Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology by Eric H. Cline (review)

Popular books on archaeology come in many guises. Some are edited volumes, others are textbooks, a few have a narrower focus or cater to National Geographic kinds of readers. All of them have a specific audience in mind. Many cater to undergraduates. Others aim firmly at very broad audiences, which is where Eric Cline assumes that his Three Stones belongs. The subtitle calls it “The Story of Archaeology,” which means that the book does not necessarily have to be a chronological account of great discoveries. This allows the author considerable latitude in what he writes about, of which he takes full advantage. Better, however, that he had called it “A Story of Archaeology.” There are narratives of archaeology around and this certainly is not The story with a capital T. Cline tells us that the text is based on introductory archaeology lectures he has given over the years. Fair enough, but I think that the best way to describe the book is as a kind of eclectic tour of selected archaeological discoveries, sites, and research, historical and modern.

Three Stones is divided into six parts, with four shorter essays between them that discuss such often-asked questions as “How do you know where to dig?” The prologue is, perhaps inevitably, the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the description briefly updating events since then, notably the CT-scans and DNA research, also the claims of hidden chambers revealed by remote sensing. From the golden pharaoh, we go back in Part 1 to the beginnings of archaeology, to the familiar eighteenth- and nineteenth-century excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Chapter 2 finds the Schliemanns excavating at Troy. Their discoveries are familiar; those of later researchers like Dörpfeld and Blegen are less so and are briefly discussed here, as are the researches of Manfred Korfmann, who showed with remote sensing that Schliemann and his successors had merely dug the citadel of a much larger Troy. The third chapter takes us to Egypt, which covers Champollion, Lepsius, Mariette, and other well-known figures. We are treated to a description of mummification and pyramid construction. Chapter 4 on Mesopotamia begins with Ur, Leonard Woolley, Max Mallowan, and Agatha Christie, then leaps back to Paul Botta, Austen Henry Layard, and Henry Rawlinson in the mid-nineteenth century. The story would have worked much better if the author had begun with Botta and Layard, then Rassam and Place (often neglected), then told the Ur story. The same is true of Chapter 5, where we learn about LIDAR surveys, then find ourselves back in the 1840s with Catherwood and Stephens and the Maya. We end with Edward Thompson at Chichen Itza’s cenote. The coverage of what we know today about the Maya is very quick fire.

Part 2 has but two chapters, one on “Our Earliest Ancestors,” a second on early farmers in the Near East. Cline plunges into the often-told stories of Lee Berger’s fossil hunting in South Africa, and the discoveries of Mary and Louis Leakey. Then, suddenly, we jump forward in time (but back historically) to Dorothy Garrod at Mt. Carmel. Then we learn about Upper Palaeolithic art—Altamira, Lascaux, and the Grotte de Chauvet. Early prehistory is painfully short-changed. There is no mention anywhere of the controversies over the antiquity of humankind or the discovery of Homo erectus by Eugene Dubois. One of the fundamental questions of archaeology surrounds human origins, and we were attacking that mystery long before the Leakeys. A mere twelve pages survey the origins of food production, which cover Göbekli Tepe and Jericho, also Çatalhöyük, but, surprisingly, not Abu Hureyra, an exemplary piece of research. We then receive a brief discussion of processual and postprocessual archaeology, which, while obviously important, does not belong in a popular book of this nature when there are so much more exciting stories in archaeology to captivate...