| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz. The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony. New York: W. H. Freeman. 2000. Pp. xvi, 366. $24.95.

The late James Deetz spent most of his professional life pioneering and popularizing the study of historical archaeology, material culture, and living history, seeking especially to uncover the realities behind the myths of life in Plymouth Colony. In this book, written with his wife and colleague, Patricia Scott Deetz, a cultural historian, he seeks to dispossess the general public of myths about Plymouth, to educate them on the reality of life in the colony, and to show them how that reality has been arrived at. 1

Despite the extensive bibliography on Plymouth, this work is like no other, combining the results of rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship on the colony with a style and content designed for popular consumption. In terms of interdisciplinary thrust, its closest rival is John Demos's A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (1970). But in terms of the kinds of new and unconventional disciplines employed, it is without rival. Aside from proclaiming the limitations of "historiographic" approaches to the past, it offers vigorous defenses of historical archaeology and living history. By the end of the book, first-person interpretation is revealed as "the closest thing to time travel that will ever be accomplished, as visitors encounter a very close approximation of the reality of life in Plymouth in the early seventeenth century" (p. 291). . . .

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