Reviews
among kin. Funeral practices, in turn, literally petrify
kinship ties through the erection of stone monuments
in cemeteries where, like residences of the living, the
graves of the dead are clustered by familial affiliations.
The final chapter of the book addresses the
religious landscapes of the peninsula in detail, focus-
ing not only on the built environment (churches and
shrines), but also more transient expressions of faith
such as cross-patterns cut into the final field of grain
to be reaped by a household. Although divine (and
malevolent) forces may be everywhere in the country-
side, hundreds of rural churches provide focuses for
Gods power so that the people of Methana are never
far removed from it. Annual celebrations on saints days
(panigyria) unite kin on the peninsula and beyond.
In his conclusions, Forbes returns to the central
theme echoed in the title of the volume: How do the
people of Methana define themselves in relation to
their extended families, as residents of Methana, and
as Greeks? The materiality of built environments both
preserves and perpetuates all of these identities. The
household is key, since the family maintains essen-
tial bodies of knowledge that individuals require to
navigate productive, historical, kinship and religious
landscapes. In sharing this knowledge with us, Forbes
is largely successful in providing, as he notes in his con-
clusions, a healthy antidote to the conscious or uncon-
scious tendency to highlight extremes of otherness
found in the use of ethnographic comparanda. The
reader will, however, still find much otherness in the
volume, and that will challenge us to think differently
about any landscape that we study as archaeologists.
Perhaps yet another book about Methana
remains to be written (and Forbes may himself some-
day write it). Its purpose might be to explore further
the distinction between etic and emic perspectives
here emphasized so nicely. How wonderful it would
be to map in detail all physical remains in the land-
scapes of the peninsula, to employ primary sources to
construct the history of settlement in Ottoman times
and then structure further dialectical conversations
between text, tradition and material culture. In the
meantime, however, one can only be grateful to Forbes
that decades of experiencing the cultures of Methana
from the inside allow him to share with us here both
the language and literature of its landscapes.
Jack L. Davis
American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Souidias 54
Athens 106 76
Greece
& CAJ 19:1, 1234
123
Department of Classics
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0226
USA
Email: Jack.Davis@uc.edu
References
Mee, C. & H. Forbes (eds.), 1997. A Rough and Rocky Place: the
Landscape and Settlement History of the Methana Penin-
sula, Greece. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Sutton, S. (ed.), 2000. Contingent Countryside: Settlement,
Economy and Land use in the Southern Argolid Since 1700.
Palo Alto (CA): Stanford University Press.
Monuments, Empires, and Resistance: the Araucanian
Polity and Ritual Narratives, by Tom D. Dillehay,
2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
ISBN-13 978-0-521-87262-1 hardback 60 & US$123;
xix+484 pp., 75 figs.
Elizabeth DeMarrais
In this book, Dillehay provides an ambitious synthesis
of archaeological, ethnographic and documentary
research on the Araucanian polities of south-central
Chile, drawing together insights gained over thirty
years. From ad 1550 to 1850, inhabitants of this
Andean region staged a protracted resistance to the
Spaniards, instigating a process that would pro-
foundly change socio-political organization, ideology
andtheexperience of daily life. Dillehay identifies a
long-term tradition of building, modifying and using
kuel, ormounds,that anchored people in a shifting cul-
tural and political landscape. The mounds and mound
complexesprovided social cues and ritual settings,
marking historical and ancestral relationships, and ori-
enting people in territories. As successive generations of
Araucanians faced the challenges brought about by the
Spaniards efforts to pacify the region, Dillehay makes a
convincing case that the mounds, as living, interactive
phenomena,werecentral to this struggle.
Drawing on practice theory, landscape approaches
and the direct historical approach, Dillehay provides a
wide-angled view of a monumental landscape where
memory, history, and lineage relationships were inter-
woven to create a sacred geography articulated through
practice. Mostimportant wererituals conducted at
the mounds by shamans, or machi. The kuel (mounds)
were(and still are)material anchors in a rapidly
2009 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
doi:10.1017/S0959774309000122 Printed in the United Kingdom.
 Reviews
transforming world, where shamans were agents of
change,leading ritual activities that structured frame-
works for action and suggested to audiences how to
behave, how to think and how to view the world.
The book is written in two sections that follow an
Introduction. The first section, entitled Prospects and
Patterns, consists of six chapters which include histori-
cal background, an overview of theoretical approaches
and three data-rich chapters that set out the findings
of ethnohistoric, ethnographic and archaeological
investigations of kuel. The archaeological chapter
isrelatively brief, while the ethnographic data are pre-
sented in substantial detail. Readers seeking detailed
archaeological information should consult Dillehays
other recent publications; this book is written for those
seeking a theoretically-informed overview.
The second section, entitled Analysis and Inter-
pretation, contains a further three chapters that offer a
diachronic reconstruction of Araucanian mound ritual
activities, seen primarily (but by no means exclusively)
aspolity-building activities. Here, the implications
of the data for theoretical models are explored, with
comparative reference to other areas of the world.
I thought this section was terrific precisely because
the theory and the data are interwoven and because
the data are sufficiently detailed to begin to answer
questions about how people and their experiences
articulate with a broader political process.
My advice to readers would be to skim the
introductory chapters and to begin reading with care
from Chapter Three. Dillehay is at his best when he is
unpacking the historical, ethnographic and archaeo-
logical details of his case study. The theory and data
synthesis are clearly articulated, emerging convincingly
from Dillehays close engagement with recorded mate-
rial frominformants, with the documents, and with the
archaeological data. Few Andean archaeologists have
had access simultaneously to detailed ethnographic
interviews (backed by evidence for cultural and his-
torical continuity in the region), historical documents,
and careful and extensive archaeological data covering
a wide region.The authorexploits these resources
admirably to convince us of the richly varied roles of
mounds in the lives of his protagonists.
Dillehay makes sparing but effective use of the
first person to share his own changing perspectives.
We move with him from a view of a single static
mound in the landscape (an archaeological site to
be dug) to a picture that encompasses cosmunities
materialized by networks of mound complexesby
means ofwhich past leaders built alliances, memo-
rialized events, andcreated a vision of the future by
manipulatingorganizational relationshipsandman-
agingrituals.We learn that mounds may be seen as
124
generational (referencing past, present, or future),
orientational (bounding territories and organizing
lineages in space), or relational (recording particular
events and the activities of past shamans and rulers),
and that these contexts may overlap in the experience
of the Araucanians who visit the mounds near their
villages today. Power, in turn, tended in the past
notto residein a person or an office, but rathertook
shape through ritual activities that inculcated unity,
morality and shared interests.The mounds were
(and are) focal points in this long-term narrative that
highlights leaders as agents whore-establishedand
re-structured corporate linkages amongst a population
fragmented in response to external threats. Ties were
fluid, changeable andmultiply determined rather than
rigid, centralized and hierarchically structured.
The ethnographic material is fascinating; Dille-
hay and his team recorded two ritual narratives in
detail. One was conductedto prepare a mound for
excavation by his team.The transcriptions of the ritu-
als, conducted at night by machi (shamans), are one
of the books highlights. I appreciated the inclusion
of the full texts in an appendix. The visual material is
more patchy inquality; while some of the historical
photographs are helpful for visualizing the landscape
and its monuments, I found the figures and mapsless
useful. Few in number, these graphics also contain a
surprising number of typographical errors. The text
also containsawkward phrasings, split infinitives and
strange word choices that shouldhave been corrected
duringcopy-editing of the book.
Despite these minor complaints, I recommend
this book to readers interested in South American
archaeology and ethnography, as well as to those
interested in other mound-building cultures through-
out the world. It is, furthermore, an empirically rich
contribution to explorations of heterarchy, political
economies and corporate polities in prehistory.
Thebook should stimulate creative thinking about
shamanism, mound-building, and the natureof
political ties in other mound-building societies(such
as Hopewell), both in the ancient New World and
further afield.
Elizabeth DeMarrais
Department of Archaeology
University of Cambridge
Downing Street
Cambridge
CB2 3DZ
UK
Email: ed226@cam.ac.uk