Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.

• Author: Wilkinson, Tony
• Position: Book review

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. By DAVID R. MONTGOMERY. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2007. Pp. ix + 285, illus. $24.95.

Using past civilizations as a starting point, this book sets out to demonstrate how the world is running out of cultivable soil. To fulfill this aim, Dirt builds upon the foundations laid by a long line of earlier publications that outline how the soil forms the basis for agriculture, and agriculture underpins cities and civilizations. Thus scholars such as Hyams, Lowdermilk, and Simkhovitch were able to suggest that cycles of the rise and fall of past civilizations were tied ultimately to the presence and health of a soil cover.

Following an introduction to the soil, its history, and processes of soil development (chapter two), Montgomery breezes through a range of archaeological case studies that relate directly or indirectly to the soil. For example, chapter three outlines the development of agriculture in Mesopotamia. Egypt, and China, and chapter four focuses upon Greek and Roman agriculture as well as classical treatises on agronomy and eventually Meso-American agriculture. In these chapters, as well as elsewhere in the book, readers of this journal may be disappointed by the lack of references or citations of primary data. However, it does not seem to be the intention of this book to provide a treatise on the use of soil by ancient society. Rather. Dirt is a book with a mission, and one clear message to come from chapter four is that civilization can be sustained only as long as people take care of the land by adopting appropriate methods of cultivation and manuring. If the health of the soil is neglected, then there is considerable loss of soil and crop productivity, with the result that the economy and society suffer. Chapter five, which continues this theme, is primarily devoted to problems of soil erosion in Europe and the Mediterranean.

As its title "Westward Hoe" implies, chapter six examines the association between soil erosion and the spread of European agriculture in North America. At this point the narrative hits its stride and from here on the book provides a more complex and nuanced analysis of the relationship between people and soils as well as the economic and social history of agriculture. This theme is continued in chapter seven, which examines the question of the dust bowl in the American plains and its Soviet-period equivalents in Central Asia and beyond. Although...