ARCHEOLOGY 457

and political factionalism. This long-awaited volume, while challenging in its conclusions, provides a model of provocative and innova- tive multidisciplinary research that will cer- tainly have great impact on Maya studies and landscape archeology.

Archaeology after Structuralism: Post- Structuralism and the Practice of Archae- ology. Ian Bupty and Tim Yutes, eds. New York: Routledge, 1990. 326 pp. 374.00 (cloth).

RICHARD A. WATSON Wushington University

As Shanks says, “The book is top heavy with theory” (p. 295) and “The book fails to deliver what it promises” (p. 296). What it does provide is dense exposition of and com- mentary on, among others: Althusser, Barthes, Baudrillard, Cixous, Collingwood, Deleuze, Saussure, Derrida, Freud, Foucault, Guattari, Hegel, Irigary, Kristeva, Lacan, and Nietzsche. These discussions are pre- sented mostly at a level far removed from practicing archeology, so that their applica- tions are notjust speculative, they are also eso- terically obscure. The only archeology in this book of meta-archeology is in Yates’s Lacan- ian interpretation of the Bohuslan rock carv- ings. The combination of commonsense obser- vations with hermeneutic spinnings is ob- viously endless in the consideration of such material. But most artifacts are not pictures, so the application to most archeological inter- pretations is limited, even if one takes-as most of the writers in this book do-the entire archeological record to consist of texts. The basic problem with the analogy to Ianguag- a problem none of these writers consider-is that people intentionally mean to communi- cate with language, but not necessarily with material culture. But if one can derive uncon- scious underlying agendas from language use, as most of these writers believe, then presum- ably one can derive the same from artifact use.

Binford, Hodder, and Schiffer bear the brunt of criticism in this book. Binford is thought to be combative and authoritarian, Hodder fickle to theories (a theorizer as some men are womanizers), and Schiffer ambitious. That seems accurate although incomplete, but Tilley’s plaint that “nowhere, of course, does Schiffer explain the meaning of this ‘thing’ sci- ence” (p. 140) is, as they say, self-reflexive, be- cause these authors don’t spell it out either. They all seem to agree with Moran and Hides that “attempts to bolster social sciences and

humanities like archaeology by modelling them on the physical sciences have generally been seen to have failed” (pp. 212-213); but there are too many passages in which science is falsely characterized as a search for cer- tainty, and in which archeology is said not to be scientific because “the past is inherently problematic,” or processual archeology is said to need “the possibility of an absolute, ‘true’, interpretation of the past” and is put down be- cause of “the admission that the whole truth of the past cannot be known” (Bapty, p. 264). Moran and Hides talk about “the end of ar- chaeology” (p. 21 1) following from their sug- gestion that everyone be allowed to write a personal archeology. Tilley thinks fiction is al- lowable, and he includes some in his chapter. Burr likes magical realism. Several of the au- thors deny that deconstruction and whatnot open the door to just any interpretation what- ever-their general purpose being that of rad- ical critique of racist, sexist, colonial capitalist consumerism-but it is not possible from this text to figure out how to argue against Von Daniken’s Gods f r o m Outer Space (Putnam, 1971), not that all ofthese authors would want to.

The most readable, plausible, and profita- ble parts of the book are Walsh’s “The Post- Modern Threat to the Past” and Bapty’s “On the Genealogy of Archaeology.” The worst fault of the book is a lot of silly self-flagellation representing lack of will and confidence in the fact that the authors are professors and ex- perts. As Shanks asks, “How many of the au- thors want to do ‘archaeology’?” (p. 296). Not many. But I’m sure all of them would agree that one would have to be an incredible dupe of the capitalist system to pay 374 for this book.

Caholria and the Hinterlands: Middle Mis- sissippian Cultures of the Midwest. Thomus E. Emerson and R. Burry Lewis, eds. Urbana: University of Illinois Press (in cooperation with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency), 1991. 370 pp. 349.95 (cloth).

STEPHEN KOWALEWSKI University of Georgia

This is a well-produced, large-format vol- ume intended for the Midwestern-Southeast- ern archeologist. The data and interpretations are based on papers from two 1983 confer- ences. The book’s objectives are to describe re- gional archeological sequences for the later prehistory in the Cahokia sphere, to compare