"This volume, which forms volume 59 in the Brill series "History of Warfare," has its origins in a 2007 AIA/APA conference panel, which provided 6 of the 10 chapters (the editors', plus Krentz, Potter, Rosenstein, and van Wees). The other four papers (Rey, Archer, Tuplin, and Rawlings) were specially commissioned.
There is much of interest here for those committed to ancient military history. This reader felt that individual papers within the volume achieved the volume's aim "to synthesize, discuss, and unravel many of the debates outlined in the introduction" (19), but that the volume as a whole did not, since most of the papers did not address those debates. The introduction reviews previous literature, broadly conceived, including literature described elsewhere as "not academic history-writing, but the collection and study of military hardware as an object of interest in its own right" (102). Such a review is useful for students, but it would have been even more useful had it tried harder to relate the papers published here to those debates. The volume papers are collectively described as a cross-section of ongoing work, which employ different methods and materials; this diversity is presented as reflecting the vibrancy of ancient military studies (17, 19). The provision of full bibliographic details in the footnotes to each chapter, although many of the items appear repeatedly in the volume and in its consolidated bibliography, suggests that the chapters are intended to stand alone and have lives as independent documents, which again is very useful for students. There is no conclusion to the volume, which with the foregoing combines to give the impression that the book is a smorgasbord of scholarship that happens to be bound together, more like a regular issue of a journal than a book. If the papers have something in common, it is that most of them are focussed on matters that are normally "given shorter shrift in the standard works" (17).
Rey writes on ‘Weapons, Technological Determinism, and Ancient Warfare' (21-56). His argument is that more attention should be paid to a raft of factors besides arms and armour, especially to the role of people, in all their wondrous diversity and idiosyncrasy, in explanations for success or failure on the battlefield. Technological determinism has a vibrant and diverse literature that could but is not used to strengthen and deepen the arguments here, from Schumpeter's 1934 reflections on how innovations impact on business, through White's 1962 stirrup that (as over-simplified in the epitomising) ‘caused' feudal society, to Wyatt's 2007 overview and contemporary debates about the social consequences of e.g. social networking sites or ‘the digital divide'.1 Arguments are now nuanced and sophisticated, and they have shown in particular that what we need to focus on is constellations of producers, technologies and users who impact on each other, not in a simple linear fashion but in feedback loops, so that to set up people and things in opposition is a rather old-fashioned approach to the issues…"
Full review here
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Amicalement
Armand
