REVIEWS

as the visual form of what we can see today or would have seen in the past. This is especially evident in his chapter on planned changes since 1945.

This is a book to be welcomed but only in a qualified way. Virtues it undoubtedly has but these must be set beside its lack of balance and other deficiencies. For the kind of market envisaged, the general public as well as students, it is reasonably well produced and is not too excessively priced. Finally, the reviewer hopes that in any future edition the errors which have crept into the select bibliography and bibliographical notes will be corrected. Perhaps at the same time a plea might be entered for the insertion into the select bibliography of works by archaeologists and historians, notably those by MacKie, Nicolaisen, T. C. Smout, G. W. S. Barrow, I. Grant and M. Gray.

University College of Wales, Aberystwyth R. A. DODCSHON

G. NICHOLAS-OBADIA, Atlas Statistique Agricole Vaudois (Lausanne: Service Cantonal Vaudois de PUrbanisme, 1974. Pp. 192 + 138 pages of plates. No price stated)

With over 140 maps and some 200 histograms this loose-leaf atlas provides a com- prehensive account of the land-use and agriculture of the Swiss Canton of Vaud which lies to the north of Lake Geneva. Although the main emphasis is on the twentieth century, the volume is also concerned with the evolution of land-use over the past 150 years. It is described as a statistical study, for which the author apologizes, the more quantitative sections of the text being printed in itahcs for the uninitiated to avoid.

Six sections deal with the characteristics of farm enterprises and of land-use, displaying information by means of a series of monochrome choropleth maps each accompanied by a histogram of the data and several pages of explanatory text; the seventh considers methods of regionalization. This section is one of the most italicized and defines regions by grouping the proportions of various farming characteristics which are represented cartographically in a series of confusing maps whose reduction has left many illegible. In this section the author claims that the “new” geography has been merged with the “old” by use of set theory to define the cores of the pays in Vaud. Although the use of sets may be considered a symbolic way of stating the obvious, the section concludes withsevenmapswhichclearlyillustratethedevelopmentofregionalcores from 1806 to 1965.

This volume may be consulted with profit for several reasons. The detailed account of agricultural conditions over some 150 years in an area with great variety of terrain is intrinsically interesting and provides a base for comparison. The sometimes novel statistical and cartographic techniques should be of interest to those concerned with the mapping of agricultural statistics and with the description of fluctuations in regional boundaries over time.

University of Cambridge MARK OVERTON

AXEL STEENSBERG and J. L. OSTERGAARD CHRISTENSEN, Store Valby: Historisk- ark@ologisk undersogelse af en nedlagt iandsby pd SjRlland (Copenhagen Det Kongelige Dansk Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-Filosofiske Skrifter 8 : 1, and Munksgaard, 1974. Three volumes. Danish kroner 345)

The contributions to archaeolgy and culture history made by Professor Axe1 Steensberg and his research associates are advanced impressively with the publication of this historical-archaeological investigation of an abandoned village in Zealand. The three- part monograph builds upon an earlier reconstruction of a pre-enclosure landscape in western Zealand and upon an infinitely painstaking study of a medieval field system and associated abandoned village site in southern Zealand. Steensberg’s demonstrated ability to conceive, organize, carry out and publish research on this scale, not once but three times. leaves one filled with admiration if at the same time somewhat frustrated over the