Recent Books

Abstract

Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People. By Amara Thornton. London: UCL Press. 2018. x + 293 pp. £40 hardback, £20 paperback, free PDF. isbn 978 1 78735 259 9 (hardback); 978 1 78735 258 2 (paperback); 978 1 78735 257 5 (PDF). This book is based on a British Academy-funded postdoctoral project, ‘Popular Publishing and the Construction of a British Archaeological identity in the nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’. As the title implies it deals with popular publishing and not learned publications. However, the chronological scope is effectively much narrower. Apart from reporting earlier research on the work of the Religious Tract society in publicizing archaeology in the 1840s the story only really starts in 1870 with the formation of the society of Biblical Archaeology. The story peters out, rather than concludes, by the 1950s, so we do not learn about Thames & Hudson's Ancient Peoples and Places series which started in 1955, which is only mentioned in passing in the epilogue. The geographical coverage is equally restrictive. The archaeology of the British isles is rarely mentioned, as the focus is on the Middle East, and to a lesser extent the ancient Greek world. The book gives a history of the rise of the archaeologist as a profession and has a chapter on women's interest and involvement in archaeology. in keeping with a study which stresses the popular image there is a chapter on fictional archaeology both on the printed page and on the screen, and remarks on biographies and autobiographies of archaeologists. Some archaeologists were reluctant to put down their trowel in favour of the pen, and only then for technical reports. Others took every opportunity to promote themselves and their finds in the periodical press such as the Illustrated London News and in partworks such as the Harmsworth Universal History of the World. Demonstrating the potential of newspaper digitization projects Thornton traces the rise and fall of news about Charles Petrie's Egyptian expeditions in the 1890s. Citing the availability of company archives for her choice Thornton devotes a chapter each to studying the sometimes fraught relations between archaeologists and publishers at John Murray, Macmillan, and Penguin. The focus of the chapter on John Murray is restricted to the 1890s, while that on Macmillan is generally restricted to the same decade. The Penguin chapter also includes some details of earlier cheap archaeological books produced by Ernest Benn, but only covers the first two decades of Penguin. The activities of other publishers with archaeological lists and series such as T. Fisher Unwin, Kegan Paul, and Chatto & Windus are referred to but not analysed in any depth. A list of Archaeologist-Authors concludes the book.