In popular perception, anthropologists and historians cut very different figures. The anthropologist, a hybrid of Indiana Jones and a Kiplingesque colonial official, wears a bush hat or pith helmet and tirelessly trudges up mountains or hacks through jungle in search of lost tribes and ancient, unchanging, folklore. The historian, a dusty and usually dishevelled figure, heads resolutely in the opposite direction, plunging ever deeper in to the mysterious and cobwebbed world of the archive, meticulously piecing together fragments...