David Meltzer has written an engaging, painstakingly researched and incredibly thorough history of a major controversy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeology, namely whether human beings inhabited North America as far back as the Pleistocene. Meltzer brings a practising archaeologist's keen eye for both personal and technical detail to the project, allowing him to provide a ‘thick description’ (p. 15) of this heated debate. The result is a blow-by-blow account of how the controversy began, unfolded and finally reached its crescendo, sometimes on a near daily basis.

With a nod to Martin Rudwick's classic, The Great Devonian Controversy (1985), Meltzer neatly divides his account into more narrative and more analytical sections. Comprising some ten chapters in all, the book begins with an introductory overview that provides a historiographical frame around the issue of controversies and what they reveal about the practice of science. The next chapter gives important background material, detailing the discovery of Pleistocene humans in Europe, while the following seven (Chapters 3–9) form the substantive heart of the book, offering a richly detailed picture of how the controversy played out. Finally, Meltzer ends with a more analytical conclusion, in which he reflects on what this story reveals about the social history of American archaeology.

The Palaeolithic war can be traced back to the late 1850s, when it was discovered that human beings inhabited Europe during the Pleistocene. But what about North America? The answer appeared to present itself almost immediately, when a medical doctor named Charles Abbott found a number of stone tools near his home in Trenton, New Jersey, that resembled those recently uncovered across the Atlantic. This led to a cascade of similar discoveries, and by the 1880s the existence of Palaeolithic humans in North America was widely accepted as fact. That changed dramatically during the 1890s, however, when William Henry Holmes, an archaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution, mounted a vigorous attack against Abbott. Invoking an oft-cited parallel between individual development and species evolution, Holmes argued that the ‘rude’ features of Abbott's stone tools were not indicative of great age. Rather than being ancient, they might simply be unfinished or damaged, offering a misleading record of the deep past.

What followed was several decades of intense controversy, in which a predictable pattern played itself out again and again. Each time a new, seemingly definitive piece of evidence in favor of Pleistocene humans had been discovered, it was quickly found to be lacking in some way. One aspect of this drawn-out controversy is especially worth emphasizing: the indigenous tribes that continued to inhabit North America were widely regarded as ‘primitive’ races of mankind, akin to the ancient ancestors of modern Europeans. For that reason, facts about the morphology of stone tools or skeletal remains were not seen as sufficient evidence of their antiquity. Instead, some independent assessment of a specimen's age was required as well. But what counted as a genuine gauge of antiquity?

One way to corroborate a specimen's age was contextual, by examining the rock formation in which it was found. However, just because a specimen was encased in rocks of a particular age did not mean that it dated from the same period. The specimen might also have been deposited at some later date, especially given that humans were known to bury their dead. Another way to corroborate a specimen's age was by association; that is, by ascertaining the age of other objects alongside which it was found. For example, if a human skeleton was discovered in close proximity to the fossil remains of a long-extinct animal, that might suffice as a test of antiquity. But here, too, the possibility always remained that the association was spurious and misleading, or, worse, had been deliberately fabricated by its discoverer to deceive the community. Thus, despite a steady flow of material evidence, the controversy continued unabated for several more decades.

Things really came to head during the 1920s, when two collectors named Harold Cook and Jesse Figgins discovered a stone projectile that, amazingly, appeared to be lodged between the ribs of an extinct species of bison near Folsom, New Mexico. Previously, one of the most ardent and outspoken Pleistocene sceptics – Aleš Hrdlička – had counselled Figgins to alert the scientific community if he ever came across a particularly auspicious discovery. So when he and Cook made their remarkable find in the summer of 1927, Figgins immediately sent out a telegram inviting several highly respected archaeologists to the dig site, including Frank Roberts from the Bureau of American Ethnology and Alfred V. Kidder from the Carnegie Institution in Washington. Being able to examine the specimen before it was fully disinterred, they had no doubt the human artefact and the fossil bison were truly associated. This effectively convinced everyone, including Hrdlička, and the bitter controversy finally came to a close.

The way the controversy played itself out – especially its resolution – points to a broader lesson about the social history of science. In the final chapter of his book, Meltzer emphasizes that most of the empirical discoveries fuelling this controversy were made by amateur collectors like Abbott and Figgins. However, scientists such as Hrdlička and Holmes did not trust amateurs to advance credible interpretations of the objects they found. All that collectors could do was to offer material specimens for expert examination, leaving the task of issuing theoretical pronouncements about their true meaning to more elite naturalists. But in the context of this particular controversy, specimens were never just that. What mattered most was not just the specimen as a material object, but its relation to the surroundings, be it the geological context or palaeontological associations. Hence collectors like Figgins were not even trusted to collect specimens on their own. It was only by calling on more elite scientists such as Kidder to observe their discovery in situ, before taking it out of the ground, that the controversy could be brought to a close. The end of the Palaeolithic war thus revealed as much about the social landscape of archaeology at the time as it did about North America's earliest human inhabitants.