Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (7.1992/1995)

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REVIEWS

elevations and increasing importance of cattle rais-
ing in both the cold grasslands above and hot for-
ested lands below. The author’s recommendations
call for new improved seeds, better potato storage
methods, cultivation of more vegetables and espe-
cially fruits, better crop rotation, and tree planting
to check erosion.
Though modest in its length, this study makes a
serious empirical contribution to the literature on
pre-industrial agriculture and to the ethnography
and cultural geography of the Andes. It avoids the
abstract theorizing that has characterized so many
community-based ethnographic studies. No ide-
ological agenda or ephemeral intellectual vogue of
the moment has warped the primacy of data col-
lection. Long after social scientists have exhausted
their abstract debates on peasant behavior, the
careful descriptions and rich detail in this work
will form the basis from which technological
change can be assessed and the continuities of An-
dean rural life can be understood.
In this contribution, one should not underesti-
mate the longterm value of the more than 60 il-
lustrations. Better than mere words, the halftones
clearly and aptly convey rural activities, tools,
products and landscapes. At some point in the
next century, photographic plates such as these
will be scrutinized for their content in ways that
most people now cannot imagine. Furthermore,
the maps in this work are superior to those found
in most ethnographic reports. Though skilfully
executed, they are more importantly the result of
intuitively grasping the meaning of scale. Four dif-
ferent levels of spatial thinking effectively weave
together the interplay of household, community,
valley and the larger region.
Several other elements of Dr. Schjellerup’s re-
search project that contributed to the overall suc-
cess of this publication come from reading be-
tween the lines. The rapport she was able to estab-
lish with several key informants humanized the
study that otherwise could easily have lacked this
dimension. Readers who know the Andes will ap-
preciate the importance of the author’s follow-up
stints to this valley to convey both persistence and
change. Periodic return to one’s research site rein-
forces the sense of the essential timelessness of
peasant existence, but at the same time enables one

to readily detect the permutations in the agricultu-
ral system since the last visit. This piece of re-
search also reflects a keen appreciation of the com-
plexities of the natural world, especially of useful
biota and soils. The concrete elements of daily life
are not seen as inert props for social representa-
tion, but rather as keys which help to unlock the
functioning and rationale of agropastoral systems
in space and time.
Daniel W. Gade
Univ, of Vermont, Burlington
MARIE-CLAUDE AMOURETTI ET JEAN-
PIERRE BRUN, ed.: La production du vin et de
I’huile en Mediterranee. (Oil and Wine Production
in the Mediterranean Area).
Actes du symposium international 20-22, No-
vembre 1991. Ed. de Ecole Franchise d’Athenes,
1993. 626 pp. Distribuee par DE BOCCARD, 11,
rue de Medicis, 75006 Paris.
This excellently produced and well illustrated
book comprises the papers delivered to an interna-
tional symposium on oil and wine production in
the Mediterranean lands including the north coast
of the Black Sea. There are 16 papers in French and
17 in English with short summaries and abstracts
in the respective languages as well as in Greek.
Moreover there is an eight page Lexicon of illus-
trated technical terms in Latin, Ancient and Mod-
ern Greek, French, English, Biblical Hebrew,
Mithnaic and Talmudic Hebrew, Modern He-
brew, Spanish, Catalan, and Italian with its dia-
lects.
By planning in this way the editors have trans-
formed the papers of an ordinary symposium into
a handbook on the production and treatment of
oil and wine, which may serve as a unique help for
students in universities and libraries as well as to
the readers of T&T.
The subjects are treated from their first appea-
rence in Classical literature in the Near East,
Egypt, Greece, Italy, Spain, Southern France and
the Algerian coast through the Medieval Era with
one useful paper on types of presses and forms of
production in the island of Corsica from the end
of the 18th century A.D., by Antoine Casanova.
The Periods are arranged in a Map-Index: Nol
registers the localisation of papers on the Bronze