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.

Alan G Morris critically examines the history of evolutionary anthropology in South Africa, uncovering the implicit racial biases of these physical anthropology researchers and the discipline itself.

About the Author
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.


Book Information
ISBN 9781776147236
Author Alan G. Morris
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Wits University Press
Publisher Wits University Press
Weight(grams) 500g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 15mm