Book Reviews 1221

peoples of the area. Pottery, metallurgy, the alphabet, the domestication of plants and
animals, and so on, and so on-items basic to civilization-were spread among Greeks,
Hebrews, and others, Yet, and this may have been Gordons difficulty, how can one
argue the obvious? Instead, then, of focusing on technology and invention, he chooses
to center his book on textual materials from the eastern Mediterranean, and as he re-
views and comments on these, he indulges in a variety of judgments of comparison,
ranging from the plausible to the preposterous. Never does he develop a reasoned case
for diffusion or independent invention, stating the arguments for each alternative, but
instead renders his judgment that diffusion occurred in a fashion that can only be re-
garded as ingenuous. For example (pp. 87-88), what should or can be inferred from the
fact that both the Odyssey (episode with Circe) and the myth of Nergal and Ereshkigal
(text found a t Amarna) contain incidents where the hero overpowers a goddess who
responds by offering her love! If this is acceptable as demonstrating diffusion, Edward
B. Tylor might never have lived.
Yet the issue between Kaufmann and Gordon is of a theoretical importance and a
generality transcending the ancient world. What do \ r e mean when we speak of a cul-
ture, and how is a culture related to a culture area and the culture of mankind?
In modern contest, what do we designate when we speak 01 Sioux culture or Basque
culture, when so many of the traits that seem to be distinctive of each prove rather to
be borrowings, some ancient, but some recently acquired? Is it the ethos (spirit or per-
sonality) of the people that is crucial for this ethnic delineation, or is it the self-conscious
attachment to a common, ideologically flavored, ethnic history?
In the specific case of ancient Judaism and on the specific grounds which Gordon has
selected-legal, literary, and mythological themes-it must be said that he is basically
wrong and Kaufmann right. Despite all the alien influences on the Hebrews, their mono-
theistic religion with its distinctive world view and ethos was unique. If it was related to
the polytheistic cults of its environment, it was as a strange mutant, not as an organic
outgrowth. (This, incidentally, is why simply analogies cannot be drawn between the
Hebraic Job and the sufferingindividuals of other cultures; suffering has different sym-
bolic meanings depending upon the world view of the particular culture-magical,
polytheistic, or monotheistic.)

Prehistory and Protohistory in India arid Pakistutz. H. D.SANKALIA. Foreword by R. V.

SATHE.Bombay: Bombay University Press, 1963. xv, 315 pp., 130 figures, 36
plates, 2 tables, chart, appendices, bibliography, index. Rs 39.50.
A. FAIRSERVIS,
Reviewed by WALTER JR., University of Waslzingtort
The basis of this important book was the Pandit Bhagwanlal Indraji lectures given
by the author a t the University of Bombay in December, 1960. However, Dr. Sankalia
has revised and elaborated his original text to conform with later evidence than what
was available in 1960 and to fulfill the special demands required by publication. The
result is the most comprehensive survey of the prehistory and protohistory of the
subcontinent presently available in the English language.
After an introduction describing the regional geography and an account of the his-
tory of prehistoric research in India, the author divides his chapters into broad chrono-
logical units: Lower Paleolithic (1); Middle Paleolithic (2) ; Mesolithic ( 3 ) ; Neolithic
and Chalcolithic (4). Each of the chapters is broken down into a description, region by
region, of the pertinent sites and their contents and the specific problems raised. Liter-
ally hundreds of sites are involved. Each chapter is supplied with distributional maps,
1222 American Anthropologist [66, 19641
figures of artifacts, and sectional drawings. CorreIative charts, full bibliography, and a
photographic section at the end of the book add immensely to its value.
As Sank& again and again emphasizes, though we are marvelously advanced over
our situation of 40 or even 20 years ago in our knowledge of the prehistory of India and
Pakistan, we are nonetheless a long way from completing even a considerable fraction of
the story, There remain enormous problems and great gaps in our knowledge. Sankalias
book, however, has the great advantage of posing the present problems and in effect
setting forth the course for future emphasis.
The Lower Paleolithic of the subcontinent is still best defined by the de Terra and
Paterson work in the Soan Valley carried out in the 1930s. However, the field activities
of Indian archeologists have in recent years ranged from East Punjab to West Bengal in
the north and throughout Peninsular India with the exception of Kerala and Mysore. .4
picture is beginning to emerge in which the Lower Paleolithic handaxe-makers best
represented by the Madras industry appear to have concentrated in southeast India,
but almost everywhere they are represented it is suggested that they favored the forest
edge or river banks for their campsites. This is in contrast to the pebble and flake tool
makers of the so-called Sohan group whose habitat was the Punjab foothills and, with
some probability, the upland areas of Peninsular India. The evidence, as it presently
can be interpreted, indicates that man h t arrived in India no later than the Middle
Pleistocene during a wet phase. The often close parallels of the Indian material with
that of East and South Africa has a potential of great significance to these studies, but,
as Sankalia indicates, there is much more to be studied before these speculations on such
limited evidence can be properly assessed.
The Indian Middle Paleolithic is characterized by relatively small tools made
generally from flakes. Tool types include scrapers, borers, and points. Interestingly,
though the Levalloisian technique occurs, the industry cannot be said to equate to
Middle Paleolithic industries elsewhere. It appears to be characteristically an Indian
manifestation in which old and new traditions mix. One theory would derive the indus-
try from the earlier but local handaxe-cleaver tradition. Two significant features mark
the Indian Middle Paleolithic; it is Late Pleistocene in time, and it is generally absent
in North India. Its relationships to the Late Soan are also completely uncertain. With
such evidence in hand, Sankalia, as do many others, seems uncomfortable with the use
of the term Middle Paleolithic even though its position in India warrants such usage
as he points out. Perhaps it would be better to stick to the term Nevasian instead.
This has local and precise meaning and has the advantage of avoiding the connotations
elsewhere which confuse the picture.
A t present, evidence for an Upper Paleolithic industry comparable to that of Western
Asia is lacking. However, there is a true Mesolithic designated by the appearance of
microliths. There is a considerable problem as to the date of the Indian Mesolithic.
Sankalia emphasizes the important fact that nowhere in India microliths immediately
overlie the Paleolithic and underlie the Neolithic. The three major sites of the Meso-
lithic-Birbhanpur (West Bengal), Tinnevelly in the extreme south, and Langhnaj
(Gujurat)-are geographically remote from one another but do share in common the
fact of their existence during a period of increasing dryness. Birbhanpur lacks geo-
metrics; Tinnevelly has geometrics associated with a unique industry of pressure-flaked
bifacial points found also in Ceylon; Langhnaj has three major periods, all of which
have microliths but each of which is distinctive: Period I (the earliest) revealed a settle-
ment of hunters and fishers living on the shores of inundation lakes; Period I1 revealed
pottery and what might be a digging-stick weight; Period I11 has iron and modern
 Book Reviews 1223
pottery. Sankalias estimate of the Indian Mesolithic as a whole conceives of dates
somewhere in the 10,OOO to 4,000 B.C. range.
The Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures receive considerable space in the book. Cer-
tain significant points can be obtained from the authors survey: (1) the Indus Civiliza-
tion generally maintains its uniformity wherever it is found; (2) both the mature and
late phases of that civilization reached Saurashtra and the Ganges region, but not the
earlier phase; (3) Central India was the seat of flourishing village settlements different
in form from but contemporaneous with the later phases of the Indus civilization; (4)
southeast India was inhabited significantly early enough to emphasize the non-Harap-
pan character of cultural origins there; (5) Eastern India, admirably analyzed by Dani,
is apparently Indian in its earliest Neolithic affinities but in contact with southeast
.4sia apparently over a long period; (6) a decided gap exists between the Indus civiliza-
tion levels in the Ganges region and the appearance of the Painted Gray Ware there,
thus the Aryan problem is still unresolved.
Sankalia describes the situation a t Kalimbangan near Bikaner in Rajasthan which
has produced pre-Harappan material that compares closely with that found at Kot Diji
in Sind. The Rot Dijian has strong affinities to the Amri, so we are thus in a fair way to
delineate an extensive pre-Harappan settlement in Sind and Rajasthan of great impor-
tance to the question of the origins of the Harappan civilization.
The almost completely excavated site of Lothal in Gujurat has furnished the so-
called dockyard-a large brick-lined enclosure to the east of the main part of the site.
There is an apparent opening for an inlet on the side nearest the Sabarmati River. Rao,
the discoverer and excavator of the site, would translate this into a landing place for
ships and thus place Lothal in the international trade to the Persian Gulf. I t is of inter-
est that there is possible evidence for an artificial channel and landing place between
areas Vs and Hr at Mohenjo-daro. Whether these are truly dockyards or samething
more Indian, such as tanks, awaits future work. In the meantime, Sankalias fine ac-
count sets forth the problems and more than suggests the emphasis we must make in the
uncovering of Indias remote past.

PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Classijcalion and Human Evolution. SHERWOOD L. WASHBURN (ed.). (Viking Fund
Publications in Anthropology, No. 37.) Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company,
1963. viii, 371 pp., bibliographies, index, figures, tables. $7.50.
Reviewed by WILLIAMS. LAUGHLIN, U?tiversi&yof Wiscoiisin
The 17 papers comprising this important volume are all relevant to the title-in
fact, to both portions of the title. This relevance is all the more interesting in view of the
wide span of topics, ranging from molecular evolution to fossil primates to psychological
definitions of man. A part of the explanation for the pertinence of the contributions lies
in the meetings which preceded this international symposium held a t Burg Wartenstein
in 1962, which had been encouraged by Dr. Paul Fejos.
Appropriate to his function as prime mover of the symposium, Washburn argues an
elegant case for locomotion as the basic adaptation of primates. The principal groups of
living primates are adaptive, and the structures by which these adaptive groups have
been recognized, the natural groups of pre-evolutionary zoologists, are closely related
to their behavior. Washburn provides a useful discussion of the pelvis and of the verte-
brae, showing in the latter case how the traditional method of counting vertebrae by the
presence or absence of ribs fails to comprehend the motions of the vertebrae which are