Harold E. Driver

Innovations in Cross-Cultural Method from Ethnomusicology: A Review: Lomax, Alan, Folk Song Style and Culture, Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968. xix, 308 pp., 3 appendices, bibliog., illus., maps, index

Lomax and his 14 collaborators have made a significant saltation toward greater objectivity of expression of the similarities and differences in song styles among societies around the world. They have shown again that scientific method is applicable to any and all kinds of human behavior, whether conventionally subsumed under the sciences or the humanities by academicians. This book is a major achievement in ethnomusicology and crosscultural method, regardless of the amount of criticism that may be leveled at the details. I have been asked to review its anthropological and methodological aspects. All page references are to this book unless another author is cited. The numerical taxonomy of Chapter 4 is based on an original list of 37 musical variables, later reduced to 27 to eliminate redundancy. A larger number were tested but &dquo;Only those devices [variables] were retained on which expert coders achieved reasonable consensus and which continued to classify songs into manageable sets&dquo; (xi). About 10 songs for each of 233 societies were coded on the 37 variables. As the authors admit

The Native Americans: Prehistory and Ethnology of the North American Indians. Robert F. Spencer and Jesse D. Jennings, Eds. Harper and Row, New York, 1965. xiv + 539 pp. Illus.

I regret that I made an error in my book review of The Native Americans [Science 149, 1364 (1965)], where I cite MacNeish for a date of 6500 B.C. as the earliest find of maize. This is incorrect. The earliest wild maize dates from about 80,000 B.C. and the earliest domesticated variety from about 5000 B.C. The earliest date given in The Native Americans is, therefore, correct for the earliest domesticated maize.