144 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE techniques of building and the structure of the finished product. He sets out to see whether and how the study of a wide range of technical processes used by potters in the Zaire basin at present might lead to more reliable interpretations ofceramics made in that region’s archaeological past. Based on his findings, he hypothesizes that morphological changes in ceramic remains were likely the result ofinternal factors in early central African societies and did not repre sent different ethnic groups, as has been assumed. Labelle Prussin’s paper alone would be reason enough to invest in this book. It is a multilayered study of what happens when no madic groups settle, focusing mainly on household architecture and the building of homes. Since economic development projects pro mote sedentarism over nomadism, her work has as much to say to policy makers as it does to scholars. She begins by pointing out that nomadic societies are hard for outsiders to grasp, categorize, and study, and that when they do come under study, it is the productive work of herding, done by men, that garners attention. Domestic work and the making of the home and its furnishings, the domain of women, are ignored. Prussin demonstrates that nomads have an architecture that is permanent though not stationary, that women invest an enormous amount of labor in the making of it, and that house-building is women’s social institution through which they cre ate and maintain important property rights. When nomads settle, women lose their rights over the home but keep rights over its fur nishings. Prussin has many other valuable things to say about the building and transport technologies of three different groups ofno mads in East Africa, suggesting historical relationships between them based on similarities in domestic structures and implicitly chal lenging an ethnic-based definition of their culture. Along the way she makes it abundantly clear why objects matter on many levels, what a tent can mean to marriage, for instance, to women’s rights, and to nomadic societies’ perceptions of space and their own place in the world. Colleen Kriger Dr . Krjger teaches African history in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is completing a book on ironworkers in 19thcentury central Africa. Databases in Historical Research: Theory, Methods, and Applications. By Charles Harvey andJon Press. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Pp· xvi+331; figures, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth). It is rare to find in an account of a new field of endeavor a combi nation of the best of all expository methods: a description of the situation and its structure and needs; an explanation of the theory of a new approach that may satisfy those needs and even enhance technology and culture Book Reviews 145 the structure; and a set ofcase studies that demonstrate the applica tion of the theory and its practical methods. Charles Harvey’s andJon Press’s intention in this book is “a con tribution to historical methodology” (p. xi), with the implication that they are addressing historians of a conventional stamp to per suade them of the utility of machine-readable database compilation and exploration. But the authors seem to reach further: to describe for any beginner in historical research the purpose, the processes, the surprises in the revelation of a clearer view than what has been offered in previous, perhaps fuzzy, dioramas. The starting point of the book is something that this reviewer has taught for many years: that civilized society depends on recorded information to transcend the limitations ofdistance and time. Manu scripts and printed books preserved and disseminated information; the telegraph, and later radio, telephone, and television, dissemi nated it instantaneously. Now computers, by recording information in an alternative medium, have introduced a new dimension. Be cause the information is recorded in digitized form, and because each unit, word, and even character is individually accessible, the computer allows us to get inside the information in new ways. Previ ously a researcher had to read every word of a book to find all the occurrences of a name or a place. This book lays out clearly...