The Great Paleolithic War--David J. Meltzer

Book reviews 501 Two pathology collections, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the Army Medical Museum in Washington, DC, play surprisingly large roles in this account. I had expected more forays into natural history rather than medical institutions, but these two are fascinating, and Redman encourages us to reflect on how race was pathologized. He draws particular attention to the transfer of the anthropological material to the Smithsonian in 1897, an important hinge in disciplinary development. This is only one of the many details of museum practice to which Redman pays laudable attention: we also learn about storage, exhibition making and acquisition – including the mechanics of this most macabre of mail and the vagaries of collecting expeditions. He also includes those elusive historical actors museum visitors and researchers. This is an important study, based on thorough archival research, and for the most part it has been shucked of its doctoral-dissertation origins. It will be interesting to see how this focus on US physical anthropology would compare with other national contexts (Sir Arthur Keith in London makes a cameo here), and with different medical or historical disciplines. One may find that racial classifications and questions endured for longer than at the institutions presented in Bone Rooms. Redman necessarily focuses on humans, but comparative anatomy was a much broader enterprise across natural-science collections and there have been some exciting analyses in recent years; likewise, the significant impact of the First World War on collections on both sides of the Atlantic would complement the short section here. Overall, Bone Rooms is an engaging and lively book. I enjoyed Redman’s easy style: in one of the few ventures into the question of soft tissue, a brain is ‘a soggy ball of flesh’ (p. 99); on the veteran anthropologist’s limited success in finding living anthropometric subjects, ‘Hrdlička’s gruff approach … may have contributed to a general reticence to sitting anywhere near the curmudgeon while he was wielding calipers’ (p. 105). He brings his characters alive, complete with egos and petty jealousies. But more, he encourages us to consider the changing values of human remains in museum collections and their role as the material basis for the disciplinary history of physical anthropology. Bone Rooms will hopefully appeal not only to historians of US science and museums but also to a wider audience interested in the provenance of public collections. SAMUEL J.M.M. ALBERTI National Museums Scotland DAVID J. MELTZER, The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America’s Ice Ages Past. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 680. ISBN 978-0-226-29322-6. $55.00 (hardback). doi:10.1017/S0007087416000881 David Meltzer has written an engaging, painstakingly researched and incredibly thorough history of a major controversy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeology, namely whether human beings inhabited North America as far back as the Pleistocene. Meltzer brings a practising archaeologist’s keen eye for both personal and technical detail to the project, allowing him to provide a ‘thick description’ (p. 15) of this heated debate. The result is a blow-by-blow account of how the controversy began, unfolded and finally reached its crescendo, sometimes on a near daily basis. With a nod to Martin Rudwick’s classic, The Great Devonian Controversy (1985), Meltzer neatly divides his account into more narrative and more analytical sections. Comprising some ten chapters in all, the book begins with an introductory overview that provides a historiographical frame around the issue of controversies and what they reveal about the practice of science. The next chapter gives important background material, detailing the discovery of Pleistocene humans in Europe, while the following seven (Chapters 3–9) form the substantive heart of the book, offering a richly detailed picture of how the controversy played out. Finally, Meltzer ends . D 58 8 :D C, : 5 5 56 5 75 6D 8 D 7 D 3 3 C, 75 6D 8 D 7 D C D 5 0 6D5DK 4 C, 8 8 D D K :/ 2 5 -5 D6 DK 17 5 , , 6 7 -5 6D 8 - D 502 Book reviews with a more analytical conclusion, in which he reflects on what this story reveals about the social history of American archaeology. The Palaeolithic war can be traced back to the late 1850s, when it was discovered that human beings inhabited Europe during the Pleistocene. But what about North America? The answer appeared to present itself almost immediately, when a medical doctor named Charles Abbott found a number of stone tools near his home in Trenton, New Jersey, that resembled those recently uncovered across the Atlantic. This led to a cascade of similar discoveries, and by the 1880s the existence of Palaeolithic humans in North America was widely accepted as fact. That changed dramatically during the 1890s, however, when William Henry Holmes, an archaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution, mounted a vigorous attack against Abbott. Invoking an oft-cited parallel between individual development and species evolution, Holmes argued that the ‘rude’ features of Abbott’s stone tools were not indicative of great age. Rather than being ancient, they might simply be unfinished or damaged, offering a misleading record of the deep past. What followed was several decades of intense controversy, in which a predictable pattern played itself out again and again. Each time a new, seemingly definitive piece of evidence in favor of Pleistocene humans had been discovered, it was quickly found to be lacking in some way. One aspect of this drawn-out controversy is especially worth emphasizing: the indigenous tribes that continued to inhabit North America were widely regarded as ‘primitive’ races of mankind, akin to the ancient ancestors of modern Europeans. For that reason, facts about the morphology of stone tools or skeletal remains were not seen as sufficient evidence of their antiquity. Instead, some independent assessment of a specimen’s age was required as well. But what counted as a genuine gauge of antiquity? One way to corroborate a specimen’s age was contextual, by examining the rock formation in which it was found. However, just because a specimen was encased in rocks of a particular age did not mean that it dated from the same period. The specimen might also have been deposited at some later date, especially given that humans were known to bury their dead. Another way to corroborate a specimen’s age was by association; that is, by ascertaining the age of other objects alongside which it was found. For example, if a human skeleton was discovered in close proximity to the fossil remains of a long-extinct animal, that might suffice as a test of antiquity. But here, too, the possibility always remained that the association was spurious and misleading, or, worse, had been deliberately fabricated by its discoverer to deceive the community. Thus, despite a steady flow of material evidence, the controversy continued unabated for several more decades. Things really came to head during the 1920s, when two collectors named Harold Cook and Jesse Figgins discovered a stone projectile that, amazingly, appeared to be lodged between the ribs of an extinct species of bison near Folsom, New Mexico. Previously, one of the most ardent and outspoken Pleistocene sceptics – Aleš Hrdlička – had counselled Figgins to alert the scientific community if he ever came across a particularly auspicious discovery. So when he and Cook made their remarkable find in the summer of 1927, Figgins immediately sent out a telegram inviting several highly respected archaeologists to the dig site, including Frank Roberts from the Bureau of American Ethnology and Alfred V. Kidder from the Carnegie Institution in Washington. Being able to examine the specimen before it was fully disinterred, they had no doubt the human artefact and the fossil bison were truly associated. This effectively convinced everyone, including Hrdlička, and the bitter controversy finally came to a close. The way the controversy played itself out – especially its resolution – points to a broader lesson about the social history of science. In the final chapter of his book, Meltzer emphasizes that most of the empirical discoveries fuelling this controversy were made by amateur collectors like Abbott and Figgins. However, scientists such as Hrdlička and Holmes did not trust amateurs to advance credible interpretations of the objects they found. All that collectors could do was to offer material specimens for expert examination, leaving the task of issuing theoretical pronouncements about their . D 58 8 :D C, : 5 5 56 5 75 6D 8 D 7 D 3 3 C, 75 6D 8 D 7 D C D 5 0 6D5DK 4 C, 8 8 D D K :/ 2 5 -5 D6 DK 17 5 , , 6 7 -5 6D 8 - D Book reviews 503 true meaning to more elite naturalists. But in the context of this particular controversy, specimens were never just that. What mattered most was not just the specimen as a material object, but its relation to the surroundings, be it the geological context or palaeontological associations. Hence collectors like Figgins were not even trusted to collect specimens on their own. It was only by calling on more elite scientists such as Kidder to observe their discovery in situ, before taking it out of the ground, that the controversy could be brought to a close. The end of the Palaeolithic war thus revealed as much about the social landscape of archaeology at the time as it did about North America’s earliest human inhabitants. LUKAS RIEPPEL Brown University JEFF CRANE, The Environment in American History: Nature and the Formation of the United States. London: Routledge, 2014. Pp. 440. ISBN 978-0-415-80871-2. £100.00 (hardback). doi:10.1017/S0007087416000893 Based at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, Jeff Crane provides a new textbook on US environmental history to join works by Mark Fiege, John Opie and Carolyn Merchant, amongst others. Crane offers a lengthy (some 430 pages) text that despite the mildly misleading subtitle ‘Nature and the Formation of the United States’ offers a comprehensive overview of American environmental history that goes way beyond formation, and right up to the present day. The book is clearly targeted at the undergraduate market, and thus includes a wide range of illustrations, primary documents and seminar questions. Lamenting contemporary bookstore trends and the absence of environmental history texts on bestseller shelves, Crane argues that ‘environmental history is one of the most important areas of study today and certainly of more relevance than another book on Stonewall Jackson or about the Special Forces’ (p. xii). Crane certainly comes across as a campaigner for the discipline. He hopes for his work to help new readers understand the role of nature in the development of the nation. The thirteen chapters cover huge ground, from Indian land use, through colonial conquest, to the fur trade, the railroad and the rise of Westward expansion, to modern twentieth-century problems of atomic fallout, pesticides and oil spills. The work impresses in its breadth. A chapter on the Civil War is particularly well thought out, attending to issues of hygiene, infection and disease, and provides a useful guide for students tackling that period. Crane’s welcome attention to the role of wildlife in the USA, as well as crops, diet and food resources, also marks this book out, and is truly refreshing. Employing the ‘ideology of abundance’ (p. xiii) as a key reference point, the author capably depicts the centrality of capitalism in the American environmental endeavour. The clash between the myth of abundance and the reality of environmental limits is usefully explored throughout. In the epilogue, Crane observes how ‘the intersection of economy and nature is still a busy and dangerous place’ in twenty-first-century America, with core issues still painfully unresolved, and Crane ends by calling for a balance between ‘ecological and economic health’ (p. 429). For some readers, however, Crane’s safe conclusions and predictable coverage will come across as all too familiar, especially when compared to more distinctive takes on the topic (see, for example, Ted Steinberg’s Down to Earth (2000)). Given the huge scope and ambition of the project, there are inevitably gaps, for example the environmental disaster of Hurricane Katrina goes unmentioned, and the role of science and technology remains mostly in the background. While providing a useful introduction to the topic, some students may desire greater reference to scholarly debate and theoretical argument. Crane thus provides a conventional take (and textbook) on an unconventional topic, competently assembled and with much merit, and a sound introduction. JOHN WILLS University of Kent . D 58 8 :D C, : 5 5 56 5 75 6D 8 D 7 D 3 3 C, 75 6D 8 D 7 D C D 5 0 6D5DK 4 C, 8 8 D D K :/ 2 5 -5 D6 DK 17 5 , , 6 7 -5 6D 8 - D