277 Reviews the expressive components of ritual and ceremony, and by drawing greater atention to the transcendental components of belief reveals the limitations of sociological deinitions of ritual that have been dominant within anthropology, and laterly archaeology, from Durkheim onwards. A clear articulation of direction is provided in the inal chapter by Mitchell. He calls for a ‘post-Structuralist Material Culture mode’, in which there is a shit from the study of meaning, structure and ideology towards practice and efect — from representational to non-representational approaches. Within this, material culture is central as a locus for much of the agency generated and maintained through ritual acts. The move is from sociological construction to performance, distributed agency and materiality. So, is this volume a ‘cult classic’? Well, probably not, but it is a highly readable, stimulating and useful series of papers that begins to chart a notable shit in interpretive direction within the archaeological study of ritual (compare this with earlier collections on the theme, such as Garwood et al. 1991). My one gripe is that the papers are oten too short for the richness/complexity of the evidence and argu- ment required. Within this ield, ‘thick description’ (a full articulation of context) has considerable value. Joshua Pollard Department of Archaeology & Anthropology University of Bristol 43 Woodland Road Bristol BS8 1UU UK Email: Joshua.Pollard@bris.ac.uk References Bradley, R., 2005. Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe. London: Routledge. Brück, J., 1999. Ritual and rationality: some problems of interpretation in European archaeology. European Journal of Archaeology 2(3), 313–44. Garwood, P., D. Jennings, R. Skeates & J. Toms (eds.), 1991. Sacred and Profane: Proceedings of a Conference on Archaeo- logy, Ritual and Religion. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Archaeology and the Media, edited by Timothy Clack & Marcus Britain, 2007. Walnut Creek (CA): Let Coast Press; ISBN 978-1-59874-233-6 hardback £40 & US$89; ISBN 978-1-59874-234-3 paperback £15.99 & US$29.95, 328 pp., 47 igs., 1 table Christopher Witmore Permit me to begin this review with a brief allegory. The Egyptian god Theuth, the cunning originator of arithmetic, geography, astronomy and writing, goes forth to present these latest of inventions to Thamous. Ater stressing the merits and utility of each, Theuth in turn listens to the bal- anced praise and critique of the wise king; but then comes the example of writing. Theuth states: Your highness, this science will increase the intel- ligence of the people of Egypt and improve their memories. For this invention is a potion for memory and intelligence. To this Thamous replies: You are most ingenious, Theuth. But you tell me the opposite of writing’s true efect. It will atrophy people’s memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. It doesn’t mater whether or not you have read Plato’s Pheadrus, in which the allegory of Theuth and Thamous was told, because its basic plot has been reiterated many times, by so many artists, archaeologists, journalists, technicians and television producers. The plot is uterly familiar. Just as writing exists outside and separate from the workings of the human mind, so too the message it conveys is separate from the medium, the vehicle that transports it. Mind and mater, ends and means, meaning and material: such is the familiar (modernist) plot into which media almost inevitably fall. In the millennia since Plato’s Phaedrus, the mixed-up fates of media and men (much less archaeologists), for beter and worse, have become ever more intertwined. Perhaps it is a sign of our times that mention of the word ‘media’ should be conlated so oten with ‘the media’. Given the ubiquity of media, and given the capriciousness of the media, the appearance of a book entitled Archaeology and the Media is long overdue. To be sure, ‘the media’ betrays a particular emphasis from the front cover onwards. For the editors, Timothy Clack and Marcus Britain, ‘media is both the means to mass communi- cation and the material agency by which that communication is transmited, transferred, or conveyed’ (p. 9). My emphases underscore two points of concern which I shall raise, at the expense of many of the book’s merits, in the course of this review: 1) media taken as ‘the media’, and 2) the pesky dis- tinction set forth by the Platonic plot with which we began. Taking media in the singular not only does an injustice to what they are (and I am referring to more than the incorrect use of Latin grammar), it also does an injustice to the diverse array of concerns which Clack and Britain have admirably drawn together in this book. Targeting archaeology’s rela- tionships to ‘mass media’, its fourteen chapters give insights into ilm, television, newspapers, photography, literature, video games and emergent media. If the allegory of Theuth and Thamous seems a distant concern to such a book, then that distance falls away when one considers how its plot is built into the very divisions of labour between primary research and secondary dissemination, between content pro- ducers (‘fuzzies’) and technical personnel (‘techies’), between interviewees and journalists. As Clack and Britain point CAJ 19:2, 277–9 © 2009 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research doi:10.1017/S0959774309000420