History from Things: Essays on Material Culture ed. by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery

Histoire des relations entre les Zuni et les musees americains, en particulier le Musee d'art de Denver et l'institution smithsonienne entre 1978 et 1987 avant la publication du Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation de 1990. Les Amerindiens ont reussi a convaincre de la necessite du retour de leurs biens culturels et religieux, parmi lesquels les Ahayu:da, objets protecteurs des Zuni, dieux jumeaux ou dieux de la guerre. Analyse des negociations dans lesquelles un conservateur, un anthropologue zuni et un anthropologue consultant representant les Zuni ont joue un role

About the Authors

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 317 Most noteworthy in the New World series is Anna Roosevelt’s “Early Pottery in the Amazon.” The pottery represents the earliest so far discovered in the Americas, dating to about 7,500 b.c.—“more than 1,500years earlier than elsewhere in the hemisphere” (p. 115). Roosevelt notes that the early radiocarbon dates for these Amazo­ nian sites were not taken seriously by earlier investigators and, while available in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution (p. 116), re­ mained hidden and unpublished until now. She does not, however, claim Amazonia as the “hearth of pottery in the New World” (p. 129), recognizing from her experience with these hidden data that archaeologists in the past have too often let their theoretical models determine and override empirical research strategies and results. The final three chapters are not as conclusive as one would expect. I take particular exception to Hayden’s preoccupation with status and prestige as forces for technological innovation. While elites are often the first to acquire exotic, expensive, and new kinds of objects in order to display their wealth and status, they often do not invent these new objects but simply adopt them. The invention of those objects and technologies originates, instead, with individuals experi­ menting on the basis of knowledge and experience of other and earlier craft technologies, and very often within a ritualistic con­ text—which apparently was the case for ceramics at Dolni Vestonice in the Upper Palaeolithic. Joan M. Vastokas Dr. Vastokas is professor of anthropology at Trent University, Ontario, Canada. Her research and writing focus on material culture, art, architecture, and technology in various societies. Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies. Edited by W. David Kingery. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Insti­ tution Press, 1996. Pp. x+262; illustrations, maps, figures, notes. $39.00 (cloth). This collection of fifteen essays is based on a Smithsonian confer­ ence on material culture. W. David Kingery’s editor’s preface cites the conference theme: “the conviction that the things humankind makes and uses at any particular time and place are probably the truest representation we have ofvalues and meaning within a society. The study of things, material culture, is thus capable of piercing in­ terdisciplinary boundaries and bringing forward meaningful discus­ sions and interactions among scholars in many disparate fields” (p. ix). This anthology is to be “an introduction to the methods and theories common to material cultural studies in a variety of specialist fields’ ’ (p. ix). Kingery claims that Historyfrom Things: Essays on Mate­ rial Culture, which he coedited with Steven Lubar (Washington, D.C.: 318 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Smithsonian Institution, Press, 1993), is a predecessor volume, but he gives neither date nor title for the conference. Nor do we learn how this volume reflects the total conference agenda. Kingery asserts that “No one denies the importance of things, but learning from them requires rather more attention than reading texts. The grammar of things is related to, but more complex and difficult to decipher than, the grammar of words” (p. 1). These es­ says help practitioners of “a relatively new and distinct discipline,” the study of material culture, learn to work together and appreciate the contributions ofmany disciplines to material culture (p. 1). After one introductory chapter, the book is divided into four parts: “Para­ digms for Material Culture Studies,” “Material Culture in the His­ tory of Technology,” “Formation Processes,” and “Materials Sci­ ence in Material Culture Studies.” The strengths of this volume are the varied backgrounds of the contributors, the strong international perspective these experts bring to their work, and the section on materials science. The ten U.S. and three European authors include anthropologists (some­ times also materials science experts), archaeologists, historians, and an ethnologist. Jules D. Prown distinguished between “hard” and “soft” material culturists, between those who focus on “the reality of the object it­ self” and “the artifact as part of a language through which culture speaks its mind” (pp. 21-22). The essays can be similarly divided. Representing the “soft” approach, JosephJ. Corn and Ruth Oldenziel provide useful historiographical essays focused on articles in Technology and Culture and on the influence...

From Visual Culture to Design Culture The past ten years of academia have seen the establishment of Visual Culture, Material Culture and, most recently, Design Culture as scholarly disciplines. Visual Culture partly has emerged from art history through its incorporation of cultural studies. Material Culture’s provenance is in a mixture of anthropology, museum studies, and design history. The term “design culture” has been used more sporadically, and not just in academia. It also has been employed in journalism and the design industry itself. But if design culture is to be consolidated as an academic discipline, what relationship would it have to these other categories and, indeed, to design practice itself? Given the foci of Visual Culture in images, and that of Material Culture in things, they should, theoretically, provide a scholastic springboard for Design Culture. Visual Culture is now firmly established as an academic discipline in universities across Europe and the Americas. It sports two refereed journals,1 at least five student introductory texts,2 and three substantial readers.3 Undergraduate and postgraduate courses have been established. While differing in their approaches, Visual Culture authors generally include design alongside fine art, photography, film, TV, and advertising within their scope.4 Visual Culture, therefore, challenges and widens the field of investigation previously occupied by Art History. This project was instigated in the 1970s within the then-called “New Art History.” Proponents turned away from traditional interests in formal analysis, provenance, and patronage to embrace a more anthropological attitude to the visual in society. Henceforth, all visual forms are admissible into the academic canon—a notion spurred on by the rise of Cultural Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Media Studies and, indeed, Design History. As the academic discipline of Visual Culture emerged through the 1990s, its central concern was the investigation of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Nonetheless, despite this apparent openness, this article contends that the methods of Visual Culture have limited use for developing an understanding of the cultural role of contemporary design in society. Victor Margolin previously has suggested the need for doctoral-level studies of design and culture.5 In essence, 1 The Journal of Visual Culture (Sage, founded 2002) and Visual Culture in Britain (Ashgate, founded 2000). 2 For example, see Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Richard Howells, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999): Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Visual Culture: An Introduction, John Walker and Sarah Chaplin, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 3 For example, see Visual Culture: The Reader, Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998); and The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Amelia Jones, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003). 4 Malcolm Barnard, Art, Design, and Visual Culture: An Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1998) includes some short references to design. 5 See Victor Margolin, “Design History and Design Studies” in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Reviewed by: Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography* Regina Lee Blaszczyk (bio) Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography. By Patricia Johnston. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xxii+351; illustrations, notes, appendix, index. $55. In his contribution to W. David Kingery’s Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), Joseph Corn lamented the recent trend among historians of technology to embrace theory while ignoring artifacts. Patricia Johnston’s award-winning monograph on Edward Steichen’s advertising photography—pronounced the Best Communication History Book for 1997 by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication—demonstrates a key point understood by Corn and other proponents of object analysis. In the hands of a skilled interpreter, the combination of documentary and material evidence—in this case, the “artifacts” consist of some 130 advertisements from popular magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, all beautifully reproduced in color and in black and white—can augment our understanding of technology’s role in the transmission and reformation of cultural values. Johnston served her artifactual apprenticeship as a graduate student in art history at Boston University and a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery during the 1980s and as editor of exposure, a scholarly journal devoted to photographic history, in the early 1990s. As a result of her interdisciplinary background, Johnston’s work is informed by her knowledge of visual culture, American studies, American history, photo history, and cultural theory. A revised and significantly expanded version of Johnston’s dissertation, Real Fantasies examines Edward Steichen’s twenty-year career as America’s most successful commercial photographer, focusing primarily on his work in the interwar years [End Page 705] for the Manhattan-based J. Walter Thompson (JWT), one of the nation’s leading advertising agencies. Known today in scholarly circles for his art photography, Steichen earned this highbrow badge through his affiliation with Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 studio, his fashion work for Condé Nast’s Vogue and Vanity Fair, and his later career as director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. Rather than rehashing this arty oeuvre, Johnston digs deep into advertising agency papers, museum archives, trade journals, and business literature to provide a close-up view of the politics of cultural production at the intersection of commerce and art. In doing so, Johnston makes a stellar contribution to the historical literature on American advertising and consumer society; there is no other text on this subject that so effectively uses images as evidence. Johnston arranges her book into ten chapters that overlap thematically, chronologically, and methodologically; her narrative proceeds through biography, stylistic matters, cultural analysis, and a postmodernist consideration of audience response. Many chapters consider how Steichen adapted his medium, navigated agency politics, and evolved his style to suit the needs of corporate clients through in-depth case studies of particular campaigns; his photos appeared in ads for Pebeco toothpaste, Fleischmann’s yeast, Kodak Verichrome film, Ivory soap, Cannon towels, Oneida silver plate, Simmons mattresses, Steinway pianos, and Matson Line ocean cruises. In each instance, Steichen bent over backward to accommodate JWT art directors and account representatives, who represented clients’ interests. Here we find no temperamental starving artist screaming for creative license but a smart businessman who recognized that a comfortable livelihood could be earned through corporate patronage. Johnston’s book is as much a biography of a corporate actor as it is a synopsis of a photographer’s commercial career. As Johnston argues, photography came to be the preferred medium for images in mass-circulation advertisements for cultural rather than technological reasons. The technical capability for photographic reproduction existed for decades before ad agencies adapted it for mass-circulation campaigns. By the 1920s, the cultural imperatives of consumer society impelled agencies to find new ways to reach women visually—and ad men saw photos as the key to female hearts, minds, and dollars. One example from Johnston’s many case studies demonstrates how agencies used persuasive photographs to unlock markets. In her chapter on Steichen’s work for the Jergens Company, a lotion manufacturer, the reader is struck...

Cushing as part of the team: the collecting activities of the Smithsonian Institution

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 441 ban, and bourgeois elements of German nationalism. The Weimar glider movement, however, mixed technological enthusiasm with antiurban , back-to-the-land sentiments. Jeffrey Herf’s Reactionary Mod­ ernism, (Cambridge, 1984) has dealt more effectively with these con­ tradictions, although only through a much narrower and a more traditional set of sources. A Nation of Fliers is also rather Germano­ centric. Comparisons with other nations are few and far between and Fritzsche misses many opportunities to employ Joseph Corn’s The Winged Gospel (New York, 1983) for a more thorough look at GermanAmerican contrasts, although he does mention the book. These com­ plaints are, however, overshadowed by Fritzsche’s accomplishments. He has written a graceful and significant work and has given impetus to the social and cultural history of German technology. Michael J. Neufeld Dr. Neufeld is a curator in the Aeronautics Department of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. He is currently completing a book, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemiinde and the German Army Guided Missile Program. Farther and Faster: Aviation’s Adventuring Years, 1909—1939. By Terry Gwynn-Jones. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Pp. xviii + 333; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, in­ dex. $29.95. Terry Gwynn-Jones, for thirty-five years a professional pilot in the service of Britain, Canada, and Australia, has authored five books and numerous articles on the history of aviation, including The Air Racers (London, 1984). He has also had “the opportunity to work in-house for extended periods as a contract writer on the National Air and Space Museum Aviation History Project” (p. x), experience from which the present volume has emerged. Farther and Faster is an enjoyable book to read and provides insight into both technical and organizational developments of the period. It spins captivating tales of innumerable air races in the years between the world wars, and its photos of aircraft and aviators (mostly from the collections of NASM) will warm the hearts of buffs and perhaps of a few historians besides. Between race descriptions, the author sets forth excellent analyses of developments in aircraft design and of changing national priorities for aviation. For example, he shows how the Schneider Trophy seaplane races of the 1920s stimulated the aircraft industries in the major combatants of World War II, aiding in the design of airliners in the 1930s and especially of the warplanes that soon followed. He also demonstrates how closed-course racing led to the development of streamlined, all-metal monoplanes and high-power, low-weight engines, while long-distance challenges and races promoted public awareness of the airplane as a vehicle of 442 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE transport—both effects necessary to entice business investment in aviation. Here then are the book’s real strengths: nicely told and well-illustrated stories of races and race series, combined with analyses of changing public attitudes and aircraft industry developments. This gives the reader a sense of how, injust three decades, the Wright Flier and Blériot XI were transformed into the DC-3 and Spitfire. However, there is a question in my mind as to how much value this volume will have for historians of technology. The major problem is one of inadequate notes. The author reserves his notes almost exclusively for providing the source of direct quotes, and even then he does so without giving page numbers to the referenced works. In addition, his bibliography contains such unhelpful references as London Illustrated News and Scientific American (without benefit of article title, volume number, or page). One wonders whether the author and the press saw the work as solely addressed to the many buffs and museumgoers likely to purchase it and gave little thought to the needs of historians. Another concern I have with the author’s approach to history is its future-mindedness, rather like the air-mindedness of many of his subjects. Among the air-minded, aviation was “the greatest factor for progress that has ever existed in the history of civilization,” as an editorial in U.S. Air Services magazine proclaimed in 1923 (quoted p. 197). Similarly, the author frequently has events prophesy the future, when aviation...

In the last thirty years, North American and European scholars of material culture have begun to cross disciplinary boundaries and to develop multidisciplinary methods for studying objects.1 In doing so, they have defined an autonomous field of scholarly inquiry that has become part of the academic landscape in much the same way that semiotics and cultural and gender studies have. An increase in the number of publications and journals specializing in material culture mirrors the growing interest in the object as a vehicle for new and innovative ways of understanding societies past and present. In the United States, examinations of artifacts are now pursued within a wide range of disciplines: history,2 folklore,3 cultural geography,4 art history,5 archaeology,6 museum studies,7 and anthropology.8 Canada has a journal specializing in the investigation of material culture, the Material Culture Review, and two French journals have recently published special issues on objects and museums: Ethnologie francaise (1996 and 1999) and Geneses (1994). Additionally, two new journals dedicated to the study of material culture have been founded in Great Britain since 1995: Things and the Journal of Material Culture. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of material culture studied objects to interpret the world views, mind-sets, desires, traditions, and hidden codes of specific social and cultural groups.9 Material things were a privileged means for historians, folklorists, and archaeologists to reconstruct the everyday life of illiterate groups, such as rural folk, urban workers, and Native Americans. Objects were considered to be reliable first-hand evidence of popular culture, and were often opposed to the written sources produced by literate elites, sources thought to be permeated with social and ethnocentric biases. Material objects and written sources were regarded as providing discrete categories of information; one type of source was used to reinforce or refute the conclusions derived from the other. Whether scholars preferred one source over the other or used both on an equal footing, however, some had a tendency to read culture through its material production, without showing much interest

and culture studies, both recent coinages, have trailed in the wake of the Western Renaissance and Western modernity's giant objects of academic attention, namely history and literature. Increasingly open boundaries of research and teaching in material culture studies have favoured rewarding exchanges. Dialogue between the humanities and the social sciences, for example, has enhanced a common focus on material objects and visual images, now liberated from jealously guarded borders of regional interest, disciplinary prejudice or just an outright failure to imagine things differently. These intellectual experiences also characterise the history of understanding China's art and material culture in the Netherlands. Encounters with China's material culture and theorisations of China's history of art within Dutch academe have often been the extra-disciplinary forays of historians of literature, philosophy and religion. Art history has suffered a similar fate in the Chinese academic arena. Keywords: China's material culture; Chinese literature; Dutch academe; Netherlands

Abiodun, Rowland, Henry J. Drewal, and John Pemberton III, eds. The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. 275 pp. including chapter references and glossary. $60.00 cloth. $29.95 paper. Barley, Nigel Smashing Pots: Works of Clay from Africa. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. 168 pp. including chapter references and index. $29.95 paper. Brett‐Smith, Sarah The Making of Bamana Sculpture: Creativity and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 352 pp. including chapter references and index. $95.00 cloth. Coombes, Annie E. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. 280 pp. including chapter references and index. $55.00 cloth. $25.00 paper.

Many practitioners of ‘world art studies’ are sceptical of systematic global models of world art history and of material and visual culture developed by such recent writers as John Onians and David Summers, though such models were common in art history in the past. The article distinguishes two theories of history in ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ world art history respectively, identified with the historiography of George Kubler and Michel Foucault respectively. Kubler's ‘rule of series’ stresses determined and developmental serial order whereas Foucault's model of ‘conjunction’ stresses contingent occurrence and unintended consequences. Though seemingly opposed, both models can be useful in describing the worldwide topography and chronology of visual and material culture and both have certain limits. The article suggests that they can be combined to yield a model of ‘devolution’ in the global or worldwide transcultural replication of series of visual and material culture – of causally ordered series that are nonetheless not governed by any ‘rule’. This model may be more palatable to sceptics of systematic models of art history than the existing evolutionary models.

Previous article FreeAbout the AuthorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEliza Butler is a core lecturer in art history at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. Her research centers on the intersections of landscape, natural history, and material culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America. Her writing has also recently appeared in Winterthur Portfolio.Maggie M. Cao is the David G. Frey Assistant Professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (2018). Her research focuses on the intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Sophie Cras is a maître de conferences (assistant professor) in contemporary art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, with a special interest in intersections between art and economics. Her first book, The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s, will appear in an English translation from Yale University Press in 2019.Michael D’Alessandro is an assistant professor of English at Duke University. His articles have appeared in The New England Quarterly, Studies in American Naturalism, Mississippi Quarterly, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Currently, he is working on a book project titled “Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Literature and Theatre, 1835–1875.”Chris Dingwall is a lecturer at Oakland University and author of Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture (forthcoming). He recently co-curated African American Designers in Chicago: Art, Commerce, and the Politics of Race, an exhibition held at Chicago Cultural Center.Diana Seave Greenwald is assistant curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford, where she also earned an M.Phil. in economic and social history. Her book Painting by Numbers: Economic Histories of Nineteenth Century Art is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.Diana L. Linden is an independent scholar. Her book Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (2015) was selected as a finalist by the National Jewish Book Awards. She was the co-editor of The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (2006). Her work has also appeared in Prospects and American Jewish History.David McCarthy is a professor of art history at Rhodes College. He is the author of The Nude in American Painting, 1950–1980 (1998); Pop Art (2000); H. C. Westermann at War: Art and Manhood in Cold War America (2004); American Artists against War, 1935–2010 (2015); and numerous essays about American art of the mid-twentieth century.John Ott is a professor of art history at James Madison University and author of Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (2014). His current book project is “Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954.”Alex J. Taylor is an assistant professor and academic curator in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2014 to 2016, he was the Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art at Tate. He is currently completing a history of corporate art patronage in the 1960s.Anne Verplanck is an associate professor of American studies at Penn State, Harrisburg. She is writing “The Business of Art: Transforming the Graphic Arts in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which explores such areas as entrepreneurship, innovation, and marketing to more fully understand the interplay of economics, social forces, and art.Alan Wallach is the Ralph H. Wark Professor Emeritus of art and art history and professor emeritus of American studies at the College of William and Mary. His publications include studies of Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School, and art museums in the United States. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 33, Number 3Fall 2019 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707480 © 2019 by Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This book addresses a critical era in the history of the city of Rome, the eighth century CE. This was the moment when the bishops of Rome assumed political and administrative responsibility for the city's infrastructure and the physical welfare of its inhabitants, in the process creating the papal state that still survives today. John Osborne approaches this using the primary lens of 'material culture' (buildings and their decorations, both surviving and known from documents and/or archaeology), while at the same time incorporating extensive information drawn from written sources. Whereas written texts are comparatively few in number, recent decades have witnessed an explosion in new archaeological discoveries and excavations, and these provide a much fuller picture of cultural life in the city. This methodological approach of using buildings and objects as historical documents is embodied in the phrase 'history in art'.

The study of material culture belongs to a relatively young discipline that examines artifacts as well as ideas about, and practices related to, artifacts, with artifacts defined as material objects created or modified by people. Aspects of research in material culture overlap with art history, archaeology, and anthropology, but studies in material culture approach the subject from a different perspective, focusing on areas not necessarily emphasized in these disciplines. Unlike traditional art history, material culture studies concentrate on the function of objects, devoting little attention to their aesthetic qualities, with more emphasis, for instance, on miracles associated with icons than on the style or iconography of icons; unlike traditional archaeology, material culture studies do not necessarily focus on extant artifacts, giving as much attention to references to objects in texts as to extant objects; and, unlike traditional anthropology, material culture studies often give great emphasis to historical development, often over vast expanses of time. While the field of material culture studies has flourished for decades, religious studies have been slow to recognize the importance of material things. Many areas of religion in which material culture plays a prominent role remain largely unexplored, including the place of objects in ritual, religious emotion, pilgrimage, and doctrine. Readers interested in the material culture of Buddhism will want to consult entries for Buddhist art, archaeology, and anthropology as well; in the entries below, the focus is on areas of material culture not necessarily emphasized in these disciplines as well as on studies within these disciplines that are especially relevant to the study of material culture. The term visual culture overlaps with much of what is considered material culture, but excludes objects associated with other senses, such as taste, smell, and touch, which are covered by the term material culture. The material culture approach is particularly well suited for exploring the qualities of particular classes of objects. What is it about relics as body parts that accounts for their appeal? Why are miracles so often associated with physical representations of holy figures and how do these differ from textual representations? How do clothing and food differ from language as a medium of communication? To highlight this aspect of research in Buddhist material culture, the scholarship listed below is divided according to type of object. At the same time, material culture studies also offer an opportunity to examine attitudes toward the material world as applied to a wide variety of objects normally separated by discipline. The doctrine of merit inspired the creation of a wide variety of different types of objects, and the monastic ideal of renunciation permeates many different areas of Buddhist material culture.

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 315 Valley, killing four hundred people. In response, California tight­ ened controls over all dam building by private companies. East­ wood’s structures were all intact, but after he died of a heart attack in 1924, no powerful voice remained to defend his legacy. Jackson surveys the others who carried on, but arch dams faded away by the end of the 1930s, not least because big-budget New Deal builders favored the monumental aesthetics of gravity dams. There was more than one possible “second nature.” In the decade that Jackson devoted to this work he appears to have examined every relevant archive and all of Eastwood’s dams. This solid, instructive, innovative, and well-constructed book de­ serves a wide readership. David E. Nye Dr. Nye, professor of American history at Odense University, received the 1993 Dexter Prize for Electrifying America. His most recent books are Consuming Power: A Social History ofAmerican Energies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997) and Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction ofAmerican Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). The Emergence ofPottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies. Edited by William K. Barnett and John W. Hoopes. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+285; illustra­ tions, maps, figures, tables, notes, index. $55.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). After decades of neglect, material culture and technology have risen recently to the forefront of sociocultural inquiry and interpre­ tation theory. Scholars have begun to explore in greater depth and in a wider interdisciplinary context the interdependence between material culture and society, matter and mind, and between technol­ ogy and human evolutionary processes. This volume of essays on the earliest appearance and development of pottery throughout the world provides a thought-provoking addition to the growing litera­ ture on the relationships between society and technology in varied historical and sociocultural contexts. Archaeologists today can reconstruct much more of the past than they could just a few years ago. Sophisticated new techniques of chemical, physical, and biological analysis in combination with re­ cent developments in archaeological methods and sociocultural in­ terpretation theory make available new kinds of data and new in­ sights into the nature of prehistoric societies. Pottery today is analyzed not only with reference to vessel shape and size or surface decoration to establish chronologies, typologies, and uncontextual­ ized sériations grounded primarily in visual analysis. With the aid of such methods as thermoluminescence dating and neutron-activa­ 316 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tion analysis for trace-element analyses of clays, archaeologists may locate the vessels’ geographical sources and map their distribution to determine trade links and other forms of exchange and social interaction. Residues adhering to vessels or shards, too, are now ana­ lyzed along with shape and decoration to recover information on not only subsistence and quality of nutrition in early populations but also vessel function—i.e., whether it was used for storage, cook­ ing, ritual, or social display. Given the availability of these new data, the authors of these essays can ask and answer new questions about ceramic technology and the relationship of pottery to society and to sociocultural change over time. Seeking to address the “social factors” behind earliest pottery production and use, the editors state that their primary aim is “to deconstruct commonly held assumptions about prehistoric ce­ ramics” (p. 1). Collectively, the essays in this volume make a power­ ful statement on the importance of the individual case in historic time and space and the likely futility of seeking universal laws in human and social behavior. The book clearly drives home, for exam­ ple, the fact that the emergence of pottery can no longer be associ­ ated solely with the appearance of agriculture. Nor is it necessarily part ofa package that includes settled village life or social complexity or any other trait previously linked with the so-called Neolithic life­ style. Instead, pottery was developed and first used by seasonally mo­ bile populations of the late Upper Palaeolithic era, among hunters and gatherers of wild foods, and most likely among those reliant upon fish and shellfish food resources. The earliest pottery so far excavated in both Old and New World contexts...