This is a brilliant book. Ochsenschlager was engaged in an important archaeological project in Iraq, starting in 1968. The site was the Sumerian city of Lagash. Puzzled by some unglamorous, but intriguing artifacts, he started looking for analogies among the local people to interpret them. The local people included Bedouin tribes, the agricultural Beni Hasan, and the famous Mi’dan [Marsh Arabs] who lived in the reed-filled swamps at the conjunction of the Tigris and Euphrates. All these people (in 1968, at any rate) lived material lives thought to very closely resemble that of the ancient inhabitants of the land when it was Edinu, the Biblical Eden (hence the book’s title). Thus, the author was drawn into the peculiar discipline of “ethnoarchaeology”, in which most archaeologist still feel uncomfortable. Archaeologists are comfortable with places and objects. They aren’t anthropologists. When they try to be, even in the laudable quest to understand ancient artifacts, they can easily screw up. Ochlenschlager is unusually sensitive to the pitfalls. One of the things that archaeologists attempt to interpret is sudden changes in material culture, such as the disappearance of a type of artifact and the substitution of another:
We discovered that it was not always easy to understand reasons for modern change initiated within the community unless one was present and privy to conversations concerning it immediately before and during the process of change itself. Shortly after change occured the previous justifications given sometimes disappeared to be replaced by a new set of justifications more culturally acceptable. In a way, then, the enduring reasons for change became part of a new mythology. These studies also remind us that our knowledge of the past sometimes relies on shaky interpretations and cavalier assumptions, and shows us that it is altogether too easy to misunderstand the significance of physical evidence. Change in personal attitude, in the availability of trained craftspeople or raw materials or in circumstances of life can alter traditions overnight, make cheap things expensive and expensive things cheap, make something either more or less desirable, and modify or change the roles of men, women, or children in society. Sometimes highly visible change is of little cultural significance, while major cultural change can be accompanied by little or no change in the material record.
The book provides a good introduction to the Mi’dan [sometimes written as Ma’dan], a people who fascinated me since I read Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs. It doesn’t just focus on striking material culture features like their famous guest houses made of reeds (which closely resemble buildings represented on Sumerian cylinder seals four and half thousand years ago). Ochlenschlager examined the making, use, and transformations of every article he could find — weapons, storage containers, cookware, boats, musical instruments, children’s toys. This could only be done in a serious way over many years, with extreme sensitivity in dealing with people, earning their trust and overcoming the perils of misdirection and misinterpretation. None of this is easy, and he shows exactly how it can be done right, or badly. Almost anyone who reads historical or archaeological interpretations of material evidence should read this book.
Some of the most delightful parts concern children’s toys, and they reveal one of the marvelous subtleties of human behaviour to which most historians are oblivious:
In 1968 children in the villages over the age of 3 or 4 always made their own toys out of mud. Abandoned mud toys could be found everywhere in village courtyards, alongside the canals and marshes, and even in the fields. Unfortunately, domestic toy making disappeared rapidly. Manufactured plastic toys, available in nearby market town, replaced them. By 1970 a wide variety of cheap plastic toys was available to those of every economic level. Most children were attracted to these plastic toys because of their bright colors and their relative durability. At first children would continue to make toys that were not available in the market out of mud, but that came to an abrupt end in 1972. So popular had the new plastic toys become that most villagers could find no reason to continue using mud toys short of lack of money. Indeed cheapness came to be thought the sole criteria for continuing to make toys out of mud, and this impacted that part of the father’s honor which depends on his ability to provide adequately for his family. To make a mud toy under these conditions was to bring dishonor on the family.
Without some knowledge of the role of honor and its requirement that men provide strong financial support to their families in these villages, what reasons would archaeologists give for the sudden and complete disappearance of mud toys? Bold colors and increased durability seem the most reasonable, and in part logical, answers, as the villagers found these attributes attractive at first. But logic alone does not begin to explain why old forms disappeared completely and with such speed; the compelling power of color and durability must not be overestimated. The children themselves were a real problem. When they had only the few animal forms sold in the suk to play with, they sometimes had to be forcibly stopped from making additional toys of mud. They missed the freedom of making any toys they could imagine and playing any game they wished. The kind and number of toys available now limited their games. Attractive colors and durability may have given impetus for the change, but it was the challenge to family honor that made parents forbid their children to make mud toys.
It takes a remarkable person to make such an observation. This book is full of such things.They’ll inspire an acute reader to understand not only the culture of the marshes, and the artifacts of the ancient civilization of Lagash, but also many puzzling aspects of human life in general.
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