HARRIET RITVO’s theme is classification, but in the vernacular tradition
rather than the classically biological. Her knowledge is prodigious, and she is
not afraid to speak out on arcane topics. She approaches classification in its
broadest aspects. Not for her are the heroes of taxonomy, from Aristotle to
George Gaylord Simpson.

Instead, with an open mind, she explores attitudes to human and animal
monstrosities, the production of hybrids, and even cannibalism, in relation to
how 19th-century naturalists attempted “to produce a systematic arrangement of
living nature”.

Ritvo’s aim is to emphasise how all classifications, both scientific and
those constructed in day-to-day life, are inextricably intertwined with social
attitudes and the politics of the time.

This was particularly so in the 18th and 19th centuries, the period of
Ritvo’s research. Certainly, Linnaeus was greatly influenced by the parochial
politics of 18th-century Sweden to such an extent that, says Ritvo, “by the
middle of the 19th century most British naturalists considered the
classificatory principles of Linnaeus quaint and artificial”. This did not,
however, preclude worldwide acceptance of his system of nomenclature.

Linnaeus invented the term Mammalia to separate off warm-blooded animals that
suckle their young from the rest of the quadrupeds, as classified since the time
of Aristotle. In part, at least, he was provoked into this separation by social
antagonism towards his earlier inclusion of humans in his class Quadrupedia.

He wrote that, “one great employment of man, at the beginning of the world,
must have been to examine created objects, and to impose on all the species,
names according to their kinds”. As Ritvo ably demonstrates in The Platypus
and The Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination, it is
not only obsessive scientists such as Linnaeus who feel compelled to classify.
Rather, it is part of human nature to create hierarchies to make systematic
arrangements of all animate and inanimate objects. This compulsion extends
beyond the mere giving of names into the defining of boundaries of one”s social
group and the exclusion of undesirables and foreigners.

To exemplify this type of classification, Ritvo cites Francis Galton who
invented the term “eugenics” because, “we greatly want a brief word to express
the science of improving stock . . . especially in the case of man”.

An even more absurd example is that of cannibalism. Only savages and perhaps
very occasionally, “others” can be cannibals. Ritvo writes that on 21 September
1867,The Lancet reported that the youth who had cooked and eaten a
small piece of human flesh taken from a corpse was an assistant in the chemical
laboratory of St Thomas’ Hospital, London, rather than one of the medical
students, “who were gentlemen by birth and education”.

Of more relevance to present-day biology, Ritvo shows, with some notable
experiments in hybridisation, how Victorian zoologists were examining the
reality of species and were preparing the way towards Ernst Mayr’s concept of
the biological species.

Ritvo has written an authoritative and compelling book filled with often
bizarre and sometimes macabre accounts of how humans divide up their world.
Every statement and quotation has full references in the end notes to the pages
and her erudition should make this an essential classic for all those interested
in the wider issues of taxonomy.

Feeding Cities: Specialized Animal Economy in the Ancient Near East
by Melinda A. Zeder, Smithsonian Institution Press, pp 280, $45

Since 1849 when Austen Henry Layard wrote Nineveh and its Remains, there
have been thousands of publications on the archaeology of southwestern Asia.
A substantial number have been massive reports on huge excavations (run
like army campaigns in the approved style of Sir Mortimer Wheeler) in the
endeavour to learn all there is to be known about the civilisations of ancient
Mesopotamia.

One of these campaigns was at Tal-e Malyan in the Kur River Basin, in
the Fars province of Iran, directed over five seasons of excavation beginning
in 1971 by William Sumner on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania. More
than 20 000 animal bones were identified from the site and analysed by Melinda
Zeder, whose report is published in this monograph from the Smithsonian.

The site of Tal-e Malyan has been identified as the ancient city of
Anshan (see Map) which, together with Susa, was the centre of the land of
Elam in the second millennium BC. Elamite, the language spoken by the people
of this small region, is unrelated to any other known language. It is famed
for being one of the three scripts on the great rock inscription (dated
to 520 BC) of King Darius on the cliff at Behistun in the Zagros mountains,
which Henry Rawlinson deciphered in 1839. The other two languages were Old
Persian and Babylonian (Akkadian).

There were three major phases of occupation at Tal-e Malyan. The earliest
period was called the Banesh, between 3400 and 2900 BC, during which time
the site covered an area of 50 hectares. It included several grand buildings
lived in by people of high status who exchanged pottery and other artefacts
in trade that stretched both east and west.

There followed a ‘dark age’ of about 500 years when occupation seems
to have ceased but it returned with the Kaftari phase, lasting from 2400
to 1800 BC, when a walled city covering 135 hectares was built on the site.
In the final phase, known as the Qaleh or Middle Elamite (1300 to 1100 BC),
all the settlements of the Kur River Basin, including Tal-e Malyan, appear
to have decreased in size and organisation.

Zeder’s analysis of the animal remains from Tal-e Malyan follows the
recognised methods in archaeozoology: deductions from counts of identified
and unidentified bones and teeth, and their weights; assessment of the ages
of the animals at slaughter; evidence of butchery; and other taphonomic
factors such as gnawing by dogs. She uses this information in support of
the archaeological and textual evidence from the region for the rise and
fall of urbanism in the Elamite state.

Urbanism is defined by Zeder as: ‘the process by which the abstract
relations among state-level governance, economy and society find concrete
expression in the arrangement of people and activities over space’. This
seems to be an unfortunate lapse in her efforts to eradicate the ‘Germanic
sentence constructions’, to which she refers in her acknowledgments.

The people of Tal-e Malyan depended on goats and sheep for their livelihood,
as people still do through much of the Middle East. In the earliest period,
the Banesh, goat remains are more common than those of sheep, but later
sheep increase in number. Zeder argues that in the beginning meat was obtained
as whole carcasses from nomadic pastoralists who slaughtered more goats
than sheep. As urbanisation progressed the supply and marketing of meat
became several stages removed from the herders, this being indicated by
bones only from the prime cuts of meat being recovered, rather than bones
from all parts of the skeleton.

During the city life of the Kaftari phase, meat from sheep increased
relative to goat meat, and 10 per cent of the animal remains were from cattle.
There were 47 bones from the wings of vultures and eagles, which Zeder interprets
as having provided feathers for arrows. The bones of ducks, geese, partridges,
cranes and doves were also recovered.

In the final Qaleh, or Iron Age, phase there is an indication from the
proportions and ages of the goat and sheep bones of a reversal to provisioning
from nomadic pastoralists. The remains of cattle are from younger animals,
indicating that the importance of draught cattle had waned. At the same
time there is a marked increase in horse remains and the first appearance
of camel bones. Archaeologists identified small numbers of bones and teeth
from domestic donkeys from all phases of the excavations.

Studies of animal remains from archaeological sites have certainly provided
supporting evidence for the development of cities and states in the ancient
civilisations of western Asia. They also hold information on important aspects
of human ecology, notably the development of nomadic pastoralism as a strategy
against the overexploitation of water, trees and grazing land in fragile
environments.

Zeder quotes textual evidence for the ratio of sheep and goats to humans
as being four times greater in the Ur III period (2100 BC) of lowland Mesopotamia
than it is today. It would not take a thousand years for this land to be
turned into semidesert by the clearing of trees for timber and the grazing
of huge herds of sheep and goats.

Without natural resources or an effective system of long-distance transport,
no city can survive, especially the powerful early empires of the ancient
Middle East.

A. M. Khazanov in his classic work on nomadism, Nomads and the Outside
World (Cambridge University Press, 1984), describes the different forms
of traditional pastoralism in the Middle East as ranging from the purely
nomadic and seminomadic to herdsman husbandry: goats predominated over sheep,
donkeys were the main transport animal, and there was some use of camels,
while horses and cattle were of small importance. There was very little
stockpiling of fodder for sedentary animal husbandry. The evidence of the
animal remains from the Qaleh phase at Tal-e Malyan indicates that the people
of Elam began this way of life 3000 years ago, after overexploitation of
the environment caused the collapse of their cities.

Juliet Clutton-Brock is the archaeozoologist at the Natural History
Museum, London.

WHY Blue Babe? Why should the frozen and muddy, half-eaten, 36 000-year-old
remains of an American, adult male, steppe bison be called Blue Babe, and
indeed why should this carcass, whose only real interest is its age, be
given any name or have a book written about it? The reasons are many, for
Dale Guthrie has been able to reconstruct the life and death of the bison
and has used the carcass as a centrepiece for unravelling, in extraordinary
detail, the climate, environment and fauna during the last interstadial
of Pleistocene Alaska 36 000 years ago. The book reads like a detective
story, yet its scientific accuracy is unlikely to be disputed. The bison
was called Blue Babe, partly because it was covered with blue crystals of
vivianite, an iron phosphate often associated with organic deposits.

The frozen carcass of the bison (Bison priscus) was found by a gold
miner in 1979; it was excavated and stored in a large freezer for a year
while Guthrie took sabbatical leave in Europe. This leave came at a crucial
time, for it enabled Guthrie to learn more about the continuity of Pleistocene
ecology across the northern hemisphere, and to obtain first-hand information
on other frozen remains of mammals. He describes frozen carcasses from the
Soviet Union, including the baby mammoth, Dima, unearthed in the Soviet
Far East in 1977, and then shown to the world in a travelling exhibition.
Guthrie reviews and illustrates, with pathos, the various possibilities
envisaged for the last days of Dima. He believes that it died of asphyxiation
after falling into deep mud, rather than that it starved to death after
losing its mother to human hunters who also wounded it in the foot, as postulated
by the Russian scientists.

Blue Babe had a more violent death, for it was possible to deduce from
characteristic scratches and puncture wounds on the face and neck that the
bison was killed by two or three lions who were then unable to devour the
body completely before it froze. On returning to the ice-hard carcass, one
of the lions left a piece of tooth in the neck of its prey. Scavengers that
later fed on the carcass, which probably lay exposed but frozen all through
one winter, included birds, established from the results of their pecking,
which left ‘feather brushes’ of tendonous fibres attached to some bones.
That the carcass was buried by silt in snowmelt water during the next early
spring can be inferred from the absence of the cases of blowfly pupae and
scavenger beetles.

Guthrie has made The Story of Blue Babe his subtitle. It is subsidiary
to his main thesis which is that, contrary to many previous views, during
the cold phases as well as in the interstadials, the seemingly barren and
windswept north was not a polar desert but supported a rich mosaic of animal
life on grassland vegetation. Guthrie proposes the term ‘Mammoth steppe’
for the vast conglomeration of grass-dominated communities that spread across
an ice-free arid zone covering northern Eurasia and Alaska throughout the
Upper Pleistocene. The dominant large mammals of these ranges were mammoth,
horse, woolly rhino, bison and reindeer. Guthrie’s term Mammoth steppe combines
both fauna and vegetation and describes a biotic zone that has no modern
analogue. He challenges the traditional view based on pollen analyis that
deciduous forests pushed south during glacial phases and that tundra occupied
the space between conifers and the ice sheet. He turns on its head the idea
of the separate Holocene biotic zones, such as steppe and tundra, suggesting
that these may be more exceptional than the complex amalgam of plants and
animals seen in the fossil record.

Guthrie’s account of the Mammoth steppe is masterly in its comprehensive
interpretations of Pleistocene ecology. The arguments would have greater
clarity, however, if the book had included a summary of the complicated
chronologies of the glacial and interglacial phases of the Upper Pleistocene
in North America and Eurasia.

The story of Blue Babe should be read by all who are responsible for
exhibitions at natural history museums because it provides a perfect example
of how a single impressive specimen can be a focus for an exhibit on the
ecology and biotope of a region during the lifetime of a single animal.
The book exemplifies the great contribution that can be made by studies
in archaeozoology to the knowledge of past environments and their climates,
without which there can be little understanding of present global changes.

See ‘Death on the steppe: the case of the frozen bison’ by Dale and
Mary Lee Guthrie in next week’s issue.

Juliet Clutton-Brock believed until recently that she had a secure post
as archaeozoologist at the Natural History Museum, London.