The VIIIth International Congress of the International Prirnatological
Society was held from 7 through 11 July 1980 in Florence, Italy, under
the auspices of the host institution, the Istituto di Antropologia of
the University of Flor nce. More than 300 papers and abstracts were
presented either at the main Congress or in 14 pre-Congress symposia the
week earlier (so scheduled to avoid conflicting with either the main
invited lectures or the contributed paper sessions). This volume
consists of the contributed papers concerning primate behavior, with
special emphasis on those social aspects that reflect on or affect
primate biology. Clearly, this is one of the more important and popular
subdisciplines in primatology today. We have thus restricted the
subject, in agreement with the publishers, in order to ensure a
successful and useful volume that is likely to be generally noticed and
widely available, as these up-to-date contributions deserve.
Furthermore, we have compiled this volume in a fairly new way for
congress proceedings. In view of space limitations, and the need to
guarantee a high-quality and sufficiently specialized book, we subjected
all manuscripts to a four-level internal review process and selected
only the best 23 of the 50 submissions. We favored natural-observation
work over captive studies. This rejection rate of 54% exceeds that of
almost all reviewed scholarly journals.