Atlantis is one of those subjects that archaeologists rarely discuss.
Eberhard Zangger, a geoarchaeologist, wins points for professional courage
in taking a new stab at this heavily overworked subject, but his results
are unconvincing.

Zangger argues that the Atlantis legend tells the tale of the Trojan
War, derived from an Egyptian version recounted by Solon, a traveller and
statesman, in the 6th century BC. In the 4th century BC, Plato used Solon’s
account to produce the story that we are familiar with – a great civilisation
destroyed and sunk beneath the ocean’s waves. Zangger’s starting point is
the familiar observation that the idealised Athenian state set in opposition
to Atlantis by Plato may reflect a memory of the My-cenaean civilisation
of Bronze Age Greece.

Plato stated that the Athenians were destroyed in a day and a night
by floods and earthquakes. Here Zangger introduces new evidence, from his
fieldwork at the important Mycenaean centre of Tiryns, northern Greece,
that a flashflood triggered by an earthquake may have played a significant
part in that city’s decline. This he sees as part of a wider series of natural
upheavals that shook Aegean civilisation in about 1200 BC, the time of the
Trojan War. Atlantis, the superpower that Plato’s Athenians were fighting
when disaster struck, was therefore Troy in northwestern Anatolia, Turkey,
which the Mycenaean kings had struggled for ten years to capture.

Zangger devotes most of his book to arguments for parallels between
Plato’s Atlantis and the Troy of legend and archaeology. But his case suffers
from the same weaknesses as the once-popular theory that Atlantis was Minoan
Crete or Santorini (Thera). If you remove Plato’s continent from the Atlantic
– geologists assure us it could not have existed – then you have to alter
dimensions, directions and dates radically. Similarities between Atlantis
and almost any Bronze Age civilisation can indeed be found. This is not
surprising as memories of Bronze Age society must have formed part of Plato’s
raw material.

The differences are more striking. Zangger is not even able to argue
that Troy was destroyed by floods because the archaeological and geological
evidence contradicts him. This leaves the climax of Plato’s story, the sinking
of Atlantis beneath the waves, as a glaring loose thread.

The presence of a foreword by Anthony Snodgrass, one of the world’s
most eminent classical archaeologists, might suggest that Zangger’s treatment
of the basic source ma-terial (Plato’s Critias and Timaeus) would be steady.
It is quite cavalier. Zangger has particular difficulty with Plato’s statement
that the Atlantic ocean was navigable but where Atlantis sank ‘the ocean
at that spot has now become impassable and unsearch-able, being blocked
up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled’. Zangger says
this means that the Greeks lost the knowledge of how to navigate the narrow
straits between the Aegean and the Black Sea for a while. Plato’s meaning
was crystal clear. That an earth scientist should gloss over such a passage
is worrying.

This makes the subtitle employed for the book seem pretentious. ‘Deciphering
the Atlantis Legend’ suggests a new, systematic approach is being taken.
To the contrary, this Atlantis book, like so many others, reads like an
exercise in shoe-horning awkward evidence into a reluctant mould.

Peter James is in the Department of Ancient History, University College
London.

The dust jacket and contents list of Experiencing the Past promise a
lively and stimulating exploration of archaeology, one that ‘reclaims the
sentiment and feeling which are so often lost in purely academic approaches’.
Michael Shanks’s previous publications have been very much concerned with
methodology, but he is dismayed how ‘a scien-tific and academic archaeology
seemed to lose so much of what made the past human and attractive’. Arguing
that there can be no genuinely objective approach to the past (which is
true enough, except for extremely limited observations), he explores the
case for restoring a measure of the intuitive into interpreting the past.
But does he succeed?

Shanks’ attempt to escape the stifling atmosphere of theory-ridden archaeology
is unconvincing. He is so deeply involved himself that it seems unlikely
he will ever taste uncontaminated air again. The central question, precisely
how a new intuitive approach will differ from the fringe romantic or traditional
archaeological schools, is never really answered, except that it appears
that plain English is inadequate to the task. Jargon crawls across the pages,
awkwardly juxtaposed with passages of impressions (full of verbless sentences
sometimes reminiscent of William Burroughs, but without the punch) and binary
lists exhibiting some painfully corny structuralism. Can parallel columns
listing objectivity, rationality and masculine on one side and subjectivity,
emotion and feminine on the other, seriously be offered in the 1990s as
an aid to understanding the nature of archaeological knowledge?

Part 4, which examines the role of the archaeologist in society, is
the most interesting. Here Shanks puts forward some thought-provoking ideas,
such as the analogy of an archaeologist to a craft worker. On the other
hand, the lengthy soul-searching that leads up to this idea seems rather
self-indulgent, even a trifle narcissistic. The book may appeal to archaeologists
obsessed with introspection, but has less to offer to those interested in
archaeology.

Peter James is an archaelogist at University College London.

Expectations, like first impressions, can be misleading. The title of
Archaeology Yesterday and Today, by two Czech scholars, might suggest that
it treats changing attitudes to the field in Eastern Europe over the past
few years, as cold war intellectual barriers crumbled away with the political.
Certain principles fundamental to Western earth sciences such as continental
drift never found wide acceptance in the East, while both Russian and Central
European archaeologists still publish papers in which the existence of radiocarbon
dating is blithely ignored. Still, this is to stress some conspicuous differences.
What Malina and Vasicek’s work serves to remind us is that eastern European
archaeologists, at least in Czechoslovakia, haven’t been on a different
intellectual planet for the past 20 years.

Malina and Vasicek attempt to take a global view of archaeology, though
with a strong bias towards European, and particularly Central European,
trends. Their historical survey (almost half the volume) rates as one of
the best since Glyn Daniel’s overview in The Idea of Prehistory (1962).
The scope is extraordinary: the birth of archaeology as a discipline is
discussed with a wealth of background detail, taking in the development
of related disciplines from linguistics and anthropology to mythology and
art history.

No history of archaeology can avoid the idiosyncrasies of its authors.
Naturally enough European prehistory takes centre stage, leaving the treatment
of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, the other cradle of archaeology,
unfortunately skimpy. Even Flinders Petrie, a key figure in the develop-ment
of modern archaeological methods, receives only three glancing mentions.

Even the best-read British archaeologist will find much that is new
(from obscure or inaccessible sources in Russian, Czech and other eastern
European languages), while its range will make it a useful handbook for
students of history, philosophy, linguistics, history of science and even
natural history. Malina and Vasicek’s broad approach enables the influence
of various trends on archaeology, such as evolutionism, diffusionism and
environmentalism, to be described and illustrated in a far more rounded
intellectual setting than one usually finds in archaeological histories.

Students of archaeology will particularly welcome the later chapters,
which give a concise guide to the often mind-boggling world of modern archaeological
theory. Since the 1960s the theoretical side of the field has become something
of a hydra – almost every new methodological approach seems to have spawned
its own brood. As Professor Anthony Harding of the University of Durham
says in the foreword: ‘It would be hard to tie a common label on all Western
archaeologists, in an era of structural, processual, post-processual, neo-functionalist,
and many other kinds of archaeologists.’ Professionals, let alone beginners,
might be forgiven for losing track of which developments are significant,
and which best left by the wayside.

Having watched from the sidelines, Malina and Vasicek are able to give
a refreshingly neutral account of the growth of the ‘New Archaeology’ (mainly
an Anglo-Saxon development) in the 1960s and 1970s, and subsequent developments.
Concern with theory, they remind us, did not begin with the New Archaeology,
a response to the subjective, ‘intuitive’ interpretations offered by traditional
archaeology. An approach critical of sources had already begun much earlier
with the German scholar H. J. Eggers, who in 1950 announced: ‘Even archaeological
remains can lie!’ The search for objectivity, and a rational scientific
means for wringing information from the evidence has preoccupied archaeologists
ever since.

Malina and Vasicek are archly critical of many of the developments they
review, leading us through a maze of often abstruse material with skill,
eschewing jargon (vital in field rapidly drowning in it) and using a dramatic,
as well as humorous, flair, to sugar the pill. There are some useful cartoon-style
diagrams. Their writing, like their thinking, is clear. Above all, in Archaeology
Yesterday and Today they never lose sight of the fact that archaeological
theory is not all of archaeology. While they feel that there is something
of a crisis in archaeological theory their implicit message seems to be
‘stay calm, there always has been. Such things can be viewed dispassionately.’

Peter James is in the Department of Ancient History, University College
London.