time passed, and other discoveries of fossil hominids were made in Asia and Africa that were dramatically different from Piltdown, the English remains came to be seen as being anomalous rather than of very great interest. It was not until 1953 that the Oxford physical anthropologist J. S. Weiner reanalyzed the remains and concluded that the braincase and jaw were from separate animals—a suspicion confirmed by fluorine testing. Further analysis demonstrated that the jaw was that of an ape and that the teeth had been deliberately altered and stained to match the color of the braincase fragments. By 1955, the entire Piltdown collection was rejected as fraudulent.

Of course, the revelation of fraud requires the identification of the forger, and this topic has become one of the most enduring detective stories in the history of physical anthropology. The list of suspects ranges from the obvious (such as Dawson) to the truly surprising (eminent physical anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith) and has included most of the people who were in any way associated with the forgery. In the absence of a signed confession by the forger, we are left with a range of probabilities. Although these may not be enough to obtain a conviction in a court of law, there is every reason to believe that there was a greater purpose to the forgery than to simply hoax the scientific community.

Tim Murray

References

Spencer, Frank. 1990. Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery. London: Oxford University Press.

Pincevent

The site of Pincevent in france lies near the village of Montereau in the southeastern part of the Paris basin. It is situated on the River Seine, between its confluence with the river Yonne and its confluence with the river Loing, in a landscape of high plateaus and wide valley systems. Its immediate surroundings were quarried for gravel from 1926 onward, but its archaeological potential was recognized only thirty years later when occasional finds began drawing the attention of local collectors.

Between 1956 and 1964, volunteers made several attempts at recording and salvaging some of the abundant remains from both prehistoric and historic times. In 1963, several Magdalenian hearths were unearthed, provoking the local suspension of gravel extraction through the intervention of the Association Française pour L’étude du Quaternaire and the Société Préhistorique Française in 1964. The site was acquired by the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles, which enabled a team from the Centre de Recherches Préhistoriques of the University of Paris to initiate a comprehensive archaeological investigation, which was partly subsidized by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. The excavations at Pincevent have become famous for their detailed and rigorous execution, setting a precedent for archaeological fieldwork that is still valid today. They were directed by andré leroi-gourhan until 1985 and continued by his team, including, among others, Pierre Bodu and Claudine Karlin.

Although finds suggest that the locale of Pincevent was the setting for human activities during at least parts of the late Pleistocene and the Holocene periods, research has focused on the Magdalenian remains. These assemblages owe their excellent preservation to a gentle incorporation into a two-meter-thick sequence of clays and silts deposited through the occasional flooding of the river Seine. They consist of scattered lithics, bone fragments, and clasts (archaeological debris) punctuated by hearths and are generally interpreted as representing a number of activity sites created by Magdalenian people in the context of (possibly seasonal) reindeer hunting. Two assemblages, those of habitation number one and section thirty-six, are the focus of two major publications.

The archaeological phenomenon of Pincevent is very much a product of the history of the discipline of French archaeology and of the persons involved in the excavations and subsequent research. Leroi-Gourhan’s background in ethnography and anthropology, and his belief that material culture is as meaningful a cultural manifestation as linguistic expressions, led him to adopt an ethnographic approach to the Magdalenian