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Trincheras Sites in Time, Space and Society, edited by Suzanne K. Fish, Paul R. Fish & M. Elisa

Villalpando, 2007. Tucson (AZ): University of Arizona Press; ISBN 978-0-8165-2540-9 hardback £42 & US$55.95;

xii+328 pp., 30 figs., 10 col. pls.

Stephen H. Lekson

‘Trincheras sites, or cerros de trincheras, is a colloquial, non-technical term for hills in the Basin and Range province [of the southwestern USA and northwesternmost Mexico] that have artificial terraces or other rockwork’, notes Stephen Kowalewski, in his ‘Concluding Observations’ to this collec-tion of chapters (p. 247). The volume comes from a seminar hosted by the Amerind Foundation, a seventy-year-old archaeological research centre about an hour’s drive east of Tucson, Arizona — near the epicentre of trincheras sites dis-cussed in this book. Director John Ware has initiated a very productive seminar series at Amerind, of which this volume is the first ‘Amerind Studies in Archaeology’. The volume is well produced and includes a portfolio of superb colour images of the eponymous sites (of which, more below).

‘Trincheras’ has become something of a catch-all (as we shall see), but the term is most consistently applied to dry-laid, stone-masonry terraced hill sites around the ‘International Four Corners’: the near-junction of the US states of Arizona, New Mexico, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua — and a southern counterpart to the Anasazi/Pueblo Four Corners, 630 km to the north. The Anasazi Four Corners, with sites like Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, is far more famous. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the southern, International Four Corners was more significant, historically, from the newly-discovered Early Agricultural Period (farming villages before 1000 bc) to the Southwest’s last and greatest city, Casas Grandes (a cosmo-politan capital, ad 1250–1450). The peoples of this region terraced hillsides throughout that two-millennium span, from at least 1200 bc until ad 1400, and perhaps later. Over that long history, it seems that not all terraces were equal, or equivalent in function. Some were defensive; others were domestic sub-structures; still others were agricultural.

One thing that almost all trincheras sites shared was a striking visibility. The ‘type site’ (as it were) is Cerro de Trincheras, in northern Sonora. Its 900 massive stone ter-races climb, stair-like, up the 160 m-tall flanks of a solitary prominence, looming over the plains of the Rio Magdalena. The mountain has been transformed into a monument, vis-ible for at least 40 km.

Cerro de Trincheras is the most spectacular of these sites, but most are conspicuous and visually prominent. You can’t miss ‘em and, understandably, archaeologists have been fascinated by these sites for decades. A recent spate of field work prompted the Amerind seminar of this volume, ably edited by Suzanne and Paul Fish of the Arizona State Museum and Department of Anthropology at University of Arizona, and Elisa Villalpando of the Centro Regional Sonora, Instituto

Nacional de Antropología e Historia. The editors (who are directly involved in trincheras research) provide a very use-ful introductory chapter. Robert Hard and John Roney then discuss ‘Cerros de Trincheras in Northwestern Chihuahua’ (in the Casas Grandes area), focusing on their work at the important Cerro Juanaqueña site (Early Agricultural Period, c. 1200 bc). Hard and Roney interpret the early trincheras sites as defensively-sited villages. Henry Wallace, Paul Fish and Suzanne Fish present contrasting views of Tumamoc Hill, a famous trincheras in Tucson, Arizona. Wallace sees this long-lived site as defensive; Fish and Fish emphasize its role in farming of agave (an important semi-domesticated succulent). Chistian Downum continues the debate, reviewing varying interpretations of Tumamoc and other ‘Cerros de Trincheras in Southern Arizona,’ including the later sites of Linda Vista and Cerro Prieto (sites he investigated). Downum discounts defence, and offers instead a more complicated reading of the terraced sites. Randall McGuire and Elisa Villalpando provide a summary description of their ‘Excavations at Cerro de Trincheras’ itself. They avoid any ‘simplistic functional label’ (such as defence, p. 164) and instead suggest that Cerro de Trincheras represented an architectural combination of defence, monument, ritual, agave agriculture, shell jewellery production and village. Suzanne Fish and Paul Fish address ‘Regional Heartlands and Transregional Trends’ through their surveys of the Rio Magdalena valley below Cerro de Trincheras, and of the northern Tucson Basin near the sites discussed by Downum. David Wilcox, Judith Taylor, Jospeh Vogel & Scott Wood stretch the trincheras concept a bit in their discussion of ‘Hilltop Settlement Systems in West-Central Arizona’ (that is, north of Phoenix, Arizona). Their hilltops are walled, not terraced. ‘We thus propose grouping all the sites that have been labelled cerros de trincheras as part of the larger class of “hilltop sites,” whose only defining attribute is that they are archaeological sites located on the tops or upper sides of hills, ridges or mountains’ (p. 197). I would add that dry-laid stone masonry is also required: around the International Four Corners, stone masonry is exceptional among traditions of wood-and-thatch and adobe architecture. The west-central Arizona sites are notably inter-visible; that is, each site can see and be seen by one or more other hilltop sites; a characteristic of Roney and Hard’s Chihuahua sites, and probably other trincheras sites. Wilcox and his colleagues emphatically endorse a defensive interpretation of their fort-like structures.

The volume has two concluding chapters, and a visual-arts coda. All three provide new views or perspec-tives on the problem. The two chapters approach trincheras from Mesoamerica: Ben Nelson from the Zacatecan hilltop ceremonial centres (such as his remarkable site of La Que-mada), and Stephen Kowalewski from ‘Perspectives from the Hill Towns of Oaxaca’ (most notably Monte Albán, the great mountain-top city). Nelson finds reflections of ‘Mesoamerican Monumentality in Cerros de Trincheras’ — and important dif-ferences. Kowalewski contrasts the planning and purpose of Monte Albán with the varied functions of trincheras sites. The visual coda is a brief essay by noted aerial photographer Adriel Heisey, who provides eleven impressive colour plates of trincheras sites: ‘Coming down from the sky to fly slow cir-

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cles around a trincheras site feels like a boyhood dream come to life: a windswept hill, ringed with stone walls as old as a medieval cathedral…When shown a well-made photograph of a cerro de trincheras, even the uninitiated viewer will have a eureka moment’ (p. 269). Heisey’s images are also featured in an on-line exhibit, http://www.statemuseum.arizona.edu/exhibits/heisey/index.shtml — a good place for readers of this review to see what trincheras look like.

Trincheras sites were (and are) above all visual: from the dramatic northern face of Sonora’s Cerro de Trincheras, to the line-of-sight interconnections of Arizona and Chi-huahua sites, to Heisey’s Raptores raptures, trincheras sites were clearly made to be seen. And to be seen clearly: in the open air of the International Four Corners, terraced hills and mountains were as conspicuous as a white horse cut in chalk or craggy castle or a church spire. They were not subtle. From the Early Agricultural Period Cerro Juanaqueña (1200 bc) to the much later type-site Cerro de Trincheras (ad 1300), these terraced hills — human horizontals carved into natural slopes — sent an unmistakable message that someone cut and blazed the land. The long history of the site-type, over two millennia, proves how impressive they were. Cerro de Trincheras may have differed in function, but it certainly referenced in form, the much earlier Cerro Juanaqueña.

The earliest were by no means the least: Cerro Juanaqueña remains a very impressive site today, three thousand years after it was first conceived and built. And Cerro de Trincheras, approached from the north by a long, straight, flat highway, inspires something almost like awe as it rears up over the shimmering heat-waves of the Sonoran desert. It is, in many ways, the most monumental of any Southwestern site. These were not the pyramids of Egypt, nor those of Teotihuacan; but cerros de trincheras shaped the ancient landscapes of the International Four Corners, and continue to shape the archaeological imagination.

Stephen H. LeksonDepartment of Anthropology

University of Colorado at BoulderUCB 233

Boulder, CO 80309-0233USA

Email: Lekson@colorado.edu

The Tribe of Witches: the Religion of the Dobunni and Hwicce, by Stephen J. Yeates, 2008. Oxford: Oxbow Books; ISBN

978-1-84217-319-0 paperback £30 & US$60; xii+195 pp., 57 figs.

Peter S. Wells

The Iron Age of western Europe occupies a special situation in archaeological research between the strictly prehistoric Neolithic and Bronze Ages and the historical Roman Period. Although the Iron Age communities in temperate Europe

did not have a writing system of their own and left no writ-ten history, some, such as the peoples of Gaul and southern Britain, were described by observers from the literate socie-ties of Greece and Rome, such as Julius Caesar. This situation between prehistory and history leaves open to researchers whether they want to approach Iron Age sites and subjects from perspectives of prehistoric archaeology or to draw on the texts by Caesar and other Romans and even medieval writers to address questions to the archaeological evidence from Iron Age societies. How far back can we nudge infor-mation gleaned from writers such as Caesar into decades or centuries before the time that they were observing and writing? And how can we use the evidence of archaeology to draw meaningful connections between the prehistoric Iron Age peoples and their descendants in Roman and medieval times?

This latter issue is the main subject of this attractive book by Stephen Yeates. His central question is, what connections can we make between the Iron Age people known as the Dobunni and the early medieval group called the Hwicce? Were the Hwicce direct descendants of the Dobunni? Yeates uses the word ‘tribe’ to refer to both but, given the complexities and ambiguities associated with this term, perhaps another word would have been better. The author informs us that the earliest surviving reference to the Dobunni is in the historical writings of Dio Cassius, pertaining to sometime around the time of Christ. The first mention of the Hwicce is in Bede, when he describes circumstances around ad 603. The Hwicce are situated by various sources in the Severn valley region of England, the same area in which the Iron Age Dobunni are believed to have lived. Yeates brings into this discussion a variety of evidence, including material from archaeology, epigraphy, onomastics, imagery, folk tradition, religion, landscape studies and history of the Roman and early medieval peri-ods. His principal foci are religion and landscape, and it is through intensive investigation of these two topics that he addresses the question of continuity from the earlier group to the later. As he explains, the beliefs and practices of the pre-Christian religions of Britain are difficult to ascertain but, in pulling together diverse kinds of evidence, the author attempts to draw connections between religious ideas in the late prehistoric Iron Age, the Roman Period and the early Middle Ages.

The geographical focus is the area around the middle reaches of the Severn and the headwaters of the Thames, from Wyre and Arden in the north to the Somerset Levels in the south, the Forest of Dean in the West to the Cotswolds in the east. Unfortunately the maps are not very helpful to anyone not intimately familiar with the landscape. There are a number of detailed local maps throughout the text showing locations of sites mentioned, but they generally bear no topographical features except rivers. A detailed full-page topographical map of the entire study-area would have been useful.

A great deal of information is provided in the text, which is generally very engaging to read. Much discussion revolves around place-names, their dates and meanings. The author discusses changing interpretations of names

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