archytas's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
TL; DR: This book is a lot of effort for a layperson, but it's worth it.
This is an exceptional work of scholarship, a detailed, apologetically specialist, summary of what is currently understood, surmised and debated as a result of Australian archaeological exploration of the desert. As a reviewer, I am far from the intended audience - despite harbouring adolescent dreams of becoming an archaeologist, I switched course at university when I realised how hard, and tedious, I found it to look at various tiny things (pottery shards, bones, stone implements) and tell them apart. In recent years, driven by some need to better understand where humanity has come from, I have ventured back into reading paleoanthropology and related works, (but still found staring bewildered at diagrams of bones, pottery shards, and stone tools - even in diagram form, my very not-visual brain struggles to see the ever-so-important differences).
So when my partner presented this to me as a present*, I was both daunted and excited. For all its global significance and uniqueness, the story of Australia's desert societies gets scant treatment in accessible science texts. Some of this is obviously the reality of global resources - Europe is a much bigger scientific hub than Australasia. There are cultural sensitivities as well - Australia's modern desert inhabitants understand what whitefella science says about how ancestors arrived, but where that conflicts with their own understanding and worldview, do not necessarily weight it. (This is hardly suprising - whitefella anything has not exactly proved beneficial to caring for country, and the assumption that whitefellas know better because, SCIENCE, has led consistently to ecological devastation, human sickness and death, and species extinction across Australia's desert communities. We are so very, very far from creating a unified understanding of our country, and the ground to be covered here requires years of respectful listening to Aboriginal knowledge and worldview.)
But despite the various difficulties, a story that covers 60,000 years of development, change, growth and consolidation seems so important to understand. I think as an Australian, it is also imperative really, to have some sense of the Country we are living in. Without the long view, we think the last 200 years and the cultures that arrived are all there is to our world, and we are self-imposed outsiders in our homeland as a consequence.
So, the book. This is an incredibly ambitious text. To describe it as a summary of current knowledge is doing it a disservice, really, as Dr Smith provides enough detail, mostly sorted thematically, then detailed site by site, to allow a budding or established archaeologist, to challenge or support the conclusions that are reached. He doesn't merely point towards the research - he describes it in just enough detail to allow for detailed critique.
Unfortunately, this can also make it pretty daunting for the non-archaeologist reader, without the necessary expertise, these passages are both cognitively exhausting (so many new words to learn!) and repetitive. When I realised that I was never going to understand the full richness of the book, and I could move through to the parts which summarised the conclusions from this data, the book got a lot more enjoyable, and I can attest there is a great deal a patient but uneducated reader can extract.
Unlike a lot of the popular paleontology I have read, this book is not a synthesis of various disciplines. Dr Smith does discuss DNA, linguistics and anthropology at points, but the book is a firmly archaeological text. I did find this frustrating at times - as the recent leaps forward in the first two of those disciplines has greatly added to our understanding of societal development globally. It also means the book does not deeply engage with the culture or viewpoint of Aboriginal societies themselves - given the context of Australian society today, I'll admit to being a little uncomfortable about that as well. But what Smith does draw out of the story of desert archaeology is a compelling picture of societies responding to climactic conditions, changing technologies and social organisation to survive in a unique and challenging environment. As oddly as this is to say of a very dispassionate technical text, there are insights from this book which haunt me. One is the brutal realisation of how many groups of humans tried and failed to colonise regions before a group took hold - and the real picture of how common starvation is in our human history. Another is the amazing strength of human connection, as knowledge and expertise move across the continent, passed from social group to social group, as surely as key cultural artifacts like ochre do.
It is both an intriguing, and in some ways challenging, implication of the book that much of modern Australian desert societies has emerged within the last 5000 years. Given that this is also a timeframe within which the totally-isolated-from-this-group European/North African/Middle Eastern societies changed rapidly - well, that's intriguing.
I've been putting off writing this review, because I feel like I won't remember to put in all the good bits. But in the end, perhaps the most important thing to mention is how much more I wanted to know as a consequence - particularly from linguistics, and DNA work, where big chunks of knowledge are hinted at in the text. Above all, of course, from the societies themselves, although finding opportunities to listen and understand is still challenging, with the history and power relations we have, it isn't fair to assume whitefella science has a right to demand engagement**.
* I actually got the ebook pdf version as a present. However, it was unreadable on anything other than a PC due to the large size format (even my 9" tablet failed me). After trying to persist despite the squintiness for ages, I tried to get the reflow epub version. That was, at the time, however nearly $80 and with no guarantee it would reflow well given the number of graphs. At some point I remembered I have access to Australia's best library collection, and borrowed the big, handsome hardcover. I find print very annoying to read now, and actively avoid it (I have arthritis in my hands all you judgmental people - holding a book open can actually hurt!) but I loved the hardcover. So much I think I might buy it - it is a very, very pretty book.
**This is also true of DNA and for that matter, linguistics, work. I am aware of the cultural complexities here, but really have no idea how well they are being negotiated.
This is an exceptional work of scholarship, a detailed, apologetically specialist, summary of what is currently understood, surmised and debated as a result of Australian archaeological exploration of the desert. As a reviewer, I am far from the intended audience - despite harbouring adolescent dreams of becoming an archaeologist, I switched course at university when I realised how hard, and tedious, I found it to look at various tiny things (pottery shards, bones, stone implements) and tell them apart. In recent years, driven by some need to better understand where humanity has come from, I have ventured back into reading paleoanthropology and related works, (but still found staring bewildered at diagrams of bones, pottery shards, and stone tools - even in diagram form, my very not-visual brain struggles to see the ever-so-important differences).
So when my partner presented this to me as a present*, I was both daunted and excited. For all its global significance and uniqueness, the story of Australia's desert societies gets scant treatment in accessible science texts. Some of this is obviously the reality of global resources - Europe is a much bigger scientific hub than Australasia. There are cultural sensitivities as well - Australia's modern desert inhabitants understand what whitefella science says about how ancestors arrived, but where that conflicts with their own understanding and worldview, do not necessarily weight it. (This is hardly suprising - whitefella anything has not exactly proved beneficial to caring for country, and the assumption that whitefellas know better because, SCIENCE, has led consistently to ecological devastation, human sickness and death, and species extinction across Australia's desert communities. We are so very, very far from creating a unified understanding of our country, and the ground to be covered here requires years of respectful listening to Aboriginal knowledge and worldview.)
But despite the various difficulties, a story that covers 60,000 years of development, change, growth and consolidation seems so important to understand. I think as an Australian, it is also imperative really, to have some sense of the Country we are living in. Without the long view, we think the last 200 years and the cultures that arrived are all there is to our world, and we are self-imposed outsiders in our homeland as a consequence.
So, the book. This is an incredibly ambitious text. To describe it as a summary of current knowledge is doing it a disservice, really, as Dr Smith provides enough detail, mostly sorted thematically, then detailed site by site, to allow a budding or established archaeologist, to challenge or support the conclusions that are reached. He doesn't merely point towards the research - he describes it in just enough detail to allow for detailed critique.
Unfortunately, this can also make it pretty daunting for the non-archaeologist reader, without the necessary expertise, these passages are both cognitively exhausting (so many new words to learn!) and repetitive. When I realised that I was never going to understand the full richness of the book, and I could move through to the parts which summarised the conclusions from this data, the book got a lot more enjoyable, and I can attest there is a great deal a patient but uneducated reader can extract.
Unlike a lot of the popular paleontology I have read, this book is not a synthesis of various disciplines. Dr Smith does discuss DNA, linguistics and anthropology at points, but the book is a firmly archaeological text. I did find this frustrating at times - as the recent leaps forward in the first two of those disciplines has greatly added to our understanding of societal development globally. It also means the book does not deeply engage with the culture or viewpoint of Aboriginal societies themselves - given the context of Australian society today, I'll admit to being a little uncomfortable about that as well. But what Smith does draw out of the story of desert archaeology is a compelling picture of societies responding to climactic conditions, changing technologies and social organisation to survive in a unique and challenging environment. As oddly as this is to say of a very dispassionate technical text, there are insights from this book which haunt me. One is the brutal realisation of how many groups of humans tried and failed to colonise regions before a group took hold - and the real picture of how common starvation is in our human history. Another is the amazing strength of human connection, as knowledge and expertise move across the continent, passed from social group to social group, as surely as key cultural artifacts like ochre do.
It is both an intriguing, and in some ways challenging, implication of the book that much of modern Australian desert societies has emerged within the last 5000 years. Given that this is also a timeframe within which the totally-isolated-from-this-group European/North African/Middle Eastern societies changed rapidly - well, that's intriguing.
I've been putting off writing this review, because I feel like I won't remember to put in all the good bits. But in the end, perhaps the most important thing to mention is how much more I wanted to know as a consequence - particularly from linguistics, and DNA work, where big chunks of knowledge are hinted at in the text. Above all, of course, from the societies themselves, although finding opportunities to listen and understand is still challenging, with the history and power relations we have, it isn't fair to assume whitefella science has a right to demand engagement**.
* I actually got the ebook pdf version as a present. However, it was unreadable on anything other than a PC due to the large size format (even my 9" tablet failed me). After trying to persist despite the squintiness for ages, I tried to get the reflow epub version. That was, at the time, however nearly $80 and with no guarantee it would reflow well given the number of graphs. At some point I remembered I have access to Australia's best library collection, and borrowed the big, handsome hardcover. I find print very annoying to read now, and actively avoid it (I have arthritis in my hands all you judgmental people - holding a book open can actually hurt!) but I loved the hardcover. So much I think I might buy it - it is a very, very pretty book.
**This is also true of DNA and for that matter, linguistics, work. I am aware of the cultural complexities here, but really have no idea how well they are being negotiated.
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