, how does it relate to other works in terms of data, theory, or methods, etc. and, (3) Evaluate the book critically. I've written a lot about book reviews in this blog; for an overview, see my earliest such post.

I have just read what may be the worst book review I have ever seen. I'll keep this anonymous to protect the guilty. Scholar A is reviewing an edited volume. In the first paragraph of the review, this person states that they will review here Scholar B's chapter on Topic C, "because as a lead editor, Scholar B's chapter may set the tone for much of the volume, and also because it is an archaeology I know." The review goes on to talk about this one chapter, with almost no mention of the other chapters. Amazing.

A review of one chapter in an edited volume is not a credible book review. But wait, there's more: the review fails to evaluate that one chapter critically. It describes the content of the chapter, and pays minimal attention to its context. But was this a good or a bad chapter? What about the rest of the book?

This inappropriate review casts doubt on the quality of the editing of book reviews in the journal. How did this get past the book review editor? I don't have to disguise the title of the journal, because I don't know it. I printed out the review a while ago, and the pages do not indicate the journal title. The headers, on both left and right pages, say "Book Reviews." I was all set to look up the name of the journal, but then thought better of it. I would feel obligated to complain to the book review editor, getting at least one colleague riled up and reinforcing my reputation as a busy-body critic with nothing better to do than hassle colleagues who do shoddy work.  (I've been this way since graduate school, when I criticized both a book reviewer and the editors of American Antiquity for what was an ethical lapse; I can't seem to help it.) If you check my old critique, be sure to read the responses that followed).

Given that there is a book review crisis in New World archaeology, it is irresponsible of the reviewer and the journal to waste valuable journal space on such a poor review. The space for book reviews in journals is limited; when I was a book review editor, I spent a lot of time agitating for a higher page count for reviews. This is valuable space. Scholars have a responsibility for using it wisely. There is  no excuse for writing such a bad review, and no excuse for publishing it.

Flannery and Marcus go for the Big Picture

I’ve just finished reading the new book by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (2012, Harvard University Press, hardcover). The book covers an immense amount of archaeological and ethnographic territory in tracing human social evolution from the Paleolithic to the early empires, emphasizing the nature of inequality in different kinds of societies. This is truly “big history.” The topic is timely and big, the time depth is enormous, the cases reviewed are numerous, and even the endnotes are big (47 pages, out of a total of 631). I learned quite a bit, and I recommend the book to anyone who reads this blog (well, perhaps not the postmodernists, who just aren’t going to like the book, but they probably don’t like the blog, either).

With an epigraph of the famous quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“Man is born free, and yet we see him everywhere in chains”), who could dislike this book? Well, Randall McGuire for one. His book review, in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (23-1, 146-147), praises the eudition and diversity of the case studies, but he really doesn’t like this book at all. It “suffers from the same flaws as all universalizing, unilinear theories of cultural evolution” (p.147). The authors, in McGuire’s view, don’t recognize or acknowledge the superior work of Eric Wolf or Johannes Fabian, who identified those flaws (Hmmm, I didn’t think Fabian wrote about cultural evolution). Flannery and Marcus are said to “spatialize time,” depicting ethnographic societies as “frozen in time” (in fact these societies are so cold and frozen that they bounce around like billiard balls, a metaphor from Eric Wolf repeated by McGuire without attribution).

I was a bit puzzled with McGuire’s review. First of all, the book didn’t seem at all universalizing or unilinear to me. Second, I thought I had heard those criticisms before. After some checking, I found the critique of The Evolution of Human Societies, by Alan Johnson and Timothy Earle (1987, Stanford Univ. Pr), contained in McGuire’s book, A Marxist Archaeology (1992, Academic Press, pp.151-152). Here’s what he didn’t like about Johnson and Earle in 1992: Their model is universal and unilinear, and it conflates time and space (i.e., it spatializes time). So now, twenty years later, McGuire has dusted off his old criticisms of cultural evolution to throw at Flannery and Marcus.

McGuire would probably respond that the criticisms are the same because the problems with cultural evolution are the same. But to me, these critiques (in 1992 and 2012) apply more appropriately to work by Elman Service and others in the 1960s and 1970s and not to either Flannery and Marcus, or Johnson and Earle. I don’t want to get into a big debate about cultural evolution here, but the following passages from The Creation of Inequality are not consistent with McGuire’s charge of universal/unilinear ideas:

·         “One of the interesting facts of hereditary rank was that it could be created even by hunters and gatherers such as the Nootka. Neither slavery nor aristocracy, in other words, had to wait until agriculture had arisen.” (p.554)

·         “For all these reasons we should probably view clans or descent groups as one of several alternative social networking strategies rather than as an inevitable second stage of foraging society.” (p.550)

In fact, much of the book is devoted to exploring alternative arrangements of social organization, inequality, economic processes, and political dynamics. To me, Flannery and Marcus did an excellent job of producing a useful contemporary approach to cultural evolution that avoids the kinds of criticisms that were popular in the 1980s and 1990s. There are no layer-cake models here, there are no simple typological sequences (e.g., bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states; or egalitarian, ranked, stratified), and the authors do not assert (or assume) that social variation is somehow explained by assigning a group to an evolutionary category. I just re-read McGuire’s review, and realized that he is really obsessed with the issue of “unilinear” evolutionary models; the term “unilinear” is used three times in the review, and the term “unilineal” appears six times. I can’t tell whether is this is a subtle deliberate distinction, or just an error of writing and editing.

I am not claiming that the The Creation of Inequality is without flaws. I was disappointed by the authors’ refusal to weigh in on a number of current debates, and it seemed to me that their treatment of inequality was somewhat reduced in the final chapters (on states and empires) compared to earlier chapters. Inequality seemed to be swamped by issues of social and political dynamics in the chapters on states. But then the lack of systematic attention to inequality is one of the major failings of the archaeological study of complex societies, so Flannery and Marcus had less research to draw on. I also have a few minor quibbles on topics I specialize in, but these do not detract from the value of this important book.

If you are a postmodernist, you almost certainly won’t like any account of cultural evolution, and you just aren’t going to like this book. But for those of you with a more empirical and scientific bent: Read this book. You will learn a lot. And then let the passages where you disagree with the authors serve as starting points for more research and writing. Inequality is a tremendously important topic with a rather poor record of archaeological scholarship (due, in large part, to the influence of postmodernism, but don't get me started.....). Let's hope this book signals a new commitment to archaeological research on inequality. 

*** ADDED 20 MARCH 2013: Here is a link to Peter Turchin's review of the book. This is a preprint; the review just came out in the Times Literary Supplement. (Click here for the TLS version).  He evidently tried to post a comment, but Blogger was being cranky and rejected his comment.

Kicked off the Editorial Board!

First I had a paper rejected from the journal Science. Now I've evidently been removed from the Editorial Board of the journal Reviews in Anthropology. Wow, is my career going down the tubes? What's next? Will my students leave me for another adviser? Will NSF ask for their money back? Will my artifacts in Mexico be put out on the street?

I'm not too surprised to find that my tenure on the board of Reviews in Anthropology is over. They just changed editors, and I wondered if the editorial board would turn over too. Some journals have entrenched boards, people who serve for decades; others have regular procedures for turnover in the board. I think the latter policy is best. But I didn't know how RIA worked, and I was a bit surprised to get the new issue (41-1) and find that I am no longer listed with the board. Well, that's fine with me, but it would have been nice to get some kind of a notice about this. Something along the lines of, "Thank you for  your service, but as you know [or maybe don't know] board members serve for three years and your tenure is at an end."

RIA is an interesting journal. They only publish book review essays. Given my liking of book reviews, this was a good journal to be involved in. I did get fed up with their policy about the composition of the essay proposals, though. Editorial board members have to submit several proposed essays each year (lists of books and potential reviewers). This was generally interesting and fun, but they started enforcing a policy that each essay had to include books from as many subdisciplines of anthropology as possible. While the promotion of cross-subdisciplinary work is a worthy goal, there are other types of valuable essays. For example, one book review essay I wrote for them (before joining the board) compared Trigger's Understanding Early Civilizations and Adam Smith's The Political Landscape. Even more  interesting to me would be essays that cross disciplinary boundaries, having books, for example, on state formation from archaeology, political science, sociology, and history. But no, they wanted only the subdisciplines of anthropology, something I found intellectually limiting.

Anyway, RIA publishes some really outstanding book review essays (and a good number of pedestrian descriptive essays). Check it out. I wonder how long it will take them to stop sending me the journal for free.

Has Latin American Antiquity abandoned book reviews?

Just got the Dec 2011 issue of Latin American Antiquity. This allowed me to complete the book review graph through 2011. This graph shows the number of book reviews published per year in the journal:


This really steams me up, and I've complained about it before; see some of the posts listed under "book reviews" in the list of terms on the right side of the blog (scroll down).

We can't trust publishers, even academic presses, to not publish bad books. Yes, most book manuscripts are reviewed by outside reviewers, but a good number of real stinkers (and lots of pedestrian yawners) get through that process and are published each year. So how does the discipline exercise quality control with respect to books? This is a prime role for book reviews in peer reviewed journals.  But if the major journals refuse to publish book reviews, the discipline suffers. My field, Mesoamerican archaeology, is particularly badly served by its major journals. Ancient Mesoamerica refuses to publish any book reviews at all. And Latin American Antiquity does allow book reviews, but now they only publish a few reviews each year (see graph).

If you want to see a really bad book criticized in a zinger of a review, check out Richard Blanton's review of a new book by Charles Maisels in the online journal, Cliodynamics.

The book review crisis

A book not worthy of review?

Why is there no review of my 2008 book, Aztec City-State Capitals, in an archaeology or anthropology journal? Although I am biased, of course, I happen to think it's a good book; thus its absence is probably not due to a judgment by book review editors that it is not worthy of reviewing. I would think it relevant to anthropology journals that include archaeology, to journals in anthropological archaeology, and to journals in Mesoamerican and New World archaeology. Yet to date, none of these journals have reviewed the book.

Why not? This is a real question, not a rhetorical question that I will now proceed to answer. The book has been reviewed by two urban journals. Caroline Dodds Pennock wrote a review in the Urban History, and Elizabeth Graham recently reviewed it for the online forum, H-Urban  (*** disclaimer: I am one of several review editors for H-Urban, but I did not solicit or edit this review, which was handled by another editor). But why won't journals in my own home fields review the book?

I have spoken several times in the blog about what I call the "book review crisis" in New World archaeology/anthropological archaeology. Some of the main journals (e.g., Ancient Mesoamerica) don't publish book reviews, and others (e.g., Latin American Antiquity) have dropped to embarrasingly low levels of reviews (about one per issue lately). These are my previous posts on the subject:

Latin American Antiquity book review update  (14-October, 2010)

Has Latin American Antiquity abandoned book reviews  (12-April, 2010)

The book review crisis in Latin American archaeology  (21-August, 2009)

Is there a book review crisis in New World archaeology?  (27-July, 2008)

It is interesting that in the three years I have been complaining about this, not one journal editor, or book review editor, or journal editorial board member has even mentioned the issue to me. The obvious explanation here is that they aren't following this blog. Ok, c'est la vie. But why are journals not publishing book reviews? It is not just me - at one point I made a list of some important books in my field that had not been reviewed by the journals (and now I can't find the list...). No, I'm not angling for a job as a book review editor. Been there, done that. Maybe again someday, but certainly not with a sabbatical coming up soon.

I apologize here for using my own case to make a general point, but it is a case I know well. But I do feel strongly about the general point, and I wish I had an explanation (and, better still, a solution).

Should graduate students write book reviews?

The question here is whether scholarly journals should solicit and publish book reviews written by graduate students. Some journals have a firm and clear policy of NOT publishing reviews by students; others leave it open to the discretion of the book review editor. When I was a book review editor for Latin American Antiquity, I did publish some reviews by students. What are the pluses and minuses of this practice?

Why graduate students may make good reviewers of books:

• Students are young and energetic and can sometimes present a fresh perspective.
• Sometimes a student is a very good choice (in terms of research specialty, knowledge of the field, etc.).
• It is good practice and training for the students.

Why graduate students may NOT make good reviewers:

• Power differentials. This is the big reason, and it is the basis for those journal policies that do not allow student reviewers. Here are some possibilities:

1. The book is bad, or has some negative aspects. If a student gives an honest review with some negative statements, the author (or the author's pals or colleagues) may get mad at the student, having potential negative professional consequences. I once wrote a review that called a book the best book of its kind yet published. I also pointed out a few relatively minor problems. The book's author nabbed me at the next SAA meeting and berated me for writing a negative review. Cranky authors are a real problem in academia (except for me, of course; I would NEVER be cranky about my work.... ha ha ha). This is MY research, how DARE you criticize it! OK, so perhaps the student will decide to glide over a book's deficiencies and concentrate on the good parts. This could produce a perfectly adequate and acceptable book review, but in my mind this would be a distortion and thus a bad review. Reviewers should not avoid the negative parts of a book.
2. The book is very good. If the student writes a positive review, others might interpret the evaluation more to the distortion mentioned above. Thus a positive review might be discounted because of the perception that a student was being careful and avoiding critique or controversy.

• Timidity (arising from power differentials, or from general shyness or inexperience).  To me, this is another reason that students sometimes write bland vanilla reviews. Avoid controversy, don't get authors pissed off, try to be smart but not controversial. A few years ago one journal published a bunch of reviews written by students as part of a class project. The reviews were generally competent, but they were boring and bland. It wasn't clear whether the blandness was from the content of the books, or to student timidity in writing the review.
• Lack of broader contextual knowledge. Students have less experience, and in their early publications tend to be worried that they get the details correct. They are less likely to do a good job in discussing the professional or intellectual context of the book, an important function of book reviews.

In my view, book review editors should feel free to solicit reviews from advanced graduate students, so long as they take the above considerations in mind. Does the student understand the issues and potential problems? Does their adviser agree that this is a good thing to do? And, of course, is the student competent to write the review.

What should a student do who is interested in writing book reviews?

• Tell you adviser and other professionals you know of your interest. They may hear of an opportunity, or they may be able to pass on an invitation they received to review a book.
• Email the book review editors of relevant journals and tell them you are interested. Give them a BRIEF statement of your areas of interest and expertise, and offer to send your CV if they wish.
• Publish some papers in journals so your name gets known in the wider arena of scholarship.

For other posts on book reviews, check the topics index at the right, bottom.

Friends, Enemies, Book Reviews, and Objectivity

I just read a book review written by a friend and departmental colleague of the book's author. Guess what? The review was highly positive. Important book, should get wide readership, etc. etc. I can recall reading some reviews over the years by reviewers who were sworn enemies of the book's author. Guess what? The reviews were quite negative. Is it acceptable to review books by one's friends or enemies?

In my view, neither close colleagues/friends of an author, nor dedicated enemies, should review an author's books. The situation is not always cut and dried, and sometimes requires thought.
I was once asked by a journal to review a book written by my then-colleague Marilyn Masson; I refused because of our close professional relationship and friendship. But what about now? We haven't been departmental colleagues for five years. We are still friends, but not close buddies and we don't have any current joint projects. I think I would still decline reviewing her books. Even if I could convince myself that I could write an objective review, others might feel that I am biased. What if I felt the book was the best thing ever published and gave it a rave review? Others might discount my review on the basis of possible bias. "Oh, that's just Smith gushing over work by his pal Masson." I think it's important to avoid giving the appearance of bias.

To me, the key factor in deciding whether to review a book is whether there is a close personal relationship, or strong personal feelings (positive or negative) toward the author. I have reviewed books by people I know, and in at least one case my initial impression was that I would like the book and the research it describes. I have also reviewed books in cases where I strongly suspected that I would not like the book. But I did not have strong personal feelings about those authors, and I felt that I could (and did) provide objective reviews.

If the criterion for determining an appropriate reviewer is the existence of personal feelings or personal relationships (assuming that the area of competence fits), then it is up the the individual scholar to make this decision. Book review editors should (and do) try to avoid potential bias, but they tend to be busy and may not know all of the relevant personal relationships (or even departmental affiliations). When I was book review editor for Latin American Antiquity, I once unknowingly sent a book to the author's worst enemy. This person submitted a review that was mostly personal vitriol, quite unprofessional. It is the only book review I rejected in my 3 years as editor. When I expressed my puzzlement to a colleague, he burst into laughter, saying, "Didn't you know about their history?"

This issue seems pretty tame in comparison to some cases I've come across. For example, I've seen the same book reviewed by the same reviewer in multiple journals, clearly a no-no in most statement of professional practice. And when I was a grad student I caused a stir by criticizing the decision of a major journal to allow a (highly positive) review by someone whose name was listed on the cover of the book as a contributor. And for graduate students, there is a whole set of issues about whether students should be allowed to review books, and whether they should accept if offered the chance to write a book review.

But please avoid writing reviews of books by your good friends and your enemies.

Latin American Antiquity book review update

In April, I asked "Has Latin American Antiquity abandoned book reviews?" This was occasioned by the LACK of book reviews in volume 21(1) of the journal. Issue 21(2) did have a single book review essay covering three books. But since the books were published in 1992, 2002, and 2005, this essay hardly serves the purpose of reviewing current books in the discipline. Issue 21(3) is now out, and we are back to NO book reviews (zero). I posted a graph of book reviews through time in an earlier post:

"The book review crisis in Latin American archaeology." (August 21, 2009).

For other posts about book reviews and their importance, click the "book reviews" topic in the list on the right.

Peter Turchin, Cliodynamics, and Archaeology

I just read an interesting essay in Nature by Peter Turchin called "Arise Cliodynamics," and it got me wondering why more archaeologists aren't reading or citing Turchin's work. Turchin is an evolutionary biologist who has moved into "big history" with a bang. He has published two major books (Turchin 2003, 2006) and a number of articles (e.g., 2 in 2009) that apply mathematical modeling to processes of the expansion and decline of states and empires.

The essay in Nature calls for a new discpline ("Cliodynamics"), a "theoretical historical social science." This will be "the study of temporally varying processes and the search for causal mechanisms." Well, this sounds like archaeology to me, or at least it is a vision close to what many of us think archaeology is or should be (I realize that postmodernists and other idealists and particularists will not agree). So why don't more archaeologists engage Turchin's work? I can find only one example: Kohler et al. (2009). Now maybe archaeologists ARE reading Turchin, but use of his work has just not reached publication stage yet.

I read Turchin's book, War and Peace and War (2006) a couple of years ago, and I just looked online for book reviews. All I could find was a (very interesting) review in the Times Higher Education Supplement. I would think that archaeology and anthropology journals would want to review the book, but I guess not. Perhaps people take a quick look and conclude that his work is simplistic and reductionistic and thus not worth consideration by anthropologists or archaeologists. On the contrary, I find his work more sophisticated in social terms than that of many economic historians (well, ok, you are probably thinking "that's not hard"!). He deals with cooperation, social capital, long-term demographic and political dynamics. And he thinks archaeological data are relevant and useful to his vision of "cliodynamics." He has collaborated with ancient historian Walter Scheidel in a paper using coin hoards to analyze Roman demographic patterns (Turchin and Scheidel 2009).

If this stuff sounds at all interesting to you, check out Turchin's Cliodynamics web site, or some of his works listed below.

Kohler, Timothy A., Sarah Cole, and Stanka Ciupe
2009 Population and Warfare: A Test of the Turchin Model in Pueblo Societies. In Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution, edited by Stephen Shennan, pp. 277-295. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Turchin, Peter
2003 Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

2006 War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Empires. Plume.

2009 Long-Term Population Cycles in Human Societies. In The Year in Ecology and Conservation Biology, pp. 1-17. Annals, vol. 1162. New York Academy of Sciences, New York.

2009 A Theory for Formation of Large Empires. Journal of Global History 4:191-217. http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/vol1/iss1/art3/.

Turchin, Peter and Walter Scheidel
2009 Coin Hoards Speak of Population Declines in Ancient Rome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:17276-17279.

Has Latin American Antiquity abandoned book reviews?

The new issue of Latin American Antiquity (vol 21, no. 1, March 2010) just arrived, and it continues the pattern that ended 2009 (vol. 20, no. 4) of having NO BOOK REVIEWS. Sorry to keep harping on this; if you are interested, check out some of my previous posts on this topic:

"The book review crisis in Latin American archaeology." (August 21, 2009)

"Is there a book review crisis in Latin American archaeology?" (July 27, 2008)

Jared Diamond: Yay or Nay ?

I have to admit that I am ambivalent about the value of Jared Diamond's books, particularly his bestseller, Collapse. On the one hand, he has applied a consistent and clear model to a variety of case studies, bringing to light a number of interesting findings. I wish I could write a comprehensive comparative work like this, something that the general public would read. On the other hand, Diamond is guilty of some serious empirical errors and omissions. So I read with interest the new book:

McAnany, Patricia A. and Norman Yoffee (editors)
2010 Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Collapse. Cambridge University Press, New York.

As I see it, the essays in this explicitly Diamond-bashing work make 3 main points:

(1) Diamond made some serious errors. The Easter Island case is particularly noteworthy for a case where the actual data contradict Diamond's information and interpretation. (I can't seem to get Joe Tainter's quip, about about the creature who cut down the last tree on Easter Island, out of my mind.)

(2) Ancient societies were resilient, and they didn't choose to fail. Well, some ancient societies were resilient, and others were less so. This is an important issue, but the essays in Questioning Collapse don't discuss the methods needed to address it, nor do they explore the variation among societies. Given all the hype surrounding the concept of resilience in some quarters, I am surprised at the lack of progress in applying it to ancient societies in a rigorous fashion.

(3) Collapse is a bad thing, and it is demeaning to descendant populations to say that their ancestors collapsed. We should say other things about past societies, or emphasize other kinds of changes, anything to avoid labeling a people (or their ancestors, or descendants) as "collapsers." Well, I disagree strongly with this notion. When millions of people die, and their political system ceases to function, and their cities are abandoned, and their culture loses much of its content, why not say that they collapsed? How can this possibly be insulting to their descendants? This theme of the book baffles me, and I think it detracts from the force of the critique.

Questioning Collapse was recently reviewed by Krista Lewis in Science (22 Jan 2010, page 413-414). Her review focused on themes #1 and 3 above. This is fine, I guess, although I must question her statement:

"Who is to say," asks Lewis, "that the Maya abandoning their monumental Classic period religious centers was a collapse rather than a political and social shift that was a good decision at the time?"

Wow, what a decision. This is as bad as Diamond asking, "How societies choose to fail or succeed." I can't imagine that the deaths of millions of people, with massive political and cultural disruption, was any kind of "decision at the time." Lewis clearly sympathizes with the Diamond-bashing of Questioning Collapse, but it is possible to be critical of Diamond without making silly pronouncements like this. (And speaking of demeaning statements, one could argue that Lewis's statement here is far more demeaning to the Maya people than is Diamond's discussion of the Maya collapse).

Here is my advice to Diamond-bashers. Drop the notion that collapse is demeaning. Collapse happens. Deal with it. Provide better data. Provide better models. And, when you have your act together, publish in places and venues that will be read by people other than academics.

A final comment. If you want to really piss off a group of academics, publish a book in a field that is not your own, applying a simple and elegant model that explains all kinds of disparate facts that the specialists in that field haven't managed to tie together. This was the fate of Edwin Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, which Romanists dumped all over in spite of the fact that it really illuminated many aspects of Roman imperialism (and Aztec and other imperialisms, for that matter). And I think this phenomenon may be responsible for some of the reaction of archaeologists and others to the books of Jared Diamond. Boy, I sure wish I had written those books.

Final note: There is a website on the book, Questioning Collapse.

The book review crisis in Latin American archaeology

I have made the claim several times in this blog that there is a crisis in publishing book reviews in New World archaeology. I devoted a post to this in 2008. (for more posts on the topic, check the index at the right under "book reviews"). Here I limit the scope to Latin American archaeology, where there are two major journals in English: Latin American Antiquity and Ancient Mesoamerica. Frustrated by the presence of only 5 book reviews in the last 2 issues of Latin American Antiquity combined, I tallied the number of reviews per year for the journal, starting in 2007. Here are the data:


Now, here are the counts for book reviews in the other major journal in Latin American archaeology, Ancient Mesoamerica:

Oops, I forgot, AM does not publish book reviews.

Book reviews are important for social science and humanities disciplines for a number of reasons:

(1) They publicize new books and let readers know what they are about.

(2) The positive and negative evaluations in book reviews are a crucial part of quality control.

(3) Book reviews can provide insight into the current status of the discipline, not only through their themes and topics, but by the contextualization provided in a good review. (What do I mean by a good review? Click here)

I hope the book review situation is better for areas outside of Latin American archaeology, but I don't have any data. In my mind, the shortage of book reviews in Latin American archaeology constitutes a crisis in scholarly publishing, and it is harmful to the advancement of the discipline.

Archaeology Book Reviews on H-Urban

Reviews of archaeological books on urbanism are starting to appear on the H-Urban Forum. I have been a review editor for H-Urban for just under a year, charged with increasing coverage of ancient cities. My first review has just been published, by Steve Lekson on:

Fletcher, Roland (1995) The Limits of Settlement Growth: A Theoretical Outline. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Although the book is not new, it was recently released in paperback, which justifies the review; I also think the book is very important and deserves wider readership.

The following reviews have been submitted and edited, and will appear soon on H-Urban:

Bauer, Brian S. (2004) Ancient Cuzco: Heartland of the Inca State. University of Texas Press, Austin.

Dobbins, John J. and Pedar W. Foss (editors) (2007) The World of Pompeii. Routledge, New York.

Marcus, Joyce and Jeremy Sabloff (editors) (2008) The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World. SAR Press, Santa Fe.

I also have a bunch of books out for review right now.

Robert Chidester, another new review editor for H-Urban, is a historical archaeologist, and he has commissioned a number of reviews on urban topics related to archaeology. This is a fertile time for urban research by historical archaeologists, with a bunch of good recent books. One of the first of these that will appear soon on H-Urban is a review of this outstanding book:

Voss, Barbara L. (2008) The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley.

If you know of new books on ancient/preindustrial urbanism that should be reviewed by H-Urban, drop me a line. Also, if you would be interested in reviewing books, let me know. Right now I do not have any new books to send out (some publishers are either very slow to send books, or perhaps they will not send them to H-Urban at all), but I get H-Net to solicit new books from publishers whenever I find a relevant title.

- posted from Toluca, Estado de México, where I am sorting sherds in order to understand the economy and society of the Aztec-period urban center of Calixtlahuaca.

A new issue of Latin American Antiquity

I just received the March 2009 issue of Latin American Antiquity, and here are a few yays and nays. The journal is thicker than usual, a good sign. The twelve papers are arranged into two sections, titled “Part 1: Themed Section on Technology Approaches” and “Part 2: Themed Section on Mesoamerica.” I can’t figure out what the phrase “technology approaches” means here. The section has four papers on bone chemistry analysis, an osteology paper, a paper on DNA analysis, and a paper on Maya lithics.

The second section has four papers on the Maya and one on another Mesoamerican region. One of the Maya papers is on lithics, like one of the papers in the other section. I looked in vain for a message from the Editor about the context or rationale for these puzzling special sections.

The journal also has a book review essay (on Olmec books), but no regular book reviews. I take this as further evidence for the existence of a book review crisis in New World archaeology.

Given my interest in promoting comparative analysis in archaeology (Smith 2009; statement on comparative archaeology), I was pleased to see Scott Speal’s (2009) paper on Maya chert tool production. Speal proposes “a new direction in Maya lithic studies with the goal of enhancing comparability of data on ancient economic structure through the use of standardized statistics that facilitate spatial analysis” (from the abstract, p. 91). (¡Way to go, Scott!) Several other papers in this issue also engage in explicit comparative analyses, including Chris Garraty’s paper on market exchange in Mesoamerica and Cecil Lewis’s paper on mtDNA in the southern Andes. Publication of this kind of comparative work is a very positive development.

When the SAA gets around to posting the contents of this issue, it will be found here.

Smith, Michael E.
2009 Editorial: Just How Comparative is Comparative Urban Geography?: A Perspective from Archaeology. Urban Geography 30:113-117.

Speal, C. Scott
2009 The Economic Geography of Chert Lithic Production in the Southern Maya Lowlands: A Comparative Examination of Early Stage Reduction Debris. Latin American Antiquity 20:91-119.

Tainter on collapse books: outstanding review essay

I want to recommend an outstanding book review essay, published in the current issue of Reviews in Anthropology:

Tainter, Joseph A.
2008 Collapse, Sustainabiltiy, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed. Reviews in Anthropology 37:342-371.

The title is a clue that one of the books reviewed is Jared Diamond's Collapse; the others are Richardson Gill's The Great Maya Droughts, David Webster's The Fall of the Ancient Maya, and Niccolo Caldararo's Sustainabiltiy, Human Ecology and the Collapse of Complex Societies.

Tainter's essay is very good for a number of reasons, including a nice contextualization of the popularity of the concept of collapse; concise evaluations of the four books; a very interesting discussion of how even technical works by archaeologists are not exempt from scrutiny (and misinterpretation) by the media and the reading public; an an understated use of humor and irony.

Just one example of the latter point. In Collapse, Jared Diamond asks "I have often asked myself, 'What did the Eastern Islander tho cut down the last palm tree say while he was going it?' " (Diamond, p.114). Tainter points out that recent research suggests that the culprits were more likely sheep and goats rather than people with axes. Therefore: "The Easter Islander killing the last tree may have uttered a bleat." (Tainter, p.350).

Finally, Tainter's paper is an example of a genre that is very important for contemporary scholarship: the book review essay. Most book reviews are very short and do not provide space to fully contextualize a work or explore its significance and connections in any detail. But book review essays do allow just this kind of discussion, typically in relation to two or more books. When so many new books pare published, and so many journals publish very few book reviews, good review essays can play a major role in synthesizing, evaluating, and moving forward current themes and topics.

Want to read some good book review essays? Try these sources:

Reviews in Anthropology is a quarterly journal that publishes ONLY book review essays. I highly recommend it for all branches of anthropology, including archaeology.

The Review of Archaeology is an odd annual journal that also consists primarily of book review essays.

Also, many journals that publish book reviews also do occasional book review essays.

Bleat bleat, baaaaaaaaaah

What are the best new books by archaeologists?

I am considering posting blurbs on some of the best new books by archaeologists. When I have time I will write something about this book, and maybe some others too.

Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher
2008 Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.

If you have suggestions, please email me with book titles, or, better still, with some purple prose describing a book or two.

Sometimes this blog is like the radio show I hosted in college. You talk into the night, wondering if anyone out there is listening. Maybe no one likes my odd tastes (one of my typical playlists would include Bach, the Grateful Dead, Monty Python, Frank Zappa, and recordings of Arctic wolf calls). Then just when you think it's a waste of time, no one is paying any attention, you get a message out of the blue (a phone call to the old Brandeis University radio station) that somebody out there really likes what you are doing. But in case that brought on warm and fuzzy feelings, there was always the Station Manager who hated what I did and didn't neglect to tell me.

Anyway, pardon the nostalgia. I would really appreciate some brief descriptions of really good recent books. What are the best archaeology books today?

Is there a book review crisis in New World archaeology?

Greetings from lovely Hermosillo, Sonora.

One of my students just brought the latest issue of Latin American Antiquity (LAA) down to Mexico, and I was surprised to see NO BOOK REVIEWS. I have been dismayed at the steady decline in the number of book reviews in this journal since I stepped down as book review editor in 2002. I see this as a real crisis for New World (NW) archaeology. A number of general anthropology journals do publish reviews of books in NW archaeology, but the number they allow (or rather, the number they solicit) is very limited. In American Anthropologist, one has to wade through many more non-archaeological book reviews to find the archaeology ones (I think this is a ploy by editors to shore up the sinking notion of “4-field anthropology,” with the assumption that archaeologists will be edified by having to browse through reviews of books in linguistics or physical anthropology. But I digress). Journals like Jr. Royal Anthropological Society and Journal of Anthropological Research also publish limited numbers of reviews in NW archaeology.

But the professional archaeology journals are not publishing anywhere close to the needed numbers of book reviews. New books should be reviewed in several peer-review journals. I don’t know the situation in North American archaeology, but I hope it is far better than in Latin America. But in Latin America, there really is a crisis in book reviews. LAA is the main journal and it should be publishing fifteen to twenty reviews per issue to keep up with the new books. But it seems that recently there are two or three (and now zero !!!) reviews per issue, and often these are not the most important books. Has LAA made a decision to limit book reviews? What is going on here?

For Mesoamerican archaeology, Ancient Mesoamerica is the top journal but they do not publish book reviews. Some specialized journals (Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl or Anales de Antropología) do publish book reviews, but they are few in number. Some unrefereed newsletters (e.g., Nahua Newsletter) also have reviews, but they tend to be few in number and of uneven quality.

Perhaps my earlier complaint about the small number of good critical book reviews in NW archaeology was misplaced – it’s hard to have a lot of good reviews when books are simply not getting reviewed. Book reviews are an important part of the quality control mechanism in a field like archaeology, and NW archaeology is now suffering in this respect. I think it is a real crisis.

It was probably my worry about the sorry state of archaeology book reviews that led me to accept an offer to become a book review editor for H-Urban, a list-serve and (OPEN ACCESS) book review venue dedicated to urban history (part of the H-Net organization). As one of several book review editors, my charge is to beef up the coverage of ancient and nonwestern urbanism within H-Urban (and within urban history generally). One attraction is their insistence on rigorous peer review and the highest professional standards. If you are not familiar with H-Net book reviews (which not infrequently cover archaeological topics), you should take a look. Did I mention that their reviews are OPEN ACCESS? You can read them online from anywhere, Reykjavík to Ouagadougou, irrespective of whether you or your library subscribes to a particular journal. I’ll blog more about the H-Urban reviews in the fall, once I get up and running. But this theme covers only a small part of the production of books in New World archaeology, and it is not really a solution to the book review crisis.

NEVERTHELESS, in writing that last sentence, it occurred to me that H-Net COULD become a major venue for archaeological book reviews. It would require establishment of a new sub-list (something like “H-Archaeology”), with a moderated listserv and some dedicated book review editors. There is a level of bureaucratic organization required, with a board and moderators, by-laws, etc. The N-Net office handles all of the logistics of obtaining books and sending them to reviewers, so review editors just have to locate books, find reviewers, and do an initial edit of the reviews (alas, one the the joys of my tenure as book review editor for LAA was that I got to put my grubby paws on all the new books as soon as they were released!). The book reviews are fully equivalent to those published in journals in terms of quality, and professionalism; in fact the regulations and training for H-Urban reviews were FAR more rigorous than anything I went through for LAA. Anyway, this might provide a convenient forum, easier to establish than something like the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, an outstanding venue for book reviews and book review essays in Classics. This would also obviate the kind of battling I went through with editorial boards and the SAA for more space for book reviews.

Oh, did I mention that the book reviews on H-Net are OPEN ACCESS ? Maybe its time to free the peer-reviewed book reviews from the many limitations of the SAA (publisher of LAA) by setting up an Open Access venue, whether on H-Net or elsewhere.

If you are not familiar with OA (and even if you ARE familiar with it), please look at Peter Suber's Open Access Overview.

Why Aren’t There More Good Book Reviews in Archaeology?

By “good book review” I don’t mean a positive review. In fact, there are all too many positive reviews of shoddy books, and this is one of the problems with archaeological book reviews. In the interests of advancing archaeology as the scholarly study of the past we need to be more critical in evaluating books and other published works. This applies equally to scientific and humanistic approaches and to the past.

I love book reviews. I like reading them (I always turn to them first when I receive or view a new journal issue), I like writing them, and I really enjoyed my stint as Book Review Editor for Latin American Antiquity a few years back. It seems to me that far too few book reviews are published; just compare the number of new books published to the number of reviews in the major journals. Some journals (e.g., Ancient Mesoamerica) don’t publish book reviews at all! One of my favorite Open Access journals is the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which consists entirely of book reviews. Now, I have little use for many or even most of the books reviewed in that journal. But I do try to keep up on some aspects of Classical archaeology, and BMCR is very useful for that. Maybe we need a new journal, the Archaeological Book Review.

Most of the essays in the BMCR are more along the lines of book review essays, an all-too uncommon beast in archaeology. The journal Reviews in Anthropology has some archaeological book review essays. I initiated this feature for Latin American Antiquity, but it seems to have been dropped by subsequent editors. Book review essays are important because they allow more details and substance on all three of the major components of the book review. A book review should:

1. Summarize the contents of the book. Readers need to know that the book is about and what it covers.
2. Place it into context. Who is the author, why did they write the book, what theoretical approach is taken, how does the book relate to other scholarship in the field, etc. etc.
3. Evaluate the quality. Does the author accomplish what he/she intended to do? Are the data solid? Do the arguments stand up? Does the book make a significant contribution to the field?

Beyond these three basic components lies a fourth aspect that I like to see in book reviews:

4. Book reviews should be well-written, concise, interesting, and insightful. This isn’t really part of the instructions that are typically given to reviewers; people generally either write excellent essays or they don’t. The task of the book review editor is to find people who can do this, and sometimes help reviewers improve their work if possible. There is nothing more boring than a review of an edited collection that consists entirely of brief descriptions of the individual chapters.

When I began my work at Latin American Antiquity, I was given instructions that no person should contribute more than one book review every three years. I thought this was silly and ignored it. For certain review authors, I would have gladly published several reviews a year because they wrote such good (insightful, etc.) reviews. Rosemary Joyce and Bob Zeitlin come to mind immediately here. I once received a brilliant review by someone I did not know well, so I immediately offered to let them review another book right away; the second review, however, came in boring and prosaic. Oh well. But to repeat, good book reviews are too rare in archaeology.

Back to the initial question—why are there so few good book reviews in archaeology? This is an important question, because book reviews can be an important part of the growth of a discipline. Here are a couple of off-the-cuff answers to that question.

1. People are too nice. They don’t want to upset colleagues or rock the boat. Some authors have big egos and get upset with anyone who challenges them. Junior scholars are worried about issues of power with respect to senior scholars, and sometimes hesitate to criticize their books. There are cliques of friends and cronies who support one another and wouldn’t dream of writing a serious critique of someone in their group. Some archaeologists want to push a particular theoretical perspective, and write positive or negative reviews based on whether a book adheres to their cherished viewpoint or not. I think that these practices are bad for the discipline, and people should not be so nice.
2. Too much archaeological writing blends and mixes up data and interpretations. This makes it difficult to evaluate books and articles. Some works have good data but faulty interpretations, whereas others have brilliant interpretations of rather scrawny data. But if the data and interpretations are too intertwined one sometimes cannot separate the wheat from the chaff.
3. Book review editors are not sufficiently rigorous. It is hectic and time-consuming to solicit and edit reviews, and there is little or no compensation. It is all too easy to just accept a sub-par review instead of sending it back for revisions (or even rejecting it). I was certainly guilty here; I published some lousy reviews that might have been improved had I taken the time to work with the author to improve the product. I only rejected one review in 3 years.

I don’t have any grand conclusions or recommendations to offer. Perhaps my main message is that archaeologists should pay more attention to book reviews. We need to take them seriously and do our best to write the best reviews possible.