478 AhtERlCAN A NTHROPOLOCIST 190, 19881

scribed as overambitious. At the price, it should have been a bargain.

Prehistoric Adaptation in the American Southwest. Rosalind L . Hunter-Anderson. New Studies in Archaeology. New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1986. 158 pp. $29.95 (cloth).

STEPHEN A. LEBLANC Southwest Museum

The Southwest has long been used as an ar- cheological laboratory where new methodolo- gies are tried and new theoretical approaches are acted on. Many ofthe students involved in these efforts worked under Paul Martin in cen- tral Arizona and New Mexico. There are sites with very early cultigens and a shift from hunters and gatherers to farmers who then abandoned the area all within 1,000 years.

This sequence has given rise to a great deal of research, model building, and speculation on why it took place. T h e au thor ra ther harshly reviews these observations. She then evaluates her model by performing a series of factor analyses on the artifacts from Martin’s excavations.

I have ser ious reservat ions revolving around the author’s ignoring the work of many people, both within and without her study area. This area of the Southwest has seen considerable relevant excavations other than those of Martin, as well as many relevant settlement pattern studies, yet all these data are ignored.

Much of her model has been proposed be- fore. The perhaps unique suggestion is that the population in the entire area was seasonal during the early periods, moving out to lower areas for part of the year. Again, plenty ofdata are available on the archeological sequence in these lower areas, but they are not considered.

There has been considerable discussion about the setting and dating of these sites, which is also ignored. The author’s character- ization of the Promentory site to one who has actually been to it is fanciful-be very careful when you write a book about a site you have never seen.

Her analysis itself also has such a cavalier attitude toward previous work that the results are suspect. For example, the bone tools are lumped together as mainly awls and needles, and interpreted as relating to textile manufac- ture. Studies have demonstrated that many of the “awls” are hair ornaments, and ethno- graphic analogy would have awls used to make baskets, sandals, nets, mats, and so on.

The factor analysis only showed that bone tools tend to be used in sets, not what was claimed. A lack of basic understanding of other artifact categories such as the ground stone is also apparent.

Factors seem to have been casually inter- preted, even to season of use, yet no indepen- dent corroborative evidence was thought nec- essary. Researchers in the Southwest will likely feel insulted by the lack ofinterest in rel- evant work. This book is not about what we know or how we know it.

The Szeletian and the Transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic in Central Europe. P . Allsworth-Jones. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1986 (distr. by Oxford Uni- versity Press, New York). 444 pp. $105.00 (cloth). The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe. Clive Gamble. Cambridge World Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 492 pp. $65.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).

PHILIP G. CHASE University Museum, University of Pennsylvania

These two books, both about the Paleolithic of Europe and both resting upon a foundation of extensive scholarship, present a fascinating contrast in goals and methods. Allsworth- Jones has attacked, empirically, a single, well- defined problem limited in both time and space. Gamble has written a general review of where European Paleolithic studies are now and where he thinks they should go. In addi- tion, although both authors are Cambridge trained, their work belongs to contrasting in- tellectual perspectives that mirror an impor- tant division within the ranks of European Pa- leolithic scholars. Allsworth-Jones’s work falls well within the tradition of Central and East- ern European prehistory, with an emphasis on determining the phylogenetic relationships (in the cultural sense) among archeological as- semblages. By contrast, Gamble’s book be- longs very much to the more recent Anglo- American tradition emphasizing close scru- tiny of the assumptions underlying archeolog- ical inference in general.

Allsworth-Jones’s goal is “to examine the nature of the Szeletian and related matters and to enquire what light they throw on the process of transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic” (p. 1 ) . In practice, this becomes a test of two competing hypotheses: that the transition in Central and Eastern Europe was due to the in situ evolution of local lithic tra- ditions, ofwhich the Szeletian is a part, or that