This informative and insightful history of physical anthropology in South Africa is written by
someone with intimate knowledge of the discipline. Rich in detail and anecdote, and never
ponderous, it is an excellent read. In the contemporary moment of decolonial and Black Lives
Matter thinking, it has particular resonance.
— Saul Dubow, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, Cambridge University

Bones and Bodies is a valuable insider perspective on the science, personalities and
scholarship of physical anthropology as it developed in South Africa. Alan Morris is
particularly attentive to the role that the discipline has played in changing and creating the
problematic perceptions of self and other that persist in the contemporary moment.
— Amanda Esterhuysen, Associate Professor of Archaeology and Head of the Origins Centre,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

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 signifi cant 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 scientifi c literature.

Morris reveals how much of the earlier anthropological studies were tainted with the tarred brush of race science. He evaluates the works of famous anthropologists and archaeologists such as Raymond Dart, Thomas Dreyer, Matthew Drennan and Robert Broom, and demonstrates through a wide array of sources how they described their fossil discoveries through the prism of racist interpretation.

Morris also shows 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 believed about race and human evolution.

In an age in which the authority of experts and empirical science is increasingly being questioned, this book 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.

Keywords: typology of race; Paleoanthropology; evolutionary anthropology; biological anthropology; early skeletons, fossils, human origins; physical anthropology;
philosophy of anthropology

List of Illustrations
A Note on the Use of Historical Terminology
Acknowledgements
List of Characters with Dates of Birth, Death and Affiliation
Schema of Types
Introduction
Chapter 1 Dr Louis Péringuey’s Well-Travelled Skeletons
Chapter 2 Boskop: The First South African Fossil Human Celebrity
Chapter 3 Matthew Drennan and the Scottish Influence in Cape Town
Chapter 4 The Age of Racial Typology in South Africa
Chapter 5 Raymond Dart’s Complicated Legacy
Chapter 6 Ronald Singer, Phillip Tobias and the ‘New Physical Anthropology’
Chapter 7 Physical Anthropology and the Administration of Apartheid
Chapter 8 The Politics of Racial Classification in Modern South Africa
Select Bibliography
Index

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.

This informative and insightful history of physical anthropology in South Africa is written by
someone with intimate knowledge of the discipline. Rich in detail and anecdote, and never
ponderous, it is an excellent read. In the contemporary moment of decolonial and Black Lives
Matter thinking, it has particular resonance.
— Saul Dubow, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, Cambridge University

Bones and Bodies is a valuable insider perspective on the science, personalities and
scholarship of physical anthropology as it developed in South Africa. Alan Morris is
particularly attentive to the role that the discipline has played in changing and creating the
problematic perceptions of self and other that persist in the contemporary moment.
— Amanda Esterhuysen, Associate Professor of Archaeology and Head of the Origins Centre,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg