Mousterian Lithic Technology: An Ecological Perspective, by Steven L. Kuhn, Princeton University Press, 1995

Data originating in old excavations are often regarded byarchaeologists as being of poor quality or even unusable. Such assemblages lack thestratigraphic and temporal resolution of material acquired by modern excavations and arethe product of research projects designed for the investigation of issues profoundlydifferent from those concerning modem researchers. Steven Kuhn's Mousterian lithicTechnology demon­strates that this kind of data (in this case coming from40-plus-year-old excavations) can be successfully incorporated into current researchagendas, as long as one uses them for addressing research questions appropriate to theresolution of the data, in this case human behavioural changes on an evolutionary scale.Kuhn bypasses the debate over the biological and/or cultural continuity vs.discontinuity between Neander­thals and modern humans. He argues convincingly thatarchaeological research will benefit from a disentaglement with the anthropological andthe genetic discussions. He maintains that Mousterian material culture and behaviourdeserve to be studied in their own right as successful adaptations that persisted overat least 200,000 years, rather than as those replaced by modern humanbehaviour