Mechanics of Pre-industrial Technology: An Introduction to the Mechanics of Ancient and Traditional Material Culture by Brian Cotterell, Johan Kamminga

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 603 seum administrators in the United States for novelty over reflection. It is a paradox, then, that this volume is dedicated to Cyril S. Smith, the scholar who has done so much to interpret the wider context of materials in art and technology. Most historians of technology have used material evidence spar­ ingly, while curators at museums of technology often display items in their collections to illustrate conclusions drawn from documents rather than as sources of information. In the culture of archaeometry, artifacts identified as “ancient” or “fine art” are accorded higher status than recent or vernacular ones; something that is “earliest” or “first” commands the highest respect. Only one of the sixty-nine articles in this proceedings volume deals with a North American industrial material. There are opportunities for a convergence of interest between historians of technology and practitioners of archaeometry that could be mutually beneficial. Robert B. Gordon Dr. Gordon is professor of geophysics and applied mechanics at Yale University. Mechanics ofPre-industrial Technology: An Introduction to the Mechanics of Ancient and Traditional Material Culture. By Brian Cotterell and Johan Kamminga. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp· xv+ 325; illustrations, tables, appendixes, bibliographies, in­ dex. $49.50. Two Australians—a mechanical engineer doing research on frac­ ture mechanics and an anthropologist studying stone tools—have collaborated to produce a book whose purpose is “to illustrate the role of mechanics theory in the study of ancient and traditional material culture” (p. 293). The idea of the book appears to be to convince nonengineers— archaeologists and anthropologists seem to be the principal targets— that “mechanics theory” can help them to understand, in both ancient and recent traditional material cultures, how the artifacts work and to evaluate their efficiency and effectiveness. Successive chapters deal with “basic mechanics” and its application to fluids and solids, machines, structures, stone tools, projectiles, land and water transport, and musical instruments. The authors use traditional Newtonian mechanics, which enables them to calculate, for example, “theoretical” static and moving forces in structures or machines, and pressures, velocities, and accelerations in mechanical and fluid systems. Dozens of historical incidents are described or cited, sometimes to show how much the ancients knew but too often to show how they “failed” to understand what “mechanics theory” can now tell us. The tone of the book is (perhaps unwittingly) set at the end of the “introduction,” where we are told that “it is only within the last few 604 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE years that a sensible and systematic set of universal units, the Système Internationale [SI], has been adopted. This—we hope—final standard­ ization has taken a long time to establish” (p. 16). Then follows a table of SI units. Throughout the book, SI units are piously adhered to: newtons for force, pascals for pressure, joules for work, watts for power. All other units have been banished. Only inadvertently and indirectly are units mentioned that ordinary people think in—for example, pounds or kilograms force and force per unit area for pressure. The rate of acceleration of falling bodies at the earth’s surface (gj is inferred (p. 26) from an algebraic statement of Newton’s universal law for gravitational force; to find g it is only necessary to know the earth’s mass and its mean radius. The book strikes me as a brief for calling in an expert in “mechanics theory” when archaeological and anthropological studies are to be made. “Even if one cannot perform the mechanical analysis,” we are told, “it is important to be aware of the information that mechanics can provide.” The authors call textbooks of engineering mechanics “bor­ ing” (p. 13), but those boring textbooks are effective in teaching me­ chanics to students who want to learn. They include numerous exercise problems to give the student experience in using rather than merely being told about what the “theory” will do in the heads of priests. As a “layman” (p. 69), I have been impressed by those books and teachers that attempt to bring a reader or student from where s/he is to where the author or teacher is, rather than refuse to bend from...