Jeremy Black’s innovative use of the naval map in this volume creates attractive and informative illustrations for his broad overview of naval history that will appeal to the general reader. Experts in naval history will be intrigued by the use of this overlooked type of image and, while lamenting the lack of precise archival source information here, will see opportunities to make further use of, research, and analyze such maps. John B. Hattendorf Newport, Rhode Island The Shore is a Bridge: The Maritime Cultural Landscape of Lake Ontario by Ben Ford (Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 2018, 304pp, illus, maps, tables, biblio, index, notes, isbn 978-1-62349605-0; $75hc)
Ben Ford’s The Shore is a Bridge: The Maritime Cultural Landscape of Lake Ontario is an ambitious book that makes important new contributions to our understanding of the history and archaeology of Lake Ontario, while raising the methodological bar for the study of North American coastal and marine archaeology. Well known for his scholarship in archaeology of maritime cultural landscapes, a burgeoning but loosely defined area of research, Ford consciously organized his book as “an argument for, and an example of” a maritime landscape approach to the study of the areas of interface between human activities on land and on the water. The opening sentence of the preface outlines Ford’s central idea and intellectual agenda with a clarity rarely seen in scholarly volumes: “the history of the shore is seamless, with
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humans moving easily from water to land, utilizing resources throughout, and the archaeology of the shore should likewise be seamless.” The appropriateness and meaning of the book’s title, while initially sounding a bit quixotic, is soon made clear. While the existing canon of scholarship and practice have created a division between land and maritime sites and cultures, Ford explains that “the shore thus forms a short bridge between maritime archaeology and terrestrial archaeology through the communication and transportation routes that radiate from the shoreline.” By connecting land and water through the bridge of shore and maritime landscape, Ford states that his ultimate goal is to view lakemen and lake women as part of their Lake Ontario maritime cultures, and the maritime cultures as part of their larger societies.” As Ford states, the intellectual construct of landscape “is both multifaceted and difficult to define.” This is in part because a wide range of academic disciplines embrace different variants of cultural landscape theory and because people from different cultures or living in different times may perceive the same physical place “from drastically different frames of reference.” In short, one place may have multiple cultural landscapes that may interact with and influence one another. While broadly suited for the study of coastal areas worldwide, the maritime landscape approach, Ford demonstrates, is especially appropriate on the Great Lakes, where a wide array of indigenous, European, and Euro-American cultures interacted with the marine environment and one another. Ford’s discussions of cultural landscape theory and applications of method are nuanced and will prove valuable to emerging generations of historians and archaeologists attracted to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the past. The book also offers much for nonarchaeologists interested in Great Lakes pre-history and history. In his second chapter, Ford provides an excellent cultural landscape analysis of the evolution of place names along Lake Ontario. In tying shifting physical geographies to patterns of human activity, Ford provides a master class in transforming lists of names into the SEA HISTORY 165, WINTER 2018–19