Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology. By John Hines. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Pp. viii + 216; 18 illustrations. $75.

In Voices in the Past, John Hines calls for a particular interdisciplinary practice: "By reading archaeology and literature together it is possible both to understand and to appreciate the complexity, and what is often the coherency, of a past that is made more open and more richly available to us than if approached in a more selective manner" (p. 35). Not that archaeology and literature have ever been completely divorced: premodern literature depends on material artifacts of many kinds, from gravestones to kitchens, and questions of representation occur in both disciplines. Cross-disciplinary work, as Hines readily admits, is not unknown. But, while work from disparate disciplines may be found within one book's covers, how much has archaeology "literally" affected literary studies? Hines argues that archaeological analysis brings a specific kind of materialism into literary studies to answer "a seriously misleading fallacy [that] asserts that culture and history are textual" (p. 34) while simultaneously broadening words beyond "mere words."

Louise M. Bishop
University of Oregon