Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Social & Behavioral Sciences

The widespread body of early rock art and abstract geometrics identified with the American West has long eluded interpretation. Though ubiquitous and ancient, this art has stymied the efforts of generations of archaeologists, art historians, epigraphists, and iconographers who have tried to elicit meaning from that range of abstract geometrics that transcend representational or naturalistic definitions. But despite the Herculean challenges entailed in recording the ubiquity and diversity of such works, Malotki (Northern Arizona Univ.) and Dissanayake (an independent scholar) have succeeded in producing a comprehensive, studied, and beautifully illustrated treatment of the most ancient and widespread abstract geometrics rendered in petroglyphic (pecked) and pictographic (painted) media throughout the American West. Their studied approach to this esoteric art form is both compelling and innovative, and constitutes one of the most thoroughgoing treatments currently available for interrogating this long-neglected and otherwise arcane medium of human expression. Drawing on the insights of ethology, cognitive archaeology, evolutionary biology, and the psychology of art and art-making, the authors succeed in building a brilliant, substantive case for the antiquity of the early geometric enigmas that span the American West, and for the psychology behind their creation.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

An interdisciplinary field since 1974, evolutionary cognitive archaeology (ECA) interprets ancient artifacts through insights from cognitive science to understand the minds of their makers. In this fascinating volume, coeditors Overmann and Coolidge provide an introductory essay to 23 chapters by 31 authors from 10 counties (most from the US, UK, and Australia) honoring Thomas Wynn, a founder of ECA, by focusing on stone toolmaking over 3.3 million years. The persuasive contributions include founders of the field to newcomers, spanning an evolutionary analysis of human technology from nonhuman primate tool fabrication and uses to knapping in Oldowan, Acheulean, and Levalloisian lithic industries (created, respectively, by Homo habilis, H. erectus, and early H. sapiens). Pebble tools, Acheulean hand axes and flake tools, and later lithic traditions are examined using a multifactorial technique, considering topics such as handedness, social transmission and hierarchies, division of labor, cognitive prerequisites, cognitive evolution stages, language (syntax and grammar), and hunter-gatherer snares, traps, and bow hunting. Wynn's epilogue rightly concludes that ECA is an active player in the study of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience. A landmark volume essential for advanced scholars.Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students through faculty.

Max Gluckman faced controversial charges in his career: abrasiveness, sexual libertinism, communism, sedition, manslaughter, "going native." But there was no doubt concerning his abilities and productivity, and Gordon details accusations and achievements alike in compelling fashion. South-African born Gluckman conducted pathbreaking fieldwork on the Zulu, and also the Lozi of Zambia; his praxis, publications, and deft training of several generations of students (the Manchester or "conflict resolution" School) helped transform anthropology. Politically and socially progressive, he passionately engaged with the world, notably by insisting that so-called "primitive" peoples should be thoroughly integrated into modern life, and that colonial Europeans belonged in the same field of inquiry. Acknowledging Gluckman's place in the history of ideas, Gordon (Univ. of Vermont) skillfully captures his charismatic, overbearing personality in a tome that's less intellectual than social biography. There is gossip aplenty here, mostly from personal papers of Gluckman and others. But it's not mere guilty pleasure: rather, such opinions and strictures document social dimensions crucial to understanding the development of anthropology in Africa and beyond. Enigma is among the most fascinating biographies of any academic.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most academic levels and large public libraries.

Shennan (theoretical archaeology, University College London) traces the Neolithic settlement of Europe using dietary isotope studies, whole genome DNA analyses, radiocarbon proxy measures of population, and settlement pattern studies. Detailing and evaluating conflicting interpretations of the data, he shows that following the origin of farming and animal husbandry in southwest Asia, small groups of people on the margins of the elaborate social and religious cultures of the core migrated into eastern Europe, western Europe, and eventually the British Isles, leapfrogging from region to region following the soils that supported the lifestyles they had developed. Arriving in a new area, groups experienced population booms--probably due to the exploitation of rich, previously unfarmed soils--and then busts as soil fertility declined. This pattern is diametrically opposed to those favored by many scholars (including Keith Ray and Julian Thomas in Neolithic Britain, CH, Dec'18, 56-1616), which focuses on the transformation of Indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers into farmers. Shennan points out that in all the studies he has reviewed from across Europe, there is little evidence of hunter-gatherers transforming into farmers. Shennan's study will supplant earlier summaries of the European Neolithic because of its sophisticated analyses and theory.Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Hodder (Stanford Univ.) offers an excellent discussion of a key process in human evolution: the interplay between humans and the "stuff" that allows the former to meet environmental challenges. Hodder argues that human dependence on things--tools, for example--leads to things' dependence on other things and on humans, which produces greater human dependence on things. It really can't be any other way: humans use things to solve problems in their environments (to get things done), but along the way, they meet all kinds of unanticipated consequences--contradictions, conflicts, and contingencies. Although Hodder doesn't use the term, these instances of mutualism are "coevolutionary relationships." Coevolution, which has long been recognized in biological systems, is now seen as a powerful process in effecting social change as well. Hodder's book adds substantially to the case for the importance of coevolutionary relationships in human evolution. In summary, this book will be a valuable addition to college courses in fields such as anthropology and history, and the book's ease of presentation make it accessible and engaging to general readers.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.