Technological innovation and cultural change
One focus of archaeological research is to look for change, and one of the most visible changes in the archaeological record is perhaps technological change—for example from handaxes to microliths, hand-built to wheel-thrown pottery, from flat copper axes to complex bronze shields. These changes are all long-term developments in technology with many intermediate steps. While these trends can be identified in all different materials—such as textiles, wood, colourants, leather and so on as well as domestication of animals and grains—they are more easily spotted in enduring materials. In addition, changes in technology often bring along cultural changes. Technological change and exchange can be traced in many studies of the past, yet it is more difficult to assess the modes of change, such as innovation, adaption or adoption. This issue's New Book Chronicle discusses three examples of recent publications that look into technological changes and exchanges from fresh perspectives. Starting with Containers of change where the development of ceramic containers and their social and cultural interpretations and impacts across western Asia is comprehensively re-evaluated. This is followed by a regional, post-colonial re-assessment of cultural (ex)change that shaped pre-Roman Italy. The final book derives from the strikingly original exhibition Machine room for the gods: how our future was invented and its aim is to reunite imagination and innovation, and the histories of art and science. The centrepiece is the fascinating Antikythera mechanism, whose astonishing complexity was incomprehensively ahead of its time. So much indeed that it makes the latest instalment of the world's most famous fictional archaeologist Indiana Jones and the dial of destiny, which is clearly heavily inspired by the tale of the Antikythera mechanism, seem almost believable.
This edited volume explores the neglected yet fundamental invention and innovation of container technology across Asia. It is also a posthumous tribute to Oliver Nieuwenhuyse who was working on a monograph with the same title Containers of change and, as part of this larger project, had organised a workshop but sadly passed away in 2020 before the event. Bereaved friends and colleagues honoured his research vision, met at the workshop in February 2020 in Berlin and completed this book as the result.
Nieuwenhuyse provides an intellectually stimulating and wide-ranging introduction to the origins and development of containers. These are defined broadly as “any material object that may act as a receptacle” and “that are at least to some degree movable and to some extent durable” (p.13). Arguably, archaeologists have frequently ignored early containers and their implications despite (or because of) their ubiquity. Even in debates surrounding the emergence of pottery the concept of containers (in all materials) is rarely discussed. The Introduction seeks to explore when containers began to impact upon society. It highlights how in the Neolithic of western Asia as late as c. 6700 BC, there is still little evidence for ceramic containers, yet only five centuries later they are widespread across the region. Rather than being a sudden emergence, however, Nieuwenhuyse traces the earliest evidence as far back as the ninth millennium BC with repeated inventions and re-inventions before an initial phase of sustained ceramic production between c. 7000 and 6700 BC. But this had apparently limited societal impact and containers in other types of materials including plaster, basketry, stone, clay, wood, leather, cloth and bitumen were being crafted in the region long before those in pottery. He argues for a more holistic inter-craft perspective as well as a greater emphasis on the social roles and contexts of containers and an acknowledgement that innovations can take centuries to be accepted.
All contributors seek to respond to Nieuwenhuyse's heartfelt appeal for a more interpretive approach to understanding early ceramics and containers. The subsequent three chapters develop a more theoretical framework, followed by varied case studies ranging from site assemblages to pan-continental perspectives. In Chapter 2, Clive Gamble explores a philosophical approach to past and present human engagement with containers, proposing the container-habitus, and highlights how fundamental containers have been to shaping world history. He identifies the connections between containers and masks as both acts of wrapping which are fundamental to embodied cognition and thus for understanding human social groupings and their organisation from the Palaeolithic-Mesolithic onwards. In Chapter 3, Ian Hodder examines how containers not only hold but can also be used to control. Using the case study of his work at Çatalhöyük, Türkiye, he highlights how in the sequence of the site there is evidence for increasing containing technologies from spoons to hearths to ovens for managing the flows of “water, fat, meat, bodily fluids (decaying corpses), milk, gruel, ancestry” (p.13). As well as stressing the need for containers as societies become increasingly larger and more complex in the seventh to sixth millennia BC, Hodder argues for containers in the houses at Çatalhöyük enabling the channelling and controlling access to their contents in specific social directions. In Chapter 4, Hans Peter Hahn provides a stimulating ethnographic perspective from West Africa where in the twentieth century the transition from locally made containers of calabash (a kind of squash) and ceramics, to industrially produced ones made from metal or plastic shows how innovations can be adopted or adapted in the context of social distinctions, gender and functional usage.
Chapters 5 to 9 and 14 to 16 explore different approaches on case studies of early pottery from across Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Levant. The primacy of craft production in organic materials such as wood and basketry and the resulting containers in shaping early pottery and later ceramic containers is repeatedly emphasised. There is, however, no straightforward linear development from organic to ceramic containers with the often fragmentary evidence revealing skeuomorphism, symbolism and a rich diversity of technological and material practices. Similarly, in Chapter 9, Danny Rosenberg and Yosef Garfinkel re-evaluate the relationship between the earlier stone and later ceramic containers in western Asia, and reveal two distinct traditions. This point is reinforced by Marion Benz in Chapter 13 with a highly engaging overview of the tenth millennium BC chlorite vessels in northern Mesopotamia. Chapters 10 and 11 emphasise the importance of a comparative approach, highlighting the very different contexts in which ceramic containers were made and used by hunter-fisher-gatherer groups across Asia and beyond from at least 20 000 years ago. These societies valued the ability of ceramic containers to be heat resistant for prolonged periods, which meant that they could produce, store and transport high-energy foodstuffs as well as technical materials such as glue. These varied affordances of ceramic containers are explored within the context of early farming societies in southern Turkmenistan in Chapter 12 where Susan Pollock highlights the wide range of uses and roles beyond that of the usual assumptions relating to food. In Chapter 17, Carl Knappet emphasises the underestimated importance of the lids of ceramic containers with case studies from the Bronze Age Aegean and, in particular, the changing cylindrical pyxis whose close relationship with a distinctive lid remains one constant.
Reinhard Bernbeck provides the final chapter with concluding thoughts on this excellent, well-edited and lavishly illustrated collection of contributions. Perhaps the only potential criticism is the significant imbalance in the scholarship towards western Asia as opposed to Central, South or East Asia as suggested in the title. Nonetheless, it provides an immensely valuable contribution for further early ceramic scholarship across the world and shows indisputably the transformative impact of the formerly oft-regarded ‘side product’ of organic and inorganic containers in the human past.
The contributions in this book stem from the ‘Trade, technology, and connectivity in pre-Roman Italy’ conference held in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2020 which also produced a companion volume with a focus on trade and mobility (Armstrong & Cohen Reference Armstrong and Cohen2022). The volume discussed here comprises 14 chapters which, along with the Introduction, deliver varied case studies, ranging from Etruria to Sicily, dating mainly from c. 900–480 BC, and centring on ceramics, architecture and art, funerary and ritual topics.
In the Introduction, the editors Jeremy Armstrong and Aaron Rhodes-Schroder briefly outline the changes in studies and models for the cultures of the Mediterranean during the past few decades and the resulting challenges that have arisen. Microhistories and the broader-picture perspectives have taken over in recent years, following a shift from ‘proto-nations’ to post-colonial thinking that has led towards a more open multidirectional system of networked societies. The meeting point of these two contrasting scales—the regional level—has not received comparative attention. This volume aims to address this gap for Italy in pre-Roman times and considers ways to detect cultural change and exchange. It seeks to go beyond the traditional focus on ‘orientalising’ influences from the ‘Greek East’ which have been based predominantly on pottery studies. Here, connections to the North and Continental Europe are highlighted, especially in regards to metallurgy, as well as influences from the western and southern Mediterranean and from within the Italian peninsula. The editors clearly describe the need for a new approach and language to study, see and explain the exchanges to complete the deconstruction of the old colonial models. Whereas the Greek or Hellenistic connections in the eighth and seventh centuries BC can certainly not be overlooked, they need to be put in perspective because contacts between these regions can be traced back to at least the Bronze Age through trade and knowledge transfer as well as the movement of people.
The following chapters are detailed case studies with many novel views on well-known material. Nicola Terrenato offers an unorthodox view about modes of up-scaling to provide for the change from village to a new urbanised lifestyle, while using traditional techniques, in this case bricolage. The cultivation of wine and its long tradition in Italy with later incoming innovations, which were deliberately chosen to be adopted, is detailed by Franco De Angelis in a thought-provoking way. Marine Lechenault and Kewin Peche-Quilichini deliver an excellent overview of Corsica in the Iron Age, specifically on the contacts with its neighbours. The island's contacts with Italy, visible through pottery and metalwork finds, can be mainly traced to the eastern part, facing Etruria. The rest of the island, however, did not participate—in the southern part, connections with the island of Sardinia are dominant. Corsica emerges as a connecting point of trade routes in the Tyrrhenian Sea, where the people chose which innovations they accepted. John North Hopkins centres his research angle on one object, the Ficoroni Cista, a fourth-century BC bronze vessel with figurative decorations, and illuminates art adaptations across early Italy through this ‘vessel of elite exchange’. Amanda Pavlick highlights terracotta roof tiles as one element of innovation in buildings that can be traced during the seventh century BC and is seen as a marker for further investigations of urbanisation and technological progress. In studying feasting vessels in Sicily, William Balco shows that with the arriving newcomers, such as Greeks and Phoenicians, new stylistic elements were adopted. Further chapters (Chapters 6–8, 11, 12) explore the connections that become visible through architecture, imagery and rituals, and all evidence a choice of what is being adopted into an already existing tradition to become a new ‘fashion’. Chapters 10 and 14 re-evaluate pottery assemblages. Gijs Tol revisits pottery typologies of Archaic Latium and establishes ‘ceramic fingerprints’ for several rural sites to challenge the recent view of a flourishing sixth-century BC countryside, to a more modest scale of spreading farms, and calls for more detailed studies into the Archaic countryside. Peter Attema and colleagues offer an extensive longue durée study of pottery traditions in the Sibaritide (northern Calabria), with the main focus on the site of Timpone della Motta, where traditions and influences are visible in its local ceramic production.
A chapter combining all the diverse strands into a connected view would have been helpful to direct the narratives into a regional overview. Despite this missed opportunity for a synthesis, plenty of ideas and data are captured between the covers of this volume. While it is not always an easy read owing to the dense material presented, it is very worthwhile as it offers new approaches to move towards a comprehensive post-colonial research methodology. The Introduction is a must for anyone needing direction or trying to catch up on the topic and the case studies deliver excellent examples, especially on how to look at known material with new eyes.
The book Machine room of the goods is the volume accompanying the 2023 German exhibition Maschinenraum der Götter in the Liebighaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt am Main. The exhibition brought together many objects to illustrate the history of science across five millennia and explore innovations and technology through ancient myths, as well as a collection of mechanical animations in ancient European and Islamic art. The beautifully and extensively illustrated book is not a catalogue as such but a collection of essays by Vinzenz Brinkmann, editor and creator of the exhibition, and various specialists placing the objects in context and seeking to reconnect the history of art with the history of technology. The text presents many of the exhibited finds and at the end a list shows all the displayed objects with an image and brief description. The chapters are structured geographically and move forward through time.
The first chapters highlight the beginnings of the natural sciences, starting with the well-known ancient civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but the book omits any achievements or mention of older or contemporaneous illiterate societies. Egypt is described as the first learned society, which is visible in the large cultural projects completed there, such as the pyramids, that needed an advanced understanding of technology but also enabled further exploration, for example in material sciences and astronomy. The beginnings of astronomy in Mesopotamia are explained in brief followed by a look into the Mesopotamian myths that might shed light on some technological progress or possibilities of people's imaginations. This is articulated eloquently by Shiyanthi Thavapalan who writes: “Invention and making are processes that are intimately linked to people's experiences in the world and to their imagination” (p.43).
The next part is about the Greek myths that were kept alive through the millennia not only in written words but through uncountable images on vessels, murals, statues, coins and much more. Adrienne Moore investigates these well-known myths here with a twist, in tracing the idea of the creation of robots or automats back and revealing the science-fiction stories of antiquity. The first possible interpretation for this can be seen in the Egyptian god Khnum who built humans out of clay on a potter's wheel, which counts as an early machine in itself (in use since c. 3000 BC in Egypt). New concepts emerge in these legends of producing life through technology/craft (and in some cases magic or power of the gods) but not through biology. We know these robots and devices from myths, such as the Trojan horse which can be interpreted as an early automat or Hephaestus' “driverless delivery carts that served ambrosia”—one step ahead of today's driverless taxis one might say—and Daedalus famously inventing mechanical wings in imitation of nature. After a discourse on the works and achievements of Aristotle, some of the real and marvellous automata and technological innovations of Greek and Roman origin are highlighted, among them the partially animated larger-than-life-sized bronze sculpture of the Apollo of Canachus (sixth century BC). A chapter is dedicated to the astonishing ‘Nero's Revolving Banquet Hall’ by Francoise Villedieu, based on recent excavations. The next part is devoted to the concept of the ‘Sphaira: the world as sphere’ in Greek scholarship and thoughts offered on the developments of astronomy.
The previous essays all build towards what must have been the blockbuster in the exhibition: the astonishing Antikythera mechanism. The leading expert on this famous object, mathematician Tony Freeth, details his research and that of a large group of colleagues, ranging from the discovery in 1902 to the many attempts to solve this extraordinary jigsaw puzzle. The newest outcome is presented and visualised in digital models, which were made possible through detailed new analyses and considering previous findings as well as ancient scientists’ texts. The results are astonishing and show the various functions of the device: predicting eclipses as well as the moon's orbiting; a planetarium with the earth at its centre and predicting the position of the sun and the planets; and the calculation of Metonic and Egyptian calendrical and astronomical data. Furthermore, the newest investigation reveals the mechanism as a Corinthian calendar and Olympiad dial for the four major games in ancient Greece. This unique find dates somewhere between 240 and 70 BC (and some investigations suggest 12 May 205 BC), and is a strange, futuristic technology that did not catch on at the time and was reprised only 1500 years later. It has inspired, and will no doubt continue to inspire, many scientists as well as spectators.
The book concludes with the developments in science from the Greek to the Arabic-Islamic cultural sphere, incorporating the textual evidence and medieval Islamic automata and how these advances in science continue into the European Modern Era, especially in exploring the world with new devices, such as telescopes and microscopes.
The essays do not look at the transfer of technology, through innovation or adaptation, but highlight through objects and ancient science the progress over the past five thousand years. The only caveat about the content is the obliteration of other prehistoric cultures who certainly had knowledge of astronomy and technology but had different ways to depict and showcase them. For much of the human past, art, technology, philosophy and religion were deeply entwined and in many ancient civilisations understood as one ‘subject’, a strict separation of the subjects became the norm only in the twentieth century. The main aim of the Machine room of the gods exhibition and book was to bring these fields back together, and the beautiful illustrations of the many wonderous objects achieve this exceedingly well. The volume is not an in-depth discussion of the history of science but an engaging and accessible overview with some highlighted topics and an invaluable reminder that we need to study and interpret past peoples and their worlds more from their perspectives than from our modern viewpoint. Bringing the strands of myths, arts and technology together so clearly testifies to imagination being at the start of any innovation or new technology.
This list includes all books received between 1 March 2024 and 30 April 2024. Those featuring at the beginning of New Book Chronicle, however, have not been duplicated in this list. The listing of a book here does not preclude its subsequent review in Antiquity.
