Overview

Bones and Bodies is a highly accessible account of the establishment of the scientific discipline of biological anthropology. Alan G Morris takes us back over the past century of anthropological discovery in South Africa and uncovers the stories of individual scientists and researchers who played a significant role in shaping perceptions of how peoples of southern Africa, both ancient and modern, came to be viewed and categorised both in the public imagination and the scientific literature. Morris reveals how much of the earlier anthropological studies were tainted with the tarred brush of race science, evaluating the works of famous anthropologists and archaeologists such as Raymond Dart, Thomas Dreyer, Matthew Drennan and Robert Broom. Morris also considers how modern anthropology tried to rid itself of the stigma of these early racist accounts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald Singer and Phillip Tobias introduced modern methods into the discipline that disputed much of what the public wished to believe about race and human evolution. Bones and Bodies shows the battle facing modern anthropology to acknowledge its racial past but also how its study of human variation remains an important field of enquiry at institutions of higher learning.

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9781776147236

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This tightly written, informative, and insightful history of physical anthropology in South Africa, is evidently the product of an author with intimate first-hand, knowledge of the discipline. Rich in detail, never ponderous (though sometimes quirky and playful in its use of anecdote) it is an excellent read. It fully deserves publication - and in the current context of decolonial and #BLM thinking, the sooner the better.--Saul Dubow, Smuts Chair of Commonwealth History, Magdalene College, Cambridge

Author Information

Alan G Morris is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Human Biology at the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on the origin of anatomically modern humans, and the Later Stone Age, Iron Age and Historic populations of Kenya, Malawi, Namibia and South Africa, as well as forensic anthropology.

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