Quaternary Science Reviews, Vol. 8, pp. 199-205, 1989. 0277-3791/89 $0.00 + .50 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved. © 1989 Maxwell Pergamon Macmillan plc

BOOK REVIEWS

Dating and Age Determination of Biological Materials, edited by Michael R. Zimmerman and J. Lawrence Angel, Croom Helm, London, 1986, ISBN 0-7099-0470-3, £45.00 hardback, 292 pp.

This volume discusses two topics: dating techniques applicable to human and nonhuman biological materials and methods for deter- mining the age of human remains. The editors have aimed the volume at archaeologists and the rationale for combining these seemingly diverse subjects is that biological remains are often the only materials in archaeological sites that can be used for dating and that human remains can be used to construct population profiles. The only common themes running through all of the papers are that they deal with biological materials and some sort of measurement of time. Otherwise this volume is essentially two different books under one cover.

The two sections of the book comprise four chapters of 175 pages devoted to dating techniques, and five chapters of 105 pages on the topic of age determination. The four chapters on dating are 'Radio- carbon dating of bones' by R.R.R. Protsch, 'Amino acid racem- isation dating' by P.M. Masters, 'Electron spin resonance' by M. Ikeya and 'Ancillary techniques' ('dendrochronology' by J.S. Dean, 'mummification styles for dating Egyptian mummies' by M.R. Zimmerman and 'tattoos and the dating of mummies' by M.R. Zimmerman and J.P.H. Hansen).

The first section of the book is clearly the one of more interest to most Quaternary scientists. The chapter on radiocarbon dating of bone is one of the few such papers published in recent years and is a welcome treatment. The chapters on amino acid racemisation (AAR) and electron spin resonance (ESR) are general and quite useful reviews. Ikeya's chapter on ESR dating is one of the few generally available discussions of this new dating technique, although largely repetitive of another review by the same author (Ikeya, 1985). This lengthy paper (67 pages) is also highly technical, considerably more so than papers usually found in anthologies on dating methods.

The chapter on so-called ancillary techniques would have been more effective with a different structure. The section on dendro- chronology should stand as a chapter on its own. It is a good review of an important dating method that is hardly "ancillary". The two sections on dating using mummies are interesting discussions of techniques accurately described by the editors as "only occasionally useful" (page viii). These sections could also form a single chapter. They stand in sharp contrast to the other chapters on much more broadly applicable dating techniques.

The second part of the book on age determination of human remains includes chapters on 'Age at death estimated from the skeleton and viscera' by J.L. Angel, J.M. Suchey, M.Y. Iscan and M.R. Zimmerman, 'The Use of hand-wrist radiographs for age assessment in deceased individuals' by E.J. Bowers, 'Estimation of age at death from histology of human bone" by D. Ubelaker, 'Determination of age at death: dentition analysis" by R.L. Costa and 'Age determination of living mammals using aspartic acid racemis- ation in structural proteins' by P.M. Masters. This portion of the volume will be of interest primarily to physical anthropologists and some archaeologists. These papers provide a reasonably comprehen- sive review of the principal methods of age determination as well as providing data on a new method (Masters" AAR technique).

This book is generally well-produced. Typographical errors are not common and reproduction of the line drawings and photographs is good. Production was apparently a slow process, however. Seven chapters have citations from 1984, but only three chapters (Masters' AAR dating, Dean, and Angel et al.) cite papers from 1985.

The volume as a whole will probably not have wide appeal in any discipline because of its unusual scope, contrary to the intent of the editors. Moreover, for students of the Quaternary, the section on dating is far from a comprehensive review of techniques that can be applied to biological materials and most will probably find the book only occasionally useful for a particular paper. The price of the volume will further reduce the appeal of the volume. It is unlikely

thatthis book will appear in the personal libraries of any but the most catholic and financially well endowed of Quaternary scientists.

REFERENCE

Ikeya, M. (1985). Electron spin resonance. In: Rutter, N.W. (ed.) Dating Methods of Pleistocene Deposits and their Problems, pp. 73-87. Geoscience Canada Reprint Series 2.

Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin -- Madison, M383 Science Hall, Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A.

V.T. Holliday

International Geomorphology 1986. Proceedings of the First Inter- national Conference on Geomorphology, edited by V. Gardiner, J. Wiley and Sons, 1987, ISBN 0--471-90869-X, £99.95, 1,292 pp.

These two volumes, which jointly contain over 2,500 pages, distil the contributions offered to the 1st International Conference on Geomorphology held at Manchester on September 15-21 in 1985. The published papers have been organised into nineteen major groups, nine of which comprise the first volume, concentrating on process studies, and the remaining ten the second volume emphasis- ing chronological and climatogenetic themes. The international authorship is impressive with all continents and at least 37 different countries being represented. It is particularly interesting to note that, in numerical terms, second only to the British contribution is that from the People's Republic of China, while in third place comes Italy.

At first glance it may seem surprising that two such lengthy volumes should have been written with so little overt reference to the Quaternary. Indeed, of the nineteen thematic groupings the titles of only two incorporate mention of the Quaternary, and even when combined these constitute less than one-fifteenth of the total work. In part this balance can be explained by the theme of the Manchester conference which was announced as being "Geomorphology, Re- sources, Environment and the Developing World' and which was interpreted by one of the senior speakers as meaning that "the human time scale should be used, and not the geological time scale" (Verstappen, page 47). A further explanation may lie in some of the editorial decisions that were made and which are alluded to again below.

It is appropriate for a review in this journal to begin by looking at the two sections explicitly devoted to Quaternary. The first of these is 'Quaternary geomorphology' which consists of eight papers prefaced by a brief introduction from Peter Worsley, who comments that cynics might be excused for thinking that a special refuge had been created for studies not readily accommodated elsewhere! Of the eight studies, no fewer than half are concerned with aspects of the Quaternary in China. Two are very brief and discuss the early Pleisto- cene evolution of the Song-Liao plain in the north-east of the country and C~4-dated macroscopic plant remains at three separate horizons within the Zhujiang delta in the south. The more substantial contributions provide regional accounts, firstly of north-eastern China and secondly of the coastlands bordering the Yellow and East China Seas. In the former area, fossil biological and physical evidence is employed to reconstruct climatic changes during the last, or Dali, glacial stage and it is suggested that during the coldest stadial, between 23 and 13 ka BP, mean annual temperatures may have been depressed some 12°C relative to the present. To Western eyes a familiar aspect of this paper is its attempt at correlation via North American work with the ocean-core record. It seems a pity, however, that the selected North American study stems from 1972 and still echoes the controversy of that period between 'long' and 'short' chronologies for the last glacial stage. The paper on the coastlands, concerned primarily with shoreline fluctuations and

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