Bibliographic Essay

Discussion of whether or not the San are a good model for prehistoric forgers at the start of human evolution has been at the root of the writings of Raymond Dart, but especially in Robert Ardrey's three books, African Genesis (London: Collins, 1961), The Territorial Imperative (London: Collins, 1966) and The Social Contract (London: Collins, 1970).

Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and Their Neighbors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) and Edwin Wilmsen's revision and argument that the Kalahari San were not isolated from their neighbours in Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). The crux of the debate was how much contact with neighbouring people had impacted on the San way of life and whether or not that had invalidated them as a model for late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.

The forensic medicine literature on bone fractures and their causes is extensive, but Alison Galloway's Broken Bones: Anthropological Analysis of Blunt Force Trauma (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1999) and Erin Kimmerle and Jose Pablo Baraybar's Skeletal Trauma: Identification of Injuries Resulting from Human Rights Abuse and Armed Conflict (Boca Ratan: CRC Press, 2008) give a reasonably thorough overview of the nature of perimortem fractures and how they are interpreted in forensic evidence, as does Alan Morris's Missing and Murdered: A Personal Adventure in Forensic Anthropology (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2011). The application of these kinds of forensic analyses to archaeological cases is well described in Nancy Lovell's ‘Trauma Analysis in Paleopathology', Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 40 (1997), 139-70, and Philip Walker's ‘A Bioarchaeological Perspective on the History of Violence', Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001), 573-96, and is also discussed by Clark Larsen in Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behaviour from the Human Skeleton, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp.

Evidence for the antiquity of violence among the Mesolithic populations of Europe is examined by J. Guilaine andJ. Zammit, The Origins of War (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). This book is Euro-focused and relies to a large extent on early research that may not have been of the methodological standard that modern archaeologists demand, but Larsen's Bioarchaeology outlines how the new bioarchaeology approach has exposed a range of skeletal assessments of prehistoric violence with a bibliography of case reports from around the world. The South African evidence is described and enumerated in Alan Morris's ‘Trauma and Violence in the Later Stone Age of Southern Africa', South African Medical Journal 100.6 (2012), 568-70, and Susan Pfeiffer's ‘An Exploration of Interpersonal Violence among Holocene Foragers of Southern Africa', International Journal of Paleopathology 13 (2016), 27-38.