Biomolecular Archaeology: an Introduction, by Terry Brown & Keri Brown, 2011. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell; ISBN 978-1-4051-7960-7 paperback £23.99 & US$51.93; Kindle £20.39 & US$56.01; 336 pp., 138 fig., 27 tables

Abstract

Reviews industrious wallpapering of the past with stone tools and the occasional bone. From the inside, it feels more that we are dealing with intractable evidence-and at this coal face it becomes second nature to dispense with issues that we cannot address, and to focus on those that we can. The social anthropologists' interest in other questions takes us straight to many of the matters that are hardest to tackle-and that can only be a good thing all round. Perhaps they need not so much to build a subdiscipline as just to follow Barnard's banner into the evolutionary tussle.