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The Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Britain
1372
Book reviews / Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001) 1371}1376
Marine Geology of Korean Seas (2nd edition): S.K. Chough, H.J. Lee, S.H. Yoon, Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, 2000, xiv#313pp., price. US$154.50/ NLG295, ISBN 0-444-50438-9 This book was "rst published in 1983. In this second edition, the authors have attempted to incorporate new results and interpretations obtained over the past 16 years, including recent developments in a wide range of topics relevant to marine geology. It is a useful summary, particularly for the "rst-time reader who would like to "nd out more about the marine geology of the region. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to information available on the Korean Seas (6 pages). Chapter 2 is devoted to the geological and tectonic history of the Korean Peninsula (39 pages). Chapter 3 deals with the Yellow Sea (98 pages), Chapter 4 with the South Sea and East China Sea (28 pages), Chapter 5 with the East Sea (25 pages), Chapter 6 with the Eastern Continental Margin (40 pages) and Chapter 7 with the Ulleung Basin (29 pages). On closer examination, a signi"cant part of the book is devoted to the late Quaternary sediments including modern sedimentation. The production of the book is generally of a satisfactory standard. However, a number of line drawings are di$cult to read in their present form and require redrafting in a clearer style. Examples include Figs. 3.26, 3.29, 3.35, 3.39, 3.44, 3.58, 4.4, 4.5, 4.11, 4.12, 4.13, 4.20, 5.6, 5.7, 7.5, 7.9 and 7.11. Some new information on the Korean Seas from the &Land}Sea Link in Asia Prof. Kenneth O. Emery Commemorative International Workshop Proceedings', edited by Y. Saito, K. Ikehara and H. Katayama and published in 1999, has not been included. Even though this book is an updated version, it is a welcome addition to the slowly growing amount of published information on continental margins/marginal seas. Often such information is kept con"dential either
The Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Britain J. Wymer; Wessex Archaeology (with English Heritage), Salisbury, UK, 1999, 2 volumes (Volume 1, 234pp.; Volume 2, 58 maps), C30.00, ISBN 1-874350-29-9 This impressive two-volume set is a natural, and one might imagine inevitable, progression of John Wymer's lifetime study of Palaeolithic archaeology, building from his seminal Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as represented by the Thames Valley (1968) and Palaeolithic sites of East Anglia (1985). Its genesis, however, lays with events entirely independent of Wymer's personal research programme. It became widely recognised in the 1980 s that there was a problem with the destruction of Palaeolithic archaeological evidence by quarrying and
because of territorial water disputes and/or national sensitivities to revealing information from territorial waters because of the possible occurrence of marine mineral resources. The region covered is particularly relevant to passive continental margins with submerged highland coastlines. A strength of this book is the presentation of results of speci"c published papers. Because of my interest in o!shore Quaternary stratigraphy, I was drawn particularly to the sections on late Quaternary sediments including where drill holes are available to ground-truth the seismic pro"les. The occurrence of pre-Holocene oxidized mud in Gomso Bay (section 3.11.4) without doubt indicated older Pleistocene deposits. However, the dating of such deposits cannot be resolved by radiocarbon dating alone due to the post-depositional changes a!ecting the deposits. There is no good reason why the original deposition cannot be much older than 13,840 yr BP. Similarly, I would like to question the radiocarbon dating of foraminifera tests in drill core YSDP 102 (Fig. 3.63). If the radiocarbon dates were correct, this would contradict with the results indicated for the adjacent piston core 89P2-2 (Fig. 3.62). A synthesis on this by the authors is needed. Tables 3.5 and 3.8 would also greatly bene"t from the inclusion of laboratory numbers, carbon values and explanations on why some of the radiocarbon dates are not presented in a consistent format. At a price of US$154.50, the book is unlikely to have a wide appeal. Outside of Korea, the market for the book is likely to be restricted to specialist libraries. Wyss W.-S. Yim Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, People's Republic of China PII: S0277-3791(00)00169-4
other development. Mitigation of this destruction was being hampered by (i) a general lack of knowledge within the archaeological curatorial community of the nature and distribution of Palaeolithic evidence, and (ii) lack of agreement over the signi"cance of di!erent Palaeolithic archaeological material. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. English Heritage commissioned Wessex Archaeology in 1991 to undertake the Southern Rivers Palaeolithic Project, headed by John Wymer. This involved a detailed three-year survey of Palaeolithic archaeological "ndspots in southern England, relating them to geological deposits and highlighting particularly rich or signi"cant sedimentary units or sites. The resounding success of this project in producing a useful tool for the curatorial community, one that collated and
Book reviews / Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001) 1371}1376
synthesised a range of obscure data into single regional volumes led to its expansion in 1994 to cover the rest of England. The value of these volumes is re#ected in the di$culty of getting hold of any particular one within the Department of Archaeology in Southampton and the reluctance to let go of it once one has it. While the project was always primarily driven by curatorial needs, it has been a shame that the original intention to make the end product more widely available than to local planning authorities and academic participants in the project was shelved on the grounds of cost. Therefore, it was with great anticipation that I opened up the two volumes of The Lower Palaeolithic Occupation of Britain, the synthesis for wider public consumption of this grand Palaeolithic survey. Volume 1 of the set comprises the text, and volume 2 the series of accompanying maps, which show "nd-spot locations in relation to mapped Pleistocene deposits. The text begins with an introduction to the origins of the southern and English rivers projects, followed by a general background primer for Palaeolithic archaeology. These are required reading, not only as a magisterial introduction to the subject by one of its foremost practitioners, concise and clear but not over-simpli"ed, but also because they signpost the arrangement of the rest of the text. One could quickly "nd oneself out of one's depth wading into the main body of text without close attention to these signposts. A perennial problem for any great synthetic work is what axis should provide its fundamental organisational structure. Chronology is the most usual, although Wymer's previous works (Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as represented by the Thames Valley (1968) and Palaeolithic sites of East Anglia (1985)) have shown a preference for spatial location, maybe a throw-back to his early modus operandi of visiting groups of quarries in an area on a bicycle (cf Lawson and Rogerson 1998). In this volume a third axis, type of site, is added to the equation. Hence the chapters of the main body of the text have folksy titles such as `Along the River Valleysa, `Around Lakesa and `Beside the Seaa * perfect song-titles for the famed Wymer piano roadshow. Under these cuddly headings lurks a continually dense distillation of Palaeolithic knowledge, subsidiarily organised by a not always easily penetrable combination of geographic location and chronology. Wymer has divided the period he is dealing with, which includes the conventional `Middle Palaeolithica, incidentally, despite the title, into three phases: Period 1 * before the end of the Anglian glaciation, equated with oxygen isotope (OI) stage 12. Period 2 * from the beginning of the next interglacial, equated with OI stage 11, which is interpreted as including the Swanscombe deposits but not those at Hoxne, to towards the end of OI stage 8. Period 3 * from the beginning of OI stage 7 to the arrival of anatomically modern humans, and including
1373
the Middle Palaeolithic, which is de"ned archaeologically by the presence of Levalloisian technology and bout coupeH handaxes. While not greatly controversial, these divisions embrace issues not universally agreed, such as the dating of the Anglian glaciation, the dating of the deposits at Hoxne and Swanscombe, and the reliance upon archaeological typology and technology to include certain sites as Period 3. In creating these periods Wymer has made a rod for his own back, having to divide the Lower/Middle Palaeolithic record of regions such as the Middle and Lower Thames between them, when for several sites even such imprecise dating is uncertain and remains a key objective for further research. The separation of sites by both type and period also makes it hard to get an overview of the Lower/Middle Palaeolithic of certain areas with varied types of site, whose evidence is covered in more than one chapter, by more than one map and in di!erent patches of text. It might have been easier, and more user-friendly, to have stuck with the trusted Wymerian formula of grouping sites primarily by geographic location. This quibble aside, once one has located the right body/ies of text and accompanying map/s, the quality of information is spot-on * measured, authoritative, well-illustrated and backed up by original references if more detailed research is desired. The use of boxes with more detailed information on key sites is also particularly helpful. It has to be admitted that these volumes do not make a substitute for the original regional volumes of the southern and English rivers projects. The more comprehensive recording of "nd-spots in these, together with the higher level of detail about each "nd-spot, concerning for instance the typology/technology of the "nds, their context, the circumstances of discovery, the current whereabouts of the "nds and key references, are not duplicated in the two volumes of the synthesis. Once one has got over this disappointment and put that prior expectation aside, one can only sit back and enjoy receiving Wymer's own synthesis of the primary data so lovingly documented in the original projects' volumes, interpreted from the strength of a lifetime's consideration of the subject. Wymer presents a broad perspective, covering many issues and standing by long-held beliefs such as the existence of a non-handaxe-based Clactonian culture and the primary in#uence of acquired social learning upon handaxe shape, but developing new ideas in other areas. It is not the purpose of this review to reiterate and discuss every opinion presented, but I would like to highlight a couple of issues raised by Wymer. Firstly, with regards to mental capacity, communication and language, Wymer suggests that some of the activities documented in even the earliest sites such as Boxgrove and Swanscombe, for instance hunting and the manufacture of handaxes, would have required some sort of
1374
Book reviews / Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001) 1371}1376
communication, probably verbal. Despite this foray, Wymer remains pretty much on the fence in this area of debate, although with more weight on the `people like usa side, noting that we would like to know whether to think of these ancestors as `fellow humans or deformed savagesa but concluding that while it would be dangerous to think of them as `more human than they werea we should also be wary of regarding them as `totally nonhumana. Interestingly, and underpinning his basic organisational axis of type of site, Wymer views the whole of the Lower/Middle Palaeolithic from the "rst occupation of Britain before the Anglian ca. 500,000 years ago to the arrival of modern humans ca. 35,000 BP as being a period of fundamental stasis of behavioural practice and cognitive evolution, despite the great diversity of technology and typology within this period and the large-scale and dramatic climatic #uctuations of the later Middle and early Upper Pleistocene, with their ensuing in#uence on environmental conditions and resources. Several workers would, conversely, see the advent of Levalloisian knapping strategies and the emphasis on #ake tools in Wymer's Period 3 as probably representing a re-organisation of behavioural practices, and may be also their cognitive basis, a period that of course corresponds with the evolution of Neanderthal physiology and a cranial capacity similar to our own. Secondly, and of particular relevance to the wider Quaternary community, Wymer is continually at pains to emphasise the inter-connectedness of Quaternary science and Palaeolithic archaeology, and the debt of the latter to the former. Palaeolithic archaeology is both a human and a historical discipline, but neither of these aspects can start to be addressed without the chronological and environmental framework provided by the numerous strands of Quaternary science, enabling for instance the dating of sites, reconstruction of the available resources, the prevailing climate and the depositional disturbances undergone by the archaeological material. Despite this persuasive case, and the widely acknowledged success of the southern and English rivers
Environmental change in the Paci5c Basin P.D. Nunn, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1999, xii # 357pp. C95.00 ISBN 0-471-94945-0 Nunn's book on Environmental Change in the Paci"c Basin strives to be di!erent in that `it focuses on the Paci"c basin, a region which has su!ered much from being marginalized in thematic booksa and aims `not [to] overplay2 the role of humans in environmental changea. The book succeeds admirably in the "rst, providing a timely and extensive summary of the burgeoning information on environmental change in the Paci"c
projects, there is still work to be done in persuading the archaeological curatorial community not just to bring Palaeolithic archaeology into the fold, but to bring Quaternary science in alongside it, for one does not exist without the other. What is essential is to recognise that even Pleistocene sediments lacking artefacts are an essential part of the Palaeolithic archaeological resource. Study of these contributes to building up the full Pleistocene chronological and environmental stage upon which Palaeolithic occupation took place, and identifying the periods of human absence as well as presence plays just as large a role in understanding some of big questions of the period such as the hows and whys of global colonisation. One can only hope that the publication of volumes such as this further promotes the cause of Quaternary science in relation to Palaeolithic archaeology and that the enlightened approach to the study of Quaternary sediments before destruction by development, applied in regions such as Kent, Essex and Greater London, propagates more widely within the archaeological planning community both in Britain and other areas with comparable records.
References Lawson, A.J., Rogerson, A. 1998. Bifaces, booze and the blues: anecdotes from the life and times of a Palaeolithic archaeologist. In: Ashton, N., Healy, F., Pettitt, P. (Eds.), Stone Age Archaeology: Essays in Honour of John Wymer: 1}10. Lithic Studies Society Occasional Paper No. 6. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Wymer, J.J., 1968. Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as represented by the Thames Valley. John Baker, London. Wymer, J.J., 1985. The Palaeolithic Sites of East Anglia. Geo Books, Norwich.
Francis Wenban-Smith Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK PII: S0277-3791(00)00180-3
basin; however, its approach to the role of humans is uneven and controversial. A volume devoted to Paci"c environmental change has more than regional appeal, because of the massive size, global in#uence, and unusual features of the basin. Our planet's greatest ocean has always played a major role in global climate, as with the opening of the Drake's Passage and the in#uence of the El Nin o Southern Oscillation. The `ring of "rea encircling the basin provides some of the best examples of the role of tectonics in environmental change, such as the oceanographic and climatic changes brought about by the closing of the
Book reviews / Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001) 1371}1376
Marine Geology of Korean Seas (2nd edition): S.K. Chough, H.J. Lee, S.H. Yoon, Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, 2000, xiv#313pp., price. US$154.50/ NLG295, ISBN 0-444-50438-9 This book was "rst published in 1983. In this second edition, the authors have attempted to incorporate new results and interpretations obtained over the past 16 years, including recent developments in a wide range of topics relevant to marine geology. It is a useful summary, particularly for the "rst-time reader who would like to "nd out more about the marine geology of the region. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to information available on the Korean Seas (6 pages). Chapter 2 is devoted to the geological and tectonic history of the Korean Peninsula (39 pages). Chapter 3 deals with the Yellow Sea (98 pages), Chapter 4 with the South Sea and East China Sea (28 pages), Chapter 5 with the East Sea (25 pages), Chapter 6 with the Eastern Continental Margin (40 pages) and Chapter 7 with the Ulleung Basin (29 pages). On closer examination, a signi"cant part of the book is devoted to the late Quaternary sediments including modern sedimentation. The production of the book is generally of a satisfactory standard. However, a number of line drawings are di$cult to read in their present form and require redrafting in a clearer style. Examples include Figs. 3.26, 3.29, 3.35, 3.39, 3.44, 3.58, 4.4, 4.5, 4.11, 4.12, 4.13, 4.20, 5.6, 5.7, 7.5, 7.9 and 7.11. Some new information on the Korean Seas from the &Land}Sea Link in Asia Prof. Kenneth O. Emery Commemorative International Workshop Proceedings', edited by Y. Saito, K. Ikehara and H. Katayama and published in 1999, has not been included. Even though this book is an updated version, it is a welcome addition to the slowly growing amount of published information on continental margins/marginal seas. Often such information is kept con"dential either
The Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Britain J. Wymer; Wessex Archaeology (with English Heritage), Salisbury, UK, 1999, 2 volumes (Volume 1, 234pp.; Volume 2, 58 maps), C30.00, ISBN 1-874350-29-9 This impressive two-volume set is a natural, and one might imagine inevitable, progression of John Wymer's lifetime study of Palaeolithic archaeology, building from his seminal Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as represented by the Thames Valley (1968) and Palaeolithic sites of East Anglia (1985). Its genesis, however, lays with events entirely independent of Wymer's personal research programme. It became widely recognised in the 1980 s that there was a problem with the destruction of Palaeolithic archaeological evidence by quarrying and
because of territorial water disputes and/or national sensitivities to revealing information from territorial waters because of the possible occurrence of marine mineral resources. The region covered is particularly relevant to passive continental margins with submerged highland coastlines. A strength of this book is the presentation of results of speci"c published papers. Because of my interest in o!shore Quaternary stratigraphy, I was drawn particularly to the sections on late Quaternary sediments including where drill holes are available to ground-truth the seismic pro"les. The occurrence of pre-Holocene oxidized mud in Gomso Bay (section 3.11.4) without doubt indicated older Pleistocene deposits. However, the dating of such deposits cannot be resolved by radiocarbon dating alone due to the post-depositional changes a!ecting the deposits. There is no good reason why the original deposition cannot be much older than 13,840 yr BP. Similarly, I would like to question the radiocarbon dating of foraminifera tests in drill core YSDP 102 (Fig. 3.63). If the radiocarbon dates were correct, this would contradict with the results indicated for the adjacent piston core 89P2-2 (Fig. 3.62). A synthesis on this by the authors is needed. Tables 3.5 and 3.8 would also greatly bene"t from the inclusion of laboratory numbers, carbon values and explanations on why some of the radiocarbon dates are not presented in a consistent format. At a price of US$154.50, the book is unlikely to have a wide appeal. Outside of Korea, the market for the book is likely to be restricted to specialist libraries. Wyss W.-S. Yim Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, People's Republic of China PII: S0277-3791(00)00169-4
other development. Mitigation of this destruction was being hampered by (i) a general lack of knowledge within the archaeological curatorial community of the nature and distribution of Palaeolithic evidence, and (ii) lack of agreement over the signi"cance of di!erent Palaeolithic archaeological material. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. English Heritage commissioned Wessex Archaeology in 1991 to undertake the Southern Rivers Palaeolithic Project, headed by John Wymer. This involved a detailed three-year survey of Palaeolithic archaeological "ndspots in southern England, relating them to geological deposits and highlighting particularly rich or signi"cant sedimentary units or sites. The resounding success of this project in producing a useful tool for the curatorial community, one that collated and
Book reviews / Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001) 1371}1376
synthesised a range of obscure data into single regional volumes led to its expansion in 1994 to cover the rest of England. The value of these volumes is re#ected in the di$culty of getting hold of any particular one within the Department of Archaeology in Southampton and the reluctance to let go of it once one has it. While the project was always primarily driven by curatorial needs, it has been a shame that the original intention to make the end product more widely available than to local planning authorities and academic participants in the project was shelved on the grounds of cost. Therefore, it was with great anticipation that I opened up the two volumes of The Lower Palaeolithic Occupation of Britain, the synthesis for wider public consumption of this grand Palaeolithic survey. Volume 1 of the set comprises the text, and volume 2 the series of accompanying maps, which show "nd-spot locations in relation to mapped Pleistocene deposits. The text begins with an introduction to the origins of the southern and English rivers projects, followed by a general background primer for Palaeolithic archaeology. These are required reading, not only as a magisterial introduction to the subject by one of its foremost practitioners, concise and clear but not over-simpli"ed, but also because they signpost the arrangement of the rest of the text. One could quickly "nd oneself out of one's depth wading into the main body of text without close attention to these signposts. A perennial problem for any great synthetic work is what axis should provide its fundamental organisational structure. Chronology is the most usual, although Wymer's previous works (Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as represented by the Thames Valley (1968) and Palaeolithic sites of East Anglia (1985)) have shown a preference for spatial location, maybe a throw-back to his early modus operandi of visiting groups of quarries in an area on a bicycle (cf Lawson and Rogerson 1998). In this volume a third axis, type of site, is added to the equation. Hence the chapters of the main body of the text have folksy titles such as `Along the River Valleysa, `Around Lakesa and `Beside the Seaa * perfect song-titles for the famed Wymer piano roadshow. Under these cuddly headings lurks a continually dense distillation of Palaeolithic knowledge, subsidiarily organised by a not always easily penetrable combination of geographic location and chronology. Wymer has divided the period he is dealing with, which includes the conventional `Middle Palaeolithica, incidentally, despite the title, into three phases: Period 1 * before the end of the Anglian glaciation, equated with oxygen isotope (OI) stage 12. Period 2 * from the beginning of the next interglacial, equated with OI stage 11, which is interpreted as including the Swanscombe deposits but not those at Hoxne, to towards the end of OI stage 8. Period 3 * from the beginning of OI stage 7 to the arrival of anatomically modern humans, and including
1373
the Middle Palaeolithic, which is de"ned archaeologically by the presence of Levalloisian technology and bout coupeH handaxes. While not greatly controversial, these divisions embrace issues not universally agreed, such as the dating of the Anglian glaciation, the dating of the deposits at Hoxne and Swanscombe, and the reliance upon archaeological typology and technology to include certain sites as Period 3. In creating these periods Wymer has made a rod for his own back, having to divide the Lower/Middle Palaeolithic record of regions such as the Middle and Lower Thames between them, when for several sites even such imprecise dating is uncertain and remains a key objective for further research. The separation of sites by both type and period also makes it hard to get an overview of the Lower/Middle Palaeolithic of certain areas with varied types of site, whose evidence is covered in more than one chapter, by more than one map and in di!erent patches of text. It might have been easier, and more user-friendly, to have stuck with the trusted Wymerian formula of grouping sites primarily by geographic location. This quibble aside, once one has located the right body/ies of text and accompanying map/s, the quality of information is spot-on * measured, authoritative, well-illustrated and backed up by original references if more detailed research is desired. The use of boxes with more detailed information on key sites is also particularly helpful. It has to be admitted that these volumes do not make a substitute for the original regional volumes of the southern and English rivers projects. The more comprehensive recording of "nd-spots in these, together with the higher level of detail about each "nd-spot, concerning for instance the typology/technology of the "nds, their context, the circumstances of discovery, the current whereabouts of the "nds and key references, are not duplicated in the two volumes of the synthesis. Once one has got over this disappointment and put that prior expectation aside, one can only sit back and enjoy receiving Wymer's own synthesis of the primary data so lovingly documented in the original projects' volumes, interpreted from the strength of a lifetime's consideration of the subject. Wymer presents a broad perspective, covering many issues and standing by long-held beliefs such as the existence of a non-handaxe-based Clactonian culture and the primary in#uence of acquired social learning upon handaxe shape, but developing new ideas in other areas. It is not the purpose of this review to reiterate and discuss every opinion presented, but I would like to highlight a couple of issues raised by Wymer. Firstly, with regards to mental capacity, communication and language, Wymer suggests that some of the activities documented in even the earliest sites such as Boxgrove and Swanscombe, for instance hunting and the manufacture of handaxes, would have required some sort of
1374
Book reviews / Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001) 1371}1376
communication, probably verbal. Despite this foray, Wymer remains pretty much on the fence in this area of debate, although with more weight on the `people like usa side, noting that we would like to know whether to think of these ancestors as `fellow humans or deformed savagesa but concluding that while it would be dangerous to think of them as `more human than they werea we should also be wary of regarding them as `totally nonhumana. Interestingly, and underpinning his basic organisational axis of type of site, Wymer views the whole of the Lower/Middle Palaeolithic from the "rst occupation of Britain before the Anglian ca. 500,000 years ago to the arrival of modern humans ca. 35,000 BP as being a period of fundamental stasis of behavioural practice and cognitive evolution, despite the great diversity of technology and typology within this period and the large-scale and dramatic climatic #uctuations of the later Middle and early Upper Pleistocene, with their ensuing in#uence on environmental conditions and resources. Several workers would, conversely, see the advent of Levalloisian knapping strategies and the emphasis on #ake tools in Wymer's Period 3 as probably representing a re-organisation of behavioural practices, and may be also their cognitive basis, a period that of course corresponds with the evolution of Neanderthal physiology and a cranial capacity similar to our own. Secondly, and of particular relevance to the wider Quaternary community, Wymer is continually at pains to emphasise the inter-connectedness of Quaternary science and Palaeolithic archaeology, and the debt of the latter to the former. Palaeolithic archaeology is both a human and a historical discipline, but neither of these aspects can start to be addressed without the chronological and environmental framework provided by the numerous strands of Quaternary science, enabling for instance the dating of sites, reconstruction of the available resources, the prevailing climate and the depositional disturbances undergone by the archaeological material. Despite this persuasive case, and the widely acknowledged success of the southern and English rivers
Environmental change in the Paci5c Basin P.D. Nunn, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1999, xii # 357pp. C95.00 ISBN 0-471-94945-0 Nunn's book on Environmental Change in the Paci"c Basin strives to be di!erent in that `it focuses on the Paci"c basin, a region which has su!ered much from being marginalized in thematic booksa and aims `not [to] overplay2 the role of humans in environmental changea. The book succeeds admirably in the "rst, providing a timely and extensive summary of the burgeoning information on environmental change in the Paci"c
projects, there is still work to be done in persuading the archaeological curatorial community not just to bring Palaeolithic archaeology into the fold, but to bring Quaternary science in alongside it, for one does not exist without the other. What is essential is to recognise that even Pleistocene sediments lacking artefacts are an essential part of the Palaeolithic archaeological resource. Study of these contributes to building up the full Pleistocene chronological and environmental stage upon which Palaeolithic occupation took place, and identifying the periods of human absence as well as presence plays just as large a role in understanding some of big questions of the period such as the hows and whys of global colonisation. One can only hope that the publication of volumes such as this further promotes the cause of Quaternary science in relation to Palaeolithic archaeology and that the enlightened approach to the study of Quaternary sediments before destruction by development, applied in regions such as Kent, Essex and Greater London, propagates more widely within the archaeological planning community both in Britain and other areas with comparable records.
References Lawson, A.J., Rogerson, A. 1998. Bifaces, booze and the blues: anecdotes from the life and times of a Palaeolithic archaeologist. In: Ashton, N., Healy, F., Pettitt, P. (Eds.), Stone Age Archaeology: Essays in Honour of John Wymer: 1}10. Lithic Studies Society Occasional Paper No. 6. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Wymer, J.J., 1968. Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain as represented by the Thames Valley. John Baker, London. Wymer, J.J., 1985. The Palaeolithic Sites of East Anglia. Geo Books, Norwich.
Francis Wenban-Smith Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK PII: S0277-3791(00)00180-3
basin; however, its approach to the role of humans is uneven and controversial. A volume devoted to Paci"c environmental change has more than regional appeal, because of the massive size, global in#uence, and unusual features of the basin. Our planet's greatest ocean has always played a major role in global climate, as with the opening of the Drake's Passage and the in#uence of the El Nin o Southern Oscillation. The `ring of "rea encircling the basin provides some of the best examples of the role of tectonics in environmental change, such as the oceanographic and climatic changes brought about by the closing of the