934 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the bloom was delivered. Successful iron smelting was also believed to require the active participation of supernatural forces, usually the spirits of ancestors, and much of the smelting procedure consisted of rituals designed to attract the support of these beings. The photography and editing of this film are excellent, while the commentary provides a lucid and convincing anthropological analysis of the actions captured by the camera. The film comes with a twentypage booklet by Herbert and Goucher that provides more detailed analysis, a summary of the known history of ironworking in Bassar, and a bibliography. While this would be an impressive documentary film by any standards, its value is increased by the fact that there are so few other films of bloomery iron smelting. It also lends strong support to the views advanced by Heather Lechtman and by some Africanists who argue that metallurgy is as much a form of cultural expression as any other, and that the development of metallurgy in many regions cannot be fully explained without an understanding of the societies in which they were developed. David Killick Mr. Killick is an archaeologist with a particular interest in the development of metallurgy, and is currently completing a Ph.D dissertation in the Department of An thropology at Yale University on bloomery iron smelting in Malawi, southeast Africa. He has done archaeological fieldwork on metallurgical sites in Malawi and South Africa and recently collaborated on studies of the beginnings of copper metallurgy in West Africa and of 19th-century steelmaking processes in England and the United States. Spinners and Weavers ofAuffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750-1850. By Gay L. Gullickson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. x + 256; tables, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $34.50. The extensive archives of provincial France have proved an irre sistible attraction to historians for several decades now. First plumbed by France’s own annalistes, they have lately inspired a number of Amer ican scholars, many of whom also use the socio-quantitative approach pioneered by the annalistes to provide case studies of varying geo graphic, chronological, and topical scope. Gay Gullickson’s Spinners and Weavers of Auffay is a recent example. Drawing on departmental and municipal records, cahiers de doléances, and firsthand accounts, she creates a comprehensive picture of life in this Normandy village. Her secondary sources blend the literatures of women’s studies and eco nomic history to place this picture in a larger frame. Her objectives are in fact multiple, for, in describing how the people of Auffay and its surrounding area, the Caux, used and were used by the putting-out system of textile manufacture, Gullickson wishes TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 935 to stress the frequently ignored contribution that women’s wages made to family incomes, and to revise the generally accepted model for proto-industrialization advanced by Franklin Mendels, Rudolf Braun, and David Levine. This model holds that the large-scale cottage in dustries that preceded fully industrialized urban manufacture were most likely to develop in those areas in which a declining agriculture forced rural workers into the production of consumer goods for putting -out merchants. Attitudinal changes supposedly followed, causing reduced thrift, earlier marriage, and an increased birthrate. This in turn created a large population vulnerable to, but dependent on, a manufacturer’s response to the laws of supply and demand, so that workers competed first against one another for hand labor and then against the machines that replaced it. Gullickson finds that the Caux and its people differed from this model in almost every way, a “contrast . . . allowing] us to draw a more accurate and complex picture of the economic and demographic consequences of proto-industrialization” (p. 3). Perhaps most impor tant, her findings stress reciprocity rather than rivalry between ag riculture and cottage industry, with workers accepting both as seasonal employment and moving rationally between them. This is not to say that proto-industrialization did not affect the cauchois. Indeed, one significant change was in the division of labor: at the beginning of the period under investigation, spinning had been done...