Disease in Ancient Man ed. by Gerald D. Hart (review)

342 BOOK REVI EWS/ COMPTES RENDUS basic topographical features but lacks a scale, Narrow, and any indication of the political boundaries of the Provincia Arabia. The two area maps lack any indication of topography. These complaints are minor, however, and none interferes with Bowersock's accomplishment in having shown how important a knowledge of the Provincia Arabia is for our understanding of the Roman Empire in the Near East. UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA JOHN PETER OLESON GERALD D. HART (ed.). Disease in Ancient Man. Toronto: Clarke Irwin 1983. Pp.xvii, 297. Cloth, $31.45. Some say that classical archaeologists care only for architecture, that New World archaeologists look only for early man sites, while nobody at all cares about bones. Here, however, is an absorbing book by scholars who do care about bones and the intriguing stories they can tell. It contains 22 papers drawn from an international conference on Disease in Ancient Man held in London in 1979 under the joint auspices of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Academy of Medicine, Toronto. Papers range in length from 2 to 37 pages (average 11). Inclusion of many (120) high quality tables and photographs has kept the articles agreeably short. This is a useful introduction to the literature in paleopathology providing 410 references and an additional listing of 124 books, articles and reports by Calvin Wells, to whom the volume is dedicated and who died during preparation for the conference. A great affection for him is evinced in many of the articles. The book is divided into five sections, the first of which emphasizes interdisciplinary points of view, particularly in the articles by former associates of Wells. Rosemary Cramp (Durham) reviews archaeological evidence, especially that relating to population characteristics and individual pathology. Most interesting to me was BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 343 her description of an excavation by Wells of nine layers within a single Bronze Age burial urn containing five cremated skeletons. She calls for creation within Britain of a major institute for osteological studies to overcome the isolation which enthusiasts in paleopatholgy feel. N. B. Millet (Royal Ontario Museum) describes his experience with ensuring maximum information from mummy material (often unprovenienced) in museum collections. He cautions against too hasty examination employing destructive techniques when future archaeometrical advances may obviate current sampl ing problems. He describes fascinating work on a 12th c. BC Egyptian weaver, Nakht, whose lungs were examined with a transmission electron microscope and microprobe X-ray analyser. This showed a very high level of granite dust, which was attributed, on historical grounds, to a stint of forced labour pounding granite monuments. Raoul Perrot (Universite Claude-Bernard) contributes a weak chapter on the strangely-juxtaposed topics of pseudopathology and discontinous traits of biological variation. Instances of the first, as illustrated, would not deceive a competent osteologist while the latter features are only arguably germane in most cases to paleopathology. Jessie Dobson (Honorary Archivist to the Company of Barber Surgeons) reviews sources for medical historians. She includes a disappointingly cursory and dated treatment of pathology in early fossil hominids. A similar contribution by W. E. Swinton (Toronto) points to an apparent chasm separating human paleopathology, which is reasonably well-founded in theoretical considerations such as cultural ecology and subsistence adaptation, from animal paleopathology, which still, it seems, can contribute only "first instances" of disease. This is disappointing and probably not the case. The second section deals with traumatic lesions. Keith Knowles (Norwich) bases his paper on Calvin Wells' many contributions to our knowledge of fractures, joint disease, bony growths, surgical techniques, and wounds from weapons. It serves as a rich introduction to Wells at his best. Here I will mention only two cases. A tibia from a Romano-British cemetery at Cirencester, with a nasty bone spike projecting from the shin, had bronze staining beside it 344 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS indicating that this individual wore a shinguard. was startled to learn that evidence for abrasion of ankle bones by shackles has been demonstrated in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. The important group of pathologies subsumed as wear-and-tear lesions is dealt with next by Nils-Gustaff Gejvall (Stockholm) drawing on his long experience with Swedish, particularly Medieval...