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The Amud Man and His Cave Site. Edited by H. Suzuki and F. Takai. The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 1970. xvi + 439 pp., 64 pls. $46.00.

The discovery in 1925 of a skull fragment similar to the remains of the Neanderthals of Western Europe in the Zuttieh Cave in a remote wadi near the Sea of Galilee in Palestine stimulated a succession of investigations of man's biological and cultural antecedents in the Near East. This volume, edited by Suzuki and Takai, is an account of one of the most recent of those studies, based on the results of fieldwork conducted in 1961 and 1964, which took place less than 1 km from Zuttieh Cave and included another significant discovery of Neanderthal remains. This impressive volume, consisting of papers by 19 specialists in various fields, forms a significant contribution to Near Eastern prehistory and to our general knowledge of man's development. About two-thirds of the book is devoted to a detailed morphological comparison of the human remains recovered by the University of Tokyo excavations with relevant material from other areas of the Old World. The most impressive fossil evidence from the Amud Cave is a largely complete burial of a Neanderthal (apparently male, about 25 yr of age) which shares significant features with specimens from both the Shanidar Cave in Iraq and the Skhul Cave on Mt. Carmel in Palestine. This individual is remarkable for his tall stature (est. 177.8 cm) and truly immense cranial size and capacity (est. 1750 cc). Certainly the quantity of morphological data on Neanderthals assembled in this volume will serve as a most useful compendium for those interested in traditional studies of fossil man. Of greater interest to most archaeologists are the chapters relating to the cultural and geological sequence in the site and ancillary studies relating to environmental reconstruction and chronology. The most striking feature of the Amud Cave deposits is the relatively limited extent of Pleistocene sediments and the complex disturbance and disruption of these sediments during post-Pleistocene occupations. The Neanderthal burial itself was only a few centimeters removed from potential destruction by 2 Bronze Age pits which penetrated the sediments to bedrock on either side of the skull. The methodology employed in unraveling this complex succession made use of trenches excavated with contextual units of 1 m squares removed in arbitrary 10 cm levels. In addition, the natural stratigraphy was used as a guide in recording specimens when the arbitrary levels contained more than 1 major stratigraphic unit. While this technique does tend to blur artifact distributions, it was considered to be the most practical compromise in a situation in which it was necessary to occasionally employ unskilled local labor in the actual excavation. The detailed profiles published for several major trench walls suggest fairly exacting control of the natural stratigraphy. For most archaeologists the heart of an excavation report consists of the description and analysis of the cultural remains from the site, and it is here that this report is most disappointing. Watanabe's analysis of the lithic industry is confined to a discussion of materials excavated during the 1964 season in controlled blocks designed to discover chronological change, for which insufficient evidence was available on material from the 1961 season. Since the resulting analysis does not seem to indicate significant changes through time, it is difficult to understand why the sample from the first season could not have been presented in this report. The treatment of this material consists largely of a descriptive presentation of the varying quantities of retouched tools classified by a system that is only generally comparable to most current lithic taxonomy. The flake materials from the 1961 excavation have already been described by Watanabe in another publication and are not treated here, while those from the 1964 season will be the subject of an additional report in the future. Although there is some discussion in the descriptive section of similarities between particular tool types found at the Amud Cave with those from other sites, there is no comparison of frequencies of occurrence of tool types in this collection with comparable data from any of the other available Near Eastern collections. This is particularly puzzling in view of the availability for 4 yr prior to the publication of the Amud report of an excellent report on the Shovakh (Shubbabiq) Cave collections (Binford, ISRAEL EXPLORATION JOUR. 16:18-32, 96-103, 1966) from an excavation conducted in 1962 less than 1 km from the Amud Cave. The apparent dissimilarity of these 2 Mousterian industries from the same general locality is surely worthy of comment. In fact, in only 1 portion of this volume is even passing reference made to Binford's report on Shovakh, although material from that site is pertinent to several aspects of the interpretation of the Amud Cave. The suggestion by Watanabe that the Amud artifacts represent a transitional industry between Middle and Upper Paleolithic is of great interest because of the presence of a somewhat "conservative" Neanderthal in association with this industry. The relative abundance of burins and end scrapers and the absence of broad Levallois flakes as indicators of the relatively late position of this industry in the Middle Paleolithic are open to serious question in view of the published reports on the Wadi Mughara caves and Jabrud, and more recent and as yet unpublished material from Qafzeh, Bezez, various Negev sites, and the Tabun Cave. On the basis of these sites, it appears that broad Levallois flakes occur in the latest Mousterian industries of the Levant, and are