From Stonehenge to Mycenae. The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation

Abstract

It is not often I come across books that are concerned with two supposedly unrelated prehistoric phenomena, but which still succeeds in capturing my full scholarly attention. From Stonehenge to Mycenae. The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation by John C. Barrett and Michael J. Boyd is another one of these rare books. It is even a rather tiny piece, with a total of 169 pages of text and 45 illustrations, focused thematically on the knowledge production of European prehistory and the challenges of archaeological interpretation. More specifically, the book addresses ‘the archaeology of two regions that were once linked by the diffusionist narratives that Colin Renfrew recognized as no longer being viable’ and the two regions are, as indicated by the title, the area surrounding Stonehenge and Aegean during the second and third millenniums BCE. The main challenge of archaeological interpretation that From Stonehenge to Mycenae focuses on is the one emerging from the relation between two types of archaeological evidence. On the one hand, there is that evidence which pertains to mobility in the past, or what was previously referred to as ‘diffusion’ in archaeology, and on the other hand there is that which pertains to regional continuity in cultural traditions. This general theme is also probably what makes the book itself so alluring, no matter what background the reader has, and the authors do a good job in situating their work within the now well-known research history of processual and postprocessual archaeology. From their view, which it should be mentioned is firmly UK-based (Sheffield and Cambridge), the first important contribution to our knowledge of European prehistory during this period was made by V. G Childe in the late 1950s, when he connected the archaeology of different regions of Europe and Western Asia through diffusionist and rather schematic models. This was the state of the art in European prehistory before the advent of radiocarbon dating, which we know had a tremendous impact on chronologies. The second contribution, in these author’s view, was made by Colin Renfrew in the 1970s, when he used results from radiocarbon dating to form a new chronology of early metal production on the European continent, which according to the authors laid the very foundation for the formation of a processual archaeology in European archaeology. Their argument is, in short, that where Childe had explained the emergence of metallurgy in Europe by migrations from Mesopotamia, the Aegean etc., Renfrew on the other hand saw technological developments realized through ‘indigenous social and economic forces’ (p. 7). Thus, systems theory in processual archaeology, combined with radiometric dating methods, had a profound effect on European prehistory. However, even studies in processual archaeology, and particularly through the application of World Systems modelling, also came to recognize certain ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ geographical regions in Europe during the Bronze Age due to the restricted distribution of artefacts and technologies, which could be observed in the empirical record. These observations reflected to some extent observations made by the cultural historical research paradigm, and thus, long after the works of Childe, there came a renewed focus on supraregional systems of material exchange in the Bronze Age, and the formation of regionally situated political elites (such as Kristiansen and