Urban archaeology is a comparatively new activity. Fifty years ago,
archaeology in towns was chiefly confined to the large scale excavation
of deserted ‘greenfield’ sites, especially of the Roman period. But from
the late 1960s, provision for digging in advance of redevelopment became
more and more common. By the early 1990s, urban archaeology had become
so much a part of popular consciousness that an urban dig recently formed
the backdrop for a television commercial. Rather stylish young people were
seen rescuing a statuette from the hands of philistine developers, followed
by liquid refreshment with the advertiser’s product. At least part of that
scenario was implausible, even outdated, but it captured something of the
spirit of two decades in which much has been discovered against considerable
odds.

With a recession upon us and building work temporarily slowed, now is
a good time to assess the harvest. Patrick Ottaway’s book provides a timely,
accessible and (wisely) not overambitious survey of new work in a selection
of British towns. As Ottaway states, in England alone about 150 towns have
had some sort of excavation in the past decade. The work he summarises from
Canterbury, Colchester, London, Winchester, Oxford, York, Norwich and a
score of other places testifies to archaeology’s central importance in understanding
the development of British urban society.

It has not been easy. Some of the most arresting stories are of the
near misses and lost opportunities. Ottaway writes with the authority of
first-hand experience, gained with one of Britain’s most successful urban
units – the York Archaeological Trust – and is especially good on the methods
and context of urban archaeology. One of the principal strengths of urban
archaeology he emphasises is that the long time sequences covered by urban
sites often bridge the conventional periods into which historians have chopped
the past.

What emerges is an impressive chronicle of achievements. Yet, the book
also reveals a subject that remains constrained by historical chronologies
and the preoccupations of period specialists. Except in urban topography,
he can draw upon few long-term, thematic studies. Archaeology deals with
the mundane realities of life, so its data primarily reflect a population,
of varying size, living in one place, and exploiting a similar range of
immediate environmental resources, quite independently of conventional historical
chronology.

Ottaway acknowledges this, yet for the main periods discussed – early
and late Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval until about 1350 – he is forced
back upon sources covering a diversity of localised interests. Urban society
can be studied through housing types over a long time period, for example,
but here they only appear to any extent in the medieval chapter, reflecting
the preoccupation of architectural historians with this period.

The book leaves a feeling that urban archaeology might focus more on
the subjects it is uniquely equipped to examine. Towns, especially through
environmental evidence, provide the best data imaginable for achieving long-term
studies of diet, external relations, internal social structure or interaction
between sites and their hinterlands. These break the boundary between present
and past, merge into contemporary urban geography, economics and the environmental
sciences, and bring a time depth which makes ‘presenting the past to the
public’ – the title of Ottaway’s closing chapter – a more immediate exercise.
Archaeology in British Towns provides the specialist and general reader
alike with some insight to what has been achieved in the past quarter century.
Equally, it points to what we should do in the next.

Colin Dobinson is a tutor in archaeology at the Department of Adult
Continuing Education, University of Leeds.

Anyone with curiosity will find a reason to read Origins Reconsidered:
it is a superb account of the state of knowledge concerning the evolution
of our species; and an introduction to the multiplicity of scientific disciplines
involved in such a study. And there is the pleasure of discovering the philosophy
of Richard Leakey, a man who sees the wood and not just the trees.

There can hardly be any other subject so contentious as human evolution.
Every fossil discovery, every new scientific technique that is applied,
every speculation – all unleash a cascade of disagreements with unresolved
and fiercely debated conclusions. Sometimes, as Leakey and Roger Lewin point
out, they are so vehement that the actual fossil hominid remains lie forgotten
in their museum boxes. Yet from this mixture the favoured, more likely ways
of explaining how we evolved somehow emerge. Leakey gives us his interpretation
of the facts, clearly expressed in the admirable style of his co-author.

Perhaps the most intriguing discussion is their attempt to define just
when, where, how and why we are human. The conclusion is that humanity is
a combination of factors, mainly behavioural. Some of these are manifest
in the fossil and archaeological record, others only vaguely so or beyond
any possibility of determination.

Much has changed since Leakey’s book Origins appeared in 1977. There
has been the application of genetic theory in the case of Mitochondrial
Eve, the discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of Homo erectus known as
Turkana Boy, the nearly complete skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis
nicknamed Lucy, the discovery of footprints of a bipedal hominid at Laetoli
in East Africa dating from about 3.6 million years, the raging argument
between a multiregional or ‘out of Africa’ development and dispersal of
H. sapiens sapiens, and much more. It is little wonder that Leakey, with
refreshing candour, decided he had better reconsider the whole matter.

He does not subscribe to the idea that humanity arose rapidly in the
late Pleistocene (about 50 000 years ago), with its cognitive language,
self-consciousness, art and concepts of compassion and morality, all restricted
to the physical remains of H. sapiens sapiens. Instead, he sees these developing
gradually from at least the time of H. erectus, possibly about 2 million
years ago, eventually culminating in our own species. There is no one thing
in this interpretation that signifies humanity, but a number of recognisable
signs in the physical anthropology and archaeology record to which he can
point and state ‘this way lies humanity’. We belong with ‘unusual bipedal
apes’ at one end of the scale and conscious but ‘unruly short-termed tenants’
of the world at the other. No person should dispute this without first
reading this book and considering all that it discusses.

John Wymer is an archaeologist specialising in the Palaeolithic period.