Environmental archaeology has been plagued by the kinds of growing pains that afflict so many multidisciplinary fields: a lack of consensus on method and theory, poor communication between collaborators, and the inevitable disagreements about the proper role of different kinds of evidence. This volume, however, clearly demonstrates that environmental archaeology is overcoming these obstacles to make increasingly significant and valuable contributions to our understanding of human behavior in environmental context. In this respect, it succeeds admirably in carrying out its intended purpose of illustrating by example how environmental data can be integrated and interpreted to provide a unique perspective on the human past. The book aims to reach a wide audience of students and professionals engaged in related research by emphasizing results rather than technique. The case studies contained in it, while exclusively New World in geographic focus, reflect archaeological investigations in a wide range of temperate and tropical environmental settings.
The actual and potential contributions of environmental archaeology receive further elaboration in the first chapter, an introduction to its subfields and history written by the editors. Chapter 2, by William Marquardt, makes the very important observation that progress in science, rather than being a simple function of the development of better techniques for empirical discovery, is highly contingent upon the nature of the questions being asked. The four archaeological examples he uses to illustrate this point (all from sites in southwest Florida) serve as a transition to the series of case studies that form the book's core.
Part II, ''The Physical Environment and Paleoenvironments,'' contains chapters that take a broad view of human-environment interaction, in some cases employing multiple lines of evidence. Julie Stein examines the possibility that changes in sediment color with increasing depth may reflect postdepositional weathering rather than anthropogenic processes. Here a widespread archaeological assumption (that of correspondence between stratigraphic units based on lithological attributes and those reflecting artifact content) is held up to scrutiny in a constructive manner that should encourage rigorous application of geoarchaeological methods in the field. Chapter 2, by Sylvia Scudder, also utilizes geoarchaeological data and methods, in this case to investigate chemical, physical, and mineralogical differences between anthropogenic and native soils in a Florida midden mound. She uses her results to illustrate the mutual character of interactions between human activity, pedogenesis, and archaeological site formation. Frances King and James King summarize a landmark project, the multidisciplinary investigation of the paleoecology of the Pomme de Terre River valley in Missouri. Catherine Fowler's chapter is unusual for this volume in its emphasis on ethnographic and historical data, which in this case pertain to the Timbisha Shoshone of the Great Basin. Fowler's research reveals the complexity of environmen-