Hidden Cave, in Churchill County, Nevada, is a well known Western Great Basin archaeological site initially studied by S.M. and G.N. Wheeler in 1940. The site was reexamined by N.L. Roust and G.L. Grosscup in 1951 in association with R.B. Morrison. The present volume is the direct consequence of a third "set" of excavations conducted at the site in 1979 and 1980 under the aegis of the American Museum of Natural History and the Bureau of Land Management. The explicit purpose (goal) of the recent excavations as articulated in Chapter 2 by David Hurst Thomas (the project leader, volume editor, and principal contributor) was to use Hidden Cave and the surrounding Carson Sink as a field laboratory in which to test and refine the so-called limnosedentary model of prehistoric human adaptation to Great Basin lacustrine environments. Briefly, this model purports that adaptation to rich, ecologically diverse, marshy lakeside biomes provided the basis for a semisedentary to sedentary aboriginal lifestyle without introduced cultigens.
Thomas provides the environmental, theoretical, and historical background for the 1979/1980 Hidden Cave research in Chapters 2-4. In Chapter 5 he defines the specific geological, geomorphological, paleobotanical, culture-historical, and reconstruction of site function objectives of the excavations. Chapter 6 details and compares the excavation and data collection strategies not only for the 1979-1980 projects but also for the earlier 1940 and 1951 investigations at the site.
The remainder of this well-executed, extensively illustrated volume discusses virtually all of the recovered artifactual and ecofactual remains from the site as well as its geological genesis and subsequent development. Also treated are the character and diversity of cultural features as well as spatial use patterns within the site.
Many of the 24 essentially descriptive chapters (17-24) are written by recognized experts in their respective fields, and all chapters are filled-no, glutted is better-with precisely the kind of substantive, exhaustive (occasionally to the point of boredom) descriptive details this reviewer happens to favor. In fact, the empirical information is so abundant as to provide (as it should!) sufficient grounds to question some of the author's own numerous conclusions.
Chapters 25-27 provide a synthesis of the vast Hidden Cave data base as viewed by Thomas, and they sequentially discuss in the broadest sense the paleoenvironmental sequence and geomorphological background from ca. 21,000 B.P. to the present. The culture history